Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Besides, he pointed out, I had no money, no house, no land. Or had I some private wealth, and he somehow had not noticed? And I had no trade, other than farming and the keeping of sheep. Or had I been taking instruction by mail in business like John, or horticulture like Jason? If not, would I perhaps like to hire myself out as a day-laborer here in Springfield? And where would I sleep at night, once he closed down the business? Did I have friends who would put me up, people he had not heard about?

He knew the answers to all those questions, of course. He knew what I had to do. And so did I.

At dawn, I rose and packed my few possessions into a gunny sack, slung it over my right shoulder and took up my rifle, and said goodbye to Father. He placed around my neck a purse on a cord with fourteen dollars and some coppers inside to give over to Mary and to pay for supplies he had ordered in Westpott for the farm, which I was to arrange to have transported on to North Elba when I got there. As always, he filled my head with last-minute instructions. Which of the merinos to breed this spring, which to sell, which to butcher for mutton; how much seed to set aside for a second planting if the first got hit by a late frost; which part of the acreage to clear next and which to leave for a woodlot; how much to pay in Westport for salt and flour, and who among the Negroes of Timbuctoo to hire and whether to pay them in goods or cash or crop shares. “Make work for them, if you can afford it, especially when the winter comes on. Even if you and Lyman and the boys are able to clear and cut on your own. They learn from your example, and it brings them a small cash payment as well, which they will surely need.

“Ah, Owen!” he declared. “I envy you, my boy. How I would love to be there now, clearing that mountain forest, working with my back and arms all day and gathering together with my precious family around the table at night,” he said, smiling and inhaling deeply, as if he could smell the crisp, cold Adirondack air. “That’s all the good Lord meant for a man to do. That, and to care for his neighbors. And you can do all of it up there. All of it. I envy you, son.”

I thanked him for it, still sullen and resentful, and we embraced, or, rather, he embraced me, and I strode away from him, crossing through town to the main road north — headed home, for that is what it was now. There was no other place I could name as home than that tidy farmhouse on the edge of the wilderness. So there I went. Home.

I had five days of walking ahead of me. A few times I accepted a farmer’s offer to put up in his barn, but otherwise I slept outdoors in a makeshift camp close to the road, huddled in my blanket before a small fire, like a tramp. I walked steadily from first light to last, up the long Connecticut Valley and across the Green Mountains of Vermont, then north again along the western shore of Lake George, past the ruins of old Ticonderoga to the glittering waters of Lake Champlain. There I stopped in Westport briefly on Father’s business, and then headed upland into the Adirondacks. And the entire time, all five days and nights, I filled my mind with the conscious pretense that I was completely turned around, that my compass had reversed itself and I was walking south instead of north. I was moving down along the Subterranean Passway into Virginia and North Carolina. I was marching towards the slaves and their masters. The fugitive slaves followed their north star; I followed its southern twin.

It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution! Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!

I arrived home in North Elba late in the afternoon just as it was growing dark, greeted by my brother Watson a half-mile east of the farm, out where the road from Keene crests the long rise through the notch. I saw him from a distance and did not at first recognize him. He was tall and lanky, all sticks and rope. He had turned onto the road, emerging from the woods there, leading the Morgan named Adelphi, hitched to a sledgeload of logs taken evidently from the back lot of the property, a forest of blue spruce that sloped towards Pitch-off Mountain.

Watson saw me and waved. Though he was barely sixteen then, he had added considerably to his height since I’d last seen him and walked like a grown man who’d done a hard day’s work. In the months since my departure, Watson had managed to slip away from most of his boyhood, and when I drew near, I saw that his long, narrow face had the beginning haze of a reddish beard. It cheered me to see him so grown up. Nearly my height, he was well on his way to being taller than I, who up to now had been the tallest in the family.

For a few seconds, we grinned at one another with slight self-consciousness, and then I embraced him warmly and tugged his new whiskers. “What’s this, Wat?” I laughed. “Growing yourself a beard, eh?”

He grabbed my beard and gave it an answering yank. “Everybody always says you’re the handsome one. I thought I’d give it a try, see if it’s the beard. It’s just great to see you, Owen!” he exclaimed, and threw his ropey arm over my shoulder. He cocked his head and studied me and said that I looked different to him, that I’d changed somehow.

“Come on, I’ve not been gone that long.”

“No, seriously, Owen. You’re looking different. You didn’t fall in love or something, now, did you?” he said, and shook my shoulder and grinned.

I confessed that it did feel weird to me, coming home this time, as if I had been away for years. My mind filled for an instant with the face of Sarah Peabody, but I swiftly put the image away, replacing her, as if for Watson’s sake, with the sights and sounds of Liverpool, London, Waterloo.

“You’re a famous world traveler now!” he said. “I want to hear about every single thing that you and the Old Man saw over there.”

We walked along beside the horse and sledge, the broad valley opening out in front of us, with white-topped Tahawus and Mclntyre in the distance and the burnished range beyond, and although it was a gray, overcast day threatening to snow, I saw again how lovely this place was. Of course, Father loved it here. How could he not? And how could he not have envied me for being free to return here? I thought, and regretted for a moment that I had been so disgruntled with him.

I was expected, Watson then told me. But expected sooner than this, he said, as they had received a letter from Father some days earlier, telling them I was on my way north. “Me and the boys thought you might’ve got distracted some over in Westport.”

This surprised me. “When was his letter dated?”

He didn’t know. The thirteenth, he thought. Yes, the thirteenth. “I copied it” he said proudly. “Like you used to.”

How could that be? Two days prior to my signing the pledge with the Gileadites, Father had written to the family that I would soon be coming home? I grew angry again and freshly confused. He had already decided and had known, even as he was working up my spirits, that we would not fight alongside the Negroes of Springfield! He knew all along that I would be sent to North Elba. And had said nothing of it until afterwards, when he feebly claimed unexpected legal troubles.

What purpose could he have had — for the meetings, the sermonizing, the pledge? And appointing me secretary and treasurer — why? Was it all for show? And for whom? Not me, certainly. For the Negroes? Had he merely been putting on a play for the blacks of Springfield, working them up, organizing them for battle and steeling them to pledge and risk their lives, when he had no real intention of joining them himself, or even of allowing his son to join them?