Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

I cursed aloud: “Damn him!”

“What’s wrong?” Watson asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “No, the Old Man, actually. It’s just that he knew I was coming back here long before he told me. Even you knew before I did.”

He laughed and punched me on the shoulder. “Ah, well, Owen, that’s the Old Man, isn’t it? You can forget about him now, though. He’s there, and we’re here. You’ve just been spending too much time with him and not enough with us. C’mon, Mother’s going to be happy to see you,” he declared. “And Ruth, too. Everybody!”

“Lyman, too?”

“Sure. Lyman, too,” he said. “It’s great you’re home, though. Tell me everything. I want to hear everything. Especially about old John Bull. I want to hear all about England. And Flanders! What’s that like?”

As we walked, I related some of the details of my journey, pleasing and exciting him to a surprising degree, as if I had been to the South Seas on a whaling ship. Down the long hill we went, and soon, although it was not yet four o’clock in the afternoon, we were walking in wintry darkness, as if dead of night had fallen. Then, in the distance, I saw the glimmer of lamplight from the kitchen, and I made out the shape of the house. In this wide, dark, cold valley with the blackened mountains beyond, the house looked like a small ship bobbing at anchor in a safe harbor.

“You go in,” Watson said. “I’ll take care of Adelphi. We can unload these trees tomorrow in a twink.”

I said fine and headed for the door, anxious suddenly and a little afraid, as if I were about to hear unwanted news.

But, no, everything was joy and thanksgiving, kisses and embraces and bright, shining faces. They all gathered around me, as if I were one of Ulysses’ returning warriors, gone for long years instead of months, and put their faces next to mine and kept touching me with their hands even after we had hugged one another. My face nearly hurt from the smiling. They pulled my coat off me and bade me sit at the table, while the babies, Annie and Sarah, who, at seven and four years old, were no longer babies, unlaced and playfully drew off my boots.

Mary, sweetly calm in the center of the sun-shower, blessed me and thanked the Lord for my safe return. She looked healthier than when I had left, her round face reddened from the heat of the kitchen stove and the excitement, and I glimpsed her prettiness, saw her for a second as she must have looked to Father when he first met her some eighteen years earlier, a warm, soft, utterly benevolent presence in his unyielding, masculine world.

I held her hands in mine and said, “I’m truly glad to see you, Mary. Are you as well as you look?”

“Oh, my, yes!” she said, and laughed, and Ruth and the boys, Oliver and Salmon, laughed, too.

“What’s the joke?”

“Oh, we’ll tell you later,” Ruth said, and ruffled my hair with her cool hand. “We’ve lots to tell. You and Father may not know it, Owen, but believe it or not, life goes on without you.”

“Apparently!’ I said, and looked around the crowded room. There were Oliver and Salmon, lithe, tanned boys grinning like monkeys, and the little girls, Sarah and Annie, already back at work, the one churning and the other putting out plates. And then for the first time I saw Susan Epps, standing beside the stove in the further corner of the kitchen. Her hands were folded in her apron, and she was smiling gently at me, as if waiting for me to acknowledge her before she could greet me. At once I got up and crossed down the room to her and gave her a friendly embrace, realizing as I did so that she was pregnant, and well along with it, too.

“Yes, indeed,” I said to her. “Life does go on!” and she gave a winning, shy laugh. I congratulated her and turned to look for Lyman. “Where’s your excellent husband?”

There was a silence, and then Watson, who had come in from the barn and was shucking his coat by the door, said, “He’ll be back soon.”

“Soon?”

“Tonight. Or tomorrow night. He’s moving a few folks north.”

“Well, good!’ I said. “I was kind of afraid that the whole operation’d come to a halt. You know, after the business with Mister Fleete and our jailbreak.”

In a low voice, Mary said, “It did stop things, Owen. At least amongst the whites.”

“I’d expect some to cut and run.”

“No, just about all have abandoned us.”

“The Thompsons?” I asked.

“Yes!’ Mary said. “Pretty much.”

“The cowards!” I said, and slapped the table with my hand.

“Not Henry, though,” Ruth piped. “He’s not abandoned us.” I looked over and remembered the exchange that I had seen between her and young Henry Thompson at church.

“Yeah, but Owen’s right,” Watson said. “The rest are cowards. It’s mostly just Lyman alone making all the runs now. I’d be there beside him, if the Old Man’d let me. It’s this Fugitive Law; it’s made cowards of our neighbors. People go over and harass the folks at Timbuctoo all the time, making like they’re looking for escaped slaves. Even some folks we once counted as abolitionists.”

I asked Susan, “Is this true?”

“Yes, mostly. But Lyman, him and a few others from there, are still taking people north. It worries me. But people get this close to freedom, you got to help them.”

We talked then for a while of the increased difficulties and dangers of harboring escaped slaves and transporting them from Timbuctoo to Canada. Lyman had evidently grown fierce in the work, enraged by the death of Elden Fleete and his own brief imprisonment and made reckless rather than timid by it, joined only by a few of the more adventurous Negroes and by Henry Thompson, with no help coming from any of the whites in the northcountry, not even the Quakers in Port Kent. There were marshals and slave-catchers all over now, stopping off at the farm every few days and like plantation overseers checking the shacks and huts of Timbuctoo, intimidating the whites generally and the Negroes pointedly and employing Partridge and others like him to spy for them.

Shortly, we were enjoying a fine, ample supper of Brunswick stew made with squirrels shot that morning by Salmon and Oliver, and pickled beets and cucumbers, and a pile of Mary’s famous Indian hoecakes — my welcome-home supper, Ruth called it. There was abundant good news, beyond Susan’s pregnancy. Yes, it was true, Ruth and Henry Thompson had been courting, and as soon as he could arrange an interview with Father, Henry intended to ask for her hand in marriage. And the big, grinning secret concerning Mary was that she, too, was pregnant.

Startled, I put down my spoon and asked, “Well! That’s something, isn’t it? Does Father know yet?”

“Why, Owen, of course he does! I wrote to him right away. As soon as I knew myself, I told him. He was pleased as pie. Didn’t he tell you?”

I said no, he didn’t. “That is wonderful news, though,” said I, weakly, thinking more of the difficulties promised by another child than the blessings. But now I understood why the Old Man had felt suddenly required to concentrate solely on work which would help support the family, and why he had put the Gileadites so abruptly aside, and why he had sent me back here. With his wife pregnant again, his sense of responsibility to his family would have been unexpectedly sharpened. He had not told me, no doubt, because it was still very early in her pregnancy, and after so many lost babies, Father had learned to protect himself by holding his excitement in abeyance: it had become characteristic of him to wait practically until the pregnancy was over before beginning to speak of it. Also, although he was a man who had helped a thousand sheep and hundreds of cows and horses to foal and had even helped deliver several of his own children, he was nonetheless peculiarly shy about talking of such matters when it came to humans.