Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

I felt kindly towards Father again, and guilty for having been so quick to judge him. I upbraided myself and began to wonder whether I held some kind of permanent, unknown grudge against the man that kept me looking constantly for reasons to indict him, even while I went on believing that I loved and admired him beyond all other human beings. It was a strange, new question, and gave me pause.

The evening wore on, and as we talked and joked around the table and in the parlor afterwards, re-establishing our old, familiar roles and routines with one another, I was more or less forcibly integrated into the family, and gradually I began to understand some of the more subtle changes that had recently taken place at the farm, and mostly they disturbed me. The winter snows were about to blow down on us. But coming in, I’d noticed that a great deal of the autumn work on the place had not been done. The livestock had looked well-cared-for, but that, from long habit, was routine and to be expected. The boys had done a lot of hunting and fishing, I saw, with plenty of hides and pelts being dried in the barn — bear, wolf, the usual deer and beaver, a wildcat, even a pair of mountain lions — and an abundance of salted venison and trout and corned beef had been put up, but by the women, I assumed. Not half the wood in, and Lyman and the boys had cleared and burned less than five hundred square rods of the flatland that wed need for spring planting and next year’s hay. Blacksmith shop and butchering shed not closed in. Cold cellar not dug, and the soil already freezing hard. Barely half the fencing for the winter sheepfolds built. The barn had been closed in properly, but there were chicken coops and an extension for a winter pigsty that hadn’t been started. They’d bred the dams for early lambing, Watson assured me, and had tanned the hides of eight deer, but hadn’t gotten around yet to tanning the fleeces and pelts that Father had asked them to prepare for winter clothing. Fortunately, the women seemed to have done their autumn work — the smoking and salting of meats, putting up cheeses and lard, filling the root cellar with potatoes, squashes, and turnips — so we would at least have enough to eat.

But as I listened to the boys’ excuses and explanations, mostly made by Watson, who as the eldest felt obliged to speak for them, I began to see that their failures had more to do with Lyman’s continued and protracted absences from the farm, evidently caused by his work with the Underground Railroad, than by idleness or distraction on their part. They were, after all, only boys. Even Watson. They did not blame Lyman directly, but I saw that they wanted a proper foreman to organize the work every day and to provide instruction, oversight, and encouragement, and they needed a grown maris strong back to lift and heft alongside theirs.

Lyman’s Railroad work had to be done, too, of course. Who could reproach him for it? Certainly not I, and in fact I intended to join him myself in his nighttime runs as soon as possible. But the farm had been allowed to slide. And unless we quickly pulled it back in line, we’d soon freeze, or our livestock would, and we’d starve, or we’d have to abandon the place altogether — and then no one would be able to work the Railroad.

I detected some small resentments against Lyman by the boys, evidenced by their clear reluctance to praise him or even to talk much about him, as if the subject held little or no interest for them. Mary and Ruth were voluble enough concerning the man, but I felt that they were not so much praising him as demonstrating to Susan their love and support of her, protecting her from embarrassment, and even at that, it was faint praise they were offering, more often excuses and explanations for his inability to run the place properly than proud descriptions of some specific accomplishment.

Also, without Father to generate and sustain the contacts with Timbuctoo, the family appeared to have fallen away from the Negro community without having built any compensatory alliances with the whites, except for Ruth’s connection to the Thompsons, by virtue of her relationship with Henry. This was distressing. In this tough place, we all needed each other, white and Negro alike. But after the death of Elden Fleete, and with Father’s and my departure following hard upon, the Negroes had been a little tetchy, Watson said. Understandably so. And there being no one left at the farm who could reassure them of our faithfulness to their cause, they had withdrawn almost all contact, despite Lyman’s and Susan’s continued loyalty to the family.

The Negroes were in bad shape, Watson said, and Susan confirmed: harried by the local whites, fearful of being carried off by slave-catchers and marshals, and not at all prepared for winter. Also, Watson explained, there was a growing number of whites, led by our old friend Mr. Partridge of Keene, who wished that both the Browns and the citizens of Timbuctoo would go back to wherever they came from. Some of these whites had previously been supporters of Father’s efforts to help the Negroes, but now they, too, coveted the Negroes’ and our land out on the flats — rich, silted land, rare in the Adirondacks, which they could see was not being farmed properly. By their lights, we were misusing it, wasting our good fortune, and this angered them, for they were New England-style farmers, the type that likes to regard waste as a sin. Mr. Partridge, himself no great shakes as a farmer, was exploiting these resentments for his own purposes, which Watson said surely included gaining revenge for our having invaded his home in August, when we shot the slave-catcher and then freed Lyman and Mr. Fleete from the Elizabethtown jail.

Now, suddenly, where before I had thought of that episode with something approaching shame, I found myself regarding it almost with nostalgia, and I wished that we had done more damage than we did, wished that we had actually slain the slave-catcher and maybe Mr. Partridge, too, and wished that I had been the one to pull the trigger. There were tensions and conflicts everywhere breaking out, and I could not see how they could be quickly resolved, least of all by me. I could not step forward in church like Father and preach the Lord’s work to the whites one week and then preach it to the Negroes the next, or walk into the midst of a crowd of white men at a cattle auction and scold them for their sloth and cowardice as only the Old Man could scold, and then ride over to Timbuctoo and do the same to a crowd of glowering, suspicious ex-slaves.

Even so, while there was little or nothing I could do to improve relations with the local people, white or black, I could nonetheless pull things together here on the farm. Eager to get an early start, and not a little tired from my journey, I begged off Watson’s and Ruth’s entreaties to tell them still more of the story of Father’s and my travels abroad and climbed up to the loft well before the others. Lying in my cot there in the darkened chamber, I listened to the murmur of the voices of my family below: Mary and Ruth were carding wool and spinning, and the boys were coming and going between the house and barn, bedding down the animals, bringing in firewood, the last household chores of the day, while the little girls and Susan took turns reading from the primer, teaching one another to read and now and again appealing to Ruth or Mary to settle a dispute over a word’s meaning or spelling. With those sweet sounds filling my ears, I drifted into peaceful sleep.

A while later, when the others came up to bed, I woke and listened in the darkness as, one by one, they, too, fell into slumber. But this time, however, I myself could not fall back to sleep. I lay wide-eyed in the silent darkness of the room for hours, my mind a-buzz with half-completed thoughts startling and interrupting one another. I could not figure what was keeping me so agitated — I almost never had any difficulty sleeping. Quite the opposite. Hours slipped by, and then I lost all track of how long I had been awake, and not until the first bleeding away of darkness signaled the near approach of dawn did I suddenly realize that I was waiting for Lyman to come home. And when I knew that, I thought only of it, and him. Until pale daylight began to filter into the room, when I rose and dressed and directly set about putting things right: like Father, the first one up and working.