Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

But it is well-known that from earliest childhood we Browns were taught not to lie. We were chastized severely when caught doing it. It was Father’s first corollary to his first commandment. If ye love the Truth, then ye cannot lie. Less well-known, perhaps, is the fact that I was the worst offender amongst us, as a child, that is; and in the early days, when he was a young man and Mother was alive, Father was more severe in his punishment and in his means of correcting us children than later, and we sometimes did not understand why he beat us so energetically and for so long. (There was the danger, perhaps especially with me, of his bending the branch too far and breaking it off, instead of correcting it to straightness; or of having it snap back defiantly against him and end up bent the other way, permanently misshapen. But I knew nothing of that then.)

By the time I was five or six years old, well before Mother had died, I had already begun to manifest the habit of lying to an exceeding degree, even for a child. I seemed to take sensual pleasure in it and almost sought out occasions for lying, making up tales, entire adventures, elaborate encounters, and so on, which had never taken place. I went beyond mere exaggeration, and although I oftentimes partially believed in the truth of my accounts, just as I believed in the corporeal reality of my imagined companion, Frederick, there nonetheless was a side of me that was wholly aware of their falsehood and was pleased by it. It gave me momentarily a sense of importance to say that I had seen a bear when I had not, to report on the visit of an Indian when no such person had appeared, to claim that I had been complimented by the schoolmaster, Mr. Twichell, when he had for days ignored me altogether and in fact seemed to think me rather a dull child.

I remember vividly a significant alteration of this wretched habit, so that in later years, when I lied, it was no longer out of blind compulsion but rather as the product of a conscious, calculated decision. Once, in New Richmond, Grandfather Brown, whose namesake I was, came over from Akron to visit us for a few days. It was during the dark months not long after Mother died, when Father had fallen into one of his periods of silence and withdrawal and passivity, and it had gone on dangerously long, so that family members and neighbors, too, were concerned for the welfare of his five children and for his own physical and mental health. Father was prone to such periods anyhow, especially following a spate of trouble, but this time he seemed unable to end it, unable to pass through his grief and loss and get on with the everyday business of his life.

Grandfather Brown stayed for a week, I remember, and as the end of it approached, Father was returning to his old, custodial self. When he roused us at dawn, the downstairs fires were now lit, and when the workers arrived at the tannery, Father was there to greet them and lay out the day’s work. In the evenings, he had resumed his reading aloud from the Bible to the younger children, and before we went to bed he totted up the day’s accomplishments and failures of each child and listed tomorrow’s obligations — to wash down the kitchen floor, sweep the yard, bring in the early peas, repair the sheepfold, separate the pullets from the hens, and so on — from each child, according to age and ability, an accounting of his or her allotted task, and to each child the next day’s charge.

I myself greeted this return to the old routines with mixed feelings, as if I almost missed the gloom and silence and inactivity that had followed Mother’s death. But the others all seemed relieved and for the first time in months happy and playful again, so I tried to join in. But then, on the final morning of Grandfather’s visit, when I passed alone through the parlor on my way out to school, I espied on the mantelpiece, where he had placed it the night before, Grandfather’s large gold watch and chain. It was a particular treasure to him, engraved with his initials, a bit ostentatious, the one vanity that that otherwise simple and utterly unpretentious man indulged in. I picked up the watch and held it for a moment, then slipped the watch, which he in his antique way called a chronometer, into my trouser pocket and dashed away to school with it, while the old man slept peacefully in the next room.

What were my motives? I did not know then, nor do I today. Except to say that the timepiece drew me like a talisman, a magical amulet. Since Grandfather’s arrival, I had been studying it at every opportunity, aware constantly of its location, whether in Grandfather’s vest pocket or on the sideboard or mantelpiece or in his tough, leathery hand. And once I had it in my possession, I felt wonderfully, magically empowered by it, as if it were the legendary sword, Excalibur, instead of a mere man-made timepiece. As if, with the watch in my pocket, I were a grown man in charge of my own life, not a boy anymore.

At school, in the clearing by the woodshed, where we children loaded the day’s stovewood to carry inside, I showed the watch to my friends, claiming that my grandfather — a man born before the Revolutionary War, I proudly pointed out — had given it to me, because our names were the same, Owen Brown, which was why the initials engraved on its case were the same as mine. The initials were mine in actual fact, I said. See? O.J.B.

My friends, the boys especially, were impressed and crowded round me to see it the better, imagining the watch and heavy chain, as I did, worn in a Colonial soldier’s waistcoat pocket by me, or someone sharply resembling me, as he marched heroically into the smoke and fury of Revolutionary battle.

At once, however, I realized that I had gone too far and now would have to swear the other children to secrecy. “Don’t say nothing to Mister Twichell about it,” I said. “My father was supposed to be the one who got Grandfather’s watch, and he don’t know yet that it’s gone to me, instead. Grandfather said he’d tell him today, while I’m off the place.”

I was betrayed, of course. Not by one of the children, though. By Mr. Twichell himself, who had stood at the doorway and had observed my little performance from across the schoolyard. When I passed by the schoolmaster and entered the building with my armload of firewood, he tapped me lightly on the shoulder, smiled down, and said, “Owen, when you have put the wood in the box, come and show me what you were showing the children.”

I did as instructed, and he took the timepiece and turned it over, examining the initials and the fine face with the Roman numerals. “How did you come by this?” he gently asked.

I looked around and saw that all the children were watching, waiting for me to reveal my lie, for at bottom they had known the truth, or at least had known that I was lying, and now I was about to be exposed in public, not just as a liar, but as a thief as well. I hesitated a second, and Mr. Twichell said again, “How did you come by such a marvelous instrument, Owen?”

I sucked in my breath and quickly repeated the lie that I had told the children outside.

He gazed at the watch for a few seconds, admiring it, and when he handed it back to me, asked if I could read the time from the markings on its face. I nodded yes, and he asked me how I knew which was which, for they weren’t numbers, were they? They were X’s and V’s and Vs.

“They’re in the same place as the regular numbers,” I said.

He said that was so, and then told us to take out our slates and begin the day’s lesson, which turned out to be — fortuitously, he said, winking broadly at me — upon the difference between Roman and Arabic numerals. In a surprisingly short time, every child in the room could write in Roman any date the teacher called out to us and any hour, the number of the states in 1776 and the number today in 1833, the white population of the United States, the Negro population of the United States, the total of the two, and the difference between.