Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

The winter in North Elba, even by our old Ohio and New England standards, was long and brutal. But our Adirondack neighbors deemed it mild, and despite our secret suspicion that it would never end, spring did eventually come trickling in, and with it came the time for the birth of Susan’s and Lyman’s baby, an imminent arrival which was regarded by all of us as a great event. We had come to know in varying degrees how Susan had lost her previous children to slavery, and though he never spoke of it, we believed that Lyman was eager to become a father. This would be his and Susan’s first child born in freedom, and its birth would be a visible emblem of their great sacrifice and triumph.

Susan had taken to sleeping downstairs with Mary, whose own baby was not due till early June, the two pregnant women sharing Father’s and Mary’s large bed by the stove; Lyman, of course, had continued to sleep up in the loft with me and the boys on one side of the curtain, Ruth and the girls on the other. It was not an uncomfortable arrangement, however unconventional, and it was practical, contriving as it did to make the hours we spent in bed a businesslike affair difficult to corrupt with indolence or socializing, for as soon as you woke, out of politeness and modesty, there was nothing to do but rise from your cot and dress in the dark and set about to work. Our sleeping arrangements, except when Father was at home, when they provided him and Mary with a small privacy, functioned strictly to enable us to sleep, nothing else. Which was, no doubt, as Father had intended.

The animals were restless, shedding their shaggy winter coats and eager to be let out of their pens and stalls after long confinement, and the lambing had begun in a promising way, and we were looking forward to a successful shearing. Also, we had two new calves and a large litter of pigs to add to our livestock. The mountains were still as shrouded by snow and bleak sheets of ice as in January, but down in the cleared valleys and flatlands surrounding North Elba, the snow had diminished to long, rounded peninsulas and smooth-shored islands melting into the yellowed, soppy fields and soft, two-feet-deep blankets that lingered in the woods and dales and on north-facing slopes. The Au Sable River was running freely again, and the lakes and ponds, although they had not begun yet to crack and boom and break up, were no longer safe to cross with a sleigh.

Suddenly, we were once again busy outdoors, clearing new ground, burning stumps and building fences, preparing the land for plowing as soon as it dried, tapping sugar maples and boiling down the sap in huge cauldrons. With each new day the sun rose earlier and set later, and every night we fell into bed exhausted from our work and rose in the morning eager to return to it. We had entered what our laconic neighbors called, not spring, but mud season. Where, for months, the frozen, rock-hard roads, lanes, paths, and farmyards had been buried under head-high drifts, they were now cleared of snow and ice and stood revealed as made entirely of soft, sticky mud — heavy, deep, corrugated rivers and ponds of it. The mud was everywhere, impossible to keep out of the house, off our tools and boots, wagons, animals, and machinery, and we slogged through it as if through molasses.

I hung the sleigh runners in the barn and put onto the wagon a new set of large, wide wheels, which I had built myself during the dark winter months, six-foot wheels with iron rims that had been crafted by Lyman in his smith’s shop. It was hard going, but with the new wagon wheels and by using both horses instead of only one, we were able to travel nonetheless. And travel we did. For there was movement again on the Underground Railroad, and this time I meant to take Watson and join Lyman myself in conducting the fugitive slaves, who were beginning to emerge blinking and fearful from their wintry hiding places and make their way north once again, passed as before from hand to hand, cellar to cellar, and attic to attic, up along the route from Utica to Timbuctoo to Port Kent and on by cart or sleigh to French Canada; or sometimes, via Lyman’s favorite route now, traveling northwest from Timbuctoo over the deepest Adirondack wilderness to Massena, thence to the St. Lawrence crossing at Cornwall and into Ontario there.

We Browns were going to be alongside him this time, armed and vigilant. I wished to make it clear to Lyman that he and I now shared the same priorities. I could not bear the thought that he might think me interested only in the farm, as had undeniably been the case in the autumn. These fluctuations in policy, I knew, were a sign of my confusion then, but it felt not so much like a moral confusion as a temporary and strictly personal conflict between loyalty to Lyman and loyalty to Father. With the autumn and winter behind us, I believed that I was able once again to be loyal to both.

Slave-catchers and their collaborators that spring were skulking like hungry wolves in and around all the towns and cities that lay along the usual routes north, especially in western New York and in the Hudson and Champlain valleys from Albany to Plattsburgh, and as a result, agents of the Underground Railroad in places like Utica, Syracuse, and Schenectady were sending many more fugitives than before over the considerably more arduous Adirondack mountain and wilderness route that Lyman favored. This in spite of the harsh weather, the bad roads, the long distances between stations, and the threat of meeting wolves and other wild animals. Along about the middle of March, fugitives first began arriving late at night in Timbuctoo, and the next morning one of our few allies from the settlement, a person known to us, would arrive at the farm to apprise us of the situation. That same night, regardless of our obligations at the farm, Lyman and I and Watson would hitch up the team and drive the wagon over to Timbuctoo, where we would pick up our poor, frightened human cargo and carry it north to Canada and freedom.

Happily, during this period Lyman and I came to be like brothers again. We renewed our old joking manner with one another and even began having serious talks on such subjects as religion and the relations between men and women. But not race. Prior to our confrontation in the fall, race had been the central subject of all our serious talks with one another, and we rarely, if ever, discussed our true beliefs regarding religion or men and women. Now, however, race was the sole unspoken subject between us. We could talk truthfully and as equals about the Lord, about His work, and about being men, like any two friends of the same color, but we could no longer talk about one of us being black and the other white. I secretly grieved over this particular loss of intimacy, for I had never shared it with a Negro man before. But at the same time I was glad of it, too. Perched up on the box alongside Lyman, with Watson crouched at the rear of the wagon with his rifle at the ready, our precious cargo huddled out of sight underneath the tarpaulin, I felt somehow freed to pretend that Lyman, like me, was a white man, or that I, like him, was black, and we were merely two American men out doing the Lord’s work together.

There were fifteen or twenty runs that spring, but I remember best the morning in mid-April when we came back to the farm from an especially arduous run to the Ontario border. We had been gone for three days and four nights, had almost lost the wagon in a muskeg south of Potsdam, had been forced to travel half a day off our route on an old lumbermen’s trail to find a place where we could safely ford the Raquette River, and at the end had narrowly escaped a pair of slave-catchers encamped outside Massena, just south of the border. Watson had performed bravely, and though he claimed to have shot both of them when they pursued us in the gray, early morning light for several miles along the bank of the broad, still-frozen St. Lawrence, he certainly hit one, which discouraged the other, and thus we were able finally to deliver our cargo safely at the crossing to Cornwall.