Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

The trip back to North Elba, though less risky — since now the only Negro aboard was Lyman, who always carried his old, tattered manumission papers in a wallet strapped to his leg like a knife — was not much easier, as the weather alternated between rain, sleet, and snow. We crossed marsh and muskeg, saw mists at dawn rising off the wilderness lakes where deer and moose came down to the edge to drink and look up and watch us as we passed along the opposite shore. We penetrated deep into the ancient blue spruce and balsam forests, passed through miles of beech woods and hickory, circled beaver ponds, saw the tracks of lion and heard the howl of wolves and the coughing bark of bears, were brought up short at fast-running, rock-bottomed streams choked with snowmelt and overflowing their banks and sending us back up into the woods on lumber trails in long complex loops until we could return again to the road, which was never a real road, only a lonely, wagon-wide path through the northwoods, a deer trail become an Indian trail widened by horses and sledges bringing out timber and by supply wagons going into the camps.

As on other such difficult, demanding treks, with little or no sleep, we had gone a whole day without food, without seeing a settlement or farm or even another human being, save for an occasional trapper crossing the trail into the deep woods to check his lines, furtive and solitary as a wild animal himself. What did the enslavement of three million Negroes mean to him? Or the Fugitive Slave Law? Did he know, much less care, who was President? Had he even heard of abolitionism? Sometimes when I saw one of these pelt-covered, bearded fellows with his backpack and steel-toothed traps and long-barreled rifle disappearing into the wilderness, I almost envied him. His ignorance and single-minded pursuit of the skins of animals was a kind of innocence that I would never know again, if I had ever known it at all.

It was dawn when we finally arrived at the farm. The overcast sky was soft as flannel and gray in the east above Tahawus and soot black in the west. It had rained most of the night, a raw, penetrating rain that had soaked straight through our cloaks and hats and made our bones feel brittle as iron. As we pulled into the yard, we saw lamplight inside the kitchen and smoke from the chimney, and Lyman remarked on it, for normally, with Father away, no one would be out of bed this early. I think that we both at the same instant realized what had wakened the family, for without saying a word to one another, as we passed the house, I handed the reins to Watson, and Lyman and I jumped down from the wagon and made for the door.

It was indeed as we had expected — Susan’s baby had come. Susan’s baby— Lyman’s baby as well. Yet somehow I could not see it that way. Even then, long before I had come to any awareness of the true nature of my feelings for Susan, I seemed to be cutting Lyman out of his privileges and prerogatives, so that when I looked from face to face in the warm, dimly lit kitchen and saw only grief and exhaustion, saw none of the exhilaration and pride that I expected, I did not think once of Lyman’s loss. Only of Susan’s, and in some small, illegitimate way, my own.

Mary slumped at the table with her Bible open before her, but she was not reading from it; she merely gazed out the window opposite at the slowly brightening field and woods beyond. Ruth was seated on the bed next to Susan, wiping the woman’s face with a damp cloth. Ruth’s expression was grim, tight-lipped, frightened, but accepting, as if during the night and long hours into dawn she had learned some terrible thing about her own coming fate. The other children moved about slowly in their pantaloons and union suits; half-dressed, sad-faced waifs they seemed, trying to put together a bit of breakfast for themselves. The women looked drained and exhausted; they had clearly been up all night, struggling to bring a child into the world. Susan herself, mother of the child, lay back among the pillows with her eyes closed, her hands beneath the covers, all color drained from her face so that she was nearly as white as Ruth, and for an instant I thought that she had died and felt a moan begin to rise in my throat.

Then her eyes blinked open. She turned her head slowly on the pillow and, expressionless, looked at her husband and me at the door, the two of us huge and cold, noisy in our heavy boots and rain-soaked clothes, clumsy, obdurate, and male, all out of place in this silent, warm, sad company of women and children. I was thinking hard thoughts. So many babies are born dead, you dare not wish for them to be born at all.

And so many die right after they are born, you wonder why they were allowed to live in the first place. And if they live awhile, so many soon sicken and die, you wish they had died at the start and had not let you learn to love them. The women, they weaken and grow sadder with each loss, but the men, what do they do? I thought that they must gnash their teeth and pound the walls with their fists, as I did then. I balled my right hand into a fist and banged it hard against the wall, one, two, three times, each blow stronger than the last, until I thought I would bring down the wall like blinded Samson. Then, frightened by my own fury, I went to a far corner of the room and closed my eyes and wished for words of prayer, but found none.

In a strangely cold tone, Ruth said, “The baby was born dead. We have wrapped it for burial. You will need to dig a grave for it, Owen. Do it now” she said.

I cleared my throat and said, “And Susan? How is she?”

Mary spoke then. “She’ll be fine, I’m sure. Do as Ruth said, Owen. Dig the grave. Susan will be fine. The midwife from Timbuctoo was over to tend her and left only a short while ago. She knows all the old remedies, and Susan has been treated by them. The baby has no name, but we need to bury it, so we can say our prayers for it. Lyman may want to make a marker, but there’s no need. It never drew breath,” she said, and added, almost as afterthought, “It was a baby boy.”

Throughout, Lyman had not made a sound or a move from the door. He stood there now, immobile and as silent as when he had come in. I had tears running down my cheeks, yet his eyes were dry and cool, his face impassive. My body was hot with rage, and I could barely keep it still, but Lyman stood with his hands slack at his sides. He was more a carved block of ice in the dead of winter than a man. He held himself like that and regarded his wife with strange placidity, as if he had come upon her sleeping and did not want to waken her but merely wished to watch her awhile without her knowing.

Finally, Susan said in a voice that was almost a whisper, “I’m sorry, Lyman.”

He twisted his lips as if to clear his mouth of an unpleasant taste, and when a few seconds of painful silence had passed, he said, “It was not meant to be.” And then abruptly he turned and departed from the house.

I followed him out the door, still shaking with what I thought was rage and grief. Unable to say anything useful or comforting to Susan, still unable even to pray, I proceeded at once to follow my stepmother Mary’s order to dig a grave for the infant. That would be my use. Then, before I had reached the barn, Lyman came riding out on Adelphi.

I reached up and grabbed the bridle and asked, “Where are you going?”

“Timbuctoo.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to put my cabin straight.”

“What? Why do that now? I don’t understand.”

He would not look at me. “I’ll be back in a few days, and I’ll be taking Susan then.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m saying what I’m saying.”

“But you can’t leave,” I said. “She needs to be here, and she needs to have you with her.”