Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“No. She and I need to be amongst our own people. I don’t want to have to explain it to you, Owen. But it ain’t right for us to be living here anymore with you Browns. There’s too much gone wrong for us since we moved over here, so we’re going to go on back now, soon as Susan’s ready to travel that far.”

“No,” I declared. “You can’t do that.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Don’t know that you can stop me, Owen, since that’s what I’m determined to do.”

“This is Father’s horse you’re riding” I said, as if that would stop him. It seemed to me almost unthinkable, that he would remove Susan and himself from our house and return to their bare little cabin in Timbuctoo. Did he think that we had cursed him, had put a hex on him?

He looked down at me with irritation and something like pity on his face. “Fine,” he said, and he swung down from the horse to the ground, handed me the reins, and walked away. I stood there holding the horse and watched in silence as he strode across the yard to the road, then down the road in the direction of the African settlement, until he was finally gone from sight.

When I returned the horse to its stall in the barn, Watson was there, brushing down the other Morgan. “I thought Lyman went off on Adelphi,” he said. “What’s the matter? He was weird.”

“Yes, well, there’s bad news” I said. “Susan’s baby, it was born dead.” His bright face suddenly went slack and pale. He said nothing, simply stood there with the brush in his hand, open-mouthed and silent, as if he had been hit in the chest and had lost his breath.

“I need help digging the grave, Wat,” I said. “Will you come with me?” I had picked up the spade and pick and stood by the door.

“Yes, sure. Oh, this is pretty terrible for them, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s terrible.”

“Is Susan all right?”

“Yes. She’ll be fine in a few days.”

“What about Lyman?”

“Lyman’s upset, but he’ll be all right.”

“Where was he off to on Adelphi?”

“Stop asking questions,” I said, handing him the pick. “Just follow me; we’ll dig the grave.”

He shrugged his bony shoulders, grabbed up the pick, and traipsed along behind me, a pair of gravediggers on a cold, gray, drizzling dawn.

A hundred rods or so beyond the house, in a clearing near a stand of birches, my brother Watson and I dug a deep hole in the wet, rocky soil. Afterwards, I built a small pine box and into it placed the tiny body of the infant wrapped in a plain, earth-colored scrap of wool and nailed it shut. We never saw the infant itself; only its humble shroud. Then Watson and I lowered the box into the hole and filled it and covered the opening in the ground with sod. It would remain unmarked. And by the time we came seven weeks later to bury Mary’s and Fathers unnamed infant in its unmarked grave, the grass had grown tall over the first grave, and daisies were blooming there, and you could not see where it had been. Although I knew exactly where the first grave was located and saw it clearly, as if there were a tall, engraved marble stone at its head:

Unnamed Baby, born to Susan & Lyman Epps “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed”

I Corinthians 15:51

It was a terrible time then, with the baby born dead and with Lyman and Susan gone off to live amongst the Negroes in Timbuctoo and with Mary’s own birthing date fast approaching — in itself not upsetting, even to me, but it meant that Father would soon be coming to North Elba, which now, more than ever before, filled me with nameless dread. Why was his coming so dreadful? He was my father. I loved him. I believed that I had done nothing wrong.

I could only say to myself that it had to do with the disarray that I saw all around, and I knew he would see it the second he drew up before the house — the Old Man could smell disorder in the air — and in short order he would set everything right again. Humiliating me. Even so, I felt strangely paralyzed, and my anticipation of his coming only seemed to make it worse.

Spring planting went ahead, but it was more Watson’s and Salmon’s doing than mine, and it was done in a desultory fashion; and though we continued to clear back the forest at a fairly good rate, cutting and burning and pulling stumps off nearly a half-acre of ground a week, we did it sloppily — unscientifically, Father would say — like hired laborers without a foreman. And the house was falling into steady disrepair, as we could not seem to find the time or the energy or the wit to repair the damage done to the roof and chimneys by the winter winds and ice.

And we had no excuses this time; we could not tell ourselves, or report to Father when he arrived, that we had been too busy doing the Lord’s work to do our own. We were no longer conductors on the Underground Railroad. Father’s great Subterranean Passway, at least our small section of it, had gone dead. Without Lyman to act as liaison between us and the citizens of Timbuctoo, we were unable to carry fugitive slaves north. Without Lyman, no one came to us anymore for help, which disappointed me greatly and made me a failure, not only in my own eyes but in the eyes of Watson, and of Salmon, too, who had grown as passionate as Watson on the issue of slavery and as eager as he to oppose it.

They could not understand my reluctance to confront Lyman forthrightly and honestly. “Why’n’t you just go over there and make it clear that we’re ready to run folks north in our wagon as soon as they show up in Timbuctoo?” Salmon demanded. “Just put it to him, Owen. What’s the big deal between you and Lyman anyhow? So what if he wants to go back and live on his own land in Timbuctoo? Seems only natural, don’t it?”

“You don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t.”

“He doesn’t want anything more to do with us Browns.”

“Why? Because of Susan’s baby? That can’t be it. We didn’t have anything to do with that. It was the Lord’s will.”

“I don’t know, Salmon. You talk to him, if you want. You go over there, and you plead with him to provide us with passengers for our wagon and team so that we can feel better about ourselves. You tell him how much he needs us to help him help his Negro brethren, Salmon. You know what he’ll say?”

“What?”

“I… I don’t know. I don’t know what he’ll say. I just know that I can’t go to him. Not now. Maybe not ever.”

“Sounds crazy to me;’ he said, disgusted. And he did, indeed, that very day of our conversation, ride out to Timbuctoo all by himself, only to return in the evening clearly disappointed and not a little confused. He came in at supper and sat down sullenly at the table without taking off his hat and coat or wiping his muddy boots.

It was Ruth who asked him what Lyman had told him, for she, like everyone else in the family, had known why the boy had gone over there. Mary had even put up a basket of bread and preserves for Salmon to carry to them. I said nothing, and neither did Watson, who I think had guessed by then that there was something dark and personal between me and Lyman, something that could not yet be named by either of us, for neither Lyman nor I knew what it was ourselves. We merely felt its power and acted on it, as if we had no choice in the matter, as if it were a shared compulsion of some sort, the nature of which would become apparent to us and nameable only later, when it no longer controlled us.

“I never even saw him,”Salmon said. “I tried talking to some others, Mister Grey and the other Mister Epps, the choirmaster. But they said there was no Underground Railroad in Timbuctoo. Like I was some kind of slave-catcher or something. Didn’t know what I was talking about. Lyman, they told me, was gone off”