Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“They say where?” Watson asked.

“Nope. Just gone off. You know how they can get when they don’t want you to know something. They smile and tell you something half-right and half-wrong, act like they don’t know the truth any more than you do. ‘Lyman, he gon’ off somewheres, Mistah Brown.’ I’m telling you, it was like I was the sheriff or a slave-catcher, the way they treated me.”

“Did you go to his cabin?” Watson wanted to know.

I remained silent throughout, as if none of this concerned me. “Yep. And it looked like he’d been doing some work on it. Has himself a pretty decent kitchen-garden under way, too. I even saw Susan,” he said, and I put down my knife and spoon and looked up.

It had been just over a month since they had left, that long since I had seen her, and suddenly, upon hearing her name in my brother’s mouth, imagining him in her presence, I realized that during those thirty-odd days and nights I had thought of almost no one else. Her face, her voice, her shape and movement, had constantly been in my mind. No matter what I was doing, no matter whom I was talking to, it was Susan I was thinking of, missing, pining for, longing to speak to. And to touch. Lyman, whenever I thought of him, as indeed I frequently did, came to my mind only as an obstacle to my reaching his wife. He was a curtain blocking my view, a rock rolled into my path, a palisado surrounding the object of my desire.

That I had not once, until this moment, stepped back from my thoughts and observed their peculiar nature shocked and alarmed me. But that’s how powerful they were, how all-consuming. Once I knew my thoughts, however, I was first appalled and then instantly repelled. Of course! I reasoned. This was the source of the pain between me and Lyman. And he had known it long before I did, surely. He had seen that I was in love with his wife, and naturally, as soon as he could, he had withdrawn her from me.

My blood washed over me. I felt absurd, and then guilty, and wished only that I could somehow purge myself of my love for Susan and make amends to Lyman. It also occurred to me that this had been the source of my anxiety about Father’s imminent arrival in North Elba: I was afraid that he would ask after Lyman and Susan, and when I replied that we had not seen them since their return to Timbuctoo, he would look me in the eye, and he would know at once what I myself had gone months without even guessing.

Abruptly, I stood up and left the house. It was nearly dark, the temperature dropping fast as the sun sank behind the mountains, with the smell of mud and melting snow mingling in the cold air. I went behind the barn and walked up to the grove of young birches there and cut off a switch and stripped it of its new, red buds. Back inside the barn, in the darkness, with the animals shifting their weight quietly in their stalls, I barred the door and stood in the middle of the large room. I pulled off my shirt and drew the top of my union suit to my waist, exposing my naked upper body to the chilled dark. Then I began to beat my chest and back with the switch — slowly and lightly at first, then faster and with greater force, and soon I was doing it with genuine fervor. But it was not enough. The switch was too light and broke off in my hand.

For a moment, I stood half-naked and foolish, out of breath, angry at myself, as if I were an iron object that I had stumbled against in the dark. I remembered Father’s strip of cowhide, which he kept out here to discipline and chastize the younger children, although he rarely used it nowadays. I knew exactly where it was, hung on a nail by the door. It was short, not quite a yard long, but heavy and stiff and dry with disuse, with a sharp edge to it. I reached out in the dark and took it down. The strip of old leather felt in my hand like a weapon. I had not actually held it myself since childhood, since that time when Father had bade me beat him with it, when it had felt alive to me, like a serpent. Now the quirt was dead, heavy, an almost wooden extension of my arm, as if my right hand were grasping my crippled left, and I whisked it through the air and struck myself with it many times — perhaps a hundred strokes, perhaps more. The pain was very great. I thrashed myself around in the darkness, slamming myself against the walls and stalls, knocking over tools and sending buckets flying, thrashing like a man caught by a seizure, until at last I was faint from the pain and exhausted and fell to my knees and did not get up.

But the scourging did not work. Nothing would work to purge my thoughts of Susan or alleviate my guilt for having betrayed Lyman. Not prayer, certainly. I prayed so constantly and loudly in the days following that Ruth and the boys teased me and said that I was practicing for Father’s return, and Mary told them to leave me be, I was only doing what was right in the eyes of the Lord; she wished the rest of the family were as devout as I. But in all my prayers I heard no voice except my own, and my own repulsed me, until eventually I could not bear to hear it anymore and gave off prayer altogether and did not join them in the evenings or when they went to church on the Sabbath. I went generally silent on all matters, not just religion, which was how people were used to me anyway.

I thought that I might cleanse myself with work, but that, too, was to no effect, for I was too distracted and anxious to complete any single task without rushing off to begin another, and all I accomplished was to create an even greater disarray and disorder on the place than had existed before. Trees half-cut or, if cut, left to lie and rot on the ground; chimneys pulled apart and not put back together again; fenceposts driven into the ground but left standing without rails to connect them; half-a-dozen rows plowed, but then the horse unhitched, taken off to haul stones from the river, with the plow abandoned in the middle of the field: it rained for most of those days, and I rushed about as if every day there were a bright sun overhead, a madman farmer, and my brothers and sisters and stepmother watched me with fear and bewilderment. My family kept the house running smoothly and the livestock fed and properly cared for, whilst I made a mess of the rest.

There was no way for me to tell them of the source of such turbulence; I was too ashamed. And besides, as the days went on, I myself had grown as fearful and bewildered as they, for I was no longer sure that my strong feelings for Susan were generated by love for her, so much as by a morbid, cruel desire to take away from Lyman his greatest treasure. I did not love her; I hated him. What perversity was this?

I needed Father to arrive home. Only he, I believed, could provide me with the order and structure of thought capable of leading me out of this wilderness of tangled desire and rage. Come home, Father! I began to say to myself, as I raced uphill and down. Come home and control me, Old Man. Bring me back to myself. Come and deliver me over to a thing larger than these strangely disordered longings. Tell me what it is I must do, and I will do it.

Then, suddenly one morning, there was the Old Man, appearing in our midst like the missing main character in a play, taking over the stage and putting everyone else at once into a supporting role. Which was how we wanted it, of course. Without Father, we had no hero for our play, and whenever he was absent, we undertook our parts without purpose or understanding. We forgot our lines, positioned ourselves wrongly on the stage, confused friend with foe, and lost all sight of our desired end and its opposition. Without the Old Man, tragedy quickly became farce.

Father seemed to know this and almost to welcome it, for when he returned home after a long while away, he always came with a fury, bearing down on us like a storm, crackling with noise and electrical energy, full of clear, irresistible purpose and making thunderous statement of it. He appraised the situation in a second, and before he was even off his horse, the man was barking out orders, schedules, and plans, was making announcements, establishing sequences, goals, standards, setting everyone at once diligently to work for the common good.