Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Accompanied this time by Mr. Clarke, the Yankee shipper from Westport, he brought supplies, seed, flour, salt, and nails. For the younger children, little gifts — a new Bible for Sarah, a box of paints for Annie, a penknife for Oliver — and for Mary, a silk handkerchief: all presented first thing, unceremoniously, off-handedly, as a greeting. For Salmon, Watson, and me, he had firm handshakes and quick commands to help unload the supplies from the wagon, so Mr. Clarke could move on and make his other deliveries in the settlement before nightfall. He would be returning here in the morning to pick up our furs and as many fleeces as we were able to release to him: that would be Oliver’s job, counting and tying for shipment and sale the spring fleeces and the winter’s catch of pelts — beaver, lynx, marten, and fisher. That’s what Mr. Clarke especially wanted. Father said to get going now, son, that’s a big job, and something was telling him that some of those pelts still needed scraping before they were ready for market, and the other boys were going to be too busy to help him. Mr. Clarke drove a hard bargain and would not accept a bloody hide, Father warned.

Up on his wagon, Mr. Clarke laughed and recalled for Father how he had lost to him his best pair of Morgans, thanks to Father’s nigger, which brought to Father’s attention the absence of Lyman and Susan. He scanned our little group out there in the yard before the house — Mary hugely pregnant and beaming with pleasure at the sight of her husband; Ruth tall and slender and fairly bursting with the secret of Henry Thompson’s promise to ask for her hand in marriage; Salmon, Watson, and I already lugging barrels from Mr. Clarke’s wagon to the barn; the little girls, Sarah and Annie, as if honored by the task, together holding the bridle of Father’s horse, a fine sorrel mare which I recognized as having once belonged to Mr. Gerrit Smith, and, indeed, it did later turn out to be a gift from him.

Father asked where were our friends, referring to them as Mr. and Mrs. Epps, a tacit correction to Mr. Clarke.

I paused at the rear of the wagon, a keg of nails on my shoulder, and Father caught my eye. “Owen?” he said, as if I were the sole reason for their absence.

Mary said, “I would have written about it to you, Mister Brown, but I thought you were coming sooner than this.”

My silence probably told him as much as any words could have then. He nodded and said that we would discuss this later, meaning after Mr. Clarke had left us. I quickly went back to my work, and Father resumed issuing orders, even as he dismounted and embraced Mary and walked arm in arm with her towards the house. Over his shoulder, he instructed Salmon to kindly water the horse when he had finished unloading, and brush her down and set her out to pasture without feeding her grain, as shed been fed this morning in Keene. Not at Mr. Partridge’s, you can be sure of that, he added. Her name was Reliance, he said, and she was reliable. And then to Watson he said that he could see fencing half up, half lying on the ground, and hed better set to work on that at once, boy, or we’ll be chasing cattle day and night. And me he instructed to check Mr. Clarke’s bill of lading against our goods received and sign it for him, then put myself to work on getting the south meadow turned under by nightfall, so we can harrow and plant tomorrow. He had observed coming down from the notch that the frost was well out of the ground there. “Come to the house at noon for dinner,” he said to me, “and we’ll lay out the rest of the planting then. We have lots of hard work to do, boys, so put yourselves to it! I’ll examine the place and view the livestock in a while this morning and will travel over to Timbuctoo this afternoon. By this evening,” he declared, “we will all know who we are and what we’re doing here!”

And then he was gone into the house.

Silence. Watson, Salmon, and I looked somberly, gingerly, at one another. Then Watson shook his head and grinned. “Well, I guess the Old Man’s back,” he finally said. “Hoo-rah, hoo-rah.”

“Yep,” said Salmon. “Cap’n Brown’s home for three minutes, and we already got our marching orders. He ain’t gonna be very happy when he finds out about Lyman, though.”

“I don’t know,” Watson said. “The Old Man’ll set it right. He has a way with Negroes.”

Mr. Clarke laughed. “Your old man has a way with white folks, too,” he said, his spectacles glinting like mica in the morning sun. “Talked me into giving him more credit than I ever give a poor man nowadays.”

“You’ll get your money,’ I said. “Don’t fret yourself”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see, Red. We’ll see how them pelts and fleeces add up,” he said, and handed me a stub of a pencil and the bill of lading, which I signed with a surly flourish, John Brown, by his son Owen Brown , and as I wrote the date, I realized that tomorrow was Father’s birthday.

I was twenty-seven that spring. When Father was my age, he had been married for nearly a decade and had fathered four children. His wife, my mother, had not yet died. When he was my age, he had already made himself a professional surveyor, had established a successful tannery that employed two grown men and four or five boys, had built a house, raised a herd of blooded sheep, cleared twenty acres of hardwood forest and carved a farm out of the wilderness of western Pennsylvania. He had founded a settlement school, and when he was my age, at a time when most respectable white people preferred that folks show slavery their blind eye, he had publically pledged his life to its overthrow. At twenty-seven, he knew what he stood for, what he could and could not do. At my age, Father had become in all visible ways a man.

And here was I, still a boy. How was that possible? In what crucial ways was my nature so different from his that our lives and works would diverge by this much?

John had once said to me, in a complaining tone, that Father had taught us to be afraid of no man except him. And it was true. Father always insisted that we think for ourselves in every way, except when we disagreed with him, and that we hold ourselves independent of every man’s will, except his. He wanted us simultaneously to be independent and yet to serve him. Father was to be our Abraham; we were to be his little Isaacs. We were supposed to know ahead of time, however, the happy outcome of the story — we were supposed to know that it was a story, not about us and our willingness to lie on a rock on Mount Moriah and be sacrificed under his knife, but about our father and his willingness to obey his terrible God. That was the difference between us and our father. We had him for a father, and he had someone else.

His father, like ours, had taught his son John to be independent of all men, but Grandfather had included himself, the teacher, amongst them. He, too, like Father, had told the story of Abraham and Isaac to his eldest son, but he had told it in such a way that it was not about the nature of obedience or sacrifice; it was about the nature of God. Grandfather Brown was a gentle, rational man whose greatest difficulty was in accommodating his character to a cruel and inexplicable universe, and unlike his son, he was not bound by a lifelong struggle to overcome his own willfulness and vanity. It’s their own secret struggles that shape the stories people tell their children. And had I been blessed with a son of my own, the story would have been told yet a third way. The central figure in it would have been neither Abraham nor God. It would have been Isaac, and the questions my story asked and answered would have been Isaac’s alone.

I would have told my son that Isaac’s father, Abraham, rose up early in the morning and led Isaac up into the mountain of Moriah, claiming that he had been directed to do this by God, in order there to make a sacrifice unto Him. And Isaac believed his father, for he loved him and had never known him to lie. And when they had reached the mountaintop and Isaac’s father had clave the wood for the burnt offering and Isaac saw no lamb there, the boy spoke unto Abraham, his father, saying, “Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” And his father said unto Isaac, “God will provide a lamb.” But when Isaac saw his father come forward with a rope and a knife in his hands to bind and slay him upon the altar they had built together, he understood that he himself was to be the lamb. He was afraid and asked himself, Did he love his father so greatly that he could not flee from Moriah back into Canaan, where lay his aged mother, Sarah, or that he could not follow his father’s bondswoman Hagar and her son, Ishmael, who was his brother, into the wilderness of Beersheba? He said to his father, “I heard not this command from God. It comes to me only from thee, and thou art not the Lord, nor canst thou speak for Him. For thou hast taught me that, and I have believed it, and therefore now I must flee from this place, or else abandon all that thou hast taught me.” Whereupon his father fell down upon the ground and said that an angel of the Lord was calling to him out of heaven, saying, “Abraham, Abraham, lay not thine hand upon the lad, for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son from me.” And Isaac showed his father where behind him a ram had been caught in a thicket by his horns, and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of Isaac, and father and son prayed together, giving thanks unto the Lord, and descended together from the mountain feeling wise and greatly blessed by the Lord. That is the story I would tell.