Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

At day’s end, when I passed out of the schoolhouse, Mr. Twichell stopped me at the doorway and handed me a small, folded sheet of paper. “I’m sorry, Owen,”he said, in a voice so soft that only I could hear it. ‘This is for your father. Please, don’t fail to deliver it to him.” I took the note with trembling hand, for I knew what it said, and slipped it into my trouser pocket, next to Grandfather’s watch. “You may read it if you wish;’ Mr. Twichell added. He seemed sad and guilty, almost, and I knew why. But he had done the right thing. I was the sinner, not he.

I did not read the note; I could not. I did not deserve to. Dutifully, when I arrived home, I went straight to Father, who was at work inside the tannery, and passed the note to him. He slowly unfolded the paper and read it. Finally, without a word, he held out his hand before me, and I drew the watch from my pocket and laid it flat in his huge, callused, outstretched hand. He thanked me, turned to Grandfather, who had been seated on a stool next to the fire, watching, and gave it over to him. Carefully, Grandfather examined the watch, as if checking it for damage, and placed it into his vest pocket. Then he took up his walking stick, rose creakily, and walked from the room to the yard, where my brothers were at work.

Father said, “Is there anything you can say in your defense, Owen?” His face was very sad and downcast, like Mr. Twichell’s.

“No.”

He sighed. “I thought not. Come with me,” he said.

We went to the barn, where it was dark. Motes of hay drifted slowly from the lofts through beams of light shining through the cracks and openings above. He told me to remove my shirt, which I did, while behind me and out of sight he took from its nail on the main post of the barn the hated piece of cowhide which, years ago, long before my birth, he had tanned and cut into a long strip strictly for the purpose of chastizing his children. I bowed my head and waited, shivering, for the first blow against the cold skin of my bare back.

And when the blow came, the force of it sent my breath from my body, and before I could inhale, the second blow came, harder than the first. Twelve times he lashed my back, one for each hour on the face of the watch, he told me, as he swung the leather strap again and again, each stroke shoving me nearly off my feet. Twelve strokes, he said, so that I would forever associate this particular punishment with my lie. “Twelve strokes for telling people that you owned what was owned by another. For lying.” Each stroke drove me a step forward — twelve steps in a circle in the dirt floor of the barn.

Finally, he stopped. I had not wept and was surprised by that and wondered if somehow, due to my sinful nature, I had lost the capacity for it. Father said, “There are also sixty minutes on the face of a watch, Owen. And not only did you lie, you stole. You coveted your grandfather’s property and stole it from him.” To my amazement, then, Father turned me around to face him and handed me the leather strap and stripped off his own shirt. “As much as you’ve failed me as a son, I’ve failed you as a father,” he said, and he got down on his knees before me. “We’re connected, our sins are connected, in the same way as the sixty minutes and the twelve hours on the face of Grandfather’s watch are connected. Therefore, you must place sixty lashes on my back. Then you’ll never forget how we, you and I, and Grandfather, too, all of us, are connected in all our thoughts and deeds.”

Bewildered at first and frightened by his command, I nonetheless did as I was told and struck him across his naked back with the leather, his own whip of chastizement. It was a feeble blow, but it was all I could muster. “Harder!” he instructed, and I obeyed. “Harder still!” he commanded, and so I did, again and again, growing stronger with each blow, until I had lashed him all sixty times. And then, at the sixtieth and final blow, at last I began weeping copious tears.

“Now, Owen, now you see how it is between God and man,” Father said to me. “Now you’re weeping. And when the Bible says, ‘Jesus wept,’ you know why He wept. Don’t you?”

I could not answer.

“Don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand now.” And I put my shirt back on and left him there alone in the dim light of the barn, praying quietly to God for forgiveness.

I will tell you another story of our life then and of early deceit and punishment, one that, like the other, will bear significantly on later events. More so than any of our neighbors, wherever we lived, we Browns kept the Sabbath holy. Defined precisely, in the way of Father’s literal ancestors, the old New England Puritans, and of his spiritual forebears, the ancient Hebrews, our Sabbath began on Saturday night at sundown and ended at sundown the following day. Father brooked no variations or exceptions to this rule. Sometimes we children argued with him as to whether the Saturday sun had actually set yet, for there was still light filtering through the trees from the west, and John or Jason might contend that if the trees behind the house had been cut, then there would be at least another half-hour of daylight, so it was not truly sunset. But Father would have none of that, answering, “Yes, John, and I suppose if the western hills were not there, we’d have fully an hour of daylight left. Come in now, boys, and honor the Lord with your silence.”

And after a few more minutes of broody grousing around outside, we’d give up and come trooping into the house, latching the door behind, to commence our twenty-four hours of confinement, of silence, prayer, and contemplation of the Lord. It was an imprisonment, broken only by the need the next morning early to tend to the animals and later to join in the few hours of worship at church that, when we were young and living in Hudson and New Richmond, Father was still able to insist on. Of course, after he broke with the Hudson Congregationalists over the slavery question back in ’37, an event you have no doubt already uncovered in your researches, after that, we no longer had even the diversion of church services when the Sabbath came around. Instead, we prayed and sang together at home, and Father preached.

It was difficult for us children, though, especially when we were very young. We moped and drifted somberly about the house, not free even to work or whittle some little tool or toy, no spinning or weaving for the females, no cooking, no household projects, for any of us. Silence, prayer, contemplation, and — except for the Bible — no reading. From our rooms upstairs we peered dreamily out the windows, as ordinary Christians passed down the road on their way to town or cut through the yard into the woods beyond with their muskets on their shoulders, gone deer hunting or out for grouse or partridge, and how we envied them. The girls as much as we boys. We were all fairly high-strung, active children used to constant physical exertion, and to put a twenty-four-hour halt suddenly once a week on our wild spirits, which usually got exercised harmlessly in work and outdoor play and sports, was an extreme imposition, often too extreme for us to place upon ourselves without heavy enforcement from Father.

Sometimes, usually by early afternoon on Sunday, by which time we had become explosive from the confinement and silence, we older boys would contrive to escape from the house for a few hours and return before sundown without being missed. Father’s habit was to retire to the parlor and sit in his chair by the window with his Bible on his lap and read silently, now and then dozing off. It was usually one of the younger children who saw the Old Man’s chin finally fall to his chest and heard him start to snore, and who, on our orders, would tiptoe up the narrow stairs to the rooms above with this welcome intelligence, and, John in the lead, we older boys, sometimes with Ruth tagging along behind, slid open a window and crept along the ridge of the shed roof to where we swung out onto the branch of a maple tree and quickly scrambled to the ground. Then for a few hours we were free to race through the woods like buckskins, shrieking and hollering to one another, making all the wild noises that for fifteen or twenty long hours we had kept bottled up inside our chests.