Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“Either way!’ Lyman said, “we know God created everything. The whole kit an’ caboodle. Question is, first time around, was it ice or was it fire? Did things heat up to get to where they are now, or cool down? With all that business about the darkness and the firmaments between the firmaments, it must’ve been ice,” he declared. “I’m holding out for a world of ice that God sets to slowly melting over the years, especially in the years since the birth of Jesus, as the Christian religion gets spread over the world. Starts way down in the Garden of Eden and moves out from there. Which is why the Bible comes from the desert anyhow. Egypt and all that. On account of it being close to Eden and it being already warm there first.”

Lyman’s accent had slipped to the South, as it usually did when we were at ease alone together and as I imagined it did when he was speaking only with black people. He slurred his vowels, dropped consonants, and let his grammar follow different, less logical rules and conventions than those that guided white people’s grammar. When he talked this way, which was his natural speech, I was often inclined to let my own speech drift over in unconscious mimicry, for it was to me an attractive way to speak — smoother and slower, softer and more intimately expressive than my own habitual pronunciation and grammar permitted. I envied its intimacy especially and longed to escape from the formality of my accent and the impersonal logic of my sentences. But whenever I heard myself trying it, I grew severely embarrassed, as I could not speak Lyman’s English without hearing myself in blackface. I felt like an inept imposter, an unskilled actor mouthing lines not his own.

Reluctantly, I would return at once to my accustomed manner of speaking, which had been influenced so profoundly by Father’s that, in the context created by Lyman’s fluency and ease, my words seemed to be coming from Father’s mind and my voice from his lips. Consequently, instead of sounding like an untalented minstrel showman making a mockery of Southern Negro speech, I sounded to myself like a tinny, nervous imitation of my old-fashioned Yankee father.

I have no idea of how I sounded to Lyman’s ears. If he envied the formality of my pronunciation and the rigorous, constricting logic of my grammar, he showed no signs of it. Merely, when amongst white people, he spoke in the manner of a poor, uneducated Southern farmer who was white also, and since he was, after all, a Southerner, it seemed authentic enough, at least to white people. Perhaps he was simply a better actor than I and could move from Negro to white speech without exposing the gap between his true and false selves. I, it seemed, could not, no matter how I spoke. Which is one reason why I so often chose to remain silent. Until now. When there is no one left to hear me but the dead, and you, Miss Mayo.

Lyman said, “There’s still lots of places around here, even, where the old, original world ain’t got warm yet. So you can still see how it was back in them olden days, if you wants to. Got ‘em close by, even.” He told me then of an ice-cave located not a hundred rods from where we sat. There were a number of ice-caves up here along Indian Pass, he said, which were known to the people of Timbuctoo and carefully avoided by them. “On account of them ol’ African superstitions an’ such. But they don’t bother me none. It’s older folks, mostly, who is scared to go inside. They warns you off ‘em like the devil live there. Ain’t nobody live there. Too cold, ‘specially for the devil;’ he said with a short laugh. “You wants to see one?”

I said sure, and we each stuck a pitchy pine-branch into the fire and, torches in hand, marched single-file into the darkness beyond our camp, moving uphill along a rocky rivulet. Soon we approached the sheer, high walls of stone that mark the highest point of the pass, where the trickling waters split and half the trickles run south and grow in time into the mighty Hudson and half run north and become the Au Sable and empty finally into the St. Lawrence. Here Lyman turned off the narrow path to his right and began to scramble uphill over riprapped rocks and tangled roots. I followed close behind.

Suddenly, I felt a breath of cold air in my face, as if a huge, dead thing had exhaled. Lyman disappeared from my sight, and I thought the freezing breath of the dying monster had blown his torch out, for all I saw before me was a clutch of low balsams and behind them the perpendicular face of the rock wall. “Lyman! Where are you?” I cried.

His voice came back all hollowed out: he was inside the cave. “Cup your torch, and come forward,” he said.

I did as instructed, and the balsams easily parted, and in a second I found myself gone from the familiar world of trees and mountain streams and purple-blue night sky. I was standing beside Lyman inside a high, rock-walled chamber — standing in the very mouth of the monster. Looking down its half-illuminated length in the flickering light and leaping shadows, I could see the throat and belly. It was as if we had been swallowed whole by Jonah’s whale. The chamber was freezing cold and the air damp and still, and our warm breath blew pale clouds that lingered before our faces. There were long, white icicles hanging from the crackled sides and sharply angled top of the cave, and thick, yellowish tongues of ancient ice along the floor, dirtied and stained by the animals that over the years had wintered here — the old beasts: bears, catamounts, fisher cats. No human could have stayed here long; it was too cold, too dark, too cruel a habitation to visit, except briefly and only to escape blizzard, flood, or fire.

Then the ice-cave was suddenly like a tomb to me, a stone sepulchre, and we were locked inside it, as if a rockslide had sealed off the entry from the world outside. I imagined this but also for a moment believed it — that we two were actually trapped inside this cold, rock-walled chamber together, and no one knew. No one would come and dig us out. No one would ever find our bones or know what had happened here. We had been at last cut loose from everything in the world outside that had long separated us one from the other — the color of our skin, our war against slavery, Susan, Father. Even God! It was a vision that promised the end of solitude. I glimpsed in this moment the possibility of escape at last from my terrible isolation. The loneliness that had cursed me since childhood and that had surrounded me like a caul seemed for the first time to stretch and extend itself like a pregnant woman’s belly to include another human being inside, who was a man like me, who was my twin, myself doubled and beloved, and who was at this instant looking back at me with love.

I reached down and shoved the unlit end of my torch into a notch between two rocks beside me so that it continued to burn. Then I drew out my knife and opened it and placed it into Lyman’s right hand and laid my right hand on his shoulder.

He looked at the knife and at me. “Why you givin’ me this?”

“I have a confession to make.”

“No,” he said in a low voice. “You don’t.”

“Yes, I do. And I’m ready to die for it. But only at your hand.”

He snorted, derisively almost. “I don’t want no confession from you, Owen Brown. Whatever you done, you already done it anyhow.”

“No. Not yet. My confession will be the act.”

“Yes, you has. Ain’t nothin’ you confess to me I don’t already know. Susan told me how you spoke to her. An’ I seen you sneakin’ ‘round our cabin nights. And now you wants me to forgive you for it? Or else to kill you?” He laughed. “No. I ain’t gonna give you that, not neither one. You wants to kill yourself, now, that’s different. Why not anyhow? Sneakin’ ’round after a colored woman, a married black woman. Like she’s not as good as a white woman and deserving the same respect? Or like I’m not as good as a white man? When here you is, the son of John Brown.” He curled his lip and stared me in the face. “You ain’t half the man your father is,” he said.