Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

The younger Lyman Epps will not end up buried here; his bones will molder next to his father’s and mother’s, three miles yonder in the old Negro burial ground of Timbuctoo. And if he learns the truth of why his father died, he will hear it from his father, the only man who knows it as well as I.

But does my beloved, murdered friend Lyman speak on into the night over there, as I do here? Impossible. Unlike me, Lyman died with a clean conscience. Thus he surely went instantly silent.

That was the year of the terrible Ohio drought, when the hay burned in the fields, and the soil crumbled into dust and was blown into dunes, and so many farmers, especially the younger ones, were pulling up stakes and heading for the western territories to start over again. From Pennsylvania to Michigan, crops failed before they blossomed, and the fields lay fallow, and the cattle and the swine were killed and butchered early to keep them from starving to death. Men and women looked out at their parched fields and up at the clear, blue sky and shook their heads and said, Enough! We’ll go where there’s rain falling. And my brothers John and Jason and their young wives were among them that year.

It was the year that the copperhead Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, the drunken Yankee minion of the slaveholders, became President, putting an essentially Southern, pro-slave government finally in place and setting up passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would turn an old-fashioned land grab into a holy war. It overthrew the Missouri Compromise and transformed the old western frontier, making it for all practical purposes into a foreign land, which in that year began to be fought over by the people of two distinct, bordering nations, the slaveholding South and the free North.

By converting the western territories into an object of conquest, the Kansas-Nebraska Act split the country more effectively than any of the battles and wars that followed. The North and the South competing for Kansas in the 1850s were like France and England at war over Canada a century earlier. Except that in Kansas the stakes were higher. Every American knew that if the pro-slavers captured the territory, they would at once make it a slaveholding state in a democratic union that would be governed from Washington by a slaveholding majority of the states, and as a direct result, three million Americans and their descendants would remain permanently enslaved. The North, hopelessly a minority, would have no choice then but to secede from the Union or commence a war of liberation against the South.

And would white Americans go to war to liberate black Americans? Unthinkable. At that time, before Harpers Ferry, with no real blood yet spilt in the name of the cause, the North would have merely shrugged and turned its back on the slaves and the Southern states altogether, and in a businesslike manner would have looked northward for expansion and marched into Canada.

It was also the year of the birth of Father’s last child, Ellen, named for the baby who had died in Springfield back in ’48. With the birth of this child, the Old Man had fathered on two women a total of twenty children. Of the twenty, only eleven were to live beyond childhood; and of those, three more would die in their youth, cut down in the war against slavery; which left, from the eldest, John, born in 1821, to the youngest, Ellen, born thirty-two years later, only eight who survived into adulthood.

It was the year that Lyman Epps and I finished our elaborate dance, and I went howling into the wilderness, leaving wreckage and smoldering ruin all around behind me.

And it was the year that I followed Father’s orders and went out to Ohio to put my brother Fred under my control and bring him back to the farm in North Elba, although in the end I did not bring him back. Instead, I disobeyed Father and took him with me to Kansas, following my brothers John and Jason into the battle there, and eventually by my actions forcing Father to do the same. It did not seem that way at the time, of course, but it does now.

It was autumn when I arrived in Ohio, and the drought had ended some months earlier, but the effects of its devastation were still all around, many empty, abandoned farms and storefronts and fields gone back to brush and weed — as if the landscape had recently been visited by a Biblical chastizement. It was like that for me, too. That warm October evening at Mr. Perkins’s large, prosperous farm a few miles outside Akron, with all the turmoil and madness of North Elba only a few weeks behind me, I was still trembling and distracted by considerations of my own recent proximity to murder and perversion. Otherwise, I might have been more astute in my dealings with Fred, whose nervous condition was, in fact, far worse than mine. I would have put my mission to him in a gentler way.

Unlike me, however, he seemed on the surface to be at relative peace with himself — sitting out with Mr. Perkins’s flocks of merino sheep all day long like an ancient shepherd with his crook and pipe, rounding them up at day’s end with his little black collie dog, and returning them at nightfall to the fold. Evenings, he retired to a small hut that he had built of cast-off lumber, where he prepared his modest meals over a tin stove and read by candlelight from his Bible and slept on a reed mat on the floor. In my agitated state, I envied him for the monkish simplicity of his life and thus did not see the turbulence it hid and anticipated nothing of what was coming.

Though not a large man, Fred was sinewy and tough and very strong, like Father. His face also resembled Father’s, with a hawk-beak nose and deep-set gray eyes under a heavy brow. His hair was stiff and straight, more brown than red, and he had grown a scruffy, wild beard. The last time I saw him, he’d been a boy — not a normal boy, to be sure, but more child than man. All that had changed considerably in the years between. I was not so much shocked or worried by the changes, because Father and my older brothers had prepared me, as I was intrigued by them. With his dark, leathered skin, he looked like a man of the desert, a bedouin or an ancient anchorite living on locusts and honey, an effect emphasized by his clothing — loose deerskin trousers held up by a length of rope, and a shearling vest with no blouse beneath it, and rough, Indian-style moccasins which he had evidently made himself. Artlessly, but all the more artful for that, Fred cut an impressive figure.

When I got to the Perkins place, it was nearly evening. A stable-hand pointed me to Fred’s hut, adjacent to the sheepfolds out behind the large white farmhouse, and I went straight there, intending to visit with Mr. and Mrs. Perkins the next day and inform them of my intention to take my younger brother away with me. I wasn’t especially eager to see them. Father was supposed to have written them of my mission, so I anticipated no trouble, but I did not particularly like Mr. Perkins and his wife. Despite his many years of generosity to Father, I somehow blamed Mr. Perkins for Father’s financial troubles. I saw him, at little cost or risk to himself, as having offered the Old Man the opportunity to develop his wild financial notions unimpeded until he had been overthrown by them. In the normal course of events, Father never would have gotten his warehousing scheme off the ground. But Mr. Perkins was a very rich man, a banker who had made a fortune in the canal business and speculation in the early ’40’s land-boom, which had bankrupted Father, and for him, the sheep business was only a distraction of his old age, a game played with idle money that allowed him to feel like a country squire and attend to something other than his many physical ailments. And I think Father’s skills as a breeder of merino sheep and his energy, earnestness, and honesty fascinated Mr. Perkins, who was in all these ways the opposite. Also, he knew that, however much of his money Father lost in the wool business, Old Brown would pay Mr. Perkins back, no matter how long it took. Meanwhile, he had the continuing benefit of having at least one of Brown’s sons to tend his flocks, which gave him an indentured, highly skilled worker with no fixed term, a hostage, almost a slave. Insensitive to these distinctions and similarities, the man was also definitely not an abolitionist, and Mrs. Perkins even less so, and we had long ago been instructed by Father, of all people, not to discuss or preach abolitionism around them. From the Book of Proverbs, he counseled us, “Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith, than a house full of sacrifices with strife.”