Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Cold stove, aprons drooped across chair-backs, muddy boots stacked in the rack by the back entry: I stand in the dead center of the room and cock my head like a hunted animal listening for the hunter; no, more like the hunter poised for the sound of his prey. But I hear nothing, not even a mouse in the wall or a squirrel skittering across the cedar-shake roof. No brother or sister turns in sleep in a narrow cot in the loft overhead; no one sighs and peers from the small, square window up there. There is not a breath, human or otherwise, to ripple the still, funereal air of this house.

Perhaps I have unknowingly arrived home on the Sabbath, the Lord’s one day of rest, when, after six days of tending to our puny needs, He commands us to tend His. Perhaps everyone has departed for the small white church in the settlement below, there to pray for strength now and divine grace at the moment of death and salvation and eternal life thereafter.

Everlasting life— what a horrid thought! Although sometimes I have believed that it would not be a terrible thing to be killed eternally. To be slain again and again, until I no longer feared death. Then life would be the illusion, and dying and being born again to die again the only reality: the world, which has no experience anyhow at being me, would simply go on being itself. I might become good, finally: a perfect man, like a Hindoo saint, with no stern, bearded God lording it over me, enticing me with guilt and shame and principles and duty, and making goodness an irresistible obligation, impossible to meet, and not simply man’s natural condition.

Ah, but I was born and raised a Christian, not a Hindoo! I can only glimpse these things but now and then and cannot sustain such a perverse, foreign view of life and death for longer than it takes to write it down here. Worse, I am a Christian without a God, a fallen man without a Saviour. I am a believer without belief.

I’m unable to say how long I have stood here in the house thinking these strange thoughts, but the shadows have grown long, and the room has nearly fallen into darkness, when finally, for the first time since my arrival home, I hear the sound of another living creature: the slow hoofbeats of a horse, then of several horses approaching the farm at a walk, and the sharp bark of a dog — from the high, thin sound of it, a collie dog — and the laughter and easy talk of human beings! From the window I see, coming through the dusk, my family: there at the front is Father, white-bearded and looking ancient in the face, though still as straight-gaited as ever; and my stepmother, Mary, and my sisters seated up in the wagon; and my younger brothers and brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and with them, afoot and on horseback and riding in a trap, half a dozen more, white people and Negroes both, our longtime northcountry neighbors and friends coming gaily along the lane from the settlement as if from a holiday outing.

Suddenly, the empty vessel has been filled, and out of invisibility and silence, I have been made visible to myself, and audible! I call out to them, joyous and grateful for the simple fact of their existence elsewhere than in my mind and memory, and rush pell-mell from the house to the yard and greet them there. These beautiful, utterly familiar faces and bodies are real, are tangible! And here, at last, clasped to the bosom of family and friends, I am one with others again! As when I was a child and my mother had not died yet. As when Father had not begun to block out the sun and replace it with his own cold disk, as when he had not cast me in his permanent shadow. They all touch me, and they even embrace me, and they say how glad they are to have me with them again. Though nothing is forgotten, all is forgiven! Even Susan Epps is here amongst them, and she has beside her, holding tightly to her skirt, a small boy — her son, Lyman’s son, emblem of her love for him and his forgiveness of me, for that is how she presents the little boy to me, saying simply, proudly, “I have a son to make your acquaintance, Owen Brown,” and that is how I receive him, and he me.

Sister Ruth declares that she, too, will soon have a child to make my acquaintance, a nephew or niece, and there will be others coming along before long, for here are Oliver and his pretty young bride, Miss Martha Brewster, who have this very afternoon become husband and wife! A wedding, one I could have attended myself, Ruth tells me, had I arrived in time or had they known of the imminence of my return so as to have held off the wedding for a few hours. But no one knew when Owen would appear, except Father, she says, and nods approvingly at the Old Man, who kept insisting that Owen would get home in time for Oliver’s and Lizzies wedding, and as usual Father was not altogether wrong, she adds, and not altogether right, and everyone laughs at that, for we are delighted when Ruth teases the Old Man, the only one of us who can do it and make him blush with pleasure from it and not scowl.

Mary, my dear stepmother, I first hold close to my face and then at arms’ length, so that I can peer into her large brown eyes and see my own face reflected back and know that, even though I can never love her as she wishes and Father asks, she nonetheless loves me as powerfully as any mother can love her natural son and feels no loss for herself or imbalance in the exchange, only sorrow for me. My brothers and brothers-in-law and my old friends from Timbuctoo and the village of North Elba, all in the shy way of northcountry farmers, shake my hand and clap me on the shoulder and ask me to say by what route, by what roads and ferries and canals, came I home all the way from I-o-way; and how were the other boys, asks Salmon, when I passed through Ohio; and their families, asks Watson, and our uncles and aunts and cousins in Ohio; and did I visit and pray over Grandfather Brown’s grave in Akron, asks sister Annie, the sweetest and most pious of Father’s daughters and of Grandfather Brown’s granddaughters. And to all I say yes and yes and yes: I have done everything that you would have me do, been everywhere you wanted me to go, said what you wished to have said yourselves, and now here I am standing amongst you, your beloved son, brother, uncle, dear friend, and I want nothing of life now but never again to leave this place and these people. I see the newly married and the recently familied and the several generations rising and all this beautiful, high meadowland and forest that surrounds us, and I permit myself the glimmering thought that someday soon I will ask to marry Susan Epps and raise her son and make for us a farm here on the Plains of Abraham. I will make of this joyful moment a starting point for a long, happy, and fruitful life, instead of making it the mocking, ironic end of a life that was short and bitter and barren.

Would that not be a wonderful way to end this story? With one wedding just finished and another soon to come — the third son of John Brown to marry the Negro widow of his dearest friend, to raise together his friend’s, her late husband’s, namesake into manhood here in the Adirondack wilderness, the three of them, one small family free of all the cruel symbolism of race and the ancient curse of slavery, a white man and a Negro woman and child held dear by a family and community that see them and deal with them solely as family and friends and fellow citizens?

Fantasy, delusion, dream! A guilty white man’s chimera, that’s all. It lasts but a second. It lasts until Father comes forward now and places his heavy hands onto my shoulders, and I am suddenly ashamed of my hope and can no longer look at Susan or her son or at anyone else. Only at Father: at his cold eyes, gray as granite. I feel him press his hands down with great force, as if he has settled a yoke upon my shoulders and wishes me to kneel under its weight. And so I do, I bend and kneel, and in Jesus’ name he prays over me, thanking the Almighty for bringing me safely home, so that I can keep and fulfill my covenant with the Lord and can now go out from this blessed place and commence the great and terrible work that He hath ordained for us.