Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

I do not know what my father was thinking while he stood that day in the empty office, counting out the money. He could not possibly have gotten away with it. And the betrayal! He was almost a partner, a trusted confidant of Messrs. Wadsworth and Wells, their reliable procurer of western cattle, one of the most knowledgeable and honest stockmen they had ever worked with. He must have felt like a child who has long protected one lie with another and has woven an entire fabric of lies, laying one strand atop and under the other, and has come eventually to long for the truth to stand revealed, not because he loves the truth, but because exposure will bring an end to the agonizing labor of weaving a world of falsehoods. To get it over with, simply to make sense of his daily life, the child finally tells an utterly outrageous lie, one that cannot be believed. With a single lie, he overthrows the entire false world and reinstates the true. The theft from Wadsworth & Wells was like that, for nothing Father could say to explain it would be believed by them, and for a single moment, as he reached into the cash box and counted out the five thousand dollars, Father must have been that child. He closed the box and placed it back inside the cabinet and locked both.

At once, he sent the money off to his friend Mr. Chamberlain in Ohio, who would on receipt of it relinquish back to Father the title of the Haymaker Place. All was well again. Until, of course, later that evening, when Messrs. Wadsworth and Wells both presented themselves at the door of Father’s room at his Lawrence Street boarding house. When they knocked, Father, in what he regarded as a remarkable coincidence, as if the Lord were introducing him back to himself, happened to be reading in his Bible, John, Chapter 10: He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.

Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Wells said that they had come to his chamber, not to accuse Mr. Brown of theft, but simply to ask into his use of the five thousand dollars. They thought that he must have needed it to make a large purchase for them, and they wished to know what it was.

He did not lie; he could not; he told them straight out: he had taken it for his own use. But it was only a temporary removal, he insisted, for he fully expected to receive the same amount in hours or, at the most, days, from a party up in Boston. This was true enough. And had he not at the same time believed that he was owed that much and more by Wadsworth & Wells, he said, money owed for the eventual sale of the cattle he had delivered to them from the west, he would have felt considerable anguish and remorse for having removed the money prematurely. But while he was truly ashamed of having gotten himself into a situation whereby he needed the money desperately and at once, he felt on the other hand no shame for having actually taken the money, no guilt.

Now, though he no longer owed five thousand dollars to his old friend Amos Chamberlain, he owed it instead to Wadsworth & Wells, who, with some justification, felt that while they may not have been exactly robbed of it, neither had they willingly loaned it. At that awful moment of his discovery, seated before his stern, skeptical discoverers, the Old Man had no choice but to comply with their demand that he sign over to them, contingent upon his return of their five thousand dollars, the one remaining property in his name, his beloved Haymaker Place, which sheltered his wife and children.

Meanwhile, the expected money from the mystery loaner in Boston did not materialize. I suspect that it had never been more than a mild promise merely to consider his request, but the Old Man, when he wanted, could make a polite rejection seem its opposite. They waited a week more, and finally Mr. Wadsworth declared that he and Mr. Wells would hold whatever monies they got for selling the herd of cattle against his eventual repayment of the money he owed them or until the sale of the Haymaker property. They had no way of knowing the true value of the farm, of course, or whether it had any prior liens on it, so they simply used the cattle as collateral. And they told him that, regretfully, they would no longer be able to rely on him as their western agent.

At that point, Father had no choice but to leave Hartford and make his somber way homeward. Thus he returned to us a humiliated man and poorer by far than when he had left to put his affairs at last in good order. Poorer, more desperate, and deeper in debt than ever, this time to men who, unlike Mr. Chamberlain, unlike Grandfather and our other relatives, friends, and neighbors back in Ohio, had no particular interest in protecting John Brown and his family. There was nothing for it then but a steady worsening of his affairs. Like Napoleon in Russia, he had advanced too far beyond his meager resources, so that he could no longer retreat back to a safe base, there to wait out the winter storms. Instead, he would have to slog and thrash his way forward, a blind man in a blizzard. And so he did for the rest of his life, dragging us along behind.

Back in Hudson, like a man switching a single pea beneath three shells, the Old Man managed to forestall disaster and hold on to the Haymaker Place a while longer, until the following year, the summer of ’40. After much legal wrangling and suits and counter-suits leading all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court, a final judgement had been found. Bankruptcy was unavoidable. This time, all Father’s debts were being called in, and his beloved old Haymaker Place had at last to be abandoned.

To his further horror, the original lien against the place had been called in by the bank and sold at auction, with Mr. Amos Chamberlain the eventual buyer, and the proceeds from the sale, once Father’s loans from the bank were covered, were to be paid against the sum owed Wadsworth & Wells. Mr. Chamberlain, in what Father saw as an unforgiveable betrayal, had managed to find the cash to offer the bank eight thousand five hundred dollars for the place. “If the man had that sort of money’ Father fumed, “he might’ve loaned it to me and let me keep the farm, so that I might feed my family!”

Blinded by his anger, Father was unable to accept the reality of the situation. He refused to turn the farm over to Mr. Chamberlain, and as a consequence, one warm day the county sheriff and his deputies came out to the farm to put us off it. The Old Man viewed the Haymaker Place as his last stand. “I need this farm! I must hold it and work here, if I’m ever going to provide my creditors with their just due,” he insisted. In recent months, he had abandoned all vain fantasies of spinning gold from straw and had wisely resumed tanning hides on the property, his most reliable means of support over the years, where his labor and skills and those of his sons were sufficient to turn a small profit. Thus he had come to imagine for the first time in years a realistic way of slowly working himself out of debt, one hard-earned dollar at a time. But he needed the house and its outbuildings and the stands of shagbark hickory that surrounded the farm in order to accomplish it.

The prospect of losing the place put him into a mindless frenzy. “Boys, we will fight them to the death! A man must defend his property!” he declared to us that June morning. “It’s an old story. If it can be made merely to appear that Naboth the Jezreelite has blasphemed God and the King, then it will be perfectly right and good for Ahab to possess his vineyard! So reasoned wicked men against Naboth thousands of years ago, boys, and so they reason against me today!”

We were all at midday dinner in the house, Oliver but a baby then, the kitchen full of babies, it seemed — Charles, who would die in the terrible winter of ’43, and Salmon and Watson, and little Sarah, who was six and who would also die in that winter of ’43. Fred, then a sweetly meditative child with none of his later turbulence, was nine; Ruth was but eleven and already performing the labors of a grown woman; and there was I, at sixteen, like a large, housebound dog, simple-mindedly excited by the loud, rough noise of Father’s voice; and Jason, two years older, silently observing, placid, skeptical but loyal; and John, the eldest, eager to display his superior understanding of the situation and his willingness to stand fast with the Old Man.