Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

And then, just as suddenly, there was silence in the whole house. It was a terrible scene, Father, as you can no doubt imagine, horrible to us all; & especially to poor Ruth, who is suffering from unspeakable guilt & remorse. She has shut herself away from the rest of us, & weeps constantly, & when she does speak, it is to beg for forgiveness, especially of Mary, who is seriously shaken from the incident but asks me to say to you that she trusts in God and knows that Kitty is in heaven with Him. The silence may have lasted no more than a second, but it seemed to go on for a long while, before Ruth began to moan, “Oh-h-h, oh-h-h…,” a moan that, in contrast to Kitty’s howl, was purely, uniquely, pathetically human, a noise that is made by no creature but one who has been the direct cause of the death of a child.

Without having observed anything of the accident, except for the steaming skin of water that spread slowly across the floor towards the empty tin bathtub, I knew at once what had happened. And I believe that Fred knew, too, for we looked at one another for an instant, and his eyes were filled with unutterable sorrow. Ruth begged me at first not to write to you, so that she could be the one to bear this burden; but then said that she could not do it. So I have done it. By the time I reached the kitchen, Mary had come down the stairs, her face white with knowledge of what had already happened, and we saw Ruth standing in the far corner of the room with the scarlet body of the baby in her arms. The large black kettle, like a head with a gaping mouth, lay on its side on the floor next to the stove, the spilled, translucent water a carpet of snakes spreading around table legs and chairs.

Ruth’s eyes had rolled back, and she was making a guttural noise now, as if she were choking. The baby had already died. Its scalded, bright red body was emptied of spirit. It was a thing, a tiny, shriveled sack, and its small soul was bouncing wildly around the room near the ceiling, like a maddened, dying moth, a bit of quickly diminishing light. I held Mary by her shoulders, and together we approached Ruth, and very gently Mary reached out and took the body of her baby from her stepdaughter, turned, and walked away from us into the parlor, past poor Fred, who stood at the door with his hands over his ears, as if he still heard the baby’s howl. Silently, I came and stood before Ruth and held her in my arms, but she was insensible of my presence and went on making a choking noise, her head tilted back, eyes whitened and unseeing, as if she had fallen into a deep trance. She needs to hear from you, Father, the same as she has heard from Mary & me (& from John & Jason as well, for they have come down from Ashtabula). She needs to hear that you do not blame her for the death of Kitty. She blames herself more than enough for any of us to add a word. I tell you, it was not Ruth’s fault. She will never see it that way herself, however. It was a simple accident, & any one of us could have been the agency for it to happen as easily as was poor Ruth. Mary dressed the body of the child in a tiny flannel nightgown, wrapped it in a blanket, as if preparing it for sleep, and that same night I went into the barn, and as Father himself had done only a few years before, in that terrible winter of ’43, when four of his children sickened one by one and died, I built for the first time in my life a small pine coffin.

The boys, not knowing what else to do, followed me out to the barn and in the dim lantern light watched me in silence, as I had watched Father, the four of them standing there like somber acolytes, learning how to cut the boards to the correct size for the body of a child, so that the coffin would hold the child snugly, without confining it or bending it out of its natural shape, watching me carefully plane and fit the boards neatly together and drive the nails without damaging the wood and hinge the cover and latch it. We have buried little Kitty out behind the house, near where you planted the crab-apple trees last spring, & am making a proper marker for her that will say her dates and name, & any little motto, if you wish one for her. Mr. and Mrs. Perkins have been a great comfort to Mary & to the rest of us, & Mrs. Perkins has taken Annie & Oliver over to the big house for the time being, to make things easier for Mary; & many other local folks have come to the house with condolences Gsympathy. At the burial, I touched Ruth on the cheek with the fingertips of my right hand and put my claw of a left hand around her back and drew my sister close to me, as if to take into myself her grief and to share with her the shame she felt. The others at the graveside, our friends and neighbors, looked at us, and I was glad of that, for I wished them to see that all of us Browns were equally to blame for the death of our Kitty and that, therefore, no single one of us was to blame. I am sorry, Father, to be bringing you such terrible news. I hope that the business is going well. No particular problems with the flocks or the farm here. Your loving son,

Owen Brown

It was not until nearly a fortnight had passed that we heard from Father at last. Due to the inescapable daily requirements of our livestock and the farm, which honor no human tragedy, the life of the family had resumed its old patterns and routines and had connected back to its various larger cycles by then; and even Ruth had made a few tentative steps back into the fold, as it were, although she was a much altered young woman. She had become the sober, even melancholy woman that she would remain for most of her life thereafter, even during her happiest years, when she and Henry Thompson were courting up in North Elba and in the first year of their marriage, before Henry rode off with us to Kansas.

Father’s letter, arriving as it did after we had already commenced to accommodate our lives and feelings as best we could to the death of Kitty, was painful to read aloud, as was our custom with all his letters, and, later on, difficult for me to copy, as per his instructions, for Father had long since told us to be sure that all his letters were copied and saved, and as I had the best handwriting of any in the family at that time, the task usually fell to me. My dear afflicted Wife & Children, he wrote, and I wrote after him. I yesterday at night returned after an absence of several days from this place & am utterly unable to give any expression of feelings on hearing of the dreadful news contained in Owen’s letter of the 30th and Mr. Perkins’s of the 31st Oct. I seem to be struck almost dumb. Not likely, I thought. For I was angry at Father, not so much for his letter, which was about all he could have said under the circumstances and which was very much in his usual voice. I suppose I was angry at his not being present when we all, and especially Ruth, suffered from the death of little Kitty, so that not only did we have to endure the horror and pain of that event alone but we had to report it to him as well — for his judgement, his huge perspective, his words of beneficence or condemnation, as if he were some lord high sheriff and we were his serfs who had to account for the loss of one of our number — without mentioning in our account that she whom we had lost was an especially beloved child, without mentioning that the awful conditions of her death had inflicted lifelong pain and shame in the heart of one of us in particular.

None of this, of course, was Father’s fault; yet that did not hinder my anger, as I copied his letter into the green school notebook used for the purpose. One more dear, feeble child am I to meet no more till the dead, small & great, shall stand before God. This is a bitter cup, children, but a cup blessed by God: a brighter day shall dawn; & let us not sorrow, like those who have no hope. Oh, if only we who remain had wisdom wisely to consider & to keep in view our latter end. This, I knew, was a pointed reference to me and to John and Jason, for surely we were the ones who were obliged to “sorrow like those who have no hope” of ever being amongst the small and great standing before God. Our sorrow, mine and my brothers’, was the greater, Father implied, because as unbelievers we believed that we would not see poor Kitty again, and that was too bad, just too bad, and nobody’s fault but our own. According to Father, the brighter day was not ours to believe in, and thus we had no wisdom wisely to consider.