Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“How do you do, miss? Are you out for an evening stroll? May I accompany you a ways?”

“Why, thank you, sir, I would appreciate your company and protection. Are you a native of these parts, sir? For I do not think I know you.”

They were pathetic little dramas, which enflamed my passions and sent me reeling back to our house on Franklin Street, where the rest of the family slept peacefully and virtuously. There I would toss and writhe in my cot in the room that I shared with my younger brothers, miserable, guilty, self-abusing.

Thus I little noticed the continued and worsening illness of another of the children, the baby, Ellen, born in Ohio the previous autumn, and I did not realize that my stepmother, Mary, had not fully recovered from her lying-in period following the birth. I lived in a household whose rhythms and concerns were being shaped once again by illness, and I did not notice. Here I was, this large, healthy young fellow lumbering out to work at the warehouse every morning, returning in the evening for supper and then slipping out again, stumbling through his days and nights with his mind filled only by the turbulence of lustful fantasies at war with private shames, while the rest of the family worried over another frail and failing babe and a mother unable to recover from the rigors of giving birth. In such a way did my preoccupation with trivial sins, with my sensual indulgence and guilt, cause me to commit a graver sin and to feel no guilt for it. No wonder Father seemed short with me that winter and spring: in my self-absorption, I thought that he and Mary and the rest of the family, John and Wealthy, Ruth, even the younger children, were casting me out, were not including me in their circle of intimate relations — when in fact it was I who had cast them out.

Then one night late in April, a few weeks before we planned to depart for our new home in the Adirondacks, I left the house in an unusually heightened state of alarm. I felt I had reached a fork in my road, and if I did not take a turning now I would be forever bound to follow the track I was on. A foolish desperation, I know, but the oncoming move to the wilderness of North Elba frightened me. We had begun dismantling and packing up our life in Springfield, almost without having yet settled there, and the house was filling with crates and cartons, and Father was making lists of goods and tools and was negotiating for a large wagon to carry everything north. That very evening he had informed me over our supper that my job would be to take the boys Salmon and Watson out to Litchfield, Connecticut, where he had been boarding his merino sheep and small herd of Devon cattle at the farm of a cousin, there to gather the livestock and move them north separately from the rest of the family, to meet up in the town of Westport, New York, on Lake Champlain.

I nodded and, on getting up from the table, sullenly announced that I would be going out to say goodbye to a few friends, since I did not expect to see them again. Father showed no interest in my stated intentions: I did not know, of course, thanks to my inane self-absorption, that his mind and the minds of everyone else in the family were very much distracted by the worsening condition of the sick baby, Ellen. It appeared to me that, but for our preparations to move, life was going on as usual. Except, as I saw it, no one particularly cared about me. So deluded was I that I had grown angry at them, at Father especially, for not having asked me pointedly where I was going, who were my friends, why did I need to tell them goodbye with two weeks yet to go before we left town? For not having caught my lie.

In a huff, then, and puffed up with self-righteous relief, I left the crowded little house on Franklin Street and made my way downtown towards the dark, broad Connecticut River, where barges and sloops and Long Island coasters tied up at the docks, and their crews and the stevedores gathered in dim, smoky taverns. In and around these taverns and boarding houses there were women — women waiting for the company and pay of lonely men and boys who came ashore for a night or two, women waiting for the drovers and woodcutters from the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire to come in from the marketplaces of the town with fresh money in their pockets and reckless intentions in their hearts.

Women, women, women! The mere idea of femaleness made me mad with desire, although I knew not what it was exactly that I desired. Sex? Copulation? Simple, carnal love? All that, I suppose. All that. The very fact of it. But something else, too. I craved knowledge, knowledge of a sort that up to then I’d had no access to, and here I speak of the certain and unmistakeable smell of a woman, the touch of her soft skin, the flow of her hair across my hand, the sound of a woman’s whispered voice in my ear, even the sight of her naked body. What were these smells, touches, sounds, and sights like? I had never experienced these aspects of femaleness. But I knew they existed, and that small knowledge made me wildly desirous of the further, larger, and much more dangerous knowledge beyond.

It was a warm night, the April air thick with the smell of lilacs and new, wet grass. I strode along, determined tonight not to leave this river town without learning at least something of what I was sure I would miss afterwards — for the remainder of my life, as it seemed. For I still believed the Old Man then, believed him when he said that our move up into the Adirondack wilderness of northern New York would be permanent. And had accepted that, because of the blacks settled there, Timbuctoo would be our base for all future operations in the war against slavery. I was sure that my permanent, lifelong job would be to run the farm and tend the flocks, so that Father could preach and organize and fight, activities to which his character and temperament were so much more neatly adapted than mine. I felt that I had reached the end of a conscripted childhood and was about to begin a similarly conscripted adult life. But on this April night, for a few hours, at least, I meant to be a free man.

I saw several women and avoided passing each one by crossing the street to the other side. But then came one I could not avoid, and after I had passed her by with my habitually averted gaze, she called out, “Hullo, Red! Would y’ be needin’ company tonight?”

She was a girl, practically, I had glimpsed that much, and red-haired herself, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, with bright white powder all over her face and a broad slash of painted lips and smudge-blackened eyes. She wore erratic scraps of cloth elaborately draped across her shoulders, wrapped, sashed, and pinned so as to suggest an exotic gown, although it was more a child’s motley costume than a woman’s dress.

I stopped and turned back to her, and she said, with a curl to her voice and a pronunciation that was noticeably Irish, “You’re a big feller, ain’t you, now.”

Because I could see that she was a child, she did not frighten me as a full-grown woman would, and I took a step towards her. “I’m… I’m only out for a walk,” I said. She was small and thin. Her head, covered with a crumpled black lace bonnet, came barely to my chest, the thickness of her wrist seemed not much greater than that of my thumb, and her waist was smaller than the circumference of my right arm.

When I approached her, she stopped smiling and stepped back from me into a bank of shadows that fell from a cut-stone retaining wall. We were down by the canal tow path, with the river passing in the darkness below and a cobbled street out of view above. I heard a horse clop past and the iron-sheathed wheels of a wagon. It was a lonely, dark, and dangerous place for a girl, even a girl such as she — perhaps especially for one such as she, whose purpose for being there was to solicit the attentions of men likely to be drunk or angry, men likely to regard her as disposable. More particularly, of course, she was there to solicit men like me — timid, passionately curious bumpkins, who would pay to use her, yes, but would not otherwise harm her.