Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

It should be she, not I, who could freely return to a warm household filled with a loving and upright family; she, not I, who was able to stand alongside her father and mother and brothers and sisters in church and public meetings and to walk freely about the town in the daylight glow of respect and admiration from the citizenry; she, not I, who performed honest labor and received for it shelter, food, clothing; she, not I, whose father, guide, and protector was the good man John Brown. Let me be the harlot, the hired property of drunken, brutal strangers. Let me go hungry and cold through the nighttime alleyways and dark corners of the town, exchanging brief, obscene gratifications for a few pennies. Let me be the victim.

Burdened with thoughts such as these, I slowly made my sorrowful way home to Franklin Street, arriving there sometime in the middle of the night. The house was not darkened, as I had expected, and when I entered I was greeted by Ruth and John and Wealthy, all in their nightclothes, gathered together in the kitchen comforting our stepmother, Mary, who sat downcast at the table with a bowl of warm milk before her. She had been weeping, I saw at once, and when I asked what had happened, John turned to me and swiftly took me aside and informed me that the baby Ellen had died just minutes before. It was a mercy, he said, for the poor little thing had not drawn a proper breath for hours. Father was still with her upstairs, and he could not be separated from the infant. “It’s as if he cannot believe her dead,” John said. Mother — for he, unlike me, called her that — Mother was all right now. She had accepted the death of the child as an inevitable thing the previous evening, although Father had not, and she had prayed for her to go as quickly and painlessly as possible. But Father had stayed up two whole nights with the babe in his arms, believing that he could somehow save her, even, at the end, trying to breathe into her mouth. But she had died in his arms, and he had refused to lay her down and now was walking up and down in the rooms above, still praying for her recovery.

I remember John saying, “The Old Man can’t seem to let this one go.” And I remember that he did not ask me where I had been until this late hour. No one asked. Clearly, and rightly, my private adventures and torment were of no account here.

Suddenly, there was Father at the bottom of the back stairs, entering the kitchen, his arms hanging down at his sides, his head lowered, with tears streaming down his face. I had never seen Father weep before, and the sight astonished and frightened me. He sat himself down next to his wife with a groping hesitancy, as if he had lost his sight, and he placed his hands against his face and wept openly as a child. No one said a word. This was beyond our understanding. I do not think that Father loved any one of his children more than the others, and he had lost at that time fully half a dozen of his babes, and he had not wept over any of them, although, to be sure, he had grieved deeply over them all, even to despair. His belief in the Life Hereafter had always been sufficiently strong that he could view their early going as a gift from God for the children and a trial from God for him. But somehow this was different. It was as if this time he believed that he, the father of the child, was being punished, not tried, by her death. “The Lord is filled with wrath against me!” he cried. ‘The Lord despiseth me!”

“No, no, Father,” we all said, and each in his own way tried to console him. We reached out to him and placed our hands on him, and several of us wept with him. Although I did not. I could not. I backed off a ways and watched in shame, for I knew the true cause of Father’s suffering, over and above his grief for the lost child. I was the cause. I knew that Father was blaming himself for my sins, condemning himself for not having interceded with me in my frequent lustful wanderings, which surely he had observed and marked. And now he believed that he was being punished by an angry God for his inattention. I did not need to hear Father say any of this; I knew it in my bones.

Slowly, I came forward, and the others, as if they knew what I intended, parted for me and made room for me to go down on my knees beside Father’s chair. “I’m sorry, Father, for what I’ve done. I have sinned, and I am sorry. Please, Father, please forgive me.”

At that, he ceased weeping and looked straight into my face. His great gray eyes penetrated my face to my very soul, and he did not flinch at what he saw there, and I did not squirm away from his gaze, much as I wanted to. “Owen, my son. You are a good boy, Owen. I forgive thee,” he said in a low voice, and he placed his hands on my shoulders and drew me to him. “The Lord hath taken one child from me and returned to me another, who was lost,” he said. “I welcome thee, Owen,” he said, and it was as if his words had cleansed me, for at once I felt uplifted and strong again. Whatever Father wished me now to do, I would do without argument, without hesitancy, without fear. I remember, on the night that the baby Ellen died, thinking that.

I don’t know how much time has passed since I began this account — days, weeks, a fortnight — for it is as if I have been elsewhere, a place where time is measured differently and space is not bounded as it is usually. The only thing that grounds me, that stills and locks me into some deliberate measure of time and place, is my intermittent awareness of you, holding these sheets of paper in your hands, reading my words, learning my story and applying it to Father’s larger story, the one that truly matters.

I know that in passing, due to my self-absorption and to the vividness of my recollections, I have mentioned many people and events that you know little of, that you may in fact know nothing of, for they have not come down in the historical record. They are not a part of the received truth. It is important that you hear of them, however, for they, like me, are figures in the context of Father’s story, which, if he is to be known at all, must be known as well. Let me speak, for instance, of Lyman Epps, the Negro man whom I mentioned earlier, and let me say how we came to know Lyman, how I first came to know him, for he will figure in the larger context of known people and events in a significant way. And his story, unlike the story of the men buried beneath Father’s stone in the shade of Mount Tahawus, has not been told before by anyone.

It was in the spring of ’50, almost a half century ago, that I met Lyman Epps, when we all first came to North Elba, a few weeks later in the season than now, and I can bring it back to my mind today as if I were dreaming it — I can see the lilacs blooming and the bloodroot, which I had not seen before, at least not to name.

It might have been earlier than now — the first of May, perhaps. For the lilacs that I am gazing at were located in the trim yards of the houses down in Westport, New York, alongside the broad verandas that faced the glittering waters of Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains of Vermont on the further side; and when Father pointed out the little, low blossom of the bloodroot, we were still down in that prosperous village, gathering the family and our livestock to begin our trek up into the mountains, where it would not be warm enough for the bloodroot and the lilacs to bloom until many weeks later.

Father and I had moved his horse, Dan, and the seven head of Devon cattle away from where we had camped, on a hillside clearing at the edge of town, intending to water the animals at a stream nearby. The boys Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, setting out the sheep to graze, had located the stream earlier. The Old Man halted suddenly, and I peered over the bony red rumps and heads of our thirsty beasts to see what was the matter.