Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“Owen, come, look here;” he commanded.

I passed by the cattle to where he stood staring intently down the embankment into a glade beside the rock-strewn stream, which was narrow here and tumbled fast downhill towards the lake. I looked where he had indicated and, as was so often the case, saw nothing. Black flies swarmed about my face, and the cattle bunched up impatiently behind us. Father held old Dan, his chestnut gelding, by the halter and peered into the glade.

“Yes, well, if we needed a sign,” he said, with a certain resignation in his voice, “here is one.” In profile, Father’s unsmiling, clean-shaven face was like a fist. He had a tight mouth with thin lips, a square chin and forehead, and a hooked, short nose, a hawk’s beak. You may be unaware that the long beard, with which he was later so often and so famously pictured, he wore only after Kansas, as a disguise, and, indeed, it did disguise him, even to his family, who fondly remembered his daily morning shave, mirrorless by the stove. It was an occasion for us to tease him into almost nicking himself with the razor. “You missed a bit,” one of us, usually Ruth, would calmly observe.

A second child, Oliver or Salmon, would add, “Over here, Father, near your big left ear.” His ears were unusually large, and to our amusement, their size slightly embarrassed him; although he denied it, of course.

“Where?” he would ask, groping over his heavy jaw with his fingertips.

“The other side! On the other side!”

“The right side, just below your enormous right ear!”

“No, it’s the left. His right, Oliver, is your left.”

Father would himself grow amused and join the game by feigning frantic confusion and flashing his long razor recklessly like a saber from one side of his face to the other. “Here? Here? Here?” Until Ruth or I or Mary would seriously fear that he was about to cut himself and would say, “Enough. Let the poor man shave his face in peace,” and the children would disperse, and Father, smiling lightly, would finish and wipe his face dry.

“It’s the May flower” he said to me that morning in Westport. “The bloodroot, we called it, when I was a boy.” Following his extended finger, I looked down by the stream and saw in amongst the ferns and mossy stones a cluster of small white flowers near the ground. “The root is red as fresh blood,” he said, and told me that the Iroquois used it as pigmentation for their war paint. “The petals, though, they come pure white, like those yonder. Innocent above ground, and bloody below,” he mused. He had known it to grow and even blossom under a layer of late snow. It was the first flower of spring, and he was truly glad to see it.

One of the cows smelled the water and started over the embankment, and the rest pulled over behind her, and quickly I stepped around in front of the leader and shoved her back.

“After such tribulation, we may well require a hopeful sign,” Father said, meaning the past winter’s long, lingering death of the infant Ellen, I supposed, and all his financial woes, which had continued to mount so relentlessly in the last few years.

It was strange to feel sorry for Father, and I rarely did and was almost ashamed of the feeling, as if he had forbidden it. Regardless, I placed my hand on his shoulder and said to him, “The Lord will provide, Father.” But the words felt like gravel in my mouth.

“Owen, don’t say words that you don’t believe. Not even in comfort,” he added, and he scowled and turned away and led old Dan and the cattle further up the hill to where the stream ran slowly and there was a shallow pool that the animals could drink from.

Yet, all in all, it was a very pleasant few days, that first stop in Westport, and I almost wished that we could settle there, instead of trekking on to a place that everyone other than Father had described as a howling wilderness. During the last year-and-a-half in Springfield, helping Father and John run Father’s and Mr. Simon Perkins’s wool business, I had grown somewhat used to the easy sociability and abundant distractions of a town. I somewhat envied John for having been left behind, even though he was burdened with looking after Father’s affairs at the warehouse, and I envied Jason, too, and even Fred, who was a full six years younger than I, for having been charged with the care of Mr. Perkins’s flocks back at Mutton Hill in Akron.

But there was no arguing with Father on this matter of our settling amongst the Negroes in North Elba. He was dead set on it. They were freedmen, a few were doubtless fugitives, and the wealthy New York abolitionist Mr. Gerrit Smith, out of simple compassion and generosity, but perhaps with a useful moral point to make as well, had deeded them forty acres per family from his vast holdings in the Adirondacks. But in a few short years the rigors of northcountry farming had for the most part defeated them, and the little colony was coming rapidly undone. Father’s agreement with Mr. Smith was that in exchange for a sizeable piece of land with an abandoned house on it, to be paid for later at one dollar per acre, we would move there and teach the Negroes, many of whom had been Philadelphia barbers and Long Island shoemakers and the such, how to organize and work their land.

Father did not think he could accomplish this without at least one adult son beside him and had carefully explained why I was the one so designated: John was more capable than I when it came to business; Jason and his new wife were settled permanently, it seemed, in Ohio; and Fred, although twenty years old then, was a person who needed close supervision, which Jason was good at providing. As usual, the Old Man was right, and I had to comply.

The first thing we needed to do was survey and validate their claims, he told me: to keep the Negroes from being cheated by the whites, who had been squatting up there for several generations — ever since the terrible, year-long winter of ’06 had driven most of the original settlers out — and had come to think of the whole place as theirs alone. Father’s motives were moral and idealistic, the same as had always prompted his political actions, and he described this move as essentially political — for he had visited North Elba alone the previous fall and had come away newly inspired by a vision of Negro and white farmers working peacefully together. His hope now, he explained to us, was to build a true American city on a hill that would give the lie to every skeptic in the land. There were many such Utopian schemes and projects afoot in those years, a hundred little cities on a hundred little hills, but Timbuctoo may have been the only one that aimed at setting an example of racial harmony. This would be our errand into the wilderness, he said.

But there was more to it than that. The wild Adirondack landscape had moved the Old Man wonderfully. All that winter and spring, despite the worry and grief he bore over the sickness and long dying of the baby Ellen, whenever he spoke of settling down on the broad tableland between the mountains, his face would soften and flush, and he would sail off in reveries and fantasies more likely to have been generated by a short stay at Valhalla than by a quick visit to a tract of hardscrabble highlands with a ninety-day growing season and a grinding, six-months-long winter. “Ah, Owen,” he would exclaim, “just wait until you see the beauty of this place! It makes you think that during the Creation the good Lord Lingered there awhile. There is truly no place I have seen whose aspect has so pleased me as those Adirondack mountains.”

On reflection, I believe, also, that there was for Father yet another deeply pleasing aspect of the North Elba project, one that he hid from us then but which I understood later. Its force was stronger than the moral point that he and Mr. Gerrit Smith wished to make and more substantive than the poetic effect of the landscape on his soul. For many years, the Old Man’s life had been cruelly divided between his anti-slavery actions and his responsibilities as a husband and father, and despite his unrelenting, sometimes wild and chaotic attempts to unite them, it was often as if he was trying to live the lives of two separate men: one an abolitionist firebrand, a public figure whose most satisfying and important acts, out of necessity, were done in secret; the other a good Christian husband and father, a private man whose most satisfying and important acts were manifested in the visible security and comfort of his family. He was a man who had pledged his life to bring about the permanent and complete liberation of the Negro slaves; and he was the head of a large household with no easy sources of income.