Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

I did sometimes wish, however, that he had applied his views on raising animals to his methods of raising children. Foals, Father told us, should learn the use of a halter very early, with nothing but a gentle touch and voice, and you must break them in to reins slowly and much later, after they have grown easy with the halter. His lectures on the use of the bit and the importance of a soft mouth were impressive, and in demonstrating the process of introducing the bit, he handled the animal with such delicacy and affection that you almost wished that you yourself were the foal.

With all livestock, Father was a gentle man who clearly loved to touch and stroke the flesh of the animal, to examine and, if the animal was healthy and well-formed, admire it and express almost motherly concern over any sign of illness or deformity. He would walk a yearling racehorse out of the barn and run his hands over the withers and back, across the barrel of the animal and its gaskins, fetlocks, and pasterns, ending with an examination of the hooves, making sure that we had been listening when he last lectured us on the proper care of a horse’s hoof.

Like most men with a developed affection for animals, Father was an excellent rider, and not surprisingly, he enjoyed instructing us boys and anyone else who would listen on the best methods of bringing your horse to jump over fences or ditches in the fields of the neighborhood and how to bring your horse quickly down a steep slope without risking injury to the animal. And although, at the time, my elder brothers and I were not especially eager to be taught yet again how to do what we thought we already knew well enough, in later years, when we were running for our lives in Kansas, leaping streams and gullies in the dark and crashing through dense copses of cottonwoods, obliging the slavers to stop, back off, muzzle around, and finally give up the chase, I remembered Father’s lectures and theories, his endless repetitions of what then seemed but practice for a steeplechase we never intended to enter, and I was glad for having endured them.

That evening at the camp in Westport, Mr. Epps flicked his nervy attention from one of us to the next with no apparent purpose, as if he were sorting out our family’s internal relations, trying to discern which of us bore influence over the others, so as to learn whose good opinion would permit him to gain the favor of all.

Was it the children? He first tried chatting up baby Sarah and strange little Annie, whose bluntness seemed to delight him. “You’re a very black man, aren’t you? Not all Negroes are as black as you,” she said straight out, and when no one in the family scolded her, for she had merely uttered a simple truth and had done so without racial prejudice, Mr. Epps laughed heartily at her words.

Or was it one of the young boys in the camp, ten-year-old Oliver, or Salmon or Watson, who seemed to be in charge of the livestock, sturdy, young, high-spirited fellows eager to talk with the stranger and show him the virtues of their herd of handsome red cattle and the purebred ram and ewes? He made much of the animals, shoving his hand deep into the fleeces and exclaiming loudly over their weight and density, but the rest of us merely watched and let the boys take his compliments.

Or maybe it was Ruth, the shy, calmly competent young woman who busied herself with the evening meal and kept her back to the man as much as possible, in spite of his pushing his animated face at her, first at one side, then the other, interrupting her work with over-elaborated questions. “Now, tell me, Miss Brown,” he said to her, “who taught you so you come to possess such a knowledge, that you can cook this here panbread and pease porridge and so on, all by yourself out here on a big, open fire for such a large family of people?”

Without looking up, Ruth answered, “My mother,” and resumed her silence, which caused Mr. Epps to pay ornate compliments to Mary — knowing nothing, of course, of our true mother’s death eighteen years earlier, for it was she who had taught Ruth to cook, not Mary. He rattled on just the same, as if our mother were still alive.

Or perhaps the person to ingratiate himself with was me, the redheaded young man whose left arm stayed bent as if permanently fixed that way, the tall fellow who stood slightly off from the others, guarded and watchful, which I am sure is how he viewed me that first time. But he did not seem to know how to address me, perhaps because I was closest to his age and a man and therefore would know more easily than the others when he was playing the cheerful darkie and when he was sincere, although I could not.

There was the young woman whom the elder Mr. Brown had introduced as his wife, Mary, a pleasant, open-faced woman who looked twenty or more years younger than her husband, eager to make the visitor comfortable. He tried her, but saw in a moment that she intended to deflect his every inquiry and observation by referring him straight to her husband, the hatchet-faced man from whom the tall young fellow had evidently got his red hair and gray eyes.

All right, then, he would chat up the Old Man himself, jabber with him awhile about horseflesh, for that was what he was concerned about this evening, and it was a subject on which Mr. Epps considered himself capable of sounding like an expert. And, at least to Father, he did so.

He was not especially religious, I noted, for he, as did I, kept one eye open and on the food while Father prayed over it. He loudly exclaimed “A-men!” when Father finished, and ate like a man who had not sat down to a proper meal in a week, which was probably the case. The difficulties he had faced in these last few days in Westport, importuning white strangers who scorned and spurned him, came to my mind, and I began to feel sorry for the man and somewhat regretted my earlier disapproval. I continued, however, to retain a degree of skepticism as to his character.

By the time he left the camp that first night, Mr. Epps had arranged with Father to work as a teamster for us. “Ain’t no way to get a team pull that wagon over to North Elba without an experienced driver to discuss the subject with them;” he said. “Them mountains scares animals all the way to sick and lazy.”

I’m sure the Old Man believed that I, or he himself, was quite capable of driving a team to North Elba, but he admired Mr. Epps’s pluck and self-confidence and agreed to exchange some seed and other supplies for his services. No doubt he wanted simply to help the man out.

Early the next morning, Father, Mr. Epps, and I, with the horse Dan in tow, showed up at Mr. Clarke’s dockside stone warehouse, a barn-sized storage building with a large stable attached, where he kept six or eight teams of horses and as many wagons, for he hauled freight all up and down the western shore of the lake, from Port Henry to Port Kent and inland to Elizabethtown and even to North Elba.

Father and Mr. Clarke, who was a bespectacled New Englander with a thin face and white chin-whiskers, quickly agreed on a price for old Dan. Then Mr. Clarke tried to sell Father a handsome matched pair of Narragansetts, grays that seemed to be, as he claimed, healthy seven-year-olds. The price was reasonable, but even with what he was being offered for Dan, it was more than Father had in his possession.

I could see the Old Man running down his inventory of possessions, wondering what he could sell to make up the difference. But then Mr. Epps stepped forward and in a clear voice said, “That ‘Gansett yonder spavined in both hocks and be done in less than a year. The other one, Mister Brown, he ain’t got no heart at all. Narrow chest on him. You take them old Morgans in the back,” he advised.

“The bays?” Mr. Clarke said, and he laughed. “Come on, Brown. They’re barely worth shoe-leather. Your nigger’s off his nut,” he said to Father.