Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

By the time we reached the roadside farm, the rain had ceased, and the clouds had drifted back up the snow-whitened slopes to cover only the mountaintops above, revealing a broad, grassy floodplain here below. A mile or so further, Mr. Epps informed us, was the village of Keene, where eight or ten additional families resided. “Mostly, they just scratches out a living. Not much different from us folks up there beyond the notch in Timbuctoo” he said, pointing to a sharp cut in the distant high ridge to the west.

Father said, “That, Mister Epps, will soon change.”

“Yassuh, Mister Brown” he said, and our eyes met for an instant, and I saw that he did not believe that the Old Man would be able to change anything, anywhere.

As we approached the white house and barn, we noticed that the place, clearly a once-prosperous dairy farm, was showing distinct signs of inattention — broken fences and tumbled walls, windblown shingles on the ground, a two- or three-year-old pile of dung collected behind the barn, and none of the abundant cleared land tilled yet.

The place was owned by a man in his mid-twenties, a Mr. Caleb Partridge — whose youth, when he opened the door to Father’s knock, surprised me — and his middle-aged wife, Martha. The couple welcomed us in, evidently pleased by the unexpected prospect of extending food and shelter to such a bedraggled party of travelers. Mr. Partridge, a tall, gaunt man with a thick black beard and heavy teeth, had a brutish handsomeness about him. His wife was pink-faced and plain as oats and seemed almost simple in her shyness, for she giggled nervously whenever one of the adults spoke, even when I was the speaker, and listened with great seriousness to whatever the children, Annie and Sarah, offered by way of conversation, as if only they did not frighten her.

The couple, apparently childless, resided there alone with an aged woman, whom the man introduced as his wife’s mother. She sat in a corner of the large kitchen, mumbling and nodding agreeably to herself, while we warmed our faces and hands and dried our clothing before the huge fireplace and while Mrs. Partridge fussed over Ruth and Mary and the little girls, bringing cloths to help them dry their hair and serving up bowls of hot cider and ample portions of freshly baked corn bread.

Later, when the boys and Mr. Epps and I had fed and bedded down the animals and returned to the house, we all seated ourselves at the Partridges’ long trestle table before a steaming pot of venison stew. Mr. Epps, however, hung back by the corner of the fireplace, where he stood with his dark face held deliberately away from us. Finally, Father noticed him there and said, “Ah, Mister Epps! Come quickly, or your bowl will be snatched by one of these greedy children!”

The Partridges, all three, even the old lady, looked up at Father with expressions of mild surprise on their bland faces. But Mrs. Partridge quickly fetched another plate and spoon, and Mr. Epps crossed to the table and joined us, seating himself with serious mien between me and Watson and directly across from Father, who then took the liberty, as he put it, of blessing the meal — whereupon with great appetite we all did eat.

We stabled our animals in the barn that night and — except for Mary, Ruth, Sarah, and Annie, who were given pallets inside the house by the fire — slept in the loft above. It had once been a fine, tight structure, but now the roof leaked, floorboards were rotting, and the hay was several years old and filled with dust and debris. Two scrawny milch cows were all the Partridges seemed to own for livestock, and they looked like aged, weak milkers ready to quit.

Apparently, most of the Partridges’ cattle had died off in recent years or had been butchered for beef or sold. For income during the long winters, Mr. Partridge had taken to killing large numbers of deer and shipping the venison by sledge south to Albany. He complained that the place was too large for him and his wife to work alone, and there were no men in the area who hired out. The woman had inherited the property from her father, a veteran of the Ticonderoga campaigns in the Revolution, who had taken a land grant here as payment for his military services and thus had been one of the first settlers in the region. Mr. Partridge, the landless third son of a New Hampshire grower of flax, had himself been a farmer for hire, had wandered here from New England, and had come to ownership of the farm nearly six years ago by marrying his employer’s only child and heir a few months before his employer’s death.

I learned all this the next morning, following our departure from the farm, from Father, who had stayed up late talking with Mr. Partridge, after the rest of us had staggered off to the barn to sleep. The Old Man had a way of eliciting personal information from strangers when he got them alone. His questions were disarmingly direct, and his inquiry seemed almost scientific in its detachment, which in a sense it was, for he was not so much interested in a man’s personal life as he was in learning about his character and about human nature generally. Usually, when Father interrogated a person new to him, his immediate aim was to move the inquiry, by way of questions about family and background, to the question of slavery and race, so as to distinguish friend from foe, certainly, but also because, according to Father, it was on this question more than any other that a white man revealed the true nature of his character.

“Our benefactor and new neighbor, Mister Partridge;’ he said to me as we walked along at the head of our little caravan, “is one of those men who says he finds slavery and Negroes equally repugnant. But I believe that he would happily accept both, if it saved his wife’s farm from ruin and left him free to hunt and fish.” He added, “I doubt he’ll be of much use to us.”

We had left just at sunrise, under a cloudless deep blue sky with the morning star and a half-moon floating high beside us in the south like a diamond and a silver bowl. The road was somewhat mudded from yesterday’s rain, but Mr. Epps expected it to be dried out by the time we got up into the mountains again, where, he explained, the road crossed mostly stone anyhow. After passing through the tiny settlement of Keene — a post office, general store, log church, tavern, and a half-dozen log houses huddled together and guarded by mangy, long-haired dogs that all seemed to be related — we crossed the East Branch of the Au Sable River and made our way easefully uphill past freshly plowed fields, switch-backing towards the notch that cut through the range of mountains which lay between us and North Elba.

I had not liked Mr. Partridge, and I told Father that.

“No,” he said, “nor did I.1 suspect he beats the woman and secretly mistreats the old lady. The man bears watching, though. Somewhere along the line,” he said, “I fear we’ll have to cut him down.”

This, of course, I could not then imagine, for no one seemed less likely to oppose us and our work with the Negroes of Timbuctoo in any focused way than the lazy young man in whose house we had just stayed. But when it came to knowing ahead of time who would oppose him, the Old Man could be downright prescient. On a dozen or more occasions, I had seen him accurately predict which man from a congregation or town, to keep us Browns from fulfilling our pledge to rid this nation of slavery, would threaten our very lives, which man would simply turn away and let us continue, and which man would join us in the work. The Lord’s Work, as Father called it.

“Well,” said I, “at least the fellow was hospitable to travelers.”

“I would not call it that.”

“We’re ten people. Nine of us and Mister Epps, and he fed and housed us all, and he let us enjoy his fire and shelter our animals. I’d call that hospitable, Father.” Though I did not like Mr. Partridge, in those days I sometimes found myself feeling sorry for individuals that the Old Man harshly condemned.