Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

But, in spite of my confusion, I knew where I was. Not a great deal had changed in the thirty years that I had been away. I instantly recognized the land and the rise and fall of the narrow road, which, owing to the springtime ruts and mud, obliged me to keep to the high center as I walked. On either side, under shade in amongst the trees and in the protected glens and dales, slubs of old, crusted snow still lingered.

There was a light wind soughing in the high branches of the pines, and I heard in the distance the mountain run-off in the West Branch of the Au Sable River, where it gushed under the bridge on the Cascade Road and from there tumbled down these rocky heights northeast all the way to Lake Champlain and on to the St. Lawrence and the great North Atlantic Ocean beyond.

On my right, set up in the sugar maples, was the Thompson farm, gone to ruin now, with the barn half-fallen and the fields on either side shifting back to chokecherry and scrub pine, but still recognizably the same four-square, cleanly constructed dwelling place of the family I loved second only to my own. Beyond the house, sheds, and barn, and beyond the lilacs gone all wild and tangled and still a month from blooming, a grove of paper-white birch trees mingled with aspens on an uphill meadow. Their spindly limbs floated in silhouette inside pale green clouds of new buds, like the delicate, blackened skeletons of birds. On the further slopes, dark maples and oak switches twitched leafless in the breeze.

I was situated at that moment in the turning of the northern year, when the end of winter and the start of spring overlap like shingles on a roof and the natural world seems doubled in thickness and density. A slight shift in the direction of the wind cools the air a single degree, and suddenly a puddle of standing water is covered with a skin of ice that, seconds later, as the same wind parts the clouds and opens the sky, melts in the sunlight. At this moment, all is change. Transformation seems permanent. I was trembling with a type of excitement that I had never felt before, a powerful mixture of anticipation and regret, as if I somehow knew that eternal gain and irretrievable loss were about to be parceled out equally — as if the idea of justice were about to be made a material thing.

I briefly looked back and saw that there were still more people of various ages and stations filing along, some white and some black, and I recognized that we were a procession. There was a horse-drawn carriage just entering the clearing before the Thompson farm, driven by a bearded white man of middle age, with his stout wife seated beside him. Following the carriage came a large, canopied wagon pulled by two matched teams of rugged Vermont Morgans, with a white man in a black ministerial suit at the reins and a young Negro man similarly clothed situated next to him. There seemed to be hundreds of people coming along, and though the impulse to stand aside and watch everyone pass by was stronger than mere curiosity, the impulse to fall in and keep step with the others was stronger still, and I turned away and continued forward along the road.

In a moment, I had passed the turning and entered a section of the road that led through a stretch of tall white pines, where it was dark as night, almost, and more patches of old snow remained, radiating light and cold. A sudden, strong gust of wind blew through the pines and swirled the branches overhead, filling my ears with a sound that made my heart leap with pleasure, for it had been a lifetime and more, it seemed, since I had last walked beneath pine trees that sang and danced furiously in the wind like that. Briefly, I was an innocent, wonderstruck youth again, newly arrived in the Adirondack wilderness. The road was covered with a blanket of soft, rust-colored needles, and I inhaled deeply, losing all my thoughts in the vinegary smell, stumbling backwards in the flow of time.

When I passed out of the pine forest, the road dwindled to a track and entered a broad, overgrown meadow, yellow and sere with the old, winter-killed grass and saturated with run-off from the slopes above. We cleared this meadow ourselves the first summer we came to this place, my younger brothers Watson, Salmon, Oliver, and I, and grazed Father’s Devon cattle on it, leaving the stingier, rock-strewn, upper fields for the Old Man’s blooded merino sheep. But now the whole expanse of cleared land was drifting back to forest, with only a patch of it remaining in grass and that spotted all over with new sumac and masses of tangled brush.

The first time that I walked this path to our farm was back in 49, when I came over from Lake Champlain on the Cascade Road with the family and Lyman Epps and saw the house here on the southern end of the promontory that we were told was called the Tableland but which Father insisted would be called the Plains of Abraham. In his usual way, he had imagined everything for us beforehand — the house was as he had said, and the barn would be exactly where he drove his stakes, facing due southeast across the Plains of Abraham into the mighty Tahawus, as the Iroquois had named it, the Cloudsplitter, so that year-round, from the barn and from our front door, we could watch the sunrise inch north in spring and then south in fall, passing like a clock hand between it and Father’s second-favorite mountain, Mclntyre, marking the slow, seasonal turn of the heavens — for Father had wanted us to mark God’s perfect logic as much by the motion and movement of the planets and sun above as by the symmetries that surrounded us here on earth.

Seven years later, I walked up to this place from the Indian Pass accompanied by a dead man’s body and two fugitive slaves and came to the house and delivered all three over to my family and fled this house and valley for Ohio and then for Kansas. Of this, you know nothing, of course, but you shall know, I promise. Three years after that, the Old Man and I came home for the even more portentous departure for Harpers Ferry. They were hard arrivals and departures. But in between and before and after, there were the thousands of easy, domestic comings and goings that a farming family is obliged to make — daily we walked and sometimes rode this line back through the woods that linked our home to the larger world, beating a footpath into a track and a track into a road which connected eventually to all the other roads that we would travel together and alone.

Considered in all the tossed and turbulent terms of my life, this fading path through the woods — for the trail crossing the meadow had diminished now to little more than that — was like the central nerve of my body, its very spinal cord. Everything of moment branched off that nerve, everything in a sense originated there, and ultimately everything must loop back and end there. And so, apparently, it had, for here I was, walking it again.

The great, broad plain and our farm just beyond the crest of the meadow were still hidden from my view. Up ahead, the children and their female teachers had nearly reached the crest, and beyond that line were the snow-covered mountain peaks — pale wedges rising from the near horizon like the sails of approaching galleons. Then, one by one, the children followed their teachers over the top and disappeared, as if jumping off a precipice. Dutifully, I trudged up the slope behind them and in my turn came to the top. And when I gazed down, I saw that I had arrived finally at my home.

A vast crowd of people had assembled below in the front yard of the house and all about the front and sides of the barn. There were many wagons, four-in-hands, buggies, and fancy carriages with men and women seated on them, and quite a few men up on horseback, and large standing groups of people of all ages. A significant number of these appeared by their dress and bearing to be personages of no slight importance in the world, reverends and top-hatted bankers and the such. I saw a lot of Negro people there, too, poorer folks than the whites, most of them elderly. They kept mainly to the side and to themselves, although here and there a richly dressed black man mingled informally with the whites, and there were even a few white individuals standing amongst the blacks. At the further edges of the crowd, back by the barn and along the far side of the house, boys and dogs chased one another in the usual way, while in amongst the adults, numerous small children sat perched upon their fathers’ shoulders.