Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“Wait a moment. Just let me tell you how it was then. Because it changed, Ruth, after she died. Believe me, it changed” I said.

“Owen, I know the story. You must settle your mind. You should pray, Owen, that’s what. You should pray for forgiveness, and to obtain peace of mind. You’re too much alone, the way you’ve fallen from belief. I can’t talk to you,” she said firmly, and moved off from the rock where I sat. “Only the Lord can give you what you need. I have to get back to the house,” she said, and she turned and left me.

I sat in the shade alone awhile then, remembering how it was when I entered the room and learned that my mother had died. I remembered the darkness that swirled like black smoke about my mother’s head as she disappeared into it and was gone. I recalled myself staring at the darkness. It had hardened into a flat black circle that was located in the exact center of my vision, as if a hole had been burned into the lenses of my eyes, and no matter where I looked, it was there, a wafer of darkness, with people and objects disappearing behind it as I turned my head from side to side. I carried that circle before me for many years, and when the hole in my lenses finally healed, there remained scars, opaque and whitened, which every now and then swam into my field of vision and again blocked out the world before me.

As on this late spring afternoon in North Elba, when I stumbled half-blind down from the meadow and entered the cabin, where Father and Lyman Epps and his wife, Susan, stood talking quietly with Mary, who lay abed on a pallet near the stove, while Ruth sat on a stool nearby, calmly churning butter.

I could not see Father at all, although I stared directly at his location and spoke directly to the spot where he stood. Father was in a circle of light, actually, situated somewhere behind it, as if occluded by a sun floating in the space between me and him, so that he was eclipsed by it. On the peripheries I saw Lyman, looking alarmed, and his wife, Susan, frightened also, by my wild visage, no doubt, and the words that splashed from my mouth.

“Father, I have to tell you something!” I began, and then I glimpsed Ruth looking up at me, dismayed, and Mary seeming bewildered and pained by the force of my entry, by the loud interruption of my ill-coordinated and off-balance body lurching through the portal as I broke into the placidity of the room, my voice loud and cracking as I spoke the words. “Father, you must let me leave! Father, I’m sorry… “ I began, and then I stopped myself. Struggling to make my desire to flee these mountains known to him in a coherent way, wanting merely his simple permission to go and live as I wished, I felt more like a child overwhelmed by a tantrum than a twenty-five-year-old man expressing his regret that he must disappoint his father in order to satisfy himself.

“You want to leave us?” Father said, pronouncing the words slowly, as if he barely understood them. “You want to fall away from your family and abandon the work we have come here to do? Just as you have fallen away from the Lord and His work?” He paused and drew his breath in through his teeth. “I love thee, Owen, and for just this reason I have prayed for thee ever since I first saw that you had moved so far from the Lord and His word and will. I knew that it would lead here, and that there would come a time when your duty would seem meaningless to you. So where do you wish to go, Owen?” His face, reddened and tight with anger, belied his calm words. His gray eyes had gone cold on me, and I felt an actual chill in my bones, as if a damp breeze had suddenly blown through the room.

“Am I not a man, Father? Am I not free to go where I wish and live as I wish?”

“I wouldn’t have you beside me or in my house, if you did not yourself choose to be there. Where do you wish to go, Owen?”

“Well, I want only to leave here. I… I’m not sure where I want to go to. Back to Springfield, I guess. To join John there, maybe. To help him, or find work on my own. I don’t know.”

“So it’s not that you’ve learned of someplace else, then, where you can do your duty to God and your fellow man more effectively than you can here. It’s merely that you’re loath to do it here. I say that you are behaving in a cowardly manner, Owen. Think like a slave, and you are one. A free man doesn’t flee his duty, unless he’s able to do it better someplace else. You disappoint me greatly, Owen,” he pronounced. “Springfield! What can you do in Springfield with regard to your duty, whether it’s your duty to your family or to your fellow man, that you can’t better do here? We have all pledged, every one of us, to bend our lives to overcoming the scourge of slavery. Some of us do it in order to do God’s work, and some others simply because they are human beings who are themselves diminished by the existence of slavery. But for all of us, it is our duty! We’ve all taken a pledge that, not kept, will betray, not only God and our fellow man and not only our family members, but ourselves! I can’t let you do that, Owen. Not without opposing you.

“I cannot—”

“Oh, stop! Father, stop, please!” I shouted, silencing him, sending him back behind the light of the sun. At the edges, I saw Lyman and Susan step away, as if about to flee. Mary had brought her hand to her mouth, and Ruth was rising from her stool, both of them looking at me as if my face were covered with blood. Which is indeed how I felt at that moment, as if my face were sheeted with a spill of blood. “I can’t go, Father! And I can’t stay! I can’t give myself over to the slaves, and I can’t leave them! I can’t pray, and yet I can’t cease trying to pray. I cannot believe in God, Father. But I can’t abandon my belief, either. What am I to do? Please, tell me. What am I to do?”

He reached out of the light then and placed both hands sweetly onto my shoulders and drew me to him in an embrace. “My poor boy,” he said in a voice almost a whisper. “My poor boy.”

My thoughts and feelings were a tangled mass of contradictions, but his embrace settled them at once and straightened them and laid them down side by side in my mind, like logs of different sizes and kinds placed parallel to one another. An unexpected, powerful wave of gratitude washed over me, when, suddenly, I became aware of a clattering noise, the sound of boots against the floor, the noise of several large people entering the dim room. I heard voices, Oliver’s and Salmon’s, and the voices of several men — strangers.

Quickly, I stepped back from Father and turned to see three men, accompanied eagerly by Oliver, Salmon, and Watson behind, all six of them making their way into the small room, the men with pack-baskets, their clothes mudded and swatched with briars and leaves, their dirty faces red and swollen from numerous insect bites. They looked embarrassed to have come in upon us so abruptly and made awkward moves to get back outside, bumping one another and the boys behind, so there was for a moment a burly congestion at the door.

Finally, one of the men, a tall, blond, bearded fellow, turned back to Father and smiled sheepishly and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but the lads said for us to come straight inside. Forgive our rudeness for not first announcing ourselves.”

Father moved straight to the man, and I found myself standing next to Lyman, who gently touched my arm with his fingertips in a gesture of affection. In a formal and dry tone, Father said to the blond man, “I am John Brown. This is my farm. How can I help you?”

The boys had removed themselves from the cabin, and the two other strangers had followed and now stood in the yard, while the one who had spoken faced Father from the portal. He was of middle-age, tall and athletic-looking, but clearly not a hunter or woodsman or farmer: his clothing, although filthy and matted with leaves and forest debris, was of too fine a cut, and his pack was a sportsman’s, not a hunter’s. I saw then that, despite his bright and polite manner, the man was sick with insect bites — his face, neck, and hands were puffed up like an adder. He and his companions appeared to have been stung a thousand times by mosquitoes and by the wretched clouds of black flies that populate the forests here. They swarm like a pestilence and are so numerous as to madden and blind a deer and drive it into the water and cause it to drown. If you don’t cover your skin with grease or carry a smutch, they can cloud out the light of day, fill your nostrils and ears, and swell up the flesh of your face until your eyes are forced shut.