Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“Yes,” I said, and turned away to sleep again, to dream the childhood faces of my sisters, Ruth and Annie and Sarah, each one exchanging her place with the others in my dream, as if the three were one and as if present were mingled with past. In the dream, I was their father, not their brother, yet I was myself and not Father. They were all, first one, then two, then three female children wailing in sorrow, and I was pacing hectically around them, like the blindfolded horse tied to the bark-crusher, marching in a fixed circle, while the three little girls stood crying in the center, lashed to the pole like witches condemned to be burned. I could not tell if I myself had tied them there or instead was marching in a circle around them to protect them from those who would place sticks at their feet and set them afire.

When I woke again, it was closer to midday, and a pillar of light fell straight down from the high window onto the board floor of the barn. I stood and walked across to where Lyman lay on his back atop a saddle blanket, staring at the distant ceiling, lost in thought. The others appeared to be asleep — except for Father, who sat on guard by the door, with his rifle across his knees. His eyes followed me, but his head did not move as I came and sat next to my friend.

“Lyman,” I said in a voice almost a whisper.

“Hello, Owen,” he said without looking at me.

“I want to ask you about your wife, Susan. Did you come out of slavery with her?”

“Susan?”

“I’m sorry. I know that I haven’t inquired much about her,” I said awkwardly. “She’s somewhat… shy.”

“So she is. But mainly amongst white folks.”

“I’m sorry for that.”

“Not your fault, Owen.”

“Well, did you?”

“What?”

“Come out of slavery together.”

“No. She come north alone. Come out from Charleston, stowed away on a timber boat and sneaked ashore in New Jersey. Down in Carolina, Susan was owned by a crazy man, and she’d a killed him if she hadn’t run off first.”

“You don’t have any children,” I said.

“No. No, we don’t. Susan has children, though. Three of them. They got sold off south, sent to Georgia someplace, she don’t know where.”

We were silent for a moment. Finally, I asked, “What about their father?”

“What about him?”

“Well, who was he?”

Lyman turned and looked at me, said nothing, and returned his gaze to the ceiling.

I stood then and went back to my corner, where I lay down on the floor and wrapped my coat around my head again as if to shut out the world and drifted back into a lurid sleep.

Later, to Father, I said, “Tell me about my grandmother. Your mother. Grandfather’s first wife. I know little more than her name, Ruth. And that she died young, when you were a boy.”

“Yes,” he said, and looked away from me. “And I loved my mother beyond measure. Her kindness and piety were great… greater than that of any person, man or woman, I have since known.”

“When she died, were you as bereft as I when my mother died?” “Yes, Owen. I surely was. Which is why I took such pity on you then, and why I feel that in many ways I understand you now somewhat better than I understand your older brothers, who suffered less. I was like you, I was barely eight years old, when my mother died. And when Father remarried, I found it difficult to make a place in my heart for my stepmother.”

“I’ve long since come to love Mary as my own mother,” I said to him.

He turned to me. “No, Owen,” he said. “You have not. Although I know you do love her. But it is your own true mother whom you still hold yourself for, as if awaiting her return. She won’t return, Owen. You’ll have to go to her. And if you believe you’re bound to be with her again in heaven, then you’ll be free to leave off this painful waiting and longing that keeps you from opening your heart to your stepmother, and to all other women as well.” He knew this, he said, because it had been a danger to him also, and if it had not been for his Christian faith, he would feel today as he had over forty years before, when his own mother died. “I cannot help you, son. Only the Lord can help you.”

I stood and walked away from him without saying anything more and returned to my place in the room.

Of the young man, James Cannon, I asked, “Do you have family in Canada who will help you settle there?”

He did not look at me when he spoke, but kept his large, wet eyes fixed before him, as if contemplating something that he could not share with me, a memory, a childhood fear or sorrow. “Family? No, not exactly, Mister Brown. But I ’spect folks will be there to help settle us. Leastways, so I hear. Mister Douglass done made the arrangements.”

“Everything will be different now, won’t it? Escaping from slavery is like a resurrection, isn’t it? A new life.”

Slowly, he turned his head and gazed wide-eyed at me, as if puzzled by my words. “More like birth, I’d say, Mister Brown. Resurrection is where you gets to be born again.”

“What is the name of the man who was your master?”

“His name? Name Samuel;’ he said. “Mister Samuel Cannon.”

“The same as yours.”

“Yes, Mister Brown, same as mine. Same as his father, too. Same as my mother.”

“So you were born a slave to Mister Samuel Cannon, and your mother was born his father’s slave?”

“Yes, Mister Brown. She surely wasn’t Mas’ Cannon’s wife.”

“Who was your father, then? What happened to him?”

He looked away from me again. “Don’t know. Long gone.”

Lyman watched me from a few feet away, listening. Mr. Fleete was asleep; across the room, still seated by the door with his rifle across his knees, Father lightly dozed. The woman, Emma Cannon, lay on her side next to her husband, with her back to us, and I could not see if she was asleep.

“Forgive me forasking,”I said in a low voice. “But your wife, Emma. Was her name also Cannon? I mean, before you married her?”

He was a young man, several years younger than I, but at that moment, when he turned his large, dark face towards me and for a few seconds studied my face, he appeared decades, epochs, whole long eons, older than I, and weary, endlessly weary, of my innocence. And when I saw his expression, it was as if in a single stroke I’d finally lost that punishing innocence, and I felt ashamed of my inquiry. I said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked into your personal affairs. Forgive me, please.”

He must have despised me that afternoon, despised all us whites, the Wilkinsons and even Father and every one of the other, more or less well-intentioned, white conductors and stationmasters whose extended hands he and his wife had been obliged to grasp — hating us not in spite of our helping them to escape from slavery but because of it. In ways that were not true for Mr. Fleete and Lyman, we were unworthy of helping him and his young wife. And the terrible irony which trapped us all was that our very unworthiness was precisely the thing that obliged us to help them in the first place.

At nightfall, Mrs. Wilkinson brought food to us a second time, potatoes and a substantial leg of mutton, and when we had eaten, Mr. Wilkinson came and cheerfully bade us farewell and let us out of the barn by a back door, into the dark, adjacent woods. Making our way down towards the valley below the house, we kept to the birch trees, as Mr. Wilkinson had urged, so as not to be seen by the men returning to their hovels from the mines. For both good and bad reasons, although he did not detail them to us, Mr. Wilkinson did not want his Irish workers to know of his involvement with the Underground Railroad.

Hidden by the darkness, as we passed among the thick white trunks of the birch trees, we saw the miners. They were illuminated by the flickering light of the whale oil lanterns they carried — shadowy, slumped figures moving silently uphill. It was like a march of dead souls that we observed, and the image troubled me, and I found myself lingering behind the others, hanging back, fighting a strange impulse to leave the darkness and join them, to fall into line with the returning miners and merge my life with theirs.