Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

To all appearances, though, and compared with our neighbors, especially our Negro neighbors in North Elba, we did prosper. Our farm was a thriving operation. This was mainly due to hard work and Father’s great organizational skills. Although I was, in a sense, the foreman, Father was the executive and every day laid out the tasks that we each would attend to. Much of farm life, of course, is a round, and the work is organized merely by the turning of the year and by the slow, regular rhythms of animal life, and it needs no executive, but we were a large family with diverse skills and abilities, children at different stages of growth, from the youngest, who was then Sarah, to the eldest in residence, me, a full-grown adult. And there were the other adults as well-Mary, our mother and stepmother, and sister Ruth, and Lyman and Susan Epps, who had come to seem like permanent members of the household, like in-laws.

We were close, interlocked, like the gears and wheels, cogs and belts, of an elaborate machine. Whatever one of us thought, said, or did had an immediate, felt effect on everyone else. It may be that our family in its closeness was sometimes thought by us to be suffocating and too much controlling of our daily lives, and it must have seemed that way often to outsiders; but we were never lonely, never without a sense of being useful and even necessary to the rest, and never without support and encouragement, even in our moments of greatest despair. For we each took strength, not from Father alone, but from the family as a whole. Father, of course, was the family’s mainstay; he provided us with example, instruction, understanding, and strength. As a result, when he himself weakened or fell into despair, it was very difficult for the rest of us not to do likewise. And whenever Father’s belief in the rightness and necessity of his path wavered, as from time to time it did, or when his faith in his God was threatened, as happened at least twice that I know of, his forward motion would instantly stop. And when he stopped, the rest of us would slow and wobble on our respective pivots and would soon find ourselves stopped and lying on our sides as well.

In the terrible winter of ’43,1 remember, when the four children died — the first Sarah, Charles, Peter, and the baby, Austin — Father fell into such a prolonged numbness that, before he recovered his feelings, we ourselves had descended into deepest despond, and he was obliged to nurse us, every one, back to health again. It was as if the sickness that took the children one after the other that bleak winter first invaded his spirit and from him spread like a pestilence to Mary and thence to John and Jason and me and on to Ruth and the younger children, even to poor Salmon, who was only a small boy at the time, seven years old, the youngest child not to be taken from us. It was an unsupportable burden. The fires dwindled and flickered out, and the ashes grew cold, and we walked about the house with our arms wrapped around ourselves and silently cursed the day of our birth. No one of us could rouse the other from his despair.

Father took to his Bible, and for the first time he did not read aloud or instruct us from it. He sat on a stool in the corner, muttering the words to himself, as if seeking, but not finding there, some explanation of why God had done this to us. Poverty he could endure with good spirits, and every setback and disappointment he regarded as temporary. And he had lost a child before, the first Frederick, who had died at the age of five and for whom he had grieved, and after a normal period of mourning he had resumed his life — he even named his next male child Frederick, as I have already described. But this disaster, this terrible loss, was beyond all his worst expectations, beyond all his understanding. His faith was sorely tested by it — that fact alone humiliated him and beat him down. To have four of his beloved children taken from him, each of them in its pitiful turn dying in his arms, this defeated him utterly. There was no one amongst us who could console or uplift him, for all of us, even Mary, had grown so accustomed to relying on him for consolation and uplift that if he was emptied of force, then we were, too.

This was the other, the darker side of our family’s strength. When the Old Man went down, we all went down. Happily, almost nothing ever discouraged or defeated Father, except the death of children, which, by the time of his own death, he had endured so many times that his heart must have been nearly covered over with a skein of thick gray scars.

Knowing his terrible, long suffering, one can forgive him anything, I suppose. It rarely happened, he was so strong and so right, but there were times, certainly, when I felt called to forgive Father. Not by him — he seldom asked for my forgiveness, and when he did ask, it was for some trivial transgression, some slight oversight — but called upon by myself alone. In order to save me from him.

Forgive the Old Man, I would say to myself. Come on, now, grow large, Owen, and be generous with understanding and compassion. Yes, understanding, especially that — for when one understands a human being, no matter how oppressive he has been, compassion inevitably follows. Yet there was so much that I could not understand about this man, my father, and the life we led because of him — my thoughts, my questions, were blocked, occluded: by the absolute tightness of his cause, which none of us could question, ever; and by the sheer power of Father’s personality, the relentlessness of it, how it wore us down, until we seemed to have no personalities of our own, even to each other. Certainly we spoke like him, but we could not hear it ourselves. We had to be told of it first by strangers.

The Old Man seemed to burn us out: whenever he rode off on one of his journeys to raise money for the work or on business of his own, he left us behind him, glad to have him gone. Yes, thrilled to have him gone — but dry and cold and light, like pieces of char or bits of cinder, like ash. When the Old Man left, we did not speak much, not to one another, not to strangers.

I meant here to write about how we spoke and why our speech was so strangely mannered. I see that I have done something else. I close now, as ash, again… or still: I do not know which.

It’s as if I’m actually living there, in North Elba, and in those olden times when I was young. As if, weeks ago, when I first began speaking of it, I went tumbling down some twisting, narrow shaft that emerged there. And now, still clambering along a descending maze of tunnels and caves, I am unable to find my way back again to the surface of the earth, to my cabin in Altadena and daylight. The only light down inside these cold, rock-walled chambers is the light of memory flaring up, illuminating rough pictures and writings overhead, like those the Indians drew in ages past to invoke and placate their pagan gods. I stand below, gazing in wonder at the pictures, and the figures begin to move and speak, and my wonder, as you have seen so many times in these pages, turns first to warmth of recognition, then to gladness, and then, as the story told by the figures grows violent or somber, turns fearful and sad, I stumble backwards away from the pictures and into the darkness of the cave again. Soon I am falling, scrambling, clawing my way along yet another shaft in this warren, until the floor beneath my feet finally levels out, and once more I stop and stand, and when the light of memory spreads from my face, I see in its glow that I have arrived in a new chamber… and there, up on the walls — a mingling of shadow and light — it moves and dances… and another, different event in my long-ago, half-forgotten life commences to unfold before me!

Today as I write I find myself still situated in the chamber of that first summer in North Elba, the summer of ’50, when I was twenty-six, and I am recalling that it was for me an especially instructive time, perhaps because of the absence at the farm of my recently married elder brothers, John and Jason, who were ranked above me at that time in Father’s little army and who, therefore, normally would have superseded me in the work. Father’s work. The Lord’s work, as he constantly reminded us, of freeing the slaves. For until the slaves were free — as he told us over and over again — none of us were free.