Russell Banks: Cloudsplitter

Though the burial ceremonies had long since ended, and the crowds had gone, I remained, as if forbidden to leave. If I had believed in the God of my fathers, I would have thanked Him for bringing me here at last. But I did not believe in God, then or now. So, instead, I thanked my fellow man, the living men and women whom I imagined digging a hole in the dirt way out west and pulling from it the box with my body in it and bringing it here and setting it down into the ground before me. For though the carcass is riddled, broken, and finally devoured by worms, the spirit survives it, like its very own child. The spirits whose bodies lie buried in mountains of Arctic ice or beneath shifting desert sands or in unmapped potters’ fields paved over by modern city streets — graves where no one pauses, where no one stands and says the name of the dead and goes silent and listens for a moment to hear the dead man or woman speak — those spirits are just as I have been, far away on a mountain in California all these years, speaking only to the sky, the sun, the moon, the cold stars above. And where there are no ears to listen, there is no story to tell. There is only a ghost bawling into the empty night.

Thus, at Timbuctoo, standing in the doorway of my family’s house, believing that my body lay crumbling in a box alongside the bodies of my father and brothers and all those who were with us at Harpers Ferry, I felt assured at last of a listening ear. There I could imagine a curious and affectionate man or woman or child, a white person or a black, an ordinary American citizen come to this place to tender his respects and to wonder about the life of my father, Old John Brown, Captain Brown, Osawatomie Brown, and his sons and followers who were martyred far away in Virginia for their violent opposition to the enslavement of three million of their fellow Americans. And because I could imagine such a person being at that place — I had seen such a person, seen hundreds of them, that very morning! — then I could imagine myself, for the first time since the end came, coming forward coherently into speech. And so I spoke, and much of what I am telling you now I said then, too.

Take that as an analogy, Miss Mayo. And if my words sometimes seem scattered to you or if I appear confused by the events in my life or by the actions and natures of others, if I wander and ruminate distractedly at times, then, please, forbear, for at such times I have for a moment or two merely lost my ability to imagine you reading these words, and my story therefore has briefly come undone or has regressed to a moan or a childish, half-forgotten, incantatory chant invoked to ward off my loneliness. It will pass, it will leave off — as soon as I picture you wandering down the lane that leads to our old farmhouse, where you stop and stand thoughtfully for a while before the graves by yonder huge, gray boulder. Do not worry, for, even though you cannot see me, I will look out and see you and will come quickly forward to speak to you.

I stand at the door in the evening light and gaze out upon the greening valley beyond Father’s somber rock and the graves that surround it, and my thoughts spread into the past like fingers groping in the dark, touching and then seizing familiar objects that lie situated in oddly unfamiliar relations to one another. In such a way am I obliged to reconstruct my past, rather than to recall it. Or perhaps simply to construct it for the first time, for it was never so clear and coherent back when I was living my life as it seems now.

These words are my thoughts given shapely proportions and relations to one another. My story is my only remaining possibility for an ongoing life, which is how it must be for everyone, living or dead.

In the distant, dusky light of a fading day in May, I peered across the fresh, wet meadow grass to the sooty Adirondack mountains. It was the eighty-ninth anniversary of my father’s birth; I was alone; it was late in the day; and a garrulous apparition is what I had become, lingering at his own, at his father’s, his brothers’, and his fallen comrades’ gravesites, speaking into the fast-approaching night and then talking still, talking even, when it came, in darkness.

Let it darken down. It mattered not a whit to me. Let the earth turn and the moon wax and wane and the tides rise and fall. Light or dark, warm or cold, early or late — I require no lamp, no fire, no sleep. Let the rain fall, the cold winds blow; let the snow come tumbling from the skies and the clouds scatter and the skies turn bright with sunlight on the morrow and the hills glisten in the dew.

I no longer know physical discomfort, nor even fatigue. I have been freed of all that. The world, simply by virtue of its continuing presence, directly pleasures me, as would any dream of life delight a man dropped permanently into sleep. This may be purgatory, but I take it as a long-desired and wholly unexpected gift. The dream of a dream come true. And it’s as if at the end of the dream there waits, not an awakening, but… what? A further, deeper dream? Silence, perhaps.

Yes, the silence of the-truth-be-told.

My thoughts and memories and even my feelings spin and spiral upwards like silk ribbons, where they float vividly amongst old, nearly forgotten memories of Kansas and the wars we fought then and afterwards. But the ribbons keep losing their momentum and tumble back down again, as if, due to the cold of a particular altitude or by having entered some atmospheric level where the elements differ from those here below, they are converted from silk to iron and are drawn back to this hard Adirondack earth by the punishing force of gravity.

Again and again, I move through the abandoned, darkened house and attempt to leave this place and find that I cannot. The door lies open before me; I came in through it as easily as a summer breeze. Yet, still, I cannot go back outside, cross the deserted yard before the large rock and the graves, and pass back along the road I came by and head out across the valley towards Mount Tahawus, retracing my morning steps and disappearing into the mists that hover tonight over its broad flanks.

What seemed at first a blessing — my finding myself located here amongst the crowd of mourners and celebrants at the ceremonial burial of the bones of my brothers and the other raiders from the Virginia attack — seems now almost a curse. I left this farm to all intents and purposes permanently way back in the autumn of ’54, when I went out to fetch poor brother Fred from Ohio and instead disobeyed Father and went down into Kansas with Fred and joined up with our older brothers, John and Jason, and thus an account of the events that took place during the years that I spent in North Elba is a story of no great significance in history. But those few years seem now like the large wheel in a clockwork, the wheel that drives all the other wheels, which are smaller than it and advance more rapidly on their axes and at differing speeds. They measure out the individual seconds, minutes, and hours of my entire life, of Father’s entire life and the life of my family. Driven by that great, slowly turning wheel, the smaller wheels tell littler stories, which are like tales or essays measured against a long romance. They are the stories of Bleeding Kansas, of the abolitionist movement, of the Underground Railroad, of Harpers Ferry, and so on. None of them, however, is my story, the one I am compelled to set down here, as if it were a confession of a great crime that, amidst all the fury and in the noise and smoke and carnage of great events, somehow went unnoticed when it occurred, unpunished afterwards, and unrecorded by you historians and biographers. Mine is the one account that explains all the others, so it is no great vanity for me to tell it.

Even so, after a lifetime of keeping silent and allowing you historians and biographers to establish and make permanent your received truth regarding John Brown and his men, to correct your record is not really why I tell it now. I tell it now because I cannot cease speaking until I have finally told the truth and can lie down in the grave alongside the others, dead, properly dead and buried and silent, and forgiven by them at last. I have begun to see that they are the ones to whom I speak. Those who died. No one else. Not you, Miss Mayo, and not your professor. And I do not haunt them; they haunt me. And their haunting will not end until I have revealed, not to you, but to them, my terrible secret.