Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Father had a power over us that seemed almost to emanate from his very body, as if he were more of a purely male person than we. While I have in my lifetime met a few other such men, who, like Father, seemed to be more masculine than the general run of men, as a rule they were brutal and stupid, which he surely was not. Like him, their beards were coarser, the hair on their hands, arms, and chests denser, their musculature and their bones tougher, heavier, more massy, than those of other men. They smelled more male-like than the rest of us. Even bathed and suited up for church, they, like Father, gave off the aroma of well-oiled saddle leather. None of those men, however, was as morally sensitive and intelligent as the Old Man, traits that made his masculinity so much more formidable than theirs. In ancient times, figures like Father, characterized in their appearance and manner by an excess of masculinity, were probably singled out in youth and made chieftain, clan leader, warlord. It was difficult not to bow before such a man.

Sometimes I thought this was how most women felt in the presence of men generally — like a small, hairless child, soft and vulnerable, before the large, hairy, tough, and impervious adult. It’s what we mean, perhaps, by “womanish.” Men like Father seem to evoke in all of us, male as well as female, long-abandoned, childlike responses which make us malleable to their wishes and will. Thus, when Father said, “Jump!” even though I was twenty-four, then thirty, then thirty-four years old, I jumped. I always jumped.

I am not ashamed of that, however. For, truth to tell, it was his gentleness, not his huge, male ferocity, that gathered us in and kept us there. We came to him willingly, not out of fear. His pervasive gentleness was like a sweet liquor to us, an intoxicant that left us narcotized, inducing in us a morbid susceptibility to his will. My most vivid memories of this most manly of men are of his face streaming with tears after he had struggled vainly for long days and nights to save his dying child. I think of his holding a freezing lamb against his naked chest under his shirt and coat, warming the creature with his own body, until the tiny lamb came slowly back to life and the Old Man could place it down beside its mother and step away and fairly laugh aloud with the pleasure of seeing it begin to nurse again. I remember Father tending to his wife and to each of his children when we were sick, hovering over us like a perfect physician, when he himself was ill and barely able to stand, tucking blankets around our shivering bodies, tending the fire, heating milk, manufacturing and administering remedies and medicinal specifics, long past exhaustion, until one or the other of us would begin at last to recover and was finally well enough to spell him, and then and only then would he allow himself to be treated. And though we often laughed and behind his back mocked Father for his long-windedness and certain other peculiarities of speech when he was trying to teach us a new skill — for he was one of those who teach as much by verbal instruction and repetition as example — withal, he was the most patient and tender teacher any of us ever had, who suffered our ignorance and ineptitude gladly, and never seemed to forget how mysterious and peculiar the world looked to a child and how even the simplest household or barnyard tasks seemed at first forbidding and complex.

No, it was the remarkable, perhaps unique, combination of his extreme masculinity and his unabashedly feminine tenderness that brought us willingly under his control and kept us there, so that, even when one or two or three of us seemed to wander off from his teachings and desires — as in the matter of religion, or, later, when he determined to go down into Virginia — none of us ever departed from him altogether. We merely on those occasions took a few cautious steps to his right or left side and tried to aid him in his work from that position, instead of from a position directly behind him. Even when John married Wealthy Hotchkiss and Jason married Ellen Sherbondy, and they moved out of the family household and set up on their own, they did it in ways that merely established new orbits that allowed them to function as satellites circling Father, like moons around a planet, and thus they were held as powerfully as before by his larger orbit, while he himself circled the sun. At an age when most men our age were running off to see the elephant, as we called it then — heading out to search for gold in California, staking out land in the further reaches of the Western Reserve, or following the crowds of bright, ambitious men and boys to New York and Washington — I and my brothers kept ourselves bound to our father’s destiny.

With the sudden arrival at the farm of John and Jason, a day that turned out to be tumultuous and, ultimately, tragic began as a celebration of familial warmth and union. Over breakfast, Father apprised his elder sons of the ongoing situation with regard to the Underground Railroad, Marshal Saunders’s pursuit of the Cannons, Mr. Wilkinson’s betrayal of Lyman Epps and Mr. Fleete, and their recent arrest and removal to the Elizabeth town jail. And when he informed them of his intention to ride over to Elizabethtown with me for the purpose of arranging the release of the Negro men—“Even if it must be done at gunpoint,” he said — John and Jason naturally chose to accompany and support us.

Once again, it fell to me to drive the wagon, while Father and my elder brothers rode on horseback. “We’ll need the wagon to carry our friends back home,” Father said, and, of course, I agreed, although Father or one of the others could have driven it as well as I. Mary and Ruth and Susan Epps packed two days’ food for us, and the entire family stood by the door and waved cheerfully, as if we were setting out on a deer hunt, and we rode uphill back along the Cascade Road, east towards Keene and Elizabethtown.

We had not planned to stop in Keene, which we reached by noon, but as we passed by the rundown farm owned by Mr. Partridge, Father suddenly determined to pull up. “I believe I have some business with that man,” he grimly announced, and pulled into the yard and dismounted. We followed, but did not get down from our horses, as he crossed the yard, strode across the porch, and rapped loudly on the door. There was a single, saddled horse at the porch rail, a bay that I thought I recognized but could not be sure until the door swung open and I saw Mr. Partridge’s long, dark, gloomy face and behind him glimpsed the grizzled face of the slave-catcher Mr. Billingsly.

Billingsly darted out of our line of sight into the darkness of the room, but he surely knew that I and probably Father had spotted him when the door opened. This was a dangerous situation, and I jumped down from the wagon and signaled to John and Jason, who dismounted and joined me at the porch steps.

“What do you want here, Brown?” Mr. Partridge said, his voice a bit shaky with fear, as the three of us came to stand behind Father, each with a musket in hand. Father, too, had his gun with him, slung under his right arm.

“I’ve come to redeem my clock,” Father announced. He reached down into his left pocket and drew out some coins, which he held in front of him, until Mr. Partridge unthinkingly extended his own palm. Father let the coins trickle into the other man’s hand and said, “That, sir, is the cost of our food and lodging for one night, which you established back in May. You may count it, and then you will hand over my clock.”

“You’re crazy, Brown,” he said, and he shoved the coins back at Father, groping at the Old Man’s snuff-colored frock coat until he found a loosely open pocket and dropped them in, whereupon he moved to shut the door in Father’s face. Father kicked the door back hard and shoved Mr. Partridge aside, and there stood revealed the slave-catcher Billingsly, who had drawn both his pistols.