Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“Let me have one of my babies,” Father said in a low voice. “Annie or Sarah. Let me have Sarah. Bring me little Sarie, will you, Ruth?” Suddenly, the Old Man looked very tired — bone-weary and aged.

Ruth went obediently to the sleeping loft to fetch the child. Father said, “Everything seems to have come undone, doesn’t it, children? Our neighbors have abandoned us. Men have been shot. Blood spilt. And a beloved, courageous friend has been shot dead. And now those whom we would assist in their plight have been captured by the enemy and taken off south to be hung, or worse. Oh, I can barely think of it!”

No one answered. The younger boys, Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, lounged at the door to the further room, waiting eagerly for the bloody details, who shot whom and where, which they knew would come later, when we elder sons went upstairs to bed and were freed by the absence of our parents to brag to one another. Mary silently placed food down on the table, and Lyman, John, Jason, and I all drew up our stools and set to eating. In a moment, Ruth returned carrying the sleepy-eyed Sarah, and deposited the child on Father’s lap. He smiled wanly down into her puffy face, and when she rose to wakefulness, recognized him, and grinned, he brightened somewhat and began to rock her slowly in his arms.

“John says I must return to Springfield,” he said to us. In a calm, low voice, he explained that he was needed there to settle some painful arguments and tangled disputes between the woolen buyers and the sheep farmers in Ohio and our main support, Mr. Perkins — old claims and counter-claims that John thought would be more easily resolved if Father was there to face down these nettlesome people in person. It had seemed a bad idea to Father at first. “Now… now I don’t know, maybe he’s right. I had hoped to be needed more here, however, than in Springfield,” he said, and he sighed heavily again. “I think our Negro friends across the valley in Timbuctoo, like our white friends here in North Elba, will no longer want to work with us. What think you, Lyman?”

Lyman looked up from his plate of ham and corn bread and baked beans, chewed silently for a moment, and finally said, “Mister Brown, I can’t speak for them other folks. Just for me and my wife here. And we’re going to do whatever you decide you need us for. You and your boys, you got me out of that jail today. And if it was me instead of poor ol’ Elden that got killed, and he was the one sitting here tonight eating supper, I know he’d be telling you the same thing. But them other folks over at Timbuctoo, they’re probably going to want to lay low for a spell. Sort of playing possum, you know. They got to, Mister Brown. You can understand that.”

“Playing possum, eh? But not you and Susan?”

“No, no, we’re colored folks, too, Mister Brown. For sure. But we’re living here now in this house. We’re not settled with them across the valley in Timbuctoo no more. That’s why we’ve got to take more consideration of what you people do than they do over there. It’s like we got this here debt that we owe to you and the family, Mister Brown. And we want to be paying it off” He looked across the room at his wife as if for confirmation, and she nodded, and he went back to eating.

“All right, then,” Father said. “It’s settled.”

“What is?” said I, warm corn bread and butter like soft, crumbled gold in my mouth.

“We’ll go down to Springfield with John and Jason.”

“We?”

Father shot me a hard look. “You and I. Isn’t that what, not so long ago, you were begging for, Owen? I need you there, for a month at least, while Jason returns to Ohio and sets things right for us out west and sees to his wife and poor Fred, who have been making do on their own these months. Taking care of Fred is no simple matter, as you know. The good woman probably did not bargain for that when she agreed to marry Jason.”

“Ellen loves Fred, Father,” Jason said. “Believe me, he’s no burden to her. She has no fear of him, even when he goes off on one of his spells.”

“Yes, well, even so, she needs you, son. And I need you there, too, to make what payments we can for the unsold fleeces and to explain our delay to the rest.”

As fast as it could be said, then, it had been decided. Father, John, and I would return to Springfield, Jason would head back to Ohio, and Lyman and Susan Epps would stay on at the farm with the remainder of the family, tending to the harvest and setting the farm up properly for winter. Lyman had replaced me, as I had replaced Jason. And there was more. Father wished to travel to England, he said, where, according to John, the price for wool was now up to seventy dollars per hundredweight, nearly twice what Brown & Perkins was getting for it in Springfield. He would go there and attempt to convince the British to buy American wool for the first time. By setting the British buyers off against the American, he might thereby break the monopoly that was crippling the producers and driving Father and Mr. Perkins deeper and deeper into debt as they purchased the wool and held it in the Springfield warehouse, waiting for the prices to rise.

But England? To travel across the sea and attempt to penetrate a market and deal with men we knew nothing about? That seemed foolish to me.

Not to Father. He would empty the warehouse and sail over with it. The tariffs were down. American fleeces could compete with the best in the world now, he insisted. John Bull had only to see it before his eyes and have a knowing man like Father explain to him the fine conditions under which those fleeces had been grown and make the necessary guarantees for future delivery, and the fellow would snap it up. Everyone knew that our free Ohio and Pennsylvania sheepmen could out-produce the poor, beaten-down Scots and Irish, once the market was opened to them. The only reason no one had done it before this was that the individual sheepman was incapable of delivering the required quantity of wool, and the devious American buyers had colluded and done everything they could to discourage and sabotage cooperatives like ours. “This is the solution!” he exclaimed, happy now, excited again, sailing before a fresh breeze, well out of his doldrums of a few minutes earlier.

It was almost too much to keep up with, these switches and turns, descents and ascents of feeling and intention. Jason was happy enough, and looked it, pursing his lips in an anticipatory smile of returning to the arms of his bride and the comfort of their home in Ohio. And John was well-pleased, for he had come to feel like a proper businessman down there in Springfield and had moved into more or less permanent quarters with his wife, Wealthy. And Lyman could not have been in the slightest discouraged by the prospect of becoming foreman of the farm, with his wife, Susan, with Mary and Ruth and a hard-working brood of boys and girls to help him.

I wondered how Mary regarded the Old Man’s decision: relief, I supposed, for his decision to call off the war against slavery for a spell but dread and anxiety as well, for his forthcoming absence from her side as autumn and winter came on.

But the one, perhaps the only one, who felt deflated by these new plans, surely, was I, Owen Brown, he who barely three months before had wanted nothing so much as to return from the wilderness of these mountains to the bustling river town of Springfield. Something had altered my feelings in those intervening months. The work with Father and the others on the Underground Railroad, to be sure, those excitements and risks and the sense of being engaged wholly in a moral enterprise — they had changed me. But something more lasting than that had eliminated my earlier longing to leave this place, a thing that had grown out of our life as a family settled on a farm in these mountains.