Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Again and again, I tried to wipe the vision from my eyes, to listen to Father, who was speaking of Deuteronomy now and the laws of treating with those who violate virgins, of the unknown man who had driven this young woman to such an extremity of despair that she would reject the light that God had given her. But his words flew past me like birds.

I hadn’t loved the woman, of course. But I knew that I might have swiftly come to that, and thus her death struck me a blow all out of proportion to the length of our acquaintance. My pain was like an echo of a cry that I had made long years before. Again, I felt not that I had abandoned her but that she had abandoned me, and somehow, as the hours passed, it did not feel like vanity to think that. It felt like anger.

Now I had even more reason to keep to my quarters, and so for the few remaining days of the crossing I nursed my sickness with hurt and gloom and a curiously satisfying kind of mourning — satisfying in that I counted and contemplated all those whom I had lost so far in my short life, and in so doing was distracted from my nausea and general giddiness. Father came and went like a recurrent dream, and I barely knew whether it was night or day.

Until one morning when I woke, and my stomach for the first time seemed settled, and I was genuinely hungry. I sat up in my bunk and placed my feet down on the deck: the ship felt steady beneath me — although clearly we were still at sea and had not yet made land. The waters that carried us had changed, however, as if we had come in off the ocean and were traversing a lake instead.

Then Father appeared at the entrance to our cabin and in high spirits informed me that we had just passed the Scilly Islands off Cornwall and were coasting north in the Irish Sea, headed towards Liverpool. “We’re in Cromwell’s waters,” he said with pleasure. “Imagine that, Owen! Come up and see the headlands off the starboard side. You’ll imagine Cromwell’s forces setting off to conquer and convert the Irish from paganism and papistry. Celts and Angles, Vikings and Romans, Picts and Normans — they’ve been sailing back and forth across these waters for centuries! Conquering and converting one another for a thousand years! It’s wonderful, isn’t it? The mad enthusiasm of these people!” He laughed.

He kept smiling happily and set about packing our two valises, our small luggage. “They’re not like us Yankees, are they? We’re a continental people, you know; they’re island people. And what a difference that makes, eh? They’re like the Fijis and the Hawaiians and those fierce, painted Caribs in their long, sea-going canoes, subduing their island neighbors and then a generation or two later being subdued right back. These days, of course, the Anglo-Saxons are on top and thinking it’ll last for all time. But you wait: someday soon the rowdy Celts’ll be back, and then the Picts. And who knows, maybe the Normans will make another run for it, eh? Napoleon nearly did it, and not too long ago.”

“Could be” I said. “Could be,” I gathered my gear and, after washing my face and neck and dressing in my one fresh shirt, went up on the main deck to enjoy the sight of land. There I saw from north to south a long row of white, low cliffs and beyond them a strip of cultivated fields, bright green, despite the lateness of the season, and overhead a pillowy bank of soft clouds breaking off to a blue sky. There seemed little more than small fishing villages along the shore; the ship was too far out for me to distinguish individual dwellings. No ports or large towns. It was hard to imagine, as Father had, the righteous armies of the faithful massing there.

The salty air was cool against my face. A fair wind blew out of the southwest, and the wheel churned steadily as a mill, and the sails bellied nicely and helped push the ship smartly north. Terns and gulls swooped low over the boat, and several of the passengers — bored merchantmen and supercargoes in shirtsleeves and a grim young man in a frock coat, whom I took to be the atheistic journalist, Mr. Forbes — idly tossed the raucous birds bits of biscuit. The merchants laughed to see the birds fighting amongst themselves and stealing crumbs from one another. The journalist, who watched the men instead of the birds, appeared to be sourly proving some other point.

But like the gulls, I was hungry, and I quickly made my way to the galley, where, although it was long after the hour when breakfast was normally served, I talked the cook into giving me several slices of hard bread and a portion of ’scouse, salt beef and potatoes and peppers mixed in gravy, and a mug of warm cider. Sitting myself down in the sunshine on a bulkhead, I ate and drank, and in short order I was a new man, ready to come ashore, eager to walk on solid ground again.

My melancholy preoccupations had begun to dissipate and scatter like yesterday’s storm clouds in today’s bright sun, when I saw standing portside, next to the rail near the bow, a woman whom I took at once to be Miss Peabody’s aunt. She was situated exactly where I had last seen my friend, when I departed from her that fateful night.

The woman looked somewhat beyond middle-age and was large, unusually so, shaped like a bronze bell, and seemed the picture of solitude and loneliness. She wore a long, black dress with hat and gloves, and her face was covered with a black veil. I could not make out her expression, because of the veil, but she appeared to be looking back out to sea, gazing in the direction we had come, as if making her final goodbye to her poor, drowned niece.

I knew that there was nothing I could do or say that would comfort her. It was such a sad sight, and it so threatened to drop me back into my recent gloom, that I could not bear to watch her, so I picked myself up and strolled back to the stern of the ship, to make there my first casual conversations with the sailors and other men in the crew, conversations and inquiries that, had I not been stricken with seasickness, I would have undertaken at the very beginning of our journey. Now, as we neared our landing at Liverpool, despite the tragic death of Miss Sarah Peabody, and despite my lengthy illness, I found myself in excellent spirits, healthy and well-fed, newly befriended by cheerful, sturdy workingmen, and, concerning our business here, fast becoming as optimistic as the Old Man. I saw that there had been completed, almost without my intending or even hoping for it, a thorough-going transformation in my character and in my relation to my father. The process had commenced in earnest in Boston and had continued during the crossing and now, somehow, inexplicably, it seemed to have been completed by the sad, wasted death of the young woman Sarah Peabody — all accomplished, for the most part, without my awareness or understanding. Until it was over, that is, when — by remembering who and how I had been before, especially in relation to Father — I realized that I had become, in an important sense, a new man. No more the disgruntled, sulky boy who followed his Old Man around and waited for orders that he could resent. No more the pouting, conflicted ape. This new fellow, who had been a reluctant follower, was now an enthusiast, was a proper lieutenant, was a fellow believer! He might fail here and there — fail to act, fail to believe — but he would no longer question his aspirations or his commitment.

Thus I fairly bounced down the gangplank ahead of Father as we disembarked at the crowded quay on the Mersey River, where the Cumbria had docked and was already being unloaded by husky lumpers and stevedores and loaded onto carts and wagons by teamsters. It was a noisy, chaotic hub-bub of a scene: hawkers and higglers in tiny stalls, men in tall beaver hats on horseback and in carriages making their way through the crowd, ragged beggars on crutches with hands held out, a musician in a harlequin’s suit with a monkey on his shoulder and a dancing dog on a string, and meandering gangs of urchins and skinny men in caps who looked like cutpurses; there were merchants, clerks, supercargoes, and shipping agents ticking off goods received and goods about to head out, and shirtless, orange-haired Irishmen lugging barrels and crates. Here and there, a distinguished-looking gentleman or lady arrived by carriage to greet a visitor or collect a parcel. People called and bawled to one another and sometimes grabbed my sleeve and tried to sell me food off their smoking carts: greasy, fried fish wrapped in paper, roasted potatoes, bits of meat on skewers; and old ladies carrying trays filled with jellied sweets accosted me at every turn; everyone was shouting at me, it seemed, but I understood barely a word I heard. Their pronunciation and the speed with which they spoke was all off. It was as if I were not in an English-speaking country at all, or as if I myself did not speak English. There were Negro men working alongside the whites, and Hindoos with turbans, and bearded men in black coats and hats whom I took to be Jews. There were tall, blond, white-skinned Swedes and florid Russians and even a few in the crowd whom I recognized as Americans, long-faced Yankees in black, and tanned Southerners with walking sticks and broad hats and pale suits. I felt that I had arrived in Phoenicia.