Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

The buildings were high and looked ancient, mostly of gray stone, and the crooked alleyways and streets between them seemed narrower and smelled more of old food, beer, and human waste than Boston even. But there was a remarkable increase in human activity here, more noise, more color and variety among human types, than in Boston, which delighted me and seemed to please Father, too, for he had a small smile on his face as we pushed through the throng and made our way from the hurly-burly of the quay to the huge stone warehouse where he had arranged for our wool to be stored pending our arrival and now to be examined and graded and, presumably, sold.

While I stayed in the dimly lit warehouse and inventoried our nearly two hundred thousand pounds of wool and made sure that none of the bales that Father, John, and I had so carefully graded, labeled, and shipped from Springfield had been damaged or come undone in transit or storage, Father retreated to the office with the purveyors’ agent, a Mr. Pickersgill, to set a time for the buyers to view Brown & Perkins’s wonderful American wool. A pimpled teenaged apprentice watched over me suspiciously, as if he expected me to steal our own wool. All six hundred ninety bales of it, neatly packaged in burlap and tied with heavy cord, had been stacked in a bay near the rear of the huge, cool, cavernous building, and after I had examined and counted every one, I proudly signed the slip the boy had handed me— Received in good order by Owen Brown, agent for Brown Perkins, Springfield, Mass., U.S.A. — and admired for a moment the tidiness of our bales, comparing them to the rough-looking stock that surrounded ours and rose in heaps nearly to the high, dark eaves, theirs, all of it, sloppily and irregularly packaged and tied. Then I picked up my valise and went straight out to the street, there to loll in the sun and admire the passing crowd.

It looks good for us, I thought. The Old Man was right. These British are no match for us.

Soon Father emerged from the warehouse, blinking in the bright light like a mole, but looking pleased with himself and eager to move to the next piece of business, which I assumed was finding lodgings. “Turns out we’ve arrived a day late for the weekly viewing and sales,” he said. It would be six days before the buyers from Manchester, Leeds, and the other cloth-manufacturing towns returned to Liverpool to examine the wool that came in during the week and make their bids according to grade and quality. “So, my boy, we have a bit of a holiday in front of us;’ he said, and he rubbed his hands together in a show of pleasure. “What d’ you say we take it?”

“What do you propose?”

“Well, let’s just keep moving! Here we are, like Father Abraham sojourning in the land of promise, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob. We are strangers and sojourners here, as were all our fathers. Am I right?”

“Right! So where do you propose we go?”

“Why, to London! And to the very continent of Europe! We’ll track Napoleon’s hundred days’ march, all the way from Elba to Waterloo!”

“We’ve only got six days for marching, Father,”I pointed out. “Not one hundred. And we have to end back here, not Waterloo.”

“And so we shall.” He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, and we stepped down to the cobbled street and joined the flow of the crowd heading into the heart of the city. He had learned from Mr. Pickersgill, the warehouse clerk, that if we hurried to Garston Street at Speke Hall, we could catch an overnight post-chaise to London. The train had already departed. “Let’s go now!” he said. “It’ll cost us less anyhow to sleep in a moving rattler than a bed in a boarding house that goes nowhere.”

I had no money of my own, naturally, so wherever Father went, there close behind, of necessity, came I. As if I were in his employ, his apprentice boy. And in a sense, of course, I was. But I did not mind any longer thinking of myself that way, since our goals were now the same. After all, had I money of my own, I would have done just as he — I would have taken a holiday, ducked into a shop on the way for bread and cheese and a sack of shiny red apples, and made for the night coach or a rattler to London and beyond. Who knows, I might even have gone to Waterloo.

This was the first time that I had been out of my native land, and therefore the first time that I’d walked the streets of a country where slavery had been banished, and I felt cheerfully liberated by it. England was then, as now, of course, an antique monarchy, not a modern republic. Nevertheless, it was a freer country than ours, for no man could legally buy and sell another, and for that reason alone, as soon as we stepped ashore, the air we breathed seemed cleaner, fresher, more energizing, than ours at home. I think Father felt the same exhilaration as I. We did not speak of it to one another, however — it was as if we were superstitiously afraid to say the words “Negro” and “chattel” and”slavery,”as if we both knew that merely to utter the words in passing would drop us back into the gloom and rage that we then associated with being citizens of the United States of America. We needed a holiday, a vacation from the obligation to be constantly conscious of our national shame, and when it came, we both took it with unaccustomed alacrity.

Our high spirits did not diminish, even when we discovered, to our surprise and my slight displeasure, that our fellow passengers in the post-chaise from Liverpool to London were Mr. Hugh Forbes, the English journalist, and Miss Elizabeth Peabody, from the Cumbria. But we did not raise the topic of Negro slavery with them, either; we did not say the hated words. Nor did they, probably because they had already heard enough on the topic from Father during the crossing and did not need or particularly want to hear more. Instead, all of Father’s comments and observations were limited at first to remarking on the passing scenery and then to interrogating Mr. Forbes on the recently ended wars in Italy, on military tactics, and on the ideas and principles of the leader of the failed revolution, the famous Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Mr. Forbes, a man of numerous small pomposities, claimed to have known personally.

The vagueness with which he answered Father’s questions made me suspicious of his claims, but Father seemed eager to believe them, and when in private, during a brief mail-stop outside Manchester, I whispered my suspicions to the Old Man, he just waved me off and explained that Mr. Forbes talked elusively and vaguely because he was British. “They all talk that way, Owen,” he pronounced. “It’s a national trait. They’re a very circumspect people, y’ know. Think of Shakespeare,” he said. I did, and still did not agree, but said nothing more.

Miss Peabody, whom Father had described earlier as “a voluble woman with many sharp Transcendental edges,” was quite obviously still stunned by the death of her niece and kept to herself, as was natural. I had mumbled my condolences, as soon as I realized who our veiled fellow passenger was, but otherwise we men deferred to her in silence and tried not to intrude upon her privacy and grief. Even Father left her alone, although I knew he would have enjoyed leading her in prayer for the salvation of her niece’s unsaved soul. He believed, as the Bible showed, that God was sufficiently powerful and merciful to break His own rules from time to time and, if sufficiently prevailed upon with prayer, might be willing to admit a fallen suicide into paradise. But, for once, the Old Man politely restrained himself.

For me, it was exceedingly difficult not to speak to her of Sarah Peabody, to tell the woman of my brief encounter with her niece on the very night of her death, for I was no doubt the last person to have seen her alive and to have spoken with her at length. Not that I could have told the aunt anything consoling. Still, I might have said that her niece had touched my heart with unusual force and had moved my mind in a significant way. I might have said that my brief meeting with her had unexpectedly clarified my thoughts and that I would remember her for the rest of my days, as indeed I have.