Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

So strong was my fear of losing Mother that, as long as nothing had happened to her, no matter what other disaster befell us, it would be as if nothing bad had happened at all. Her essential goodness and her love of me compensated for everything that was not good. And in an unpredictable, unstable world, where babies died before children and children died before adults, where without warning twisters and droughts and hard freezes descended on us like Biblical plagues and ruined a year’s and sometimes a lifetime’s careful husbandry of crops and livestock, a world in which the God to whom everyone prayed for mercy and justice seemed not to care one way or the other, in such a precarious, incomprehensible world, my mother’s love was the only kindly constant, her gentle smile my sole comfort, her soft, shy voice the music that pacified my turbulent mind.

I dropped Frederick’s hand and ran full speed towards the house. Frederick laughed, as if I had invented a game, and gave chase, trying to tag me. At the door, he finally tagged me on the shoulder and said, “Ha! Got you! Now get me!”

I shook his hand away and tugged frantically on the door and banged on it, crying, “Mother! Mother! Let me in!”

It would not give, try as I might to open it. I was sobbing, hammering against the door with my fists now, enraged and terrified. Whether it was barred from the inside against me or in my panic I simply could not work the latch, I do not know; I hurled my weight against it and kept crying, “Mother! Mother!”

Then suddenly the door swung wide, opening into the small, darkened room. I found myself facing Father’s broad chest. His arms reached around me and held me tightly to him. I remember his stifling smell of leather and blood and wool. I glimpsed behind him the shadowy forms of my older brothers, John and Jason, and several men and a woman, people I knew from their outlines but did not at that moment recognize — they were merely adults, large people, shades blocking out my mother’s light. Foremost amongst them, and darkest, was Father. He wrapped me in his iron arms, holding me face-first against his woolen shirt, and said, “Owen, come on outside for a moment. Come, son, and let me speak calmly with you. Come outside, Owen,” he said, and he moved me backwards out to the stoop, where my Frederick was standing, bewildered.

Frederick said, “Don’t cry, Owen. I only meant to tag you. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Father held me firmly by the wrist, and as he drew me across the stoop, I squirmed and tried in vain to break free of his grasp. “Come here, son,” he said to me in a low voice. “Come on now, let’s sit down and talk. I must talk a moment with you.”

He sat on the step and finally released his hold on me, and when he did, I shoved him aside and ran back through the slowly closing door into the house. “Owen!” he called, but too late.

The room was dim, cold, and damp, like a sepulchre, and although it was crowded with people, I saw no one in the room now, except Mother, who lay on her and Father’s day-bed near the window, fully dressed, her eyes closed, as if she were asleep. Father’s brother, Uncle Frederick, he for whom my dead brother had originally been named, was there, up from Ohio, and he quickly moved towards me and grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to move me back outside, away from Mother.

I wrenched myself free of his grasp and ran straight to her and clutched both her hands in mine. They were as cold as clay and as inert, and at first I was afraid of them, as if they were small, dead animals, skinned and dried. But they were my mother’s hands, as familiar to me as my own, and they were all I had left of her, so I pulled on them, as if to lift her up from her bed or to yank her back from the abyss into which she was falling. I drew her into a half-seated position on the daybed. But her head flopped to one side like a doll’s, and her weight became too much for me, and her body began to tilt towards the wall. Her face was turned entirely away from me then, and suddenly it was as if she were pulling against my grasp, shoving me from her.

I unclasped my hands from hers and watched her slip away from me. Her body fell back onto the day-bed and then slid over the lip of the abyss into the darkness. She was gone. Gone. And in that instant, although I was still a child, I understood to the bottom of my soul that I was now alone. I knew, too, that I would remain so for the rest of my life.

Slowly, I turned and left the darkened room. Father waited outside, still seated on the doorstoop. I sat down beside him, taking the same position there as he, head down, hands on knees, back straight. Father and son. We did not speak.

I never saw my mother again. I never saw my imaginary companion, my poor lost Frederick, again, either. My father would soon remarry, as you know, a good woman whom I called only Mary, never Mother, and she would provide him with eight more children. But nothing would be the same for me, ever again. I mark the end of my childhood from that day.

I’m sorry. I can write no more today. I will resume, however, as soon as my hand is steady again and my mind cleared of this embarrassing self-pity.

Following yesterday’s letter, I’ve been recalling this morning those early days in New Richmond and the peaceful prior years of my boyhood in Hudson — both wildernesses of the old Western Reserve when we resided there, as fraught with difficulty and danger on our first arrival and settlement as was our Adirondack mountain farm later. We lived in our villages then amongst wolves and bears and mountain lions in deep forests that blocked out all light in the lost ravines. We lived close to Indians, Iroquois, mostly, suspicious and withdrawn and silent, who sometimes left their forest enclaves and visited our villages to trade, but mainly kept a safe distance from us. And there was the occasional fugitive slave, coming up from Kentucky or the mountains of western Virginia by way of the Underground Railroad, run generally by the Quakers back then, and passing through to Canada — a quiet, frightened, day-long visitor hidden in the attic of our house and spirited on under hay in Father’s wagon as soon as night fell to the farm of a Quaker or some fellow radical abolitionist twenty or thirty miles to the north.

But recalling those days of long ago, after having seen all of the civilized world that an ordinary man needs to see in order to know the true nature of people in society, I am struck by nothing so much as our sustained virtue and orderliness. Wherever we lived in those days, wherever we set up our house and farm and commenced doing business with our neighbors, we were like an island in a sea of chicanery, godlessness, disorder, and willful ignorance. For we Browns were distinct; we were different from most of those who surrounded us. We were surrounded not just by wilderness but by reckless sinners.

As individuals and as a family, we were sinners, too, of course, like all men and women, but ours was the fastidious sin of pride, for we were proud of our difference and took pleasure in enumerating the ways in which it got daily manifested. We even prided ourselves on the number of occasions and the ways in which our friends and neighbors were affronted by our virtue and orderliness or found it strange or eccentric and as a result held themselves off from us, choosing to view us, as did the Iroquois, from what must have felt to them a safe distance.

Our pride, that subtlest and most insidious of sins, got manifested in a variety of ways, but, all reports to the contrary, I do not believe that we were arrogant. Certainly Mother, and later my stepmother, Mary, and my sister Ruth were not arrogant. And the younger children were all naturally modest and shy, boys and girls alike, and were constantly encouraged to remain so when they ventured out into the wider world than home provided, and for the most part they did. My older brothers and I, too, strove not to lord it over others less fortunate than we, less disciplined, less inclined to sacrifice their force and time on earth for the greater good, what Father called “the commonweal.” And even Father himself was not arrogant — although he was indeed commanding and headstrong — and made only those demands on us that he made on himself as well, and made no demands on others, but wholly accepted people as he found them. To Father, other people chose to live our way — and there were a few here and there who did — or they chose not to. It was the same to him, either way.