Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

There were a few snuffles of disbelief, and one of the Englishmen asked him who had graded his wool. “More to the point,” he said, “who cleaned it?” and the company laughed, for it was unfortunately true that American wool was notorious in those days for not being clean, and a hundredweight of fleece might have as much as twenty pounds of dirt and feces stuck in it. This had been one of Father’s ongoing concerns, making sure that Brown & Perkins wool was clean, even for the domestic market, where the practice of folding trash in with the fleeces was all too common. From the beginning of his and Mr. Perkins’s Springfield enterprise, Father, although only a middleman, had made a great effort when purchasing the wool in the west to teach his shepherds how to wash their sheep thoroughly before shearing and how to pick the wool clean before shipping their clips to him in Springfield. His lectures on the subject at fairs and shows where he demonstrated his methods were famous among the sheepmen from New England to Ohio.

“Gentlemen, I have purchased every clip of this wool from shepherds I’ve trained personally. It’s been sheared from sheep whose stock I’ve improved with my own purebred merinos and Saxonys. And I myself am the man who has graded this wool. I’ve graded it, and my own sons and I have examined it before shipping for cleanliness.” This was not exactly true, for it was impossible to examine closely two hundred thousand pounds of wool. One graded it by taking a single handful of fleece from each shepherd’s clip, and one sampled clips at random to check for dirt and hoped that the shepherds were as good as their promise to deliver clean wool. Which, for the most part, they were. Besides, Father could generally estimate two hundred fifty pounds of clean wool by casting his eye over its volume.

“An expert, then,” said one of the Englishmen, a tub-bellied fellow with a yellow waistcoat stretched to its limits. “We have us an expert. He grades his own wool!” he said, turning to his fellows and smiling like a catfish.

“I am an expert, when it comes to grading wool. I’ve made it my business for nearly forty years, man and boy. Too many cunning shavers out there, gentlemen. Too many trimmers. Not enough honest men, like yourselves. But even so, a sheepman would be a fool not to know how to grade his own wool.”

“And you’re no fool, eh, Yank?” called one.

“Gentlemen,” Father said, heating up, “I can grade wool in the dark.”

“Indeed?”

“Aye. Blindfolded.”

“Extraordinary!”

“I can read a clip blind, from a single tuft,” Father declared, truthfully, for I had seen him do it hundreds of times.

The short man with the broad face and blond moustache then stepped forward and removed his own necktie, a blousy piece of fawncolored silk that matched his gloves, and held it out to Father. “Perhaps you’d like to demonstrate, Mister…?”

“Brown. Be glad to,” he said, and he passed me his knife and stick, removed his hat, and tied the scarf around his head, blocking his sigh t.

“No help from you now, my fine golumpus,” the man said to me, and he departed from the group and exited quickly from the warehouse, returning after a few seconds bearing a reddish tuft of hair in his gloved hand. “Now, Mister Brown, here’s your sample,” he said, and gave Father the tuft.

Father rubbed it between his fingers and dropped it at once to the floor. “Gentlemen,” he pronounced, “if you have any machinery that will spin the hairs of a dog, one of those large, wire-haired red dogs, I believe, then I would advise you to put this into it,” and with a flourish, he pulled off the blindfold.

After that, the Englishmen seemed more respectful of Father and more openly curious about our wool. We might be a couple of rustics from the republic of Pumpkinshire, but we were not fools.

Nor were they. After some pleasantries — during which the rotund man in the yellow waistcoat took a drink from a silver flask and extended it to Father, who naturally declined, suffering himself to be called, quite good-naturedly, a bloody parson — Father began once again to praise the quality of Brown & Perkins wool.

In the midst of his discourse, one of the more sober-visaged buyers, a man who up to now had been silent, interrupted him and said, “Mister Brown, I saw your son there setting out these bales. He’s a stout lumper, I must say, especially with his dumb arm and all, my compliments, but really, sir, since it was so easy for him to heft these bales, perhaps you could have him replace them and pull from your stock a few that we ourselves might choose for appraisal. I’m sure you understand, sir.” This man was tall and distinguished-looking, with a narrow gray beard. He was somewhat older than the others, and they seemed to defer to him — even Mr. Pickersgill, I noticed, whose interests were supposed to be the seller’s, not the buyer’s — for they all punctuated his statement with wise nods and pursed lips, as if for his approval.

Father wasn’t pleased by the implications of the request, but he agreed to it, and I was obliged to haul the bales back, replacing them on the floor with three that the tall Englishman himself selected, all of them, like the first batch, marked number 2, the base-price grade.

“And now, my good man, if you would be so kind as to show us your fine American wool,” said the Englishman, pointing with his cane at the center bale.

“My pleasure,” Father said in a hard voice, and he cut the cord so as to expose a top corner of the bale.

“If you don’t mind,” said the Englishman, passing his cane to the man behind him, and he took the knife from Father’s hand and swiftly cut away the rest of the cord, stripping the bale halfway down of its burlap wrapper. The snowy white fleeces, released to the open air, puffed up at once and grew to nearly twice their size, smelling sweetly of lanolin and freshly scythed grass, evoking a sudden, painful, unexpected memory of home, my first longing to return.

In silence then and in a strange sort of frenzy, five or six of the group rushed at the open bale and plunged their hands into it. They groped up to their elbows and pulled fleeces apart and grabbed great clumps of wool from the depths of the bale, sniffing it, rubbing tufts across their palms and between their fingers, passing snowy gouts back to their colleagues and reaching in for more. They were like a pack of ravening wolves. We had never seen this sort of behavior from buyers before and were stunned into silence.

Finally, Father recovered from his shock and called out, “Wait! Gentlemen, wait! You’re ruining the bale! What on earth are you doing?”

They went on a few moments longer, until at last the tall man stopped and turned to Father and glared at him. “This, sir, is what you Americans call clean wool?” he said in a cold voice, and he reached back into the bale with both hands and drew from its depths a large quantity of wool, nearly a bushel of it, and dropped it at Father’s feet. He retrieved his cane from one of his fellows and spread the wool out. It was filthy. Sticks, twigs, grass, and leaves and clots of dried fecal matter stuck to it.

Father’s face reddened at once, as he realized what had happened. Bad luck, yes; but worse. Much worse.

“More dirty Yankee wool, eh?” one of the fellows in back called. “Same old stuff”

“Filthy.”

“Disgusting.”

“So there’s your Yankee parson, eh?”

Several men in the group broke away then and moved towards the English sheepmen further down. Mr. Pickersgill hesitated a moment, but quickly followed after them, as if eager not to be associated with us. The tall Englishman did not leave, however, and now he stared hard at Father, whose ears and neck were scarlet with embarrassment and anger. “Mister Brown” he said evenly, “I’m quite disappointed. Frankly, I took you to be an honest man.”