Cloudsplitter (5 page)

But until Mother died, we Browns had been to all appearances a normal family of our time and place, if a bit overly strict in matters of religion. After that, we became like some ancient Hebrew tribe of wanderers and sufferers, burdened by the death of women and children and by our endless obligations to our father’s restless, yet implacable, God. Isolated from our neighbors and tangled in tribulation and increasingly dire financial circumstances, we were weighed down further by complicated vows and covenants that made sense only after Father had explained them to us. And even though his explanations made our life briefly comprehensible, since there was always a reason for everything that we did, over the long run they made things worse, for he likened our life, not to the lives of the modern American people who surrounded us, but to those of his Biblical heroes. It was as if, after Mother died, we moved outside of conventional time and wandered with our herds and puny belongings through some distant land and epoch, so that we were not living in Ohio, but in Canaan, not in Pennsylvania, but among the Philistines, not in Massachusetts, but in Pharaoh’s Egypt.

Probably, Father had viewed himself and others in that peculiarly vivid, Biblical light from early in his life, for he had been a devout and an unusually imaginative Christian since boyhood, when he had practically memorized the entire Bible. But, for me, it began when Mother died. It seems strange to me now, strange that I didn’t know it earlier, when I was still a believer, but as my Christian faith secretly began to fade, a fading surely occasioned and probably even caused by the sudden death of my mother, I came gradually, at the same time and pace as the fading, to an awareness of the unusual degree to which our lives as a family and as individuals were described, prescribed, and subscribed by the Bible. The Word of God. His Holy Writ. As understood, interpreted, and applied by our father, John Brown. It was almost as if we were characters in the Good Book and had no other lives or destinies than what Father said had been given to us there.

Let me tell you how it was then. Because after Mother died, everything changed, and I want you to know us in the ways we were not generally known, for better or worse. I don’t know if somehow Father himself became a different man, a man more forcefully committed to the liberation of the Negro, and more religious, even, than he had been before, or if instead everything and everyone merely remained the same, and it was I alone who had changed, a small boy who suddenly saw things about his life and circumstances that until then had been invisible to him. But whichever it was, for me, at least, everything changed.

I have been remembering this morning how it was when I entered the darkened room, the small front parlor of our log house, and learned that Mother had died. It was still a rough and wild section of the country there in New Richmond, and I came home from the simple, one-room log schoolhouse that Father had built when we first settled in the region, where the young fellow from Connecticut taught the children of the settlement. Mr. Twichell was his name, Joseph Twichell. Him you may not know of yet. He was a fine young fellow, hardly more than a boy himself, freshly graduated from Yale College. Father, on one of his early trips east to sell cattle, had met him at an abolitionists’ meeting and had convinced him to come all the way out to the Western Reserve, so that he could serve the Presbyterian God and His Son, not in New Haven amongst the wealthy, educated class of people that he sprang from, but away in the wilderness, teaching rudimentary reading, writing, and figuring skills to the children of lowly shepherds, farmers, and tanners.

Mr. Twichell was a slender, almost delicate fellow with a pointed Yankee face, all narrow nose, chin, and forehead—a face made of small, delicate bones. And I remember him with pleasure and ease, for he bore immense good will towards children, as if he thought the ways in which we were treated by adults would shape our minds and morals for the remainder of our lives. This was an unusual perspective in those days, especially way out there in the Western Reserve amongst families with no time for coddling the young, no use for it whatsoever. Teach them merely what they need to know for doing their basic business and for keeping them from being cheated by strangers, then send them home to clear the forest and work the farm—that was the prevailing viewpoint.

I returned from school one autumn afternoon along towards dusk, hopping like a red squirrel through fallen leaves. I can hear the rustling sound of the leaves, ash, hickory, and oak, and can smell their dry, cinnamon smell in the clean, cool autumn air cut through with woodsmoke as I passed the cabins of my schoolmates in the settlement and moved further down the narrow, rutted road towards Father’s tannery and our isolated house just beyond. Too young to join my brothers at the tannery and too old to stay at home with the babies, I went alone to school in those days. But—and here is something else that you cannot have learned elsewhere—I had a constant companion then, an imaginary boy who was as real to me as a twin brother and whom I had named Frederick, no doubt because of some half-buried worry about the recent transfer of the name from the dead brother to the living one.

I had revealed his existence to no one but Mother, for I knew that she and only she would look kindly on him. My companion was, in a strange, prescient way, very much like my brother Fred would soon become, when in a few years we in the family would begin to understand that, in certain, crucial ways, Fred was different than the rest of us children, especially we boys—or, to put a finer point on it, that Fred did not
feel
things the same as we did, as if he were more sensitive to cold than we or less sensitive to heat—and, as a consequence, Fred would have to be treated more carefully than we were. Already Father had begun to arrange a special set of rules for Fred, which did not deny him the rights and privileges enjoyed by the rest of us at the same age but did not require him to take on the same responsibilities, either.

Even then I saw that Father was a genius at legislating rules and regulations for the governance of the numerous members of his family, adjudicating over everything domestic, from the most trivial quarrel and difference of opinion and desire to the most complex and lofty difference of principle. Notwithstanding his claim that he was, at bottom, even amongst his family, a democrat, Father exercised all the authority of a monarch, and got away with it, perhaps because he was never arbitrary or whimsical and never compromised merely in order to obtain some vaguely dissatisfying middle ground. At our supper table, Father’s seat was the seat of government, all three houses of it, executive, legislative, and judiciary. His constitution was, of course, the Bible, in particular the Old Testament. His Declaration of Independence and Preamble were the Books of Genesis and Deuteronomy. His Bill of Rights was taken straight from the New Testament: love the Lord thy God above all else, and treat thy neighbor as thou wouldst have him treat thee. Christ’s first Commandment and His Golden Rule—these were the scales upon which Father weighed all our needs, decided all our disagreements, and meted out to us our punishments and rewards.

Fred’s was a difficult case to rule on, however. From the time he first began to speak, it was evident that he was an innocent, that he was a boy incapable of lying. He was not like the rest of us. He always told the truth with perfect, natural, unthinking ease, and as a result—not for any lack of intelligence, but due to his primitive honesty—he was incapable of understanding that others often lied to him. Even after he became a man. Thus, unlike the rest of us, unlike me in particular, Fred could not protect himself against liars by lying to them first. He was not simple—his understanding in many areas was as good as the next fellow’s—but to most people he must have seemed mentally slow. And because they treated him that way and consequently were wont to cheat and mislead him, we were obliged to protect him as if indeed he were. At home amongst his three older brothers and sister Ruth and the younger ones when they came along, our stepmother Mary’s children, his innocence, as he grew older, reflected only badly on the rest of us—especially on me, for I was as a boy an incorrigible and incompetent liar. It was an early habit, and I do not know how it came to be that, but once begun, it could be stopped only with extreme diligence and discipline, neither of which could I properly muster myself, and so, frequently, I found myself corrected and chastized by others, especially by Father and his fierce belt.

When, with my imaginary Frederick at my side, I turned in at the tannery yard, I saw at once that something strange and ominous was going on. The blindfolded horse on the bark-grinder had come to a stop and stood unwatched in the center of the yard, with the long wooden arm of the grinder still attached. There was no smoke coming from the chimneys of the tannery, none of the usual signs of activity—of hides being hung to dry, of John, Jason, or the other workers hefting baskets of wet bark from the vats or lugging freshly scraped skins in and out of the low storage sheds, of customers going over accounts with Father, and so on. And before the house, three saddle horses stood hitched.

With my Frederick close behind, I began to run towards the house, as if I had already divined what had occurred. But I did not know, I could not have known, for Mother had seemed perfectly well that morning, although once again she had not come to the door and waved us off when in the gray dawn light my Frederick and I had set out for the schoolhouse. But somehow, suddenly, on this day I knew—perhaps because I feared so powerfully the loss of my mother that no other eventuality mattered to me and on this day was finally no longer able to suppress that fear: I knew that her continuing inability to rise from her bed was not what Father had said, the consequence of fatigue and a result of the sadness of having recently lost her newborn infant. Those things passed, not easily but naturally; they were part of the seasonal round of our and our neighbors’ daily lives: the dark fatigue of women and the death of infants. But this, I suddenly believed, was different.

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.