Cloudsplitter (66 page)

Slavery, slavery, slavery! I could not have a thought that was not somehow linked to it. It was an obsession. At times, it came to feel like a form of insanity, for I was incapable of a normal thought, a single private thought that began and ended with me and did not identify me as a white man. And this was all due to Father.

It was during our run with the four Hammlicher fugitives that Mary came to her time. And before we were able to get back from the Canadian border to North Elba, she gave birth to a son, her next-to-last child, born strangled and crushed by the terrible trial of his birth, leaving Mary herself nearly dead and Father frantic with fear that he would lose her.

The excitement of our run to Canada had made our blood race, and we were still thrilled by it when we returned home. It was almost as if we had Miss Tubman herself aboard, her long rifle at the ready, and for the first time in months there was no tension between me and Lyman, which put even Father into a jolly mood as we rode the wagon back down along the rough roads from Massena. We had passed a party of Indian hunters along the way, Abenakis, French-speaking Algonquins from Lower Canada, a remnant of a remnant people, and had engaged in deep speculation amongst ourselves as to their racial origins, Lyman arguing for ancient Africa, Father for Asia, and Watson for the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Then, when we arrived at the farm, we were met by the grim sight of a birthing gone bad, the sad familiarity of it, the desolation and dashed hopes and expectations, the terrible, bloody, failed work of it, and all our male heartiness and camaraderie, our blustery pride in our good and difficult work, went suddenly silent and cold. Men go numb at these times, I discovered. That’s what they do. All feeling bleeds out of us. We suddenly realize that we know nothing of what it means to the woman who has carried this child inside her body for nine months and has suffered through the excruciating pain and work of bearing it and has had to see its tiny body emerge into the world lifeless, battered and bruised by the vain effort, a grotesque, sorrowful waste. We do
think
sorrow and grief and pity. But we
feel
nothing. Husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers, we all respond the same way. First we say to ourselves that we are to blame, then we say that we are unfairly deprived; we are the cause, we are not the agent; we are the custodian, we are a mere bystander: every feeling is cut down by its near opposite, so that in the end we come up numb, silent, too large, too rough, too coarse, too healthy and strong, to be in the same room with the poor, devastated women, our shattered, weary mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters.

Numb. Cold. This, I know, was how Father felt that June afternoon when we men, dirty, exhausted, full of our own importance and valor, entered the house and saw that Mary’s baby had been born dead. We are there at the beginning and almost never at the end. Father, Watson, Salmon, Oliver, and I, and it was how Lyman felt, too, and how he had felt when his own baby was born dead, I now understood. There’s no way to change this; we are men and must remain men. It was how my brothers felt, their young faces dark and worried with the fruitless search for an appropriate emotion. And it was how I felt. Numb. Cold.

But so different was it from when I had exploded with rage on the raw, gray morning seven weeks before, when Susan’s baby was born dead, that I was forced to remember the earlier event anew and this time to regard it with dismay. My rage then made no sense to me now. Lyman’s silence and withdrawal, which had seemed strange to me then, I now saw as having been the only sensible, normal response for a man. I should have reacted as he had. From what hole in my unconscious mind had that rage of mine emerged? Why had I not reacted instead with this all-too-familiar, cold cancellation of feeling that surrounded me now?

I saw that my anger had been caused not by Susan’s suffering and loss at all but by my guilt for wishing that I could have stood that morning in Lyman’s place instead of mine, for believing somehow that I should have been Susan’s husband and the father of her dead infant and should not have been this farmer standing at his side. I had felt guilt but could not show it, even to myself, and so I had pounded the walls with my fists and roared like a wounded lion. Lyman had instinctively understood the nature and source of my rage, and he had hastily withdrawn himself and his wife from my presence and had stayed away from us, until now, until Father had returned and displaced me and reshaped the family and its priorities. Until once again it was slavery, slavery, slavery. And—inescapably—race, race, race. Until once again, due to our obsession, we were, as it were, insane. Which to the Negroes, to Lyman, made us perfectly comprehensible and trustworthy—sane. Not just another dangerous batch of well-intentioned, Christian white folks.

Mary’s recovery from her delivery was slow and erratic. It had, in fact, been many years since she had been able to return to her normal state of good health following a pregnancy; she was no longer young, after all, and this had been an especially difficult and painful birthing, leaving her physically devastated, without even the joy of a new infant to help her heal.

Father managed to obtain several postponements of trial downstate, where he had been scheduled to defend himself and Mr. Perkins against their creditors, and he by-passed the July convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Syracuse, so that he could stay at the side of his wife throughout this period of her recovery. Night and day, he prayed at her side and nursed her back to health in his inimitable, tireless fashion, leaving most of the work on the farm and the risk and work of running the Underground Railroad to his sons and Lyman and the other residents of Timbuctoo. But it was not clear, until nearly a month had passed, that Mary would recover at all. She waxed and waned, came forward and fell back, with the entire family growing increasingly fretful. Each day commenced with an announcement from Father as to our mother’s condition, followed by appropriate family prayers, either for her continued good progress towards health or for a fresh resumption of that progress. Happily, the Lord blessed us all, and slowly the good woman began to come around, and from midsummer on, her progress was steady and in a straight line, until Father was freed once again to resume his normal activities at his usual, furious pace, exercising over us and everyone associated with those activities his characteristic authority and force.

The farm was flourishing, religion was properly established, and our white neighbors had begun again to join us in aiding our black neighbors and the fugitive slaves. Sister Ruth and Henry Thompson were set to marry in the fall, as soon as Henry and his brothers finished building the couple a proper cabin on a piece of land that his father had deeded over to them. Miss Tubman and associates of Mr. Douglass were steadily sending escaped slaves north to us from Utica, Syracuse, and Troy, two and sometimes three times a fortnight, and though ours was a difficult route, it was now the safest, as slave-catchers and their helpers no longer dared to come slinking around North Elba or Timbuctoo. The word was out: the mad abolitionist, John Brown, and his sons and neighbors and a pack of Gerrit Smith’s niggers were holed up there in the mountains all armed and ready to drive off anyone who came looking for fugitives.

Emboldened by this change in the community, the residents of Timbuctoo began to move about the settlement more freely and to mingle with the whites in a more regular fashion, showing up at barn-raisings, for instance, in considerable numbers and taking their ease down at the grist mill or joining the whites after church at a huckleberry-picking prayer picnic up on the sunny slopes of Whiteface Mountain. On several of these occasions, I saw Susan, always at a distance from her, which distance I studiously kept, but each time I saw her—a glimpse of her coffee-brown face, half-hidden by her bonnet, or her shoulder and arm, visible for a second, until a crowd of Negroes surrounded her—my heart pounded like a hammer, and the blood rushed to my ears, and if I happened to be speaking with a person, I began to stammer and had to lapse into silence or else sound foolish as a mooncalf. I averted my gaze and then stole glances out from under it, until she disappeared from my sight.

She, of course, made no attempt to speak with me. Nor did Lyman, when he was with her. Any initiative would have to be mine, and I had neither the courage nor the clarity to take it.

I know now what was the cause and true nature of my fixation on the woman, how thwarted and misshapen it was, how far from its true object; but I did not understand it then in the least. I was ashamed of it, naturally; but ashamed for all the wrong reasons.

Often, at an hour close to dawn, I found myself, after a long night of prowling alone through the forests, lurking in the close vicinity of the cabins of Timbuctoo, peering through the mist and the languorous, sifting pines at the very cabin where she slept beside her husband. I would crouch in low bushes for hours, lost in a sort of reverie, my heart furiously pounding, my hands trembling, my legs weak and watery, as if I were a hunter who at last had sighted his long-sought prey. Then I would suddenly shudder and come back to myself and, horrified, would steal away home.

These prowls were not unlike my sordid, secret, nighttime walks several years earlier in the streets and alleyways of Springfield, and my family accepted them more or less as they had then, which is to say, as evidence of a solitary young man’s restless nature. And to a degree, they were correct to think that. Also, I always carried my rifle and sometimes brought home the carcass of a raccoon or fisher or some other nocturnal animal, as explanation for my having been out so late and long. As long as they did not interfere with my work on the farm, Father did not acknowledge my late night absences; perhaps he did not even notice them, so preoccupied was he that summer, first with Mary’s long recovery, then with the planting and further clearing of our woodlands, and with his local abolitionist activities and the Railroad. Also, he was busily educating his neighbors as to the advantages and virtues of raising blooded stock by selling them some of his Spanish merino ewes and carting his best ram around for stud and showing off and now and then selling one of his red Devon cattle. After lengthy negotiations by mail with a farmer in Litchfield, Connecticut, whom he knew from his past dealings with Wadsworth & Wells, he had succeeded in having a fine young Devon bull delivered as far north as Westport for him. I do not know how he paid for it, as such an animal did not come cheaply; possibly with promises of eventual returns from stud fees, possibly with a portion of the monies he accepted from our neighbors to help feed and clothe the fugitives. It was not beneath Father to mix ingredients like that; despite all, he was still unaccountably optimistic when it came to financial matters. But in early July, he sent Salmon and Oliver over the mountains to the lake to retrieve the beast, and soon it had become a source of much pride and the occasion for his traveling about the settlement in the attempt to improve the stock of his friends and neighbors.

Thus, except for my brothers, who watched me go out late and come back in the early pre-dawn hours, my nighttime prowls went largely unnoticed by the family and, in a significant sense, unnoticed by me as well. My brothers teased me some, privately, for they suspected that I was secretly courting one of the maidens in the settlement, but they did not otherwise speak of it.

Then in August, like most of the farm families of the region, we took ourselves, our best produce and manufactured items, and our finest livestock down to the Essex County Fair, in Westport. We loaded the wagon with jugs of maple syrup, Mary’s and Ruth’s quilts, blankets made from the wool of our sheep, willow reed baskets and fishing weirs, tanned hides, and various leather items the boys had made during the winter—wallets, purses, sheaths for knives, belts, harnesses, and, a specialty of Oliver’s, plaited bullwhips. Father made up a small, handpicked herd of merino sheep, together with his finest red Devon heifer and the widely admired new bull, and off we went—a triumphant return to Westport, as it were, proof that our spiritual errand into the wilderness, despite our reputation as non-farming, abolitionist troublemakers, had turned out an agricultural success, too.

Father rode at the front on his fine sorrel mare, which later carried him all through the Kansas wars with great strength and courage. He loved that animal as he had no other and trusted no one not a family member to care for her and trusted not even us to ride her. I drove the wagon, with Mary and Ruth beside me, the younger children all crammed in with our cargo, and the boys came along behind with Father’s little herd of blooded stock, helped by our black collie dogs, the type Father preferred over all others, despite their diminutive size and their uselessness for hunting.

We arrived in mid-afternoon, in high excitement. There was a light off-shore breeze, and in the east, across the glittering waters of the lake, a towering white bank of clouds rose from the softly rounded hills of Vermont into the bright blue sky, where it broke apart and scudded off in pieces to the south, leaving us here on the western shore to bask in bright sunshine. It was the first agricultural fair ever held in the region, a visible sign that the northern wilderness of New York State had finally been settled and conquered by farmers. People came to it from all over the Adirondacks. They trekked in from their log and daub-and-wattle cabins in the furthest, most isolated valley and bog—squatters, grubstakers, miners, shag-bearded trappers and hunters dressed in the skins of their prey. Merchants and storekeepers, boatswains, blacksmiths, and coopers rode down in carriages from the prosperous shoreline towns to the north, like Port Kent and Plattsburgh, or rode up from Port Henry and Ticonderoga or sailed across from Shelburne and Charlotte in Vermont, readier to buy goods and livestock than to sell. The big dairy farmers and sheepmen rode in from their fifty-year-old farms on the broad, rolling meadows of the older villages inland, like Elizabethtown, Jay, and Keene, their wagons and carts stacked high with the fruits of the year’s labor, touting their skills and bearing evidence of the generosity of the fertile Lake Champlain and Au Sable River floodplains. From the newer outlying settlements tucked up among the mountains, North Elba, Tupper Lake, and Wilmington, came the poorer, hardscrabble farmers, folks like us and the Thompsons and the Brewsters and the Nashes, recent settlers who were still chopping small fields out of the upland forests and had not much to show for it yet, although we Browns intended to give that the lie. Many of the citizens of Timbuctoo came over also, a two-day trek on foot, bearing on their backs and in wheelbarrows—for they had no wagons at that time and no draft animals—garden produce to sell and exhibit in the halls, hams and maple syrup and candy and cheeses, packs of furs and hides, caged fowl, and a variety of crafted objects: reed baskets, woven hats, and prettily dyed cloth. There was even a small number of Indians, Abenakis and Micmacs, who had paddled down along the lake shore in canoes from their last remaining encampments, north of Plattsburgh, coming more out of curiosity, it seemed, than to exhibit wares or to buy and sell livestock and farm goods, for they had none to sell and no money with which to buy. Their abject poverty and loneliness were apparent to all, and they seemed more like refugees in the land than its original masters, a people exiled without ever having left home. It was difficult to know how to feel towards them, and so we tended to watch them in silence and from a distance and not to speak of them at all, even to one another.