Cloudsplitter (19 page)
Slowly, I came forward, and the others, as if they knew what I intended, parted for me and made room for me to go down on my knees beside Father’s chair. “I’m sorry, Father, for what I’ve done. I have sinned, and I am sorry. Please, Father, please forgive me.”
At that, he ceased weeping and looked straight into my face. His great gray eyes penetrated my face to my very soul, and he did not flinch at what he saw there, and I did not squirm away from his gaze, much as I wanted to. “Owen, my son. You are a good boy, Owen. I forgive thee,” he said in a low voice, and he placed his hands on my shoulders and drew me to him. “The Lord hath taken one child from me and returned to me another, who was lost,” he said. “I welcome thee, Owen,” he said, and it was as if his words had cleansed me, for at once I felt uplifted and strong again. Whatever Father wished me now to do, I would do without argument, without hesitancy, without fear. I remember, on the night that the baby Ellen died, thinking that.
I don’t know how much time has passed since I began this account—days, weeks, a fortnight—for it is as if I have been elsewhere, a place where time is measured differently and space is not bounded as it is usually. The only thing that grounds me, that stills and locks me into some deliberate measure of time and place, is my intermittent awareness of you, holding these sheets of paper in your hands, reading my words, learning my story and applying it to Father’s larger story, the one that truly matters.
I know that in passing, due to my self-absorption and to the vividness of my recollections, I have mentioned many people and events that you know little of, that you may in fact know nothing of, for they have not come down in the historical record. They are not a part of the received truth. It is important that you hear of them, however, for they, like me, are figures in the context of Father’s story, which, if he is to be known at all, must be known as well. Let me speak, for instance, of Lyman Epps, the Negro man whom I mentioned earlier, and let me say how we came to know Lyman, how I first came to know him, for he will figure in the larger context of known people and events in a significant way. And his story, unlike the story of the men buried beneath Father’s stone in the shade of Mount Tahawus, has not been told before by anyone.
It was in the spring of ’50, almost a half century ago, that I met Lyman Epps, when we all first came to North Elba, a few weeks later in the season than now, and I can bring it back to my mind today as if I were dreaming it—I can see the lilacs blooming and the bloodroot, which I had not seen before, at least not to name.
It might have been earlier than now—the first of May, perhaps. For the lilacs that I am gazing at were located in the trim yards of the houses down in Westport, New York, alongside the broad verandas that faced the glittering waters of Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains of Vermont on the further side; and when Father pointed out the little, low blossom of the bloodroot, we were still down in that prosperous village, gathering the family and our livestock to begin our trek up into the mountains, where it would not be warm enough for the bloodroot and the lilacs to bloom until many weeks later.
Father and I had moved his horse, Dan, and the seven head of Devon cattle away from where we had camped, on a hillside clearing at the edge of town, intending to water the animals at a stream nearby. The boys Watson, Salmon, and Oliver, setting out the sheep to graze, had located the stream earlier. The Old Man halted suddenly, and I peered over the bony red rumps and heads of our thirsty beasts to see what was the matter.
“Owen, come, look here;” he commanded.
I passed by the cattle to where he stood staring intently down the embankment into a glade beside the rock-strewn stream, which was narrow here and tumbled fast downhill towards the lake. I looked where he had indicated and, as was so often the case, saw nothing. Black flies swarmed about my face, and the cattle bunched up impatiently behind us. Father held old Dan, his chestnut gelding, by the halter and peered into the glade.
“Yes, well, if we needed a sign,” he said, with a certain resignation in his voice, “here is one.” In profile, Father’s unsmiling, clean-shaven face was like a fist. He had a tight mouth with thin lips, a square chin and forehead, and a hooked, short nose, a hawk’s beak. You may be unaware that the long beard, with which he was later so often and so famously pictured, he wore only after Kansas, as a disguise, and, indeed, it did disguise him, even to his family, who fondly remembered his daily morning shave, mirrorless by the stove. It was an occasion for us to tease him into almost nicking himself with the razor. “You missed a bit,” one of us, usually Ruth, would calmly observe.
A second child, Oliver or Salmon, would add, “Over here, Father, near your big left ear.” His ears were unusually large, and to our amusement, their size slightly embarrassed him; although he denied it, of course.
“Where?” he would ask, groping over his heavy jaw with his fingertips.
“The other side! On the other side!”
“The right side, just below your enormous right ear!”
“No, it’s the left. His right, Oliver, is
your
left.”
Father would himself grow amused and join the game by feigning frantic confusion and flashing his long razor recklessly like a saber from one side of his face to the other. “Here? Here? Here?” Until Ruth or I or Mary would seriously fear that he was about to cut himself and would say, “Enough. Let the poor man shave his face in peace,” and the children would disperse, and Father, smiling lightly, would finish and wipe his face dry.
“It’s the May flower” he said to me that morning in Westport. “The bloodroot, we called it, when I was a boy.” Following his extended finger, I looked down by the stream and saw in amongst the ferns and mossy stones a cluster of small white flowers near the ground. “The root is red as fresh blood,” he said, and told me that the Iroquois used it as pigmentation for their war paint. “The petals, though, they come pure white, like those yonder. Innocent above ground, and bloody below,” he mused. He had known it to grow and even blossom under a layer of late snow. It was the first flower of spring, and he was truly glad to see it.
One of the cows smelled the water and started over the embankment, and the rest pulled over behind her, and quickly I stepped around in front of the leader and shoved her back.
“After such tribulation, we may well require a hopeful sign,” Father said, meaning the past winter’s long, lingering death of the infant Ellen, I supposed, and all his financial woes, which had continued to mount so relentlessly in the last few years.
It was strange to feel sorry for Father, and I rarely did and was almost ashamed of the feeling, as if he had forbidden it. Regardless, I placed my hand on his shoulder and said to him, “The Lord will provide, Father.” But the words felt like gravel in my mouth.
“Owen, don’t say words that you don’t believe. Not even in comfort,” he added, and he scowled and turned away and led old Dan and the cattle further up the hill to where the stream ran slowly and there was a shallow pool that the animals could drink from.
Yet, all in all, it was a very pleasant few days, that first stop in Westport, and I almost wished that we could settle there, instead of trekking on to a place that everyone other than Father had described as a howling wilderness. During the last year-and-a-half in Springfield, helping Father and John run Father’s and Mr. Simon Perkins’s wool business, I had grown somewhat used to the easy sociability and abundant distractions of a town. I somewhat envied John for having been left behind, even though he was burdened with looking after Father’s affairs at the warehouse, and I envied Jason, too, and even Fred, who was a full six years younger than I, for having been charged with the care of Mr. Perkins’s flocks back at Mutton Hill in Akron.
But there was no arguing with Father on this matter of our settling amongst the Negroes in North Elba. He was dead set on it. They were freedmen, a few were doubtless fugitives, and the wealthy New York abolitionist Mr. Gerrit Smith, out of simple compassion and generosity, but perhaps with a useful moral point to make as well, had deeded them forty acres per family from his vast holdings in the Adirondacks. But in a few short years the rigors of northcountry farming had for the most part defeated them, and the little colony was coming rapidly undone. Father’s agreement with Mr. Smith was that in exchange for a sizeable piece of land with an abandoned house on it, to be paid for later at one dollar per acre, we would move there and teach the Negroes, many of whom had been Philadelphia barbers and Long Island shoemakers and the such, how to organize and work their land.
Father did not think he could accomplish this without at least one adult son beside him and had carefully explained why I was the one so designated: John was more capable than I when it came to business; Jason and his new wife were settled permanently, it seemed, in Ohio; and Fred, although twenty years old then, was a person who needed close supervision, which Jason was good at providing. As usual, the Old Man was right, and I had to comply.
The first thing we needed to do was survey and validate their claims, he told me: to keep the Negroes from being cheated by the whites, who had been squatting up there for several generations—ever since the terrible, year-long winter of ’06 had driven most of the original settlers out—and had come to think of the whole place as theirs alone. Father’s motives were moral and idealistic, the same as had always prompted his political actions, and he described this move as essentially political—for he had visited North Elba alone the previous fall and had come away newly inspired by a vision of Negro and white farmers working peacefully together. His hope now, he explained to us, was to build a true American city on a hill that would give the lie to every skeptic in the land. There were many such Utopian schemes and projects afoot in those years, a hundred little cities on a hundred little hills, but Timbuctoo may have been the only one that aimed at setting an example of racial harmony. This would be our errand into the wilderness, he said.
But there was more to it than that. The wild Adirondack landscape had moved the Old Man wonderfully. All that winter and spring, despite the worry and grief he bore over the sickness and long dying of the baby Ellen, whenever he spoke of settling down on the broad tableland between the mountains, his face would soften and flush, and he would sail off in reveries and fantasies more likely to have been generated by a short stay at Valhalla than by a quick visit to a tract of hardscrabble highlands with a ninety-day growing season and a grinding, six-months-long winter. “Ah, Owen,” he would exclaim, “just wait until you see the beauty of this place! It makes you think that during the Creation the good Lord Lingered there awhile. There is truly no place I have seen whose aspect has so pleased me as those Adirondack mountains.”
On reflection, I believe, also, that there was for Father yet another deeply pleasing aspect of the North Elba project, one that he hid from us then but which I understood later. Its force was stronger than the moral point that he and Mr. Gerrit Smith wished to make and more substantive than the poetic effect of the landscape on his soul. For many years, the Old Man’s life had been cruelly divided between his anti-slavery actions and his responsibilities as a husband and father, and despite his unrelenting, sometimes wild and chaotic attempts to unite them, it was often as if he was trying to live the lives of two separate men: one an abolitionist firebrand, a public figure whose most satisfying and important acts, out of necessity, were done in secret; the other a good Christian husband and father, a private man whose most satisfying and important acts were manifested in the visible security and comfort of his family. He was a man who had pledged his life to bring about the permanent and complete liberation of the Negro slaves; and he was the head of a large household with no easy sources of income.
Never having married, I did not experience this sort of division in my life, which is perhaps why it took me until I was practically middle-aged before I was led to these particular sympathies for Father. And I certainly had no inkling of his conflicted state back then, when I reluctantly agreed to join him in his removal of the family from Springfield to North Elba, the tenth move in nearly as many years. Now, however, I can see that, for the first time in his life, Father expected to live as what he regarded as a whole man. In the Adirondacks, amongst the Negroes, he had at last imagined a life that was capable of containing all his contraries. Or so he believed then.
Father turned fifty that spring; Mary was thirty-seven. I am sure that, despite all, Father’s errand into the wilderness pleased her, especially after the death of the baby Ellen. It was a fresh start, and Father’s reveries and fantasies about the place had convinced her that our life would finally be calm and organized. Mary was a profound and prayerful person, more meditative and inward than the Old Man and most of the rest of us, and the idea of making a sanctuary in the mountains pleased her, especially if it met the Old Man’s standards for his and our participation in the struggle to free the slaves. And as far as she and we knew then, the removal to North Elba would accomplish that.
I remember him reassuring her that in a year or even less he would tie up his tangled affairs with Mr. Perkins in Springfield and Ohio and have all his debts at last paid off. Then he would be free to build his racially harmonious city on the hill, raise his prize-winning cattle and sheep on the slopes of the Adirondacks, and live out his years in the comfort of his family and neighbors. He would be a preacher, a teacher, and a farmer, he said. It was all he had ever wanted in life. He did not want to be a great man.
He told her that, told it to all of us, and we believed it, and I’m sure that, sometimes, he believed it, too. I soon learned, of course, that months before, when he had gone to North Elba alone, he had had other things in mind—the scattered, dimly formed, but powerful beginnings of ideas and plans that would develop and coalesce up there in the mountains and that would eventually prove irresistible to him. And, I confess it, ideas and plans that would prove irresistible to me and to my brothers as well.