Cloudsplitter (15 page)

Having just set and lit the evening fire, I was seated next to it and, as I had made a trip that afternoon into town for feed and some nails, was preparing to enter into the account book the day’s expenses. Mr. Perkins was responsible for all costs associated with the keeping of the flock, and thus we kept scrupulous track of our expenses. I
would have written to you at once, but there has been no time for it until now. Our little
Kitty
has died, a painful & tragic death with much suffering that thankfully
she
did not have to long endure.
From where I sat, I could see around the corner the tin bathtub on the floor of the kitchen. The kitchen stove, however, was out of my line of sight, as were Ruth and the baby, Kitty, whom I could hear gurgling and burbling over one of the house cats.

Ruth was silent. Perhaps she, like Fred in the parlor, was looking out her window in the kitchen, looking not at the dogs begging Fred to let them come inside but at some imagined young man strolling down the pathway from the road from town, a beau come to call, a sweetheart of her own venturing forth to meet her large, boisterous, somewhat notorious family in the absence of the stern, demanding father, hoping to befriend the brothers and talk politely and deferentially to the woman of the house, so that when the father returned they would all speak well of the young man, and the father would then allow his eldest daughter to go walking with him.
Kitty’s
untimely
death was the result of a simple, blameless accident.
It was
in the evening about 7o’clock
& Ruth
was heating water, so that the little children could bathe; and due to some business about the house, what with the usual commotion of the children & cooking supper, the water heated to a boil, and when
Ruth ran
to fetch the pot from the stove, she did not realize it was so hot & as a result she dropped it; & the boiling water splashed all over little Kitty, who was standing naked next to
her waiting
for her bath, and who evidently
swallowed a
great gulp of it when it spilled over her body, which was a mercy, for
otherwise she
would not have died so swiftly and
would have lingered
in terrible pain.
I heard a horrible yowl, the cry of a wild animal, not that of a human being, and not so much a cry of pain as an enraged, savage shriek. That was the last utterance made by our baby sister Kitty, who had just begun to walk and say our names in ways that made us laugh and re-name ourselves, a blond, pink-skinned, robust child, made suddenly monstrous by her wild, final howl.

And then, just as suddenly, there was silence in the whole house. It was a
terrible
scene, Father,
as you can no doubt imagine,
horrible
to us all; &
especially to
poor
Ruth, who
is suffering from unspeakable guilt & remorse.
She has shut
herself away from
the
rest of us, & weeps constantly, & when she does speak, it is to beg for forgiveness, especially of Mary, who is
seriously shaken
from the incident but asks me to say to you that she trusts in God and knows that Kitty is in heaven with Him.
The silence may have lasted no more than a second, but it seemed to go on for a long while, before Ruth began to moan, “Oh-h-h, oh-h-h ... ,” a moan that, in contrast to Kitty’s howl, was purely, uniquely, pathetically human, a noise that is made by no creature but one who has been the direct cause of the death of a child.

Without having observed anything of the accident, except for the steaming skin of water that spread slowly across the floor towards the empty tin bathtub, I knew at once what had happened. And I believe that Fred knew, too, for we looked at one another for an instant, and his eyes were filled with unutterable sorrow. Ruth
begged me at first not to write to you, so that
she
could be
the
one to bear this burden; but then said that she could not do it. So
I have
done it.
By the time I reached the kitchen, Mary had come down the stairs, her face white with knowledge of what had already happened, and we saw Ruth standing in the far corner of the room with the scarlet body of the baby in her arms. The large black kettle, like a head with a gaping mouth, lay on its side on the floor next to the stove, the spilled, translucent water a carpet of snakes spreading around table legs and chairs.

Ruth’s eyes had rolled back, and she was making a guttural noise now, as if she were choking. The baby had already died. Its scalded, bright red body was emptied of spirit. It was a thing, a tiny, shriveled sack, and its small soul was bouncing wildly around the room near the ceiling, like a maddened, dying moth, a bit of quickly diminishing light. I held Mary by her shoulders, and together we approached Ruth, and very gently Mary reached out and took the body of her baby from her stepdaughter, turned, and walked away from us into the parlor, past poor Fred, who stood at the door with his hands over his ears, as if he still heard the baby’s howl. Silently, I came and stood before Ruth and held her in my arms, but she was insensible of my presence and went on making a choking noise, her head tilted back, eyes whitened and unseeing, as if she had fallen into a deep trance.
She needs to hear from you, Father, the same as she has heard from Mary & me (& from John & Jason as well, for they have come down from Ashtabula). She needs to hear that you do not blame her for the death of Kitty. She blames herself more than enough for any of us to add a word. I tell you, it was not Ruth’s fault. She will never see it that way herself, however. It was a simple accident, & any one of us could have been the agency for it to happen as easily as was poor
Ruth. Mary dressed the body of the child in a tiny flannel nightgown, wrapped it in a blanket, as if preparing it for sleep, and that same night I went into the barn, and as Father himself had done only a few years before, in that terrible winter of ’43, when four of his children sickened one by one and died, I built for the first time in my life a small pine coffin.

The boys, not knowing what else to do, followed me out to the barn and in the dim lantern light watched me in silence, as I had watched Father, the four of them standing there like somber acolytes, learning how to cut the boards to the correct size for the body of a child, so that the coffin would hold the child snugly, without confining it or bending it out of its natural shape, watching me carefully plane and fit the boards neatly together and drive the nails without damaging the wood and hinge the cover and latch it. We have buried little
Kitty out
behind the house,
near where you planted the crab-apple trees last
spring, &
am making a proper marker for her that will say her dates and name, & any little motto, if you wish one for her.
Mr.
and Mrs. Perkins have been a great comfort to Mary & to
the rest
of us, &
Mrs. Perkins has
taken Annie &
Oliver
over to the big house for the time being, to make things easier for Mary;
&
many other local folks have come to the house with condolences Gsympathy.
At the burial, I touched Ruth on the cheek with the fingertips of my right hand and put my claw of a left hand around her back and drew my sister close to me, as if to take into myself her grief and to share with her the shame she felt. The others at the graveside, our friends and neighbors, looked at us, and I was glad of that, for I wished them to see that all of us Browns were equally to blame for the death of our Kitty and that, therefore, no single one of us was to blame. I
am sorry, Father, to be bringing you such terrible news.
I
hope that the
business is going
well.
No
particular problems with the flocks or the farm here. Your loving son,

Owen Brown

It was not until nearly a fortnight had passed that we heard from Father at last. Due to the inescapable daily requirements of our livestock and the farm, which honor no human tragedy, the life of the family had resumed its old patterns and routines and had connected back to its various larger cycles by then; and even Ruth had made a few tentative steps back into the fold, as it were, although she was a much altered young woman. She had become the sober, even melancholy woman that she would remain for most of her life thereafter, even during her happiest years, when she and Henry Thompson were courting up in North Elba and in the first year of their marriage, before Henry rode off with us to Kansas.

Father’s letter, arriving as it did after we had already commenced to accommodate our lives and feelings as best we could to the death of Kitty, was painful to read aloud, as was our custom with all his letters, and, later on, difficult for me to copy, as per his instructions, for Father had long since told us to be sure that all his letters were copied and saved, and as I had the best handwriting of any in the family at that time, the task usually fell to me. My
dear afflicted Wife & Children,
he wrote, and I wrote after him.
I yesterday at night returned after an absence of several days from this place & am utterly unable to give any expression of feelings on hearing of the dreadful news contained in
Owen’s
letter of the 30th and Mr. Perkins’s of the 31st Oct.
I
seem to be struck almost dumb.
Not likely, I thought. For I was angry at Father, not so much for his letter, which was about all he could have said under the circumstances and which was very much in his usual voice. I suppose I was angry at his not being present when we all, and especially Ruth, suffered from the death of little Kitty, so that not only did we have to endure the horror and pain of that event alone but we had to report it to him as well—for his judgement, his huge perspective, his words of beneficence or condemnation, as if he were some lord high sheriff and we were his serfs who had to account for the loss of one of our number—without mentioning in our account that she whom we had lost was an especially beloved child, without mentioning that the awful conditions of her death had inflicted lifelong pain and shame in the heart of one of us in particular.

None of this, of course, was Father’s fault; yet that did not hinder my anger, as I copied his letter into the green school notebook used for the purpose.
One more dear, feeble child am I to meet no more till the dead, small & great, shall stand before God. This is a bitter cup, children, but a cup blessed by God: a brighter day shall dawn; & let us not sorrow, like those who have no hope. Oh, if only we who remain had wisdom wisely to consider & to keep in view our latter end.
This, I knew, was a pointed reference to me and to John and Jason, for surely we were the ones who were obliged to “sorrow like those who have no hope” of ever being amongst the small and great standing before God. Our sorrow, mine and my brothers’, was the greater, Father implied, because as unbelievers we believed that we would not see poor Kitty again, and that was too bad, just too bad, and nobody’s fault but our own. According to Father, the brighter day was not ours to believe in, and thus we had no wisdom wisely to consider.

In normal circumstances, this difference between us and Father did not create any painful conflict; but when we, too, were suffering, when we ourselves were grieving, it only angered us that he regarded the ragged edge of our pain as merely a consequence of our moral failings. There was no telling him of this, however.

Oh, we could tell him of it, yes; but he could not hear us, his own belief was so powerful, so constantly clanging in his ears: with all those hosannas, halleluiahs, and simple hoo-rahs he was hearing, it was to his large, hairy ears as if nothing but a serpent’s hiss were coming from our mouths.
Divine Providence seems to lay a heavy burden & responsibility on you in particular, my dear Mary; but I trust that you will be enabled to bear it in some measure, as you ought. I exceedingly regret that I am unable to return & be present to share your trials with you; but anxious as I am to be once more at home, I do not feel at liberty to return to Akron yet. I hope to be able to get away before very long; but cannot say when.
These words I could barely transcribe without breaking off the point of my pen, and the tension in my hand caused me to spatter the paper with several ugly blots of ink. But he was not through.
I trust that none of you will feel disposed to cast an unreasonable blame on my dear Ruth on account of the dreadful trial we are called to suffer; for if the want of proper care in each all of us has not been attended with fatal consequences, it is no thanks to us.
With a cold fury in my heart, though I said nothing of it to anyone, I saw that Father could forgive Ruth only by including the rest of us in her blame, which, of course, allowed him to forgive no one. As he saw it, not just Ruth, but we, all of us, were guilty of wanting proper care, so that it was only the Lord’s will that had kept the rest of us from the fatal consequences of our sloth and inattention.

If I had a right sense of my habitual neglect of my family’s Eternal interests, I should probably go crazy from shame,
he said, and I transcribed. And as he had apparently not gone crazy, were we to assume then that he did
not
have a right sense of his habitual neglect of his family’s Eternal interests? Was that his point? Or was he merely changing the subject, at which he was so skilled, in order to invite us to reassure him, to praise him, to be thankful that he was out there in Springfield looking after his family’s temporal, rather than Eternal, interests?
I humbly hope that this dreadful, afflictive Providence will lead us all more properly to appreciate the amazing, unforeseen, untold consequences that hang upon the right or wrong doing of things seemingly of trifling account. Who can tell or comprehend the vast results for good or evil that are to follow the saying of one little word? Everything worthy of being done at all is worthy of being done in good earnest & in the best possible manner.
Not that again, I said to myself and dutifully wrote his words into the tablet as if they were my own. Not more platitudes and maxims, not more of Ben Franklin’s rules for living.
We are in middling health, & expect to write to some of you again soon. Our warmest thanks to Mr. & Mrs. Perkins & family. From your affectionate husband, & father,