Cloudsplitter (6 page)

Slowly, I turned and left the darkened room. Father waited outside, still seated on the doorstoop. I sat down beside him, taking the same position there as he, head down, hands on knees, back straight. Father and son. We did not speak.

I never saw my mother again. I never saw my imaginary companion, my poor lost Frederick, again, either. My father would soon remarry, as you know, a good woman whom I called only Mary, never Mother, and she would provide him with eight more children. But nothing would be the same for me, ever again. I mark the end of my childhood from that day.

I’m sorry. I can write no more today. I will resume, however, as soon as my hand is steady again and my mind cleared of this embarrassing self-pity.

Following yesterday’s letter, I’ve been recalling this morning those early days in New Richmond and the peaceful prior years of my boyhood in Hudson—both wildernesses of the old Western Reserve when we resided there, as fraught with difficulty and danger on our first arrival and settlement as was our Adirondack mountain farm later. We lived in our villages then amongst wolves and bears and mountain lions in deep forests that blocked out all light in the lost ravines. We lived close to Indians, Iroquois, mostly, suspicious and withdrawn and silent, who sometimes left their forest enclaves and visited our villages to trade, but mainly kept a safe distance from us. And there was the occasional fugitive slave, coming up from Kentucky or the mountains of western Virginia by way of the Underground Railroad, run generally by the Quakers back then, and passing through to Canada—a quiet, frightened, day-long visitor hidden in the attic of our house and spirited on under hay in Father’s wagon as soon as night fell to the farm of a Quaker or some fellow radical abolitionist twenty or thirty miles to the north.

But recalling those days of long ago, after having seen all of the civilized world that an ordinary man needs to see in order to know the true nature of people in society, I am struck by nothing so much as our sustained virtue and orderliness. Wherever we lived in those days, wherever we set up our house and farm and commenced doing business with our neighbors, we were like an island in a sea of chicanery, godlessness, disorder, and willful ignorance. For we Browns were distinct; we were different from most of those who surrounded us. We were surrounded not just by wilderness but by reckless sinners.

As individuals and as a family, we were sinners, too, of course, like all men and women, but ours was the fastidious sin of pride, for we were proud of our difference and took pleasure in enumerating the ways in which it got daily manifested. We even prided ourselves on the number of occasions and the ways in which our friends and neighbors were affronted by our virtue and orderliness or found it strange or eccentric and as a result held themselves off from us, choosing to view us, as did the Iroquois, from what must have felt to them a safe distance.

Our pride, that subtlest and most insidious of sins, got manifested in a variety of ways, but, all reports to the contrary, I do not believe that we were arrogant. Certainly Mother, and later my stepmother, Mary, and my sister Ruth were not arrogant. And the younger children were all naturally modest and shy, boys and girls alike, and were constantly encouraged to remain so when they ventured out into the wider world than home provided, and for the most part they did. My older brothers and I, too, strove not to lord it over others less fortunate than we, less disciplined, less inclined to sacrifice their force and time on earth for the greater good, what Father called “the commonweal.” And even Father himself was not arrogant—although he was indeed commanding and headstrong—and made only those demands on us that he made on himself as well, and made no demands on others, but wholly accepted people as he found them. To Father, other people chose to live our way—and there were a few here and there who did—or they chose not to. It was the same to him, either way.

On the other hand, though there was never a man so detached from the sinner who so loathed sin, when it came to the sin of owning slaves, which Father labeled not sin but evil, all his loathing came down at once and in a very personal way upon the head of the evil-doer. He brooked no fine distinctions: the man who pleaded for the kindly treatment of human chattel or, as if it could occur naturally, like a shift in the seasons, argued for the gradual elimination of slavery was just as evil as the man who whipped, branded, raped, and slew his slaves; and he who did not loudly oppose the extension of slavery into the western territories was as despicable as he who hounded escaped slaves all the way to Canada and branded them on the spot to punish them and to make pursuit and capture easier next time. But with the notable exception of where a man or woman stood on the question of slavery, when Father considered the difference between our way of life and the ways of others, he did not judge them or lord it over them. He did not condemn or set himself off from our neighbors. He merely observed their ways and passed silently by.

And he knew all the ways of men and women extremely well. He was no naif, no bumpkin. My father was not the son of man who stopped up his ears at the sound of foul language or shut his eyes to the lasciviousness and sensuality that passed daily before him. He never warned another man or woman off from speech or act because he was too delicate of sensibility or too pious or virtuous to hear of it or witness the thing. He knew what went on between men and women, between men and men, between men and animals even, in the small, crowded cabins of the settlements and out in the sheds and barns of our neighbors. And he knew what was nightly bought and sold on the streets and alleys and in the taverns of the towns and cities he visited. The man had read every word of his Bible hundreds of times: nothing human beings did with or to one another or themselves shocked him. Only slavery shocked him.

Father was a countryman, after all, a farmer and stockman much admired by other farmers and stockmen, a workingman who could roll up his sleeves and cut timber, tan hides, or build a stone wall alongside the roughest men in the region. And although he was a failure at it, he was a businessman, too, a man who traveled widely, to Boston and New York and once even to England and the European continent, and stayed in hotels and taverns where prostitutes plied their trade in the lobbies and drinking rooms below and visited the men he traveled with in their rooms next to his, with only a thin partition between. Father knew the ways of most men and women, and he did not loudly condemn them. He merely elected to behave differently, to go his own way, to keep himself pure, and to marry young.

Our virtues as a family were, of course, guided and enforced from our earliest childhood years well into adult life by Father’s own example and by his steady instruction. Although, when we did become adults, after about the age of sixteen or so, his manner of dealing with our lapses changed, in that he no longer chastized us or enforced his will and the wisdom of his ways with the rod and belt or punished us for our disobedience. Instead, he merely withdrew from the offender the shining light of his trust. And no punishment was so powerful a corrective as that. He did not require that we share with him his deep, unquestioning Christian faith, as long as our every act was a reflection of our belief in the rightness of the Golden Rule and our love of the Truth. “If you cannot be a believing Christian but will nonetheless do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and if you will obey the first commandment of Jesus Christ and only substitute the word ‘Truth’ for God, then I swear that I shall not disavow you.” That was his pledge to us.

My brothers, John and especially Jason, took him at his word, and by the time they turned twenty, they had already long abandoned the Christian faith and had become rigorous but upright freethinkers in matters of divinity. When I, a few years behind, saw that this did not cause a significant rift between them and Father, I secretly followed suit. Our loss of faith did not please Father, naturally, and he never ceased to speak of it, but he nonetheless knew that there was no way he could command us to maintain our faith, any more than God could command him to maintain his. And so, instead, he grieved over it and constantly upbraided, not us, but himself, for having failed us as a teacher and father.

There was no way we could disabuse him of this notion. Nor did we especially want to, for it was one of his virtues, after all, and we held all his virtues in the highest esteem. And because our close adherence to his example was what gave to the family as a whole its character, its defining nature and difference from other families, we could not reject the worth of a single one of his virtues without rejecting an essential aspect of the family as well. Which would have been like choosing the life of the outcast. So that if Father grieved over his failure as a teacher and father, then John, Jason, and I were obliged to grieve over our failure as pupils and sons.

Nevertheless, despite the differences in degree of our faith in Father’s Lord and his Saviour Jesus Christ, we were a pious little clan, we Browns. The daily round of prayers and hymn-singing, Father’s morning Bible lessons, and his insistence on interpreting all events in Biblical terms were of great value. They disciplined and ordered our attention together as individuals and as a group. They woke us from our self-absorbed slumber, connecting us one to the other and all to the larger world outside, and linked that world to the great, overarching sphere of Truth, or God, which we loved before all other truths, or gods.

I remember Father’s surprisingly lovely singing voice—surprising because his speaking voice was somewhat reedy and thin, a consequence less of his language and attitude than of his physical nature. When he sang, however, his voice was strong and melodic and pitched high, like a young boy’s. He sang sweetly, yet with sufficient force to redden his face, which, when we were children, invariably brought smiles to our faces. He would notice, before we could cover our mouths, and would smile also and sing all the more loudly. In making a joyful noise unto the Lord, smiles and even laughter were permitted, and our favorite hymns were the joyous, loud ones, like “Blow, Ye Trumpets, Blow.” At prayer, however, or during the daily lesson, we knew to keep our heads lowered, our brows knitted as if in sober thought, our hands clasped together, and no catching one another’s amused eyes when Father, as he occasionally did, due to the fervency of his feelings, lost the train of his thought and fell to stammering or repetition.

In those days, to anyone who saw us, we were naturally regarded as pious. But not in the strict Methodist or old German Lutheran manner, as we have sometimes been portrayed. No, piety in us Browns was an attitude of respect which we held towards the Truth and our fellow man and which we strove to maintain daily in all our small as well as our large affairs. Our rituals and forms of worship, which were mainly the basic, old, New England Presbyterian forms, functioned, at least for me and my brothers and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Ruth and the other, younger children, merely to remind us of that respectful attitude and, every morning and evening and over every meal, to renew it in our hearts and to place that attitude of respect, of reverence even, in the forefront of our minds.

And if respect for the truth and our fellow man was the basis of our piety, then there was probably no more consistent and singular expression of our piety than our adherence to the principle of honesty in all our dealings, as much with strangers as with each other, as much with enemies as with friends. It sometimes made us appear odd to folks who were not so insistent on honest dealings, and it made Father, in the end, an incompetent businessman. But for us, that oddity, as I said, was a point of pride. And although we were often obliged to forgo an easy advantage, especially when it came to matters of money, our honest dealings frequently obliged decent people in turn to deal the same way with us, and we were thus sometimes able to prosper by it.

But it is well-known that from earliest childhood we Browns were taught not to lie. We were chastized severely when caught doing it. It was Father’s first corollary to his first commandment. If ye love the Truth, then ye cannot lie. Less well-known, perhaps, is the fact that I was the worst offender amongst us, as a child, that is; and in the early days, when he was a young man and Mother was alive, Father was more severe in his punishment and in his means of correcting us children than later, and we sometimes did not understand why he beat us so energetically and for so long. (There was the danger, perhaps especially with me, of his bending the branch too far and breaking it off, instead of correcting it to straightness; or of having it snap back defiantly against him and end up bent the other way, permanently misshapen. But I knew nothing of that then.)

By the time I was five or six years old, well before Mother had died, I had already begun to manifest the habit of lying to an exceeding degree, even for a child. I seemed to take sensual pleasure in it and almost sought out occasions for lying, making up tales, entire adventures, elaborate encounters, and so on, which had never taken place. I went beyond mere exaggeration, and although I oftentimes partially believed in the truth of my accounts, just as I believed in the corporeal reality of my imagined companion, Frederick, there nonetheless was a side of me that was wholly aware of their falsehood and was pleased by it. It gave me momentarily a sense of importance to say that I had seen a bear when I had not, to report on the visit of an Indian when no such person had appeared, to claim that I had been complimented by the schoolmaster, Mr. Twichell, when he had for days ignored me altogether and in fact seemed to think me rather a dull child.

I remember vividly a significant alteration of this wretched habit, so that in later years, when I lied, it was no longer out of blind compulsion but rather as the product of a conscious, calculated decision. Once, in New Richmond, Grandfather Brown, whose namesake I was, came over from Akron to visit us for a few days. It was during the dark months not long after Mother died, when Father had fallen into one of his periods of silence and withdrawal and passivity, and it had gone on dangerously long, so that family members and neighbors, too, were concerned for the welfare of his five children and for his own physical and mental health. Father was prone to such periods anyhow, especially following a spate of trouble, but this time he seemed unable to end it, unable to pass through his grief and loss and get on with the everyday business of his life.