And we had no excuses this time; we could not tell ourselves, or report to Father when he arrived, that we had been too busy doing the Lord’s work to do our own. We were no longer conductors on the Underground Railroad. Father’s great Subterranean Passway, at least our small section of it, had gone dead. Without Lyman to act as liaison between us and the citizens of Timbuctoo, we were unable to carry fugitive slaves north. Without Lyman, no one came to us anymore for help, which disappointed me greatly and made me a failure, not only in my own eyes but in the eyes of Watson, and of Salmon, too, who had grown as passionate as Watson on the issue of slavery and as eager as he to oppose it.
They could not understand my reluctance to confront Lyman forthrightly and honestly. “Why’n’t you just go over there and make it clear that we’re ready to run folks north in our wagon as soon as they show up in Timbuctoo?” Salmon demanded. “Just put it to him, Owen. What’s the big deal between you and Lyman anyhow? So what if he wants to go back and live on his own land in Timbuctoo? Seems only natural, don’t it?”
“You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t.”
“He doesn’t want anything more to do with us Browns.”
“Why? Because of Susan’s baby? That can’t be it. We didn’t have anything to do with that. It was the Lord’s will.”
“I don’t know, Salmon. You talk to him, if you want. You go over there, and you plead with him to provide us with passengers for our wagon and team so that we can feel better about ourselves. You tell him how much he needs us to help him help his Negro brethren, Salmon. You know what he’ll say?”
“What?”
“I… I don’t know. I don’t know what he’ll say. I just know that I can’t go to him. Not now. Maybe not ever.”
“Sounds crazy to me;’ he said, disgusted. And he did, indeed, that very day of our conversation, ride out to Timbuctoo all by himself, only to return in the evening clearly disappointed and not a little confused. He came in at supper and sat down sullenly at the table without taking off his hat and coat or wiping his muddy boots.
It was Ruth who asked him what Lyman had told him, for she, like everyone else in the family, had known why the boy had gone over there. Mary had even put up a basket of bread and preserves for Salmon to carry to them. I said nothing, and neither did Watson, who I think had guessed by then that there was something dark and personal between me and Lyman, something that could not yet be named by either of us, for neither Lyman nor I knew what it was ourselves. We merely felt its power and acted on it, as if we had no choice in the matter, as if it were a shared compulsion of some sort, the nature of which would become apparent to us and nameable only later, when it no longer controlled us.
“I never even saw him,”Salmon said. “I tried talking to some others, Mister Grey and the other Mister Epps, the choirmaster. But they said there was no Underground Railroad in Timbuctoo. Like I was some kind of slave-catcher or something. Didn’t know what I was talking about. Lyman, they told me, was gone off”
“They say where?” Watson asked.
“Nope. Just gone off. You know how they can get when they don’t want you to know something. They smile and tell you something half-right and half-wrong, act like they don’t know the truth any more than you do. ‘Lyman, he gon’ off somewheres, Mistah Brown.’ I’m telling you, it was like I was the sheriff or a slave-catcher, the way they treated me.”
“Did you go to his cabin?” Watson wanted to know.
I remained silent throughout, as if none of this concerned me. “Yep. And it looked like he’d been doing some work on it. Has himself a pretty decent kitchen-garden under way, too. I even saw Susan,” he said, and I put down my knife and spoon and looked up.
It had been just over a month since they had left, that long since I had seen her, and suddenly, upon hearing her name in my brother’s mouth, imagining him in her presence, I realized that during those thirty-odd days and nights I had thought of almost no one else. Her face, her voice, her shape and movement, had constantly been in my mind. No matter what I was doing, no matter whom I was talking to, it was Susan I was thinking of, missing, pining for, longing to speak to. And to touch. Lyman, whenever I thought of him, as indeed I frequently did, came to my mind only as an obstacle to my reaching his wife. He was a curtain blocking my view, a rock rolled into my path, a palisado surrounding the object of my desire.
That I had not once, until this moment, stepped back from my thoughts and observed their peculiar nature shocked and alarmed me. But that’s how powerful they were, how all-consuming. Once I knew my thoughts, however, I was first appalled and then instantly repelled. Of course! I reasoned. This was the source of the pain between me and Lyman. And he had known it long before I did, surely. He had seen that I was in love with his wife, and naturally, as soon as he could, he had withdrawn her from me.
My blood washed over me. I felt absurd, and then guilty, and wished only that I could somehow purge myself of my love for Susan and make amends to Lyman. It also occurred to me that this had been the source of my anxiety about Father’s imminent arrival in North Elba: I was afraid that he would ask after Lyman and Susan, and when I replied that we had not seen them since their return to Timbuctoo, he would look me in the eye, and he would know at once what I myself had gone months without even guessing.
Abruptly, I stood up and left the house. It was nearly dark, the temperature dropping fast as the sun sank behind the mountains, with the smell of mud and melting snow mingling in the cold air. I went behind the barn and walked up to the grove of young birches there and cut off a switch and stripped it of its new, red buds. Back inside the barn, in the darkness, with the animals shifting their weight quietly in their stalls, I barred the door and stood in the middle of the large room. I pulled off my shirt and drew the top of my union suit to my waist, exposing my naked upper body to the chilled dark. Then I began to beat my chest and back with the switch — slowly and lightly at first, then faster and with greater force, and soon I was doing it with genuine fervor. But it was not enough. The switch was too light and broke off in my hand.
For a moment, I stood half-naked and foolish, out of breath, angry at myself, as if I were an iron object that I had stumbled against in the dark. I remembered Father’s strip of cowhide, which he kept out here to discipline and chastize the younger children, although he rarely used it nowadays. I knew exactly where it was, hung on a nail by the door. It was short, not quite a yard long, but heavy and stiff and dry with disuse, with a sharp edge to it. I reached out in the dark and took it down. The strip of old leather felt in my hand like a weapon. I had not actually held it myself since childhood, since that time when Father had bade me beat him with it, when it had felt alive to me, like a serpent. Now the quirt was dead, heavy, an almost wooden extension of my arm, as if my right hand were grasping my crippled left, and I whisked it through the air and struck myself with it many times — perhaps a hundred strokes, perhaps more. The pain was very great. I thrashed myself around in the darkness, slamming myself against the walls and stalls, knocking over tools and sending buckets flying, thrashing like a man caught by a seizure, until at last I was faint from the pain and exhausted and fell to my knees and did not get up.
But the scourging did not work. Nothing would work to purge my thoughts of Susan or alleviate my guilt for having betrayed Lyman. Not prayer, certainly. I prayed so constantly and loudly in the days following that Ruth and the boys teased me and said that I was practicing for Father’s return, and Mary told them to leave me be, I was only doing what was right in the eyes of the Lord; she wished the rest of the family were as devout as I. But in all my prayers I heard no voice except my own, and my own repulsed me, until eventually I could not bear to hear it anymore and gave off prayer altogether and did not join them in the evenings or when they went to church on the Sabbath. I went generally silent on all matters, not just religion, which was how people were used to me anyway.