Free Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks

his chest and heard him start to snore, and who, on our orders, would tiptoe up the narrow stairs to the rooms above with this welcome intelligence, and, John in the lead, we older boys, sometimes with Ruth tagging along behind, slid open a window and crept along the ridge of the shed roof to where we swung out onto the branch of a maple tree and quickly scrambled to the ground. Then for a few hours we were free to race through the woods like buckskins, shrieking and hollering to one another, making all the wild noises that for fifteen or twenty long hours we had kept bottled up inside our chests.
    I remember, for powerful reasons, one Sabbath in particular, which I will describe, for it has a meaning that extends into the later part of my story. It was late in the fall of ’33, when I was but nine years old, the year after Mother died, and our stepmother, Mary, had been living with us for only a few months. A nearby neighbor and not much more than a girl herself, Mary had first been hired by Father to keep house and care for his younger children during the days, while he ran the tannery, but soon he married her. She was then pregnant with her first child, Sarah, born the following spring. I remember little else of that sad whirl of a year, except what happened to me on one crisp, sunshiny day, when John, Jason, and I, as we had done a hundred or more times, made our escape from our father’s and new stepmother’s dark, silent house to the large, bright world outside.
    I was then a cold, withdrawn child, hopelessly saddened by the death of my mother. The pain of my days and nights was such that I thought of little else and thus was to all appearances a permanently distracted child, one of those children who seem neither to know nor to care where they are or who is with them. I was a boy whose gaze was always inward and fixed there, not on himself, but on some imagined closed door. I have seen dogs whose beloved masters have gone into the house, leaving the animals to wait outside, there to sit on the cold stoop, staring at the door with unbroken gaze. I was like that poor animal, and the door was the death of my mother.
    John went first out the window and crept along the ridge of the steeply pitched roof of the shed, followed by Jason. Then me. At the end of the roofline, there was a two-storey drop to the ground, which had been dug away for the entry to our root cellar below. A sturdy, full-grown maple tree stood at the back of the shed, with several branches close enough to the structure that a medium-sized boy could in a single move slide down from the ridge of the roof to the eave, where he could leap out and catch onto the tree and from there make his way easily to the ground. Without hesitating, John reached the end of the ridge, turned, squatted, and duck-walked quickly down the wood-shingled slope, sprang into the air, grabbed the branch of the tree, and like a squirrel hurried down its length. Jason, grinning, was right behind him.
    Then came I, walking in a kind of haze. I made my way to the end of the roof. But instead of stopping there and lowering myself to a sliding position, like the others, I simply continued straight on, as if the ridge of the roof extended below me. I remember stepping off the roof into open space and falling for a very long time through sunlight and bright green leaves and blue sky in a dreamy downward flight, pulled, not by gravity, but by some force even more powerful than gravity. I was like the boy Icarus, who flew too near the sun on unnatural wings and was hurled back to earth as punishment for his pride and vanity. Down, down I fell, crashing at last against the stone steps to the root cellar.
    I must have reached out at the last second with my left arm, as if to push the ground away, for the arm lay beneath me, crushed by my own weight and the force of my fall. I was fully conscious and at first felt no particular pain, but when John and Jason reached me and rolled me over, I saw