Raintree County (110 page)

Mr. Shawnessy watched the bluff form of a certain illustrious commander blending with the crowd at the Station, lost from view in the tired afternoon. He thought then of monuments approaching but not quite reaching their apex. Of love approaching but not quite reaching a climax. Of blind seeds struggling in the swamp and not quite reaching a matrix. And of trains, the great trains coming into stations. Of the miracle of arrival and consummation. Of life incessantly defeating the paradox of Zeno. Of the riddle of Raintree County incessantly proposing itself as its own solution.

As usual the thought of a train coming filled him with excitement. He took from his pocket a telegram received the day before and reread it.

CANT COME FOR PROGRAM BUT WILL ARRIVE ON FIVE OCLOCK TRAIN IN WAYCROSS FOR BRIEF VISIT ON WAY TO PITTSBURGH STOP HOPE TO SEE ALL OLD FRIENDS STOP LAURA MAY COME

CASSIUS P CARNEY

Mr. Shawnessy wondered then if it was still possible to walk through the late afternoon (when the Grand Patriotic Program was over and crumpled leaves of it were strewn among the burst firecrackers) and find strong love and a great wisdom among the faces of

Waycross Station

WERE THE WORDS
painted on the building by the tracks. Eva realized that always before when she had seen the Station, it had been empty, a bleakly official structure where trains passed and never stopped. Now the Station like the town was filled with people, and all the trains were stopping.

The Reverend Lloyd G. Jarvey stood somewhat apart from the crowd at the Station talking with her Grandfather Root. The two big heads wagged solemnly at each other. The town had been filled today with perilous encounters. She remembered how at noon, she and other children had seen through a window at Mrs. Passifee's a great white creature in a darkened parlor. This creature had looked blindly at her as it stood in the act of placing a pair of spectacles on its nose.

General Jacob J. Jackson was climbing into a carriage before the Post Office and waving good-by to friends. Standing near the track before the Station was Senator Jones and his entourage, while somewhat apart her father talked to a tall, thin man with a cane.

On this one day, the little town where she had lived for two years had been briefly touched with splendor, and its homely mask had fallen to show an immense tide of faces, arriving, passing, and departing. She felt that they had always been there really, and were part of what the town had always been and meant.

Waycross was the place where straight roads crossed on the breast of the land. It was the Shawnessy lot extending from the Road back to the Railroad. In this time-enchanted world, rectangular between two paths of change, the rooms were always quiet in the summer, and in the bookcase in the middle room the same books held their places on the wall. On fall nights an apple dropping on the woodhouse roof made a one, solemn, hollow, haunted sound. Always the cellar underneath the house was cold incredibly, smelling of waxen rims of cans of apples, peaches, pears. A cold jet came from the
driven well at the southwest corner of the house. The smokehouse smelled of woodchar and rinded pigfat, an odor steeped and stained into its boards. The cherry tree beside the cistern bled a clear jellysap from clotted wounds where armies of ants collected. The barn, the woodhouse, and the walk to the outdoor toilet were eternal things. Waycross was this bordered plot of earth, scarred, built on, hived in, inhabited—an ancient, man-created ground.

Waycross was the General Store at the intersection, the Post Office in the sleepy street, the Station, a huge, decaying toy, left to rot functionless beside the track. It was the Schoolhouse down the Road, divided by absolute decree into two rooms.

Waycross was this ancient fixity of things, but it was also the thunder and butting rhythm of trains passing with a cry of desperate haste back of the lot across the land.

And Waycross was at last the broad Road cutting through the town. Endlessly the carriaged faces came, swept by on the low rush and rumorous sound of wheels, arriving, enlarging, impending, passing, receding, fading.

Eva knew that she, too, like the town of Waycross was a being filled with a becoming. Seasons, tides, fruitions poured through this waycrossing with the changeless name of Eva. Today the long road widened and beckoned her beyond her present self, the Waycross Eva. In this town to which her father had come to live his life out, she was perhaps only to build the last edifice of her childhood and then go forth herself and become one of those faces on the Great Road, one of those passengers on trains. . . .

EVA GROWS UP
(Epic Fragment from the
Eva Series
)

And so, indulgent little readers, as we bring Eva near the end of her happy child life and leave her on the threshold of woman's estate, we will agree, I think, that the little heroine of our moral pilgrimage is not wholly unprepared to face the great world in which doubtless she will have many troubles—for such, alas! is the fate of us all in this perplexing world. But if she keeps the happy faith of childhood, may we not hope that all her cares will come to nought and she will find her way through all vexations homeward at last along

from curb to curb. When Eva ventured across it, she always felt scared until she reached the other side. Out in the middle, she lost her ancient footing in the County. Space attacked her. Tides of force rolled in from blue horizons east and west. What she was seemed annihilated, levelled, trod under, thinned out, and spread over the whole of the United States of America.

Except for the Road, Waycross was like any other town in Raintree County, and a few days after the family arrived in the summer of 1890, Eva felt at home. But it was at Waycross that she herself changed with amazing swiftness. In the spring of 1892 the tide of growth completed its inexorable rhythm, and Eva became in form a woman, though in spirit still a child. The child, the sexless, anachronistic child, still lingered on, ill at ease, unhappy, reluctant to give up. And in a last desperate orgy of self-assertion, this child did strange devotions.

Her jealousy toward her brother Wesley was violently exaggerated. She threw herself with excessive zeal into her studies. She forced her awkward body to the limit of its strength in the schoolyard games. But she was getting plump, her hips were broad, her hands were stubby, and it looked as though she never would be slim and pretty like her mother. She knew that anything she got in the world would have to be achieved through character and intelligence. When her father got her a piano at a serious strain to the family pocketbook, she practiced like a fanatic, sometimes six hours at a stretch, until she was so dizzy and cramped she could hardly stand.

Her mind was feverishly active, wandering off into daydreams in which she was one of the greatest authors of her time. She greatly admired Mrs. Brown and, like her, became an ardent feminist. She was convinced that women were downtrodden creatures: they had never had a fair chance; everything conspired to keep them from asserting their true capacity. She was determined to become a great
woman and make the name Eva Alice Shawnessy famous as the names Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Augusta Evans, Rosa Bonheur. She selected a pen name—Eva Westward, in honor of her father—and began to write fragments of stories, novels, poems, which she hid from everyone, being painfully dissatisfied with them.

It was during these years at Waycross that Eva conceived her great plan to write her father's life so that nothing that he was would be lost to posterity. She kept the plan secret from everyone and even began to make some small notes. But the whole thing became absurd when she realized how little she knew about her father in the Pre-Eva age. Whole eras of his history were buried beneath the debris of the indifferent years. Like the evolutionary biologist, she had to be satisfied with a leafprint on a rock or a fragment of fossil bone, sole remnants of gigantic life-fabrics that flourished on the earth in lost ages.

Strange, wonderful, and fearful must have been that ancient life before there was any Eva. Now and then, unexpectedly, a pale ray was cast across those old times, and she beheld her father briefly in an attitude of his youth. Once she had found a little wallet full of newspaper clippings, among them some which reported her father's death in the Civil War. She knew something, of course, about that famous mistake. But she had a feeling that there were meanings and happenings buried in his homecoming from the War that she would never learn. What had it been like to come back to Raintree County after being reported dead? What had he found waiting for him after that homecoming?

This sacred, lost person—her father in his younger days—moved, as it seemed to her, through a mystic web of adventures, loves, dreams, exertions which had nothing in common with the life he lived now. The lost eras of his life were all bathed in the golden light of legend; they were inexpressibly remote; they were fragmentary, scriptural, symbolic—like the gospels.

On the other hand, when Eva thought of writing about that part of her father's life in which she had had a part, she was surprised by how little there was to tell. Her father had taught school and written poetry and read books and talked with people; the children had grown up; the family had lived in several little towns in Raintree County. That was all there was to it. Yet even here, she felt
the presence of a meaning sacred and momentous, if she could only express it.

Slowly the town of Waycross became for her the perfect image of her father's life in his latter years. To this waycrossing on the breast of the land, the family had been meant to come. Between the two broad roads of change, they had found perhaps a lasting home. She had often heard her father say to her mother,

—This is a good place to spend the rest of our days, Esther.

During these years, Eva became more appreciative of her father's rare literary gifts and began to wonder at the paradox of a man so gifted living contentedly in a little country town and teaching the half-formed minds of children. And yet he seemed perfectly in context, and it was a happy life that the family had in Waycross. Sometimes in the midst of reading something, Eva would lift her eyes from the book and, not yet having left the land of legend, would see the life in Waycross in a perspective as of time and years remote. And then truly it seemed a golden and serene existence to her. This feeling was strongest when she would hunt out certain old manuscripts of her father's—Tennysonian lyrics written in his youth. One such was a little song called ‘One Summer Morn,' which perfectly expressed for her the color of the years in Waycross.

My muse and I, one summer morn,

Built, dreaming we were cunning fays,

A castle on a cloud-isle borne

Adrift on blue, ethereal bays.

Our blessed isle was far away

From earth. It swam down eastern skies,

Whereon in bright pavilions lay

Glad choristers with joyous eyes,

And from their sweet throats woke the song—

'
Tis summer, and the days are long.

Far east o'er pure empyreal seas,

Our happy souls that morning sailed,

Light-seated on our isle at ease,

Unheeding earth from whence we hailed.

Forgotten was all touch of care.

An age was lived in one sweet dream,

As in our castle built in air

We swam the blue celestial stream

Safe into daybreak with the song—

'
Tis summer, and the days are long.

Summer was his season and his temple. The perfect weather of his soul was in the season of the long midsummer days that rose and blazed and waned above the Road and the Railroad, while the carriages passed in dust and the trains in wailing fury all day long; and in the little rectangle of the family ground, becalmed between the two great bands of change, close by the cornfield in the backlot, beside the sundial with the inscription,
I record only the sunshine,
her father would be sitting in his old rocker, his long blue eyes enclosed in their intricate net of suncreated lines and wrinkles, propping his head on his hand, holding a neglected book, a copy of the
Indianapolis News-Historian,
or perhaps notebook and pencil; and the sleepy noises of the little town—cries of children, murmur of women at backfences, jingle of harness—would rise and fall like surf on white sands; and the whole level, sun-enamored earth of Raintree County would lie in a bland repose outward from the intersection of Waycross—and it was summer and the days were long.

At such times, Eva too would generally be reading, lying on her stomach under an appletree or curled up in the swing on the front porch. She would be walking high meadows of summer in the land of the sentimental novels, stories grave and gay for the instruction of all the wellbroughtup little girls of America.