Raintree County (128 page)

It was clear to her that Pa loved her more than anything else in the world, had always loved her more, far more, than he had loved her mother. His love was a somber, enduring fact. She didn't expect it to change. She would have been shocked if it had changed, as much so as if some morning on awakening she had found that Raintree County had turned into a desert.

But during the year after the Teachers' Institute at Paradise Lake,
especially after her mother's death, there was a change in the way Pa expressed his love for her. He now could hardly bear to have her out of his sight, and when she was at the Stony Creek school, where she taught, she knew that he was thinking constantly of her. As often as he could, he came to meet her in the evening and rode home with her, asking her about her day as if he wanted to relive and repossess every minute of her. When he drove into town, he took her with him. At night before she went to sleep in the room that had been her mother's, he would wait until she was in bed, and then she would hear his heavy footfalls on the creaking stair, there would be a timid knock at the door, and she would say,

—Come in, Pa.

He would come in, always fully clothed. He would come over to the bed where she was now tucked in with only her face showing above the sheet. He would bend over without a word and kiss her mouth, and would pat her hand and hold it a moment, and then say,

—Good night, Esther.

—Good night, Pa, she would say.

Then he would get up and leave the room, firmly shutting the door. The ritual hardly ever varied, and had it varied even a little, Esther would have been deeply disturbed and perhaps even a little frightened, as any change would have meant some disturbing change in Pa.

She was bound as by great cords to the earth of her father's farm.

Nevertheless, there was another world in which she moved during that year and which she tried desperately to keep separate from Pa's world.

The other world had begun a long time ago when she was a little girl in her first term of school with Mr. Shawnessy. For a long time afterwards, only a memory persisted of that world, like voices faintly calling from a remote place. Then for two weeks in the summer of 1877 the voices had become loud and joyous; she had discovered their source one evening when a buggy carried her down sloping hills to a place of waters. For two weeks she had lived entirely in this rival world, had bathed in its green lifegiving pool, had become almost lost in its primitive serenity, had shared its images of beauty, goodness, truth. Then Pa had appeared dreadfully on the threshold of that world and had reclaimed her.

For Esther, too much happiness always had something forbidden and wrong about it. To be really good was to be a little unhappy and engaged in a task that demanded all of one's strength and somewhat more than one's inclination.

She knew from the beginning that there was no way of reconciling her two worlds. They were night and day, with no twilight between. They were stone and fire. They were earth and air.

Not long after the Teachers' Institute, Ivy Foster called on her and left a letter from Mr. Shawnessy, the first of many she was to receive and answer.

This letter all by itself was as strong as Pa's world. It brought back the memory of Paradise Lake. The very handwriting had the curving look of that other world, of its lifegiving foliage, luxuriant shapes, and springing forms. She read the letter over and over, hid it under her pillow at night, carried it always on her person, as a token, a blown leaf, unspeakably precious, of that other world. Of course, she concealed all knowledge of this other world from Pa, knowing the futility of making him understand it or accept it.

She answered Mr. Shawnessy's letter, and there were other letters. They were all very simple. His letters told her that he loved her and wanted to make her his wife in spite of all. They were full of images and recollections of Paradise Lake. Her letters said that she loved him, but that she didn't know whether she could ever come to him. In the earlier letters, he addressed her as ‘Dear Esther,' and she addressed him as ‘Dear Mr. Shawnessy.' In the later letters, he addressed her as ‘Darling,' ‘My Darling Esther,' ‘Dearest,' and ‘Dearest Pet.' She addressed him as ‘Dearest One' and ‘My Darling.' These forms of address seemed right to her, but she never called him John and knew that she never could. Such a thing was unthinkable.

After she began teaching the school on Stony Creek, she and Mr. Shawnessy managed to see each other secretly. He had the school at Moreland that year, and after school in the afternoons, the lovers would meet as often as possible at a deserted mill on the Shawmucky about midway between the two schools. They also left notes at the trysting place under a stone. Sometimes, too, Esther would be invited to dinner at Ivy and Carl Foster's, their house being only a half-mile from the Root house across the fields. Mr. Shawnessy would be there too, and all four would keep the secret. Ivy was
Esther's only confidante until somehow Fernie found out about the secret trysts in the spring; but Fernie—goodhearted, homely, talkative Fernie—kept her mouth shut and never breathed a word of the affair to anyone.

In fact, Esther never did discover who it was that found out about the secret letters and meetings and told Pa.

One day in April of 1878, she went to the trysting place to leave a note for Mr. Shawnessy. She knelt and placed the note under a stone close to the door of the old mill and was just rising when she saw Pa standing in the door of the mill not ten feet away watching her. He walked over and without a word lifted the stone and took the note.

—Pa, she said in a small desperate voice, please don't read it. He opened the note and read it through. His face, usually red and bloated at moments of anger, was pale.

—Is he coming here today? Pa said.

His voice scared her as she had never been scared before because it was so dreadfully even and controlled. For the first time, she realized that Pa was fully capable of killing Mr. Shawnessy.

—No, Pa. I don't think so.

—How long have you been meeting him and writing to him? Pa said in the same low, quiet voice.

—Since September, Pa.

—Don't lie to me, Esther. I know about it anyway.

—I didn't lie to you, Pa.

—Where is he now? Pa said.

—I don't know, Pa. Please, Pa, don't hurt him. It isn't his fault. It's my fault.

Pa picked up the gun that had been leaning against the wall inside the mill and went around back of the mill where he had tied his horse. Esther looked at the long black gun with which she had often seen Pa knock a rabbit kicking.

Pa got on his horse and came around. She got on her horse. She kept running her eyes all over the fields and the paths of the countryside, praying that Mr. Shawnessy wouldn't appear, riding along in his abstracted way, his eyes bright and pleasant.

—If you kill him, Pa, she said, I'll kill myself.

—Why did you do it, Esther? Pa said, with a passion so terrible
that it took all anger from his voice and made it break like a woman's.

—I love him, Pa.

Pa turned his face away. He was crying. Sobs tore his big frame. Esther was appalled. She had never seen Pa cry, had never dreamed that he could cry. She began to sob with him.

—Don't, Pa. Please don't.

Pa fought to contain himself, his big chest heaving convulsively.

—Please, Pa, she said. I'm sorry. It was all my fault. Honest, I didn't do anything but meet him a few times and write. I'll never do it again, honest. I'll stop it. Honest, I will, Pa. Please, don't—don't
cry
so, Pa.

At that moment, it seemed to her that the whole matter was irrevocably sealed and settled. There was nothing else to do but stop the whole thing. The way it was, Mr. Shawnessy would be killed or Pa would die or something dreadful would happen. This thing was bigger than she. It was Fate that she had loved as she had, and it was Fate too that she was doomed never to marry her love. It was Fate, Godappointed Fate, that she was to live forever with Pa. The pain of tearing herself away from him seemed at this moment greater than any conceivable pain of separation from Mr. Shawnessy, which would be a dull long pain, prolonged over all the years of her life until she died.

So she went home with Pa, and in sorrow, fear, and remorse remained for weeks a voluntary prisoner at the farm. As for Pa, he openly declared his intention to horsewhip John Shawnessy to death if he ever caught him around his daughter again.

Meanwhile, in the world outside, a number of remarkable things occurred that Esther didn't know about at the time.

To begin with, Mr. Shawnessy, who had always been regarded as an easy-going person in the County, showed unexpected fight. And his position in the affair was improved by a strange development.

In late April a letter came from Louisiana, saying that his wife had disappeared several months before from the private home where she was being kept and that although a diligent search had been conducted for her, she had not reappeared. There was some evidence that in her demented state, she had committed suicide, and cannons were fired over the Mississippi River in an effort to raise the
body. News of this development had been unpardonably delayed in reaching Mr. Shawnessy, as his wife's family had kept expecting her to be found alive or dead. An action was instituted in a Louisiana court to get the woman declared legally dead, but the affair was pending and promised to go on for a long time. Mr. Shawnessy then boldly claimed the legal death of his wife on the basis of her disappearance. His case wasn't a strong one, but it was better than nothing. The way was as clear as perhaps it ever would be.

Mr. Shawnessy managed to get these facts to Esther by way of Ivy Foster. He said that he was ready to stand up before the world and claim Esther for his wife.

Meanwhile, Esther was being subjected to a different kind of pressure. Pa and other older people whom she respected had talked with her gently but firmly about the matter. They told her that no matter how strong it seemed to her now, her feeling toward Mr. Shawnessy was after all only a girlish infatuation. They said that from no point of view was Mr. Shawnessy a fit man for her. They said that he was an atheist and a no-account, ambitionless drifter. They said that he had had other shady affairs with young girls in schools where he had taught; and though the names of the girls were not named, some details of the affairs were given. They said that Mr. Shawnessy's own father had forced him to marry his first wife. They said that there was a bad streak in the Shawnessy family. It was no secret in the County that old T. D. Shawnessy was the child of an illegitimate union and had come to America to escape the shame of his bastard birth. Everyone loved the old gentleman—true enough—but there was that stain. Mrs. Shawnessy had been, as everyone knew, a wonderful woman, and no one had been more broken up than she by the failures and foibles of her brilliant but erratic son. They said that John Wickliff Shawnessy was an unstable, undependable philanderer, approaching middle age, almost old enough to be Esther Root's father, and once she got over the crazy infatuation she now felt, she would thank her lucky stars forever that she hadn't let herself get caught with him. They said that besides all that, her pa, who had loved and looked after her all her life, was alone in the world, now that his wife had died and the other girls were getting married and the sons had left, and she would break her pa's heart by making such a bad marriage. They said that anyway there were legal impediments in the way of such a marriage. They said that it was better to break
off the whole thing clean, or at any rate to wait and get more tangible evidence of Mr. Shawnessy's honesty than an annulment based on a mysterious disappearance.

Meanwhile, Esther was watched and attended by various energetic maiden ladies of mature years who rose staunchly to the defense of outraged fatherhood and threatened chastity. One of them even slept with Esther at night. It became almost impossible to get any word at all to or from Mr. Shawnessy, even through Ivy Foster, who was forbidden to see Esther any longer.

In spite of herself, Esther was shocked and disturbed by what she heard. She hadn't seen Mr. Shawnessy for a long time. It began to appear that she might have been all wrong in her infatuation for him. At any rate there was nothing that she could or would do about it. The gods of Family Virtue, Conventional Morality, and Orthodox Religion seemed to be winning a decisive victory.

These Raintree County deities did not, however, reckon with a certain masterpiece of romantic strategy on the part of Mr. Shawnessy.

In early June of 1878, there appeared in the
Free Enquirer,
in the space usually reserved for the Sage of the Upper Shawmucky, Will Westward, an open letter to Mr. Gideon Root, under which appeared in bold capitals the name JOHN WICKLIFF SHAWNESSY. The letter made a clear, honest, and dispassionate statement of the legal facts of the case, and it concluded with a courteous demand that the writer be permitted to visit the Root home and ask the hand of Esther Root in marriage, as the young lady was now twenty-one years old and the suitor was a man not without friends and prestige in Raintree County—and, to the best of his knowledge, legally single and eligible. A note of passion crept into the letter in the last sentence, in which the writer did not hesitate to appeal to justice and the power of immortal love.

It was the last sentence that threatened to cook Mr. Gideon Root's goose.

On receipt of his personal copy of this letter, Mr. Root went out and got into his buggy, selecting his longest and heaviest leather whip as a suitable accessory. He drove over to the Shawnessy Home and walked into the yard, carrying the whip. What followed was variously reported, but most accounts agreed on the following conversation.

Mr. Shawnessy, upon answering the door and seeing Mr. Root standing there fingering a big black whip, carefully kept the door between himself and his visitor.