Raintree County (130 page)

Toward morning, she fell asleep and dreamed that she was going somewhere all by herself. It appeared that she was all dressed up and was hurrying across the land. Her feet sank in the freshly plowed earth of the fields around her home, but she stumbled on, crossing fences and pushing through thickets trying to find a place where she was to meet someone. It had something to do with catching a train or keeping an appointment, with whom or where she couldn't say for certain, but in the dream she kept seeing the dark, beloved ground of the Farm lying all around her in a light that was tinged with the sadness and forever of a myth. In the oak forest that lay behind the Farm, the trees were dark and still. She could see deep into the hushed recesses. But across a distant stile, where the spring welled to make a running branch,

THERE HUNG, ALL SHINING
IN THE GRAY
DUSK

The Golden Bough

M
R
. S
HAWNESSY
said, is the title of tonight's discussion of the Waycross Literary Society. We are happy to have with us a visiting celebrity, Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles, who will lead the forum.

The Perfessor adjusted his pince-nez.

—Let me see, he said perfessorially. Yes, I have my notes with me.

He plunged both hands into his looseflapping coat and plucked out two flasks, one half full, the other full. His face, nodding on long neck, leaned past Mrs. Brown, tendering the full flask, an amber bubbling bottle, to his two companions, who smilingly declined.

The face of Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles was a map of wrinkles and ridges. Black eyes glittered unfocused in seamy sockets. The skull was polished bone under black hair. The wide mouth grinned stumps of moribund teeth. The pince-nez glasses, lensed with pictures of the fading day, were a feature of the face, as much so as the sharp nose and the big shapely ears sensitive to the least shift of the forehead. The face of Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles was wise and devious like an old monk's manuscript.

Mrs. Brown put the Raintree County
Atlas,
which she had been diligently examining, under the swing.

—Shall I keep the minutes? This promises to be a memorable . . .

MEETING OF LITERARY SOCIETY

(Epic Fragment from the
Cosmic Enquirer
)

Attractively landscaped with smooth lawns, tufts of shrubbery, and pagan adornments, Mrs. Evelina Brown last Monday entertained members of the Waycross Literary Society in her palatial residence east of town. Refreshing himself with frequent drafts from the Heliconian Spring, Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles led a discussion on the origin of . . .

Mr. Shawnessy was sitting on the right of the porchswing and the Perfessor on the left, with Mrs. Brown between. It was seven-thirty and the picnic supper was over. Mrs. Brown's American-Gothic mansion gloomed over the three forms. The yard was a rectangle of shaven green where children played. A fountain in the left corner lifted a thin jet to flower and fall over two bronze bodies. Enshrined in halfcircles of the fence, the nymphs were lumps of rusty nudity. The house and yard were nearly surrounded by cornfields. A cornfield began on the far side of the National Road and extended to the elevated bed of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Due west, a white bull stood in a small pasture. Islanded in trees, the roofs of Waycross were drenched in fading splendor.

—Mr. Shawnessy, the Perfessor said, will you elucidate our text for tonight?

—Our text for tonight, Mr. Shawnessy said, is taken from the
Aeneid,
the story of a national hero. In Book VI, members, you will recall how the hero descends into the land of shades, after first plucking a golden bough. This talismanic branch makes him superior to death and he is enabled to learn of things past and future.

—To begin then with things simple, the Perfessor said, I propose this question to the enlightened company which I behold before me: What is human life?

—Human life is a myth, Mr. Shawnessy said.

—Amen, the Perfessor said.

—To be most human is to be most mythical.

—This is wisdom, said the Perfessor.

—A myth is a story that is always true for all men everywhere.

—An oracle speaks, the Perfessor said. But are there any new myths? I doubt it. In their wisdom, the Hebrews and the Greeks have furnished us with all our myths. Will there ever be another mythical race?

—Yes, Mr. Shawnessy said. The Americans are a mythical race. We are making a new myth, the American myth.

—What is this American myth?

—It's the story of the hero who regains Paradise.

—Ah, yes, the Perfessor said. The subject of your own great unfinished epic.

—Where does he find Paradise? Mrs. Brown asked.

—At the crossroads of the Nation. In the Court House Square. In a train station. In the center of Raintree County.

—Adam, the prize of God's great bounty,

Pops up again in Raintree County,

recited the Perfessor.

—Americans have rewritten the old epics and have added myths of their own. From the Greeks, we've taken the plural gods, the rape of beauty, the long war, the wandering and the return. From the Hebrew and Christian myth, we've taken the lost garden and the divine man. But to all this we've added our own national experience. Our myth is a sun myth—it has the path of the sun. America is the geographical symbol of the Renaissance. The seagoing humanists set out to find again the lost garden of humanity. What were they seeking except a Passage to India, the cradle of mankind! America is mankind returning upon itself through the circle of the earth and defeating time and space. In a new Eden, we have strewn the memories of all mankind. We began by calling the aborigines of America ‘Indians' and have pursued the delightful fraud ever since. We're the new mythmakers.

—But this westward legend, John, and this Edenic dream belong to an innocent day when myths were believable. It belongs to young America. My dear boy, you're trying to Hellenize America after her Hellenic age is over.

—I'm trying to Americanize America, Mr. Shawnessy put in.

—All great myths, the Perfessor went on, are pre-alphabetic. By your theory, then, early America has had the advantage of being almost illiterate?

—The early Americans, Mr. Shawnessy said, were poets of the open road. They rediscovered the earth. They uncoiled the Mississippi, they unrolled the Great Plains, they upheaved the Rocky Mountains. They brought the miracle of names to an earth that was nameless, even as Adam did when God bade him name the earth and its inhabitants. They were the new Adams.

—Adam, who always slept in the raw,

Went to bed with an Indian squaw,

the Perfessor recited. It's an amazing synthesis that you've achieved, my boy. How you ever managed to make this bleak little county conform to a universal pattern amazes me. You didn't have much to work on.

—On the contrary.

—I suppose you're referring to our little local myth, the Perfessor said. Assume just for fun that a seedy halfwit called Johnny Appleseed
did
walk through here seventy-five years ago when this was a wilderness, and suppose this nutty yokel
did
strew a little seed around here. Even suppose he got hold of a seedling of some exotic tree and planted it. What of it? One tree is like another. Johnny Appleseed was just one of the bees who help the winds spread pollen. It's human and poetic to make a myth out of it. But if you and Evelina and I made an excursion tomorrow to your precious swamp in the middle of your precious county and found your precious tree with a couple rocks under it, do you know what we'd do? We'd sit there and have a couple sandwiches and after an afternoon of contemplating the tree, we'd go back home with sunburnt noses and ants in our pantses, no wiser than before.

—I'd be thrilled to death, Mrs. Brown said, to find the Raintree.

A girl's voice clanged in the yard:

—Mrs. Brown!

—I've got to help direct games and things, she said, rising. I'll be back as soon as I can.

The Perfessor took a drink. Mr. Shawnessy made a motion indicative of the lawn, the town, the running children, Mrs. Brown in her green dress.

—You see, he said. It is all myth. We are all myth.

—John, the Perfessor said mellowly, what you say is true. Americans are an absolutely legendary people. Who knows it better than I, after a lifetime of reporting the incredible deeds of this incredible race?

—If we have a recorded epic in this century, Mr. Shawnessy said, it's the newspaper. A hundred years from now the newspapers of this day will provide the epic fragments of our time.

—I suggest, the Perfessor said, that you name your epic poem the
Mythic Examiner,
being a kind of fabulous newspaper in which the
deeds of these fabulous people, the Nineteenth Century Americans, shall be recorded in a mythical American style.

—I suppose I've been too close to this stuff of myth, Mr. Shawnessy said, to handle it properly.

—Your great poem, the Perfessor said, is your own life, John. My God, what an epic we have lived in this century! But as you say, we've been the makers of the legend, and I suppose someone else will have to record it. We're essentially a physical people—doers not sayers. Where the Greeks worshipped the form, we worship the act. For us, it's size, strength, and speed that count. I see it all the time, and I think we're getting more rather than less so. Maybe you've been reading about the coming fight between the Great John L. Sullivan and Gentleman Jim Corbett. It's the very stuff out of which our American Homer will some day create his Hector and Achilles, with breast-thumpings, epithets, and great brags. Only a few weeks ago, I myself saw the Great John L. stripped to the heels. I was in Boston when they carted the Strongest Living Body down to a doctor's office to have it measured. It made me think of a big fat beefy bull at the County Fair. We all stood around gaping and gasping, while John L. flexed his biceps and blew out his great chest. Of course, hardly had the Boston doc called Sullivan the Strongest Living Man than Corbett's manager trotted his bruiser down to a doctor, who gave it as his opinion that the Challenger was the finest hunk of man in all America.

—Well, well, we have these cunning things called bodies, and we might as well mythicize them. What's wrong with trying to be first in a hard contest? It's another sign of our innocent obsession with space.

—Ah, I just remembered, the Perfessor said, you were something of an athlete yourself in your youth. Here, have a slug of this, hero boy, and tell us how you sought the garland. Give us a few chapters from your mythic life.

Smiling, he declined. In the yard, his oldest boy ran past the porch, leading a cry of children around the house.

Life's young Greek and blithe contender, maker of myths, stand forth. Stand forth again, pre-alphabetic and prediluvian boy, and find the earth gardened with names, the earth rivered and roaded, fenced and freehavened.

Where is the young American?

He stood on the brink of day and heard prophecies and legends old and new. He dreamed and saw the republic of himself. He knew that somewhere the Tree of Life was waiting, from which the County took its name of music and of strangeness. For this he had come forth to summer. For this he stripped him for the race. For this he heard speech like unworn coins flung down ringing in the Square. For this he made great vaunts and laughed with white teeth.

—And right after this exhibition, the Perfessor was saying, the Great John L. took us all down to a saloon in the heart of the Hub, where he stood at the bar hammering hell out of the counter and buying drinks for the crowd. I can lick any mon in the worrrrrrrld! says he, letting me have the flat of his hand between my shoulder blades. After they picked me up and revived me with a double slug, I said, John, I've seen this Corbett fight, and he's a crafty one. He says you'll never lay a glove on him. At this, John L. roared like a bull, doubled his great fist, and rocked the teaparty town with a blow on the brass. See this arm? he said. I see it, I said. See this fist? he said. Yes, sir, I said. With this arm and this fist, he said, I'll . . .

Make way, make way for the Hero of Raintree County. He who is first in the race shall pluck the golden bough; flowers shall pelt his naked shoulders.

—He stood there, the Perfessor was saying, and so help me, he drank two to my one until midnight and went right on roaring and beating the bar and . . .

The words of an old myth shall be graven on lost columns. They shall be the speech of the early Americans and their Olympic games. Godlike, they ran toward mountains of gold. Goldseekers, trainracers, aeronauts of the blue and enterprising day, stringbreakers, steamboaters, wirewalkers, make way, make way for

was set for eleven o'clock in the morning of the Fourth. Around nine o'clock, opencoated, longlegged, with a blue bowtie at his throat, Johnny Shawnessy walked through the Court House Square nodding to friends.