Raintree County (134 page)

And there in the white roadway, before the multitude, did the loveliest of the damsels adorn his fine curlclustered head with the antique garland, a chaplet of laurel, flower of the mountain. There did she secretly also tender to the young Athenian the empetalled garland of her love, and all the girls dancing flung wreaths of flowers over the heads of the statues lining the way, and all this was in the day when the beautiful gods still dwelt on the mountains and in the rivers and

PEOPLED THE SHORE AND THE SEA, AND YOUTH WAS A TIME
OF MANLY CONTEST AND OF
INNOCENT

—D
ESIRE
, said the Perfessor, is blind, as the Greeks well knew. The original love-desire is that of the sperm for the egg. This blind little boat loaded with memories goes and goes till the fuel gives out or it touches port. This terrific tadpole is the real bearer of life. It is Aeneas bearing the Golden Bough and overcoming death. And the only sacred place is the darkwalled valley into which it swims. As for us, we're just seedpods with delusions of grandeur.

The Perfessor took a drink.

—I wish I could believe in sacred places, he said. At heart, I'm really a bacchant hunting for a garland and a pliant nymph. I ask nothing better than to shout hymen and jump up and down before the symbol of the god. But beauty and the gods can't survive the era of Darwin and the Dynamo. All lovely things are old things.

He took a pull at his bottle and sighed.

—The barbarous peoples had beautiful and dreadful rites. In Mexico, they chose a young man to be the god. They feasted him, gave him flutes to play and fair young women for his pleasure. At the climax of the festival, he mounted a sequence of great stone steps, breaking a flute on each one. Arriving at the top, he was seized forcibly by the priests. They flung him down on a block of stone and cut out his living heart. Then they bore him tenderly to the base of the altar, where they cut off his young, beautiful head.

The Perfessor took another drink and sighed.

—All the primitive peoples, he said, including the early Greeks and Romans, killed their gods. They all believed in the immortal soul, as we do not, and they wanted their god to remain young and vigorous in a new human proxy every year. With burnings and beheadings and geldings of gods, they celebrated the great mystic rite of fertility and besought the spring to come again. The later Mediterranean peoples touched this blood rite with beauty. Mother-gods of earth and vegetation, Venus, Cybele, Diana, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Astarte, were loved by beautiful young men, Adonis, Osiris, Tammuz, Attis. Each year the goddess and her lover had to mate, or the whole earth would wither without issue. And at the sanctuary of the goddess,
each year the human sexes aped the gods in licentious rites. We don't know what the Eleusinian Mysteries were, but we know enough of the Dionysiac revels and the Roman Saturnalia to know that religion used to be fun. In Babylon, the Vestals of Astarte, the Syrian Venus, gave up their bodies to strangers as a religious sacrament. By their charming gift they guaranteed the green returning spring. I don't know about you, but I think they had something on the Baptists.

The Perfessor stopped and took another drink.

—Ah, how beautiful the earth was in pagan times! Imagine going into the sacred shrine at Eleusis. I wonder what words were uttered, words so old that no one knew any longer what they meant, words like the whisperings of a womb, words from the dawn of the Aryan peoples! And what mystic rite did the young initiate behold!

—I think it likely that he was shown an ear of corn.

—What a charming idea! the Perfessor said. John, you must go abroad some day before you die. Of all the shrines, the one I like best is the lake at Nemi in the Alban Hills. Of course, you know Turner's picture of ‘The Golden Bough.' The ancient belief was that Jupiter entered the oak, his sacred tree, in the lightning bolt and left his evergreen spirit on its limbs in the herb called mistletoe. So each candidate for the priesthood of the Arician grove at Nemi had to pluck down this golden bough, the life of the god, and take it to himself. Then he could kill the old priest and take his place. No doubt, after this achievement he coupled with the vestals who kept the oak fire burning.

—Professor, you ought to write this great story of the myths of vegetation and the beginnings of religion.

—I'm too old, the Perfessor said. Some other genius, younger and less bibulous, will do it and get the credit for it. You see, John, the Jews made the world ethical instead of beautiful. I for one will never forgive them for the myth of Eden. Of course, the dramatic climax of the story, as in most myths, is simply the act of love. But the great invention of the Jews was their idea that sex was evil as well as fun and fruitful. Their god, though made in the image of man, never made love. The old boy was too busy breaking the heads of rebellious tribes. Why is love taboo anyway?

—Taboo was primitive man's moral law. The taboo thing wasn't
evil in our sense—just dangerous. It was charged with the fluid of divine power. For primitive man, all things connected with love and death were dangerous.

—Did it ever occur to you that primitive man was a rather wily customer after all?

—The wisdom of the mythmakers is still with us, Professor. The profoundest mystery in the world is the existence of Another. Erotic love is the intense awareness of this Other, a Sacred Place. The lover bears the golden bough of godlike appetite and mysterious power and passes through the dismal wood that lies at the portals of Tartarus. Among the gibbering shades, he presses in with mortal thrust, making the boat of Charon heavy with his unusual weight. He bears the golden bough to the inmost shrine of the earth-goddess where he repeats the ancient frenzy. As you say, this rite is not unconnected with blood and death, for the renewal of form is possible only by the destruction of form. Love is a sweet death. A million die that one may reach the mark.

He beheld the fading beauty of the day over Waycross. Now the roofs of the town were drenched in a last red bath of fire. A few rays thrust through to paint the green body of a nymph and touch the pooled and spouting fountain with golden light. The children were little blind swimmers in the valley of the day's receding brightness. Corn filled the earth with blind roots. All things were bathed in light and longing.

—We'll never go any farther than those broken stones beside the inland ocean, the Perfessor said. The corn god is gone, and we have—behold!—only the corn.

He took a long pull at his bottle, coughed, and sighed.

—The world is still full of divinity and strangeness, Mr. Shawnessy said. The scientist stops, where all men do, at the doors of birth and death. He knows no more than you and I why a seed remembers the oak of twenty million years ago, why dust acquires the form of a woman, why we behold the earth in space and time. He hasn't yet solved the secret of a single name upon the earth. We may pluck the nymph from the river, but we won't pluck the river from ourselves: this coiled divinity is still all murmurous and strange. There are sacred places everywhere. The world is still man's druid grove, where he wanders hunting for the Tree of Life.

—This conversation is hard on an excitable old man, the Perfessor said. Just look at little Evelina out there! I wish you could persuade her to do her duty as a vestal. And isn't it a ritual day that we've been having?

The Perfessor moved his head in quick darts to an odd rhythm. Under his breath, he was reciting,

—lo Hymen Hymenaee!

Io Hymen Hymenaee!
On the day of the birth of the Republic, after the runners had gone down the lane of faces to a distant string and the women had made a music of laughter and applause with their red mouths, in the young afternoon, by a curious and curving pathway, the hero made his way unto the place.

And the waters of the lake slept in the solitude of the encircling hills, the stream of the serpent river came down by shore and shallow, through tarn and tangling swamp, the murmur of its waters was beautiful in dense reeds.

And according to a legend, there was a grove near that lake and in the midst thereof a sacred tree, from which the earth there had taken its name of music and of strangeness.

In distant and dark woodlands, in the attitude of one listening, the young hunter stood and waited for a sign. And this was in the time before the fall and death of so many woodland deities, when the earth was young, and the goddess still lived on earth in the person of a woman with bright hair and gracious limbs. It had also been said in the legend that she might be known by a curious and curving mark on the bare flesh of her body.

And the tall oaks of the wood were filled with a living sound, the barky lips were calling to him through the dim forest, saying:

Io Hymen Hymenaee!
O, fleet of foot, the goddess is waiting by the tree. O, impetuous young man!

In distant and dark woodlands, in the attitude of one listening, he waited for a sign, and the voices of the woodland deities were saying:

Io Hymen Hymenaee!
O, sun-belovèd! For you, the golden bough, all heavy with seed. For you the talismanic branch. For you a prize, dangerous and sweet. O, mortal more than mortal, o, young man more beloved than a god, hunt deep and far and do not be prevented.

Come, come, the voices said, come unto these woods with dark
hair glancing. Come and join our revels. But first drink deep the blood-exciting potion. We will imprison you in ropes of flowers.
lo Hymen Hymenaee!
O, strong young bull! O, young prizewinner!

Victorious boy, feed on the flesh of apples smitten by the sun. It is the season when the corn is green beside the river and the sacred juice of life is rising in the stalk. Let there be rains and golden warmth for many days. O, brave young man, be tender but compulsive. Lo! you were chosen from among thousands to make the goddess fruitful.

The vestals are jealous—all afternoon they plunge their fevered bodies into the lake without relief.

The corn is as tall as the knee of a goddess. Let the corn be high and the seedshock stiff to bursting. Fling seed and make the earth tremble from delirious feet.

Come, come, and bring the hero to the shrine, sweet sisters, unclothe his body, let his limbs be laved in the cold waters of the sacred pool, and bring him, bring him, jealous sisters, into the presence of the goddess

was dizzy from the noonday sun and other, more worldly causes. In the buggy were three other people, Susanna Drake, Cash Carney, and a girl from Middletown named Peachy something or other. The buggy seat was narrow, and Susanna sat on Johnny's lap. The girls had insisted that he wear his oakleaf garland. Peachy said it looked fetching, and Susanna said that it reminded her of the picture of a statue she had seen somewhere, but she couldn't remember where.

Cash Carney had brought two jugs of cider and a few sandwiches. The sandwiches were soon gone. The whiskey and the Race had left Johnny very hungry and thirsty, and he drank several cupfuls of cider. It had a sharp taste that made him feel wild. Of course, even in his festive condition, he was aware that Susanna Drake was a Southern Lady and that he must be very careful not to offend her in any way. It was hard, however, to find legitimate uses and places for his hands, until he discovered that she was holding them and squeezing them from time to time. Her hands were warm, moist, and very strong. A light dew stood on the flesh above her pouting mouth, and her body smelled faintly of flowers. After a few cupfuls of cider she was talking very fast and giving little shrieks of laughter at inappropriate times. She bounced and twisted in his lap and now and then to express excitement hugged him so hard that he couldn't breathe.

Cash Carney had brought some firecrackers along, and every now and then he lit one on his cigar and tossed it out of the buggy. He had also brought a newspaper, from which Johnny kept reading aloud to the girls, introducing witty variations of his own into the news, until the sun and the cider made his head swirl and the print blurred. All four talked excitedly and sometimes all at once.

Cash Carney talked about extending the branch rail line northwest from Three Mile Junction and of various plans he had for expanding
his feedstore and liquor business to Middletown. He gestured forcibly with his cigar and sometimes put his right arm around Peachy's back and blew smoke in her face.

Peachy talked about various troubles she had had with a dressmaker in Middletown, who was, it appeared, an impossible person.

Susanna Drake talked about various buggyrides she had been on and picnics on rivers down South. She talked about how beautiful Louisiana was and how Johnny must come South sometime and visit her. He would just
love
it.

Johnny, for reasons quite unknown to himself, talked mostly about balloon ascensions, goldseekers in the West, and tightrope walkers.

The road which led from Freehaven to Lake Paradise was a grass-grown trail just wide enough for one buggy, and in the last halfmile it was little better than a cowpath. Those days, the lake was still inaccessible to the general public, though fishermen, hunters, and picnickers sometimes made their way to it. Now and then, in the latter stages of the ride, it was necessary to get out and push the buggy through difficult places. Johnny, still chapleted with oakleaves, performed prodigies of strength. The earth was fluid beneath his pushing feet. There was a strong taste of cider in his throat.

He had always intended to visit Paradise Lake. Now he remembered the time he had set out to do so in a leaky boat, which foundered just short of the goal. On that occasion he had made his way out of a swamp and had encountered a buggy coming from the lake, containing a number of young people, including Nell Gaither. Even now he felt a hot twinge of jealousy because Nell had gone swimming in the mysterious waters of Lake Paradise with Garwood Jones.