Raintree County (135 page)

The buggy went through oak forests and past dark ravines choked with brush and rotten logs. The air returned the jocund voices with a hollow distinctness. There was a smell of rottenness and the river. Gaps in the forest showed half-naked hills, strewn with glacial boulders. Now and then there was a low place filled with rushes and swampgrass. The path, perhaps an old Indian trace, writhed in and out among the hills, slowly through a vast green summer day. Soon he would see the ancient pool of Paradise.

Meanwhile, he drank more cider, and his vision became less certain. Other people were making the decisions, and he was just going
along for the sensation. Somewhere it was decided to leave the buggy and walk.

In the young afternoon, reeling and singing like a clovenfooted god, one finger hooked into the ring of a ciderjug, the other holding the hand of a laughing girl, Johnny Shawnessy came down to Lake Paradise.

He wasn't aware of the exact moment when he first saw the lake. After a while he knew he had been walking for some time beside the cold, flat pool of it, smelling its fishy odor. He wanted to plunge into it, feel the cold wash of it across his floating limbs, he wanted to raise his voice in great cries clanging like the majestic birds that swam down the air along the lilied reaches of the lake and river, he wanted to croak and cry with watergurglings like the troops of frogs that shouted from the shallows.

What happened after that, Johnny Shawnessy never could remember in a systematic way. There was a period during which everything was blurred, and there was a period during which everything had a dazzling clarity.

It was during the blurred period that he and Cash changed into striped bathing suits that hung below their knees. Cash kept his cigar and Johnny his oakleaf garland, token of victory. They hunted up the girls, who had been giggling and shrieking in a secluded place near shore. Susanna came out of the wood in a green bathing dress belted at the waist and reaching to her ankles. Her black hair was unloosened. She and Johnny took hands and ran into the water.

—I can outswim you, Johnny! she cried.

The padded floor of the lake sank under their bare feet. They swam out into the lake a long way.

—Let's dive under! Susanna shrieked.

Diving under, he saw a creature moving through glaucous depths with a fishlike ease in spite of its fantastic costume. Its black hair trailed in the water. Its face approached his in the green pool of Lake Paradise, the large violet eyes dilated, the deep lips parted. This creature below the surface of the lake looked ferally excited. It flung its strong arms around his neck. For some reason, he wasn't at all afraid. With a swift motion, he freed himself and shot to the surface, his oakleaf garland dripping.

The sun was a hot yellow coin in the vast day overhead. The lake
lay brilliant and flat around him. There were no human sounds or forms anywhere to be seen except his own.

Then Susanna's head broke the surface.

—Let's have a waterflight, Johnny.

She sprang on him and tried to thrust him under. They were near the northeast shore now, in water up to their necks. Johnny had never dreamed that a woman could be so strong. But it turned out that he was much stronger, and he got a savage joy out of overpowering her without hurting her. The struggle lasted a long time, as they thrashed around in the water. It ended when Johnny plucked her bodily from the water and ran up on the shore with her, both of them gasping and almost crying with laughter. Then they had perhaps fallen down in a strange ecstasy of laughter and exhaustion, and there had been perhaps a kind of sleep.

It was much later that he awoke. The sun hailed heat on his eyeballs. He seemed to remember that he had lain backward and the earth had turned over on him. He had taken it into his arms, and he had touched it with his hands, admiring the slippery warmth of it. The shadecasting hair of it had fallen into his eyes and around his face. He had touched his lips to it again and again. He had touched its mouth, warm and with a taste of passion, and he had drunk the steam of it, which was of madness and of grapes.

The second period, the period in which all things seemed drenched with an unusual light, began when he opened his eyes. He saw then a wild, almost unfamiliar woman's face watching his face.

—We must be sort of crazy, she said. Lying here like this with nothing on.

He reached up and touched his head.

—I still have my garland, he said.

At this, they began laughing, and while they were laughing they sat up, and he saw that they were in deep grass close to the lake. Their cast-off bathing suits lay in soggy heaps beside them. They were in a region of pools, rushes, small trees. Frogs quirped among the lily pads.

The girl sitting beside him dropped her head in sudden shyness and put her hands over her perfectly formed breasts.

—I hope you don't mind my scar, Johnny, she said in a low, thrilling voice.

He had seen it faintly scarlet, descending just to the roots of her left breast, deepening into a pool of cruelly writhen flesh where it ended. But it only emphasized the mystery and beauty of the creature who had been lying with him on the shore of Lake Paradise. And in answer to her question, he was about to put his arms around her again, when abruptly she sprang up and began to walk away from him.

—Catch me if you can! she said, looking back over her shoulder.

—Madame, he said, you have just challenged the fastest runner in Raintree County.

The gesture with which she flung her hair back and began to run was so wanton that he was smitten with a precise ambition, though up to this time he had hardly known what it was that he intended to do. Now, a. victorious smile curved his lips, and he sprang after. The olive-tinted nudity of the girl seemed about to dissolve in the green-gold light of the swamp. He made the pursuit much longer than was necessary while his eyes drank in this incredible creature reeling and running before him. He listened to her wild, soft cries. Twice he caught her, but when she struggled to escape, laughing and pushing him away, he let her go.

In this way they came to a place in the deep swamp where there were many small trees of one kind all growing from a grassy mound which rose from the damp floor of the marsh like an island. It seemed an ultimate place as he chased her up the gentle incline among the trees and caught her a third time. He had seen boulders strewn along the ascent, and there were two stones between which, panting with exhaustion, he stood holding his companion.

—You win the race, she said. To the victor—

Her hand came up and lazily pulled at the oakleaf garland around his head, and then suddenly the whole consented weight of her body was suspended only by the circle his arms made at her waist. Head reeling with light and heat, he stood a moment braced against this tyrannous weight that pulled his whole body into an attitude of resistance and desire. The earth seemed tremulous beneath his feet. It buzzed and softly clamored, beat him with quick, soft wings of wind and light. A dust of yellow flowers dripped on his shoulders and into the black hair of the girl.

He didn't know then who it was that he held. She was nameless,
untamed, candid. And as for him, even as the river found its way with slowness, as if it had an everlasting summer to swell and swell through its broad channel to the lake, so did he linger on the brink of young fulfillment, life's young American, wearing his victory garland. Mad images of desire, contest, and thrilling achievement, of bold exertions, words of valor and pagan disregard for old convention assaulted him in the rank air of Lake Paradise, where still his feet were arched to support the weight that was pulling and pulling at his strength. He shut his eyes. A flood of words on fragments of newspapers streamed down on him in a soft dust, describing mythical Events in which he was the hero. Stringbreaker, wirewalker, goldseeker, aeronaut of a blue and enterprising day, he lingered on the brink of . . .

TERRIFIC ASCENSION

(Epic Fragments from the
Mythic Examiner
)

The crowd became impatient, as the ascension had been delayed for so long and the balloon still lay collapsed on the car. Mr. Mountain gave a last look of appraisal at the sky, and as everything still seemed propitious he gave a signal to his assistants, who straightway began to inflate the sphere. Gradually the canvas globe rounded out under the pressure of the instreaming ethereal fluid, until with a few last vigorous puffs it burst into majestic rotundity, taut and straining to be off, pulling with gigantic force against the restraining ropes. The ballasting sandbags were torn violently from their place and it was only by dint of grabbing the flailing ropes and hanging on for dear life that Mr. Mountain's assistants, aided by volunteers from the crowd, could keep the prodigious ship from bursting from its moorings and soaring off into the azure with no passengers aboard. There was no time to be lost. With a brisk adieu, still wearing his stovepipe hat and jauntily swinging his cane, Mr. Mountain, overcoat and all, leaped handily aboard, where he was joined by Mr. Jennings and Mr. Luce. Your correspondent bestowed a farewell kiss on the lips of his intended, and notebook in hand, walked toward the eager craft, excited and not a little filled with trepidation at the thought of being the first professional eyewitness reporter of an aerial ascension. The men began to release the ropes, and no sooner had the ballast been removed than with a smooth, birdlike rush, the great sphere shot up and floated blithely down the air. Leaning out, your observer had the giddy dreamlike sensation of being carried aloft on the magic carpet
of the Arabian Nights. The City grew small. Figures of friends and strangers became antlike. Then, although there was no further sensation of movement, the rigid projectile was coasting serenely down the blue sunlit vistas of the upper air, proceeding southward at a tremendous rate of speed to . . .

A place of ancient memory waited for him beside still waters. A grove of flowering trees beside memorial waters.
A green isle in the sea, love, a fountain and a shrine.
There had been a legend and a prophecy of how . . .

The young hero swam a night and a day through the ocean stream and arriving at an island of various and pleasant growth, came forth streaming into sunlight, dashing the water from his hair and eyes. Then, entering a gloomy wood, he walked toward the center of the island, where . . .

—I feel right out on public view, he said.

—You're sweet, she said. O, you are
so
sweet, Johnny.

A GENERAL INVITATION

A general invitation is extended all around

To the people of the Union in every state and town,

To come and witness this great and daring feat

Of walking on the mammoth rope by the great Professor Sweet.

The crowd cheered the steel-legged Professor, who was doing his best to uphold the strength, resolution, and muscular agility of Americans before the world. He made his way through roaring thousands. He stopped once, and gesturing for silence, made one of his quaint speeches, to the effect that he had been practicing for two years and that he had every reason to suppose he was as adroit in all the complicated evolutions of the sport as the renowned Frenchman himself. He bespoke himself ready to do whatever another man could on a slack rope or a taut. Admission for the first performance, his virginal adventure in this breathtaking pastime, was free of charge. Taking in hand the usual long, smoothly planed pole, if anything a trifle above the dimensions commonly employed by the famous Frenchman, he set his foot tentatively on the wire and then, as if bracing himself for the shock of standing above the chasm over which he was expected to go and return, he paused while the full military band struck up a chorus. Then . . .

As the young hero approached the tree, he passed by flowers that kissed his body like soft mouths. He beat them down, observing with a sidelong glance the furious and sweet death of so much beauty. And the earth here became more moist and seemed as if it swayed beneath his feet. Looking upward he saw the sunburst of the tree in the very middle of the sacred grove while . . .

WAY DOWN SOUTH

Those accustomed to the pinching and penurious weathers of the North cannot possibly imagine until they have experienced it the daylong softness and fragrance of the Southern air. Below the Mason and Dixon Line, one passes almost imperceptibly into another realm, full of balsamic odors and blue skies of billowy clouds. And who shall sufficiently extol the loamy richness of that Southern earth and who shall describe . . .

THE WONDERS OF AERIAL NAVIGATION

Looking over the side of the car, we perceived that the smoke from the factories had faded. Streets grew narrower and darker, and at last the City had dwindled to a spot. The balloon now commanded an extended view of the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Illinois Rivers, and another water which we could not identify glimmered eastward in the direction which our flight was now swiftly taking. Your observer had now lost all sense of danger. His feeling was that ballooning, besides being the most pleasant and swift, was the safest mode of locomotion known. Steaming down a rapid current in a boat on a lovely evening, with sublime vistas, romantic caverns, and green foliage on either side, glistening waves below and mild sky above, is grand and delightful; sailing on an unruffled lake, parting the placid water and skimming like a gull with gentle fleetness, is ineffably glorious, but these enjoyable modes of travel yield in point of dainty pleasurableness to the birdlike grace and the impressive surroundings of aerial . . .

THERE HE GOES!

Without more ado, the young American ran a short way out onto the rope, where he seemed to hesitate. Then taking the pole more firmly in hand, he ran rapidly out to the middle, where again he paused briefly, and then, in less time than it takes to relate it, while the crowd gasped, his lithe young form was seen to negotiate the
whole length of the perilous crossing, and he leaped down on the far side to accept the applause of the crowd, louder than the cataract over which he had just safely transported himself. Then, as if stimulated by the excitement of his audience, he stepped once more upon the swaying rope, and running lightly out to the center, he stopped, placed the pole crosswise on the rope and stood on his head. As the crowd alternately applauded and begged him to return to safety, he went on to perform certain gymnastic evolutions so complicated as to bring gasps of horror. These acrobatic feats, performed at a fixed spot on the rope, were rendered all the more difficult because of the encumbrance of the pole with which at other times the intrepid boy maintained his equilibrium. Now, however, this unwieldy prop came very near precipitating him headlong to disaster as he several times executed headstands, bodyflips, hung with one leg from the rope, and once again achieved an upright position. The chasm of the Niagara River roared ominously hundreds of feet below, but the steelnerved little figure never for a moment lost his head and at last, amid salvos of applause, catching the balancing stick in his two hands, he ran lightly and easily back to the American . . .