Raintree County (137 page)

Just a Fourth of July bonfire. Some fragments of old lumber that used to be somebody's house, loose odds and ends of lives.

—You may prate as you please, the Perfessor said, of beauty and the good—human life's a dark affair. In the Swamp all was fated, but no one knew it. Now, our advance in understanding consists of
knowing
that all is fated.

—But what you call fate includes moral decisions made by human beings. The tragedies of human life merely teach us that we can't escape responsibility. In short, we can't resign from the Republic.

The two men smoked in silence. The red glare in the west now flickered through the palings in the fence.

—John, the Perfessor said, shaking his head, what a bloody tapestry our life has been! In this modern republic, nineteen hundred years after the birth of Christ, a million young men killed each other in hot blood because human skins differ in pigment. And the end is not in view.

The Perfessor shot a keen glance at Mr. Shawnessy.

—Your own life, he said, has been strangely touched by this mixture of the bloods. You know, John, there was something you never told me about your first marriage, though you hinted at it.

—Yes?

—Maybe I shouldn't ask, the Perfessor said, but I've always been damn curious—

He hesitated.

—Yes? Mr. Shawnessy said, his voice gentle and remote.

He was flicking pages in the book of his own life, a myth of himself and his memories of the Republic in War and Peace.

The trains are changing in the station of Myself. I must catch a darktime express. Good night, ladies. Good night, ladies. Good night, sweet ladies, we're going to leave you now. . . .

O, let's go back and live in old daguerreotypes of houses by the river.
O, subtle, musky, slumbrous . . .

Yes, I was guilty too. I never could resist the shape of beauty by the river. But I didn't know that I set my mouth to the mouth of a dark Helen.

Did you think that a single black man could feel the lash and you not bear the scar? Did you think that a single comrade might lie dead in the July corn, and you not lose a portion of yourself? Did you think that mankind could go to war and you not fight?

Go back. Unwind the tapestry and trace the scarlet thread. Go back, lonely young voyager on rivers. Relive the sibilant names. Review old lusts beside the river. Lay on the lash and fill the slaver's hold. Plant seed and raise a crop of cotton in the bottom lands. Stand up and give us pompous words about the rights of man, while the darkies labor on the levee.

(All this is the marvellous myth of Raintree County, where all threads come together and where all rivers run and all must find the lake, where all the trains are changing in the stations, and every single word that ever was is written into riddles between the four lines of a square.)

But tread with care. There are lost souls here. There is a piteous and lost republic. Tread with care. There are lost lives here that will cry out like sinners touched by flame. Catch the train. Hurry back along the branchlines of departed Raintree Counties. There are lost souls here. There are lost voices here. There are lost songs. Tread with care.

O, don't you remember a long time ago? O, don't you remember

he felt, as the train chugged on toward Three Mile Junction. He shook the last of a brief, uneasy sleep from his head. Smoke sifted in through the open windows on his already grimy face. He stared at the daguerreotype in his hand, in which four faces looked palely out from under the shadow of a Southern mansion. He studied the mad scrawls on two letters that had started him two days ago on a hunt for two lost children. He had touched their ghostly trail in a store where a doll had been bought. He had seen the two lost faces imprisoned on a glass plate in a photographer's shop. One of these faces had taken the name Henrietta Courtney, a certain Negro girl, dark Helen, dead long ago in fire. He had said good-by to Nell Gaither in the station in Indianapolis. And now the chase had nearly come fullcircle to the place where it had started.

In a few minutes, he would be home in Freehaven, and the thing would be settled. No doubt this dark old melodrama in which he had been entangled for four years would turn out all right—more or less—and the nightmare of the last three days would have an awakening.

Nevertheless, he felt more terror now than at any time since the hunt had started, as he sat helpless, holding some fragments of a life. He had been slowly assembling the pieces of a curious puzzle for three years now. He reshuffled the pieces, slowly fitting them into place, still hunting for the missing piece.

The faces in the daguerreotype were pale smudges in the yellow gaslight. Behind them rose the pillars of a doomed house. Here (but twenty years ago) was a little girl beside a river.

Then it seemed to him that only through a weakness of the will is the past relinquished. A human life had a dimension that wasn't perfectly understood. In this dimension, the whole river of one's life existed all at once, a legendary symbol written across the face of time. And the source of the river was in the gulf to which it flowed
as well as the spring from which it rose. And if one were to understand the enigma of a twisted life on the land, where would one begin, except in a daguerreotypal river flowing past a daguerreotypal house?

The river was flowing, flowing to the sea. It poured its cold strong waters past dissolving swamps. The yellow pollen sifted on the river, the yellow pollen sank and bubbled in the river. The river passed a city on the Delta.

It was summer, and a little girl with violet eyes grew up beside the river, her life rising out of ancient summers where the hot nights throbbed with voices of darkies singing on the levees. They picked the cotton in the fields and piled the bales beside the river, and the steamboats passed in neverending line, their whistles shrilling and their big wheels turning. And the river passed and washed the earth away.

Whence had she come—Susanna, lost child of a stained republic? Who was the mother of this child? Who was the father of this child? Was it possible to follow this child, holding her unburnt doll, back through the windings of the Great Swamp?

The river passed in darkness to the sea, the yellow river passed in darkness, flowing, flowing to the sea.

This little being, being human, knew love and hatred by the river. One night she hunted for a doll in an old log cabin. On the levees, the darkies were gay, a glare of bonfires lit the night to celebrate the birth of the fairest of all republics. And her small form in a nightdress (dark hair hanging to her shoulders) wavered on a mirror at the landing. She saw the dark flesh and the white; the rose of love bloomed scarlet in the night, the symbol of a stained republic. This was the thing she found while hunting for a doll.

(Do you want to lose the most precious thing in all the world? Can you keep the most tragic of all the secrets?)

After that, she never ceased to be a little girl who was hunting something in the night.

The days went by like a shadow o'er the heart.
There were novels about sentimental ladies and courtly gentlemen, in which mysterious notes broke up loves, effected conciliations and happy endings. Was it strange that in a little girl's jealous anger, the fatal note was penned?

(How could I know that it would kill the dearest thing in all the world? Didn't I hunt for the letter after that and ever since in the album where I left it? Didn't I hunt and hunt to get it back before she read it?)

Who set the fire that burned the house beside the river?

No one will ever know. No one will ever know who put the torch to the house and burned it to the ground. Was it a little girl who did it with a jealous word? Who was it murdered two bodies joined by fire taken from the ashes of the house beside the river? Whose was the footstep passing in the night? And could anyone tell after the fire which was the mother of Susanna? Did they ever put out the fire entirely and heal the scar and stop the smouldering pain over the left breast?

So there was one who grew up a shape of this earth; her name was musical and proud like names of cities razed. Her body was lovely like Helen and the Greeks, though scarred with a scarlet letter.

And the river flowed, the river flowed in music and strangeness, the father of all waters, dividing east and west and joining north and south, through shore and shallow, tarn and tangling swamp to the sea. And the senators stood up, put togas on their phrases, they bade the black flesh lie quiet in the chains, they bade the clamorous West to be still.

Could they make the words be still? Could they chain the strong words? Could they keep seed from growing and hunting for the light? Could they keep the black flesh in the Great Dismal Swamp?

(For there were strong men ever going West.
0, Susanna, do not cry for me!
They were putting the rails across the plain. The covered wagons shrugged and staggered through the passes. The engines hit the grade at forty miles per hour. They were coming all the time. They were coming down to . . .)

The days went by like a shadow o'er the heart.
And one day a hero, lost young bard of Raintree County, sprang from the sunlight of a court house square and entered a room where his image was traced forever with a finger of light.

The train brought Johnny Shawnessy into Three Mile Junction, stopped briefly, and started up for the short run into Freehaven. Several new passengers had got on, crowding the coach. He would soon be home.

Then he remembered the afternoon on the shore of Lake Paradise, when a young gymnosophist had performed for cheering thousands, had walked a tightrope over the broad Ohio, achieved gymnastic bliss, ridden a balloon across the Republic, made bold forays below the Mason and Dixon Line, beaten down desire with a branch of yellow flowers.

And he remembered faces around a telegraph window and a letter at the post office, jasmine-scented from the South. A gray face had been seen many times in the Court House Square, of an old man, biblically stern. (Blow ye the trumpet, blow, all over the Republic!) One evening of November, when leaves dripped on the dead grass, he had stood by a lonely rock at the limit of the land and had remembered duty.

—Jedgin' from the light of them fires, they sure are raisin' a ruckus in town, a man said, peering out of a window. Reckon maybe they're celebratin' this here great victory at Gettysburg.

There was a strong glare of light in the sky over Freehaven, but as the train turned now directly toward the town, Johnny could see nothing more. He sat waiting.

The fragments of an immense puzzle of a human life and the Republic continued to fall into place, moving more and more swiftly and strongly like a river proceeding southward collecting a thousand random waters into one inexorable tide. On such a flood of waters he and Susanna Drake had gone South for their honeymoon to sultry nights of love in an old American city by the Delta.

He looked again at the daguerreotype in his hand. A tall house beside a river with five windows on its face! He remembered then the house near the Square in Freehaven; walkings at night, strange evasions, a scarlet strand of madness growing.

(When we lay together in the night, my unforgotten darling, when we touched our bodies in the night and made that fatal crossing, when we lay dreaming in the darkness so long and long, my darling, we were coming down to Sumter.
O, Susanna, do not cry for me. . . .
)

He remembered then how the bloody rose of Sumter had dawned on the Republic. Meanwhile he had lived in the tall house far from battles and had seen a being that was only a beginning come into Raintree County, Little Jim Shawnessy, a blue-eyed child. This child
had come from the swamp where no one knew what seeds had intercrossed, where black and white and red and yellow sought each other blindly in the timeless underside of Raintree County.

He remembered then the face of his mad little wife fading from the doorpane back into the detested fabric of the house.

Who was Susanna Drake? A stream of reflections in mirrors? A sequence of shadows on lightsensitive plates? A river of dreams of rivers? Had she ever awakened from a dream that had begun one night before a fire? Perhaps she had gone on, always moving in that dream, walking in terror at night, hunting through the chambers of a tall house with a lamp in her hand, hunting for a secret darker than any other, whose source was hidden in the night of the Great Dismal Swamp. Did she hunt for a secret so dark that it could only be purged in fire?

He shut his eyes. Instantly, he saw the face of a little boy, an earnest small face in darkness, with violet eyes. A child's arms clutched at him wildly. A child voice cried,
Daddy!

Johnny Shawnessy's body was bathed in cold sweat. His heart pounded. He was choking in the smoky heat of the car.

A man standing in the crowded coach leaned over and peered from the window.

—Must be some big excitement in town! Look at all them people on the road there!

Many people in wagons and buggies were going into town along the road that ran parallel with the tracks. Two or three wagons on their way out of town turned around and started back. The faces on the road were faintly scarlet.

Johnny stuffed the letter and the daguerreotype into his coat-pocket. He got up and walked to the car door. Though the train had just entered the outskirts of Freehaven, he opened the door and stepped down to the last step, which skimmed the weeds along the track. He leaned out, watching. Other passengers lined up behind him. Above the noise of the train he could hear people shouting, bells ringing.

They were in town now. Streets, houses, buildings shuttled past. People stood before their houses all looking in one direction. Down all the ways of Raintree County in this commemorative night, hooves thundered, wheels turned, feet flew, all moving toward a center.