Raintree County (145 page)

—But doesn't this thought make you unhappy, Professor? Do you really want to die?

With a festive gesture, the Perfessor tossed the empty bottle over the side of the porch where it landed in some bushes.

—Life is sorrow, he said. And death is a stoppage of sorrow. Why then be sorry to die?

Where every sickness is unsickened and every lust is cooled.

—I think it's likely, the Perfessor said, that all the myths of homecoming are really symbols of death. If I took up teaching school again, I'd teach only one thing—resignation to death. By the way, what did I do with my heart pills?

The Perfessor fumbled in his pockets and pulled out the other bottle.

—I will tell you a secret, he said. Perhaps because I'm drunk.

The Perfessor did something that Mr. Shawnessy hadn't seen him do all day long. He removed his glasses and breathed on them. His face acquired a childlike, defenseless look while he carefully polished the lenses with a silk handkerchief.

—Years ago, he said, I was a child in Raintree County.

He paused as if the words just said were full of labyrinthine meanings.

—My father had died before I was old enough to remember him. When I was only ten years old, my mother died. In that death, Jerusalem Webster Stiles knew the secret of life—which is death—and never after added to his wisdom though he added to his words. And with that act, also, he left Raintree County and went East, where he had roots. Now, as you know, he came back to Raintree County when he was a young man, but he never came back home. He
learned early, with the bitterness of the homeless child, that the earth cares nothing for our grief, and that even our mother who cared for us in life cares nothing for us in death. We care for her and keep her image alive in our brief world of memory and grief, but she doesn't care for us any longer. She has forgotten us. She doesn't remember our face.

—Your mother, Mr. Shawnessy said. You never mentioned her before. You remember her—clearly?

—My mother, the Perfessor said amiably, was a tall, thin woman in a black dress. She had a sharp, sweet voice. She knew the Bible backwards and made me memorize all the popular passages. I went to church every Sunday and to prayer meetings during the week. I spouted verses at the drop of a hat, being considered a prodigy. I hated God, and I think he hated me. We never got along together.

The Perfessor took another drink.

—My mother, he said, had a kind smile and a wistful look around the mouth. She meant I should be a preacher and praise God. She was very stiff and terrible in her coffin, and they buried her at noon on a summer's day. I remember this like yesterday. I wept so many pints of tears that the well has been dry ever since. Sometimes, I try to cry to see whether I can or not. I make a very impressive racket—but no tears. The bucket comes up empty. After her death, they kept trying to get me to recite Bible verses, saying it would get me over my grief. I went East with relatives and became slowly the pitiful, harmless creature that you behold today. This is the autobiography of Jerusalem Webster Stiles, which may be said to have ended when he was ten years old.

—If you could only cry, Professor, you might recover your faith in life.

—What is there to cry about? the Perfessor said. When you have known all grief and learned all wisdom at the age of ten?

—But you loved your mother?

—Yes, I suppose I did, the Perfessor said. But when I came back to the County years later, I found no trace of her except her grave, and I felt no desire to dig that up again.

—So you believe that the dead are utterly and forever gone?

—This I believe, the Perfessor said, and I assure you that once you accept this wisdom and give up to it entirely, you get peace. You
lose your vanity and most of your vexations. Nothing is left of the dead but earth. Can you refute this wisdom?

—Perhaps I can.

—And how will you do it, hero boy?

—By the legend of my life, with which I refute all sophistries. By a myth of homecoming and a myth of resurrection.

Come back to Raintree County, wandering child. Remember the great deaths and the great homecomings. Come back, and bring a sprig of lilac. For you will always be on trains and coming home, and the legend that recalled you from the City will always be tingling along the wires of the Republic.

Come back to Raintree County and find your home again. And you will find again the sphinxlike silence of the earth. Knock hard, young hero, on the gates of death.

Listen to the wail of the train at the crossing. This is the myth of America and of those who cross America on trains. This is the myth of those who come back home.

Who would not suffer grief? Grief is the most beautiful garland given to love. (And who would not suffer love?)

But listen to the wail of the train at the crossing. O, sound of sorrow and farewell, as we go down the years of life into the gulf together! Lost years. Last years. Stations upon the plain. One-minute stops of life and smoky rooms where I got down with crowds. O, gates of iron gushing human faces!

Delay the trains! Keep them from crossing rivers! Delay the iron horse of time!

My gilded years come back to me, my postwar years. The Republic was roaring West; factories mushroomed from the nightsoil of cities. But there was a message for me to come back home. I had known already how the legend would end. All the great legends of the earth are certain like the earth.

For the saddest legend of my life was only some pencil marks on paper, a pulse of atoms in a wire. It was the one undissuadable legend. It had been coming all the time down all the wires and all the ways of the world since the world began, and it found a lost young man in the City and made him once more a passenger on trains, for it was

was in his pocket as he travelled by train along the trunklines of the Republic. When his train came into Pittsburgh, he remembered dully that the Great Strike was still on. Only a week ago, he had seen the Strike become a bloody war in the yards at Pittsburgh. He remembered an army leaderless and lost in darkness. In the Workers' neighborhood a boy named Johnny Fabrizio had lain dead.

Since that day in Pittsburgh, he had taken the warm flesh of the City into his arms and had possessed it by rejection. Since that time, he had received a telegram. He knew now that time couldn't be measured by Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, but only by the revolutions of the soul.

The telegram that he kept in his pocket and sometimes took out for rereading had already acquired a crumpled antiquity.

JOHN WICKLIFF SHAWNESSY:

COME HOME. . . .

A few words had crossed the statelines and rivers of the Republic and had found him in the City.

As the train passed slowly through Pittsburgh with unexplained delays, he saw the wreckage of the yards, a drab aftermath of battle—ashes, watersoaked rags, lumps of iron, overturned cars, gutted buildings, spewed bricks. Troops were in force, and when night fell and the train hadn't yet left the station, torches sputtered in the yards, and the air was charged with excitement, as if at any time the fighting might flare up again.

As he was leaving Pittsburgh at last, train bells were tolling. He heard them in the yards of city after city on his way back home. They went on tolling and tolling the bloody dirge of the Great Strike. With troops and court injunctions and arrests without right of trial, the Strike was being broken. Cash Carney had been absolutely right. But the trouble was a long time dying in the land.
Usually, John Shawnessy would have expected to come home in a day and a night, but he was many days getting home now because of the Strike.

Those days, the Strikers gathered along the trainways, standing sometimes in mute hundreds. Often at night, the train would be stopped by Strikers, John Shawnessy would be awakened from a fitful sleep, a lantern would be thrust into his face, voices would say,

—Is this the feller?

—No, that ain't the one. Must have been the next car down.

—Who are you, Mister?

—John Shawnessy.

—Where you from?

—New York.

—Where you goin'?

—Indiana.

—What's your business?

He showed them the telegram, and they passed on.

Several times, men raised lanterns to the windows.

—Are there any soldiers on this train?

—No.

—Damn good thing!

Through these summer nights and days of anger and pent violence, he passed, obeying an old command. For certain words had come and found him in the City. They had been reaching out for him with feminine and pleading hands, and they had called him home.

During these days, he hated the bigness of America. These miles of iron roadways, these planless cities, these stations, depots, roundhouses, warehouses, grain elevators, factories were the gray huge swollen river of American time. Like a gulf of bitter waters he had to drink it down before he could come home.

But there was a dark satisfaction, too, in these many delays because they kept the legend of the words he had got from becoming final. Perhaps a man might, by crowded thought, by accumulation of images, linger for a hundred lifetimes between two unrelated points on the vast earth of America.

The convulsions of the Strike had reached Indiana before him.
More days were lost as he was diverted to Chicago, and from there down to Indianapolis, where the Strike had reached a climax of violence. During a stop-over there, he got out briefly in the Union Station and saw the backwash of bloody riots in which troops under the command of General Benjamin Harrison had been called in by a court injunction to put down the disturbance.

Strangely, all during this time, he had a morbid preoccupation with the lives and destinies of other people whom he saw, passengers on trains. He seemed to understand as never before the isolation and uniqueness of other human beings. Each one, he knew, was going a private voyage across time, approaching or departing from the terminals of birth, marriage, death, from the cities of joy and sorrow; and each, whether he knew it or not, carried in his pocket a crumpled telegram telling him to come back home.

Then on a brilliant August afternoon, he was speeding out of Indianapolis on the way to Raintree County. Familiar names went by, tolling the minutes off. Those days, the trains ran unpredictably, even on the local lines, and he hadn't been able to get a telegram through. Consequently, when he got down at the station in Freehaven, he looked in vain for a familiar face. The town was hot and sleepy, and hardly anyone was on the Square.

John Shawnessy set out to walk home. He was unshaven, grimy, sweaty. His suitcase was heavy. His city suit was baggy and hot. The streets blurred and swam in his eyes. Looking back, he saw the flag limply hanging on the tower of the New Court House. The clock said three o'clock.

He was dizzy and panting as he went on through the outskirts of the town. The weeds along the road seemed insultingly lush, tall, fragrant. Thousands of voracious grasshoppers seethed at the edges of the road, frightened by his feet. The Shawmucky was choked with reeds, flowers, small trees, mudbars. As soon as he crossed the bridge, he left the road and picked his way through the lost yards and fallen fences of Danwebster, following a lane that led down to the mill on the river. He crossed the structure of wood and rock that still spanned the river there. He climbed the railroad, went down the embankment, ascended the hill to the iron gates of the graveyard, entered.

The Danwebster Graveyard hadn't been mowed for several weeks.
As he walked through the deep grass, hundreds of insects rose and fell like seeds from the hand of a sower.

He went down on his knees before a fresh mound in the southeastern corner of the yard. The tall stone, surmounted by a cross, had the legend

MOTHER
Ellen Shawnessy
1801-1877

There were bouquets of withered flowers on the grave. The sun beat hard on the crusted earth.

He lay on the earth, and the earth gave no sign, except to remain beautiful with summer. The river made a little sound in the shallows. A train passed, crying.

He thought of a face darkly tranquil in the earth below him.

Then he remembered the living face of his mother, Ellen Shawnessy. And with this memory there came to him like a tide of musical waters the legend of his days in Raintree County. The face of his mother leaned down to him from a prehistoric past. This young, vivid face with the affectionate smile moved, and the mouth said the single piercing word that had touched him into being.
Johnny!
With that word came the memory of his father, T. D. Shawnessy, benignly nodding down to him from a great height. The old days came back, the days of his childhood on the breast of the land, a life steeped in myths and golden quests. Like invulnerable angels, the forms of his father and mother moved on the young earth of Raintree County. From the grass and flowers that brushed his face a sweet, wild fragrance rose of all the withered summers distilled into the little house behind the house. He remembered the primeval Home Place in the County, the log cabin, the road before it—a pioneer trace, the great oak forest, a twilight of stately trunks.
Johnny!
The word was talismanic. It called into being the newer Home Place of Before the War and the days of his burgeoning manhood. He remembered golden afternoons on the upland meadows, harvest of wheat and corn. He remembered the Old Court House, the shrine of clockless days when there had been no death. He remembered a hundred Saturdays, Memorial Days, Fourths of July, footraces, picnics, ice-cream socials, church suppers. The form of a young professor stood at the blackboard in a brick building and
chalked a slanting script across it. The river ran through the whole bright legend, green waters of prophecy, rising from an unknown source and flowing to a lake.
Johnny!
With a pang of sadness, he heard the name said like a caress by the mouth of one who was lost and gone forever on the great river of the years.