Raintree County (149 page)

That's what she was. She was lost in the woods as I've heard people say. She had got lost. It was too late now to do anything about it.

She had never been lost before, unless it was a long time ago as I've heard people say because a long time ago she couldn't remember where she was.

But God took care of all little children, and God would take care of her. She was lost in the woods as I've heard people say.

She began to cry a little then, being lost. She would have cried more, but she heard voices calling to her.

—Eva! Eva!

They weren't so very far away, and she called back.

—Papa!

Her voice wasn't very strong because the voices just went on saying, Eva, Eva, the same way, and the way they said it was very musical. They made the name last a long time, and the sound went on quavering after it was really over.

She wandered away from the water and came back, and pretty soon, she heard Papa's voice very close say,

—E-e-e-e-e-va!

—He I nam, Papa.

—Stay where you are, Papa said.

He came over to her, stomping and wading through water. She was very happy to see him and said,

—I dot my dreth dutty.

—So you did, Papa said.

He picked her up and gave her a big squeeze. He was all scratched, and his shirt was torn, and his hair was mussed. As they walked back, he kept calling out,

—I've found her! I've got her!

He went a long way around, and it kept getting darker and darker. When they got to the lake, it was very dark. A lot of people came up with lanterns and kept shining them at Eva.

—Eva, you sure gave us a scare, people said.

She just clung to Papa and was very happy. They got into a boat, and several people were rowing boats over the lake. There were big lights on the water. Papa told her she must never run away again.

—Wheh ith Wethley? she asked.

—O, he's all right, Papa said. Count on Wesley.

When they got back to the camp, Mamma came down, and her face was all wet as a child's is when it has been crying, and she gave Eva a very stern, unhappy look and squeezed her very hard, and said,

—Well, pshaw, Eva,
didn't
you give us a scare!

Everybody was around them and walking with them when they went up to the tent.

—I'm hungwy, she said.

They took her into the hotel and gave her so much to eat she thought she would pop. Everybody at the lake didn't seem to have anything to do except to come in and watch her eat. Men kept coming in bunches with lanterns, and someone would yell,

—She's in here. John found her on the fer side of the lake.

—Right in the middle of the swamp, Papa said, just ready to fall into a pool two or three feet over her head. How she got that far without drowning I'll never know.

—How'd you happen to go there, John? a man said.

—Just a hunch.

—Look at her eat!

—Poor child! she's starved.

She had never been up after dark before. It was just as black as when she woke up sometimes at night. When they carried her out of the hotel and down to the tent, it was sort of cool, and there were lots of people around all smiling and coming up to see her. Her mother took the little dirty dress off and bathed her. Papa picked up the dress and shook it and the little yellow flowers fell out of the pockets.

—Where did you get these? he said.

—Unduh a twee, she said.

—We'll have to give Eva the grand prize in Natural History, he said.

He stood with a strange look on his face sifting the tiny flowers from one hand to the other.

She had meant to tell more about the flowers and all the things she had seen because these were things that no one had ever seen before, and she wanted desperately to tell Papa about them, but she didn't have the words, and she got all sleepy, and they put her to bed.

The moment she shut her eyes, she was back under the trees in the middle of the swamp, where the earth rocked her softly and the warm sunlight touched her cheek, and the soft yellow flowers fell on her hair and eyelids, they said that they made honey out of flowers, and she was hungry and a little sad, waiting for them to find her, and their voices were far-off and

HAD BEEN A LONG TIME CALLING
AND CALLING HER TO
COME

—
BACK
where I started from, the Perfessor was saying. Well, thirty-three years ago, the Lord God Jehovah drove me out of Raintree County, and now I've driven him out.

He and Mr. Shawnessy walked up on the verandah and sat down again in the swing.

—And to think, the Perfessor said, that the old ranter himself had been riding the circuit only this morning. Well, it's been a busy day for us all.

The Perfessor looked at Mrs. Brown, who was still standing near the gate. He sighed.

—If I had your chances and my morals, John, what a time I'd have! Couldn't I love that, though! Ah, that is sweet! Look at her out there! Ah, John, life is so good to us, and we are so bad to it! It gives us beauty and the earth and days and nights. Then we build our walls and weapons and defy each other to come in.

The Perfessor was very hoarse. He and Mr. Shawnessy lit cigars.

—You certainly are putting on a good show today, John. As for me, I've nearly talked myself out. What time is it?

—Nine-fifty, Mr. Shawnessy said, consulting his watch.

—What time does my train come through?

—Twelve o'clock.

—You're sure it'll stop?

—Yes, we'll wave it down with a lantern. But, frankly, I don't like to let you go into this dark night, Professor. What will become of you?

—O, it's very simple, the Perfessor said. I shall die.

—In my opinion, no one will hold harder to life than you. You'll take pills to the end and expire with the beginning of a witty word on your lips, as if you intended to finish it in the hereafter.

—But if we could only resign ourselves to death,
complete
death, the Perfessor said, how much happier we'd be! I seem to see things more clearly tonight, John. And I'll give you my
History of Mankind
in a few hundred words, which are more than it deserves.

The Perfessor took a long, hard pull on his last bottle.

—THE HISTORY OF MANKIND
by Professor
JERUSALEM WEBSTER STILES

Sometime in the mist of the hugely indifferent ages, the ancestor of Man climbed down out of the elm and walked on his hind legs. The female of the species was beginning to lose the hair around her vestigial tail because the male of the species liked it better that way and chased the ones with the bare behinds. This is called Natural Selection. From this beginning Man became the Bald Mammal—though I must say he carried it a little too far. The tail itself was beginning to curl up and wither, and some of the foremost sports of the day expressed a strong preference for the ladies who didn't have this curious twig.

Dawn Man was a dumb little character with a jut jaw and a flat head, bearing a remarkably close resemblance to a cousin of mine in Spokane. Back in his Asian homeland, where for centuries he enjoyed immunity from serious competition, he managed to evolve sub-species of different colors.

While he was still in his original home, Dawn Man began to enjoy a loud blat that he discovered in his throat. He brayed loudest in the mating season and from that time forth made poems. He was a pugnacious runt from the beginning and fought ferociously with other males for the possession of his little bearded doxies.

With the discovery of fire, our little bastard progenitor won a secure foothold on terra firma and a resounding victory over the other mammals, who were afraid of his torch. Sometime after that, he discovered words, and by words he began to build up his brain, being no doubt somewhat less attractive after he made the top of his head bulge. He spent several thousand years adding to his cortex and his vocabulary, and meanwhile the races of mankind began to spread out, and whole cycles of languages flowered and decayed. Language gave Man a means of transmitting his knowledge from generation to generation. Thus culture came about, being the intellectual inheritance of mankind as distinct from the physical. Morality grew from the fact that Man was a social beast. All Man's moral sanctions were really social. And the only reason Man ever held back his hand in the whole range of his history was the fear of retaliation.

This little Dawn Man, our poor relation, our skeleton in the biological closet, had wonderful hands. His little deft hands, developed by swinging on limbs and picking fleas, were as good as Modern Man's, and with hands and words he developed his brain. For the human
brain itself, with all its wonderful processes of language, memory, aesthetic feeling, and association, was only a highly specialized instrument of survival. Some of the variations of the species seem to run away with themselves and develop beyond the point of utility, and Man's brain, with its myth-making power, wasn't an unmixed gift. Primitive Man was a creature so enmeshed in taboos and totems that he was much less free than the beast he hunted for food. Biologically, Man never came very far from the little bald mammal with the deft hands and vestigial tail who came down from the Miocene oaks all ready to elect Garwood B. Jones President of the United States.

Modern Man began with the discovery of the alphabet. Modern Times were characterized by the following grand illusions—warfare on a large scale, art, religion, and science, most of which had to be written off as a dead loss to the development of life. For example, the invention of gods and finally of God didn't help the Bald Mammal to any noticeable extent. Religion was a purely intramural pastime of the existing tribes. Taken as a whole, God was merely Man's pathetic hope that a creature like himself devised the world.

As for who devised the world, Man never found out. Science, the religion of the intelligent man, never told him who devised the world. But the world wasn't well explained by imagining a Person who made it. After all, what was the Person of God? The most searching theologians were obliged to deprive It of all real attributes and make of It a Great Someone who was Nobody and Nothing. The most advanced men said, Nature is: this Isness is what I believe in because I can see it, measure it, and make predictions about it.

In the department of miscellanies, I wish to take special note of the Christian Religion, the Republic, and the United States of America. The Christian Religion was the cultural product of a little tribe with delusions of grandeur. By a fascinating historical process, the infection spread. But Christianity reached its peak in the Middle Ages, and erosion set in. The Church encouraged the Bald Mammal to believe in his importance, and he could believe in it only if he seemed important enough to be punished for his crimes. Actually, the Universe never cared enough about Man even to punish him. It just accepted him and let him live and die as he could. As for the Republic, it was merely the primitive horde squared—and acted like it. America was one of the more picturesque migrations of the Bald Mammal. One sub-species exterminated another by superior weapons and numbers. As an instrument of biological survival, the American Culture proved a wondrous supple weapon. The Doctrine of Moral and Political Equality invited expansion by attracting other people to its
banners. The Economics of Unlimited Material Expansion and Free Enterprise kept the race on its toes and squelched the unfit. And of course the Americans stole a magnificent hunk of earth from lo! the poor Indian.

—And how did it all end?

—We gibbon apes, who superseded Mankind as the master race on the planet, look back today with a certain nostalgia on that quaint dead-end of the Simian Family, whose specialized nervous system led to self-annihilation. Unlike most species, whose decline and fall are gradual, Mankind's collapse would appear to have been sudden and spectacular. Though more weakly armed than the insect in the reproductive battle, Man's overthrow would appear not to have been induced by procreative weakness. The most ancient historians of our own race, to whom there remained some literary relics of the pregibbon ages, refer over and over to the amorous fury with which the human males wooed their pertbreasted and plumpbottomed females (to use the epithet of that quaint old historiographer Jehoshaphat Wooster Stuttius, whose veracity in this particular there is no reason to doubt). Probably it was Man's own somewhat remarkable gifts that proved his undoing. He was his own—and life's—greatest enemy. By his extraordinary mechanical ingenuity, he discovered ways of destroying the delicate adjustment of the species to one another. And in the year 2032, he blew himself right off the face of the earth.
Requiescat in pace.

The Perfessor made a small, neat smoke ring, which rose slowly and somewhat mournfully into the night.

—And this is
The History of Mankind?

—This is it, the Perfessor said. What can you say against it?

—Against it, I'll set another history, which is included by it but which includes its includer.

—And this is?

—The Legend of Raintree County,
Mr. Shawnessy said. A little fable with multiple meanings, and a moral for a vestigial tail.

—All right, the Perfessor said, let's hear it.

—THE LEGEND OF RAINTREE COUNTY
by
JOHN WICKLIFF SHAWNESSY

Once upon a time a child looked abroad on the darkness of a Great Swamp. And a voice spoke and said a Word.

And behold! the child lived in a place called Raintree County, which had been forever, even as the child had been forever. This was the magic of the Word, for the Word was of God, and the Word was God.

But the child had forgotten the curving path by which he had come into Raintree County, and he had forgotten the location of the shrine where the Word was spoken, and he had forgotten the Tree, which was the living embodiment of the Word. And as he grew in strength and years, he had a quest to find the Tree and the sacred place, which was the source of himself.