Raintree County (153 page)

Corporal Johnny Shawnessy lifted the heavy load of papers and carefully put them back on the table. He picked up his suitcase and left the office. His throat felt hot and choky, and his eyelids burned. He walked across the street and put his suitcase down in the shade of the tree again. He sat down on it and stared at the ground.

When Johnny comes marching home again
(hurrah, hurrah). . .

The first wave of anger and disbelief passed and left him pale and weak. After all, what did the dead expect? Did the dead have any rights? Besides, long ago, he had said good-by to a tearstained face on a rainy night in December, and the next day he had left Raintree County with a bride, though the getaway hadn't been very cleverly timed.

It occurred to Corporal Johnny Shawnessy that his anger was the first sign that he was getting well and becoming a civilian again. In a few days, he would have all his old vanities and vices back. The purity of the soldier was already passing. But what about the yellow corpses in the Soldiers' Hospital, the mouldering form of Flash Perkins on the edge of a forest near Columbia, South Carolina? What was a newspaper article more or less to the dead? After all, he couldn't expect to come back and have the world at his feet. Who did he think he was anyway?

Panic rushed through him. He wanted to go back and read the rest of the papers. After all, in six months, terrible things could happen, things that one didn't even want to dream about. He hadn't had a single word from home for six months.

He got up and took his suitcase and started out of town along the familiar way. He felt as though he were going to choke, and reaching up found his collar buttoned tight and the blood throbbing beneath it. He opened the collar. Sweat dripped into his eyes. He ran a few steps now and then, but the heavy suitcase slowed him down. Grass, weeds, and flowers along the road were thick and fresh. In the air was a fragrance of clover hay, the first cutting.

They were cutting the clover in Raintree County, and Johnny Shawnessy had been six months buried in the memory of Raintree County.

The corn was a hand high, bright spears in wavering rows. Wheat, a tender, undulous carpet, covered the uplands along the
Shawmucky. When he reached the river bridge and looked down the street of Danwebster, he saw a few men around the General Store. He didn't want them to see him. He didn't want anyone to see him until he got back home. He made a quick decision. After crossing the bridge, he climbed down to a path that followed the river bank.

The river was cold and shallow here at its great south bend. The air was tranquil under the bordering trees. Frogs splashed in the shallows, fish leaped, heads of turtles broke the skin of the water, floating. The river had a cold old smell of rottenness and fishy life. The Civil War had come and gone, Chickamauga had been fought by furious thousands, Missionary Ridge had been scaled from base to summit, Atlanta had been burned, Savannah had been taken, Lee had surrendered, Lincoln had been shot, and Corporal Johnny Shawnessy had been interred in iambs. And all this was simply nothing to the river.

How beautiful the still air was under the trees beside the river! Ah, it was all here, the same plentiful and peaceful earth. All the old symbols were here, the tokens of the legend, waiting to be read. The great enigma was here, murmuring its lost language among the rushes at the river's edge. Whither, whither, whither, the waters said, and whence, whence, whence.

Johnny had expected to give the mill a wide berth to avoid seeing anyone, but to his surprise the mill was abandoned. The wheel had been dismantled, and several timbers were down. He sprang up on the northern abutment. Then on a sudden impulse, he walked across to the other side. The path had been freshly cut. He reached the railroad embankment, climbed over, and made his way to the hill beyond. He reached the iron gate of the Danwebster Graveyard. He could see the family lot over in the far corner, the two stones marking the graves of his little sisters who had died in the epidemic of 1842.

There was a new stone in the Shawnessy family lot.

He started over to it, but almost stumbled on a grave that was lying across the way. It had the usual raw look of a new grave. There were withered funeral bouquets lying on the mound. He glanced at the stone, rising in a tranquil arc. The legend was simple.

NELL
Wife of Garwood Jones

Died in Childbirth, May 24, 1865,
and
Lies in this Earth with her Infant Child.
. . . .
‘We Parted in the Springtime of Life,
Nell and I.'

S. F
OSTER

Johnny Shawnessy sat down on his suitcase again. He was really very weak.

He looked at the stone, reading and rereading the words. He looked at the fresh gash of the grave, the fast-withering flowers. It had rained since the burial.

So then, all the time, these legends had been a-building. Day and night, while he was gone from home, the words had kept coming from the presses. Time hadn't stopped in Raintree County, merely because Johnny Shawnessy had gone to the War. Birth, marriage, death, the cutting of the clover, the harvest of the corn—all these things went on.

And the river had carried its unceasing burden of musical waters to the lake, day after day, and who could say how many creatures had died and sprung into birth along the valley of its course!

If only this grave were not so new and naked and ashamed! If only the years had touched it with gentle curves and greenness!

He made some calculations. Nell had been dead for a week only. The child, since it was unnamed, must have been a very premature birth. May 24. That was the day of the Grand Review in Washington. Garwood must have rallied fast for the victory celebration in Freehaven.

Well, what about Corporal Johnny Shawnessy? He had been a jaunty marcher on that day. Or was there really a relationship between what he was doing that day and this legend in stone? Hundreds and thousands of years would make no difference now to the green-eyed, streambegotten girl named Nell. He had never known
her anyway, the real Nell, who had lived a hundred thousand hours in a Raintree County uniquely hers, while Johnny Shawnessy had gone selfishly along his own way, building fantastic dreams of love and fame.

Who was Nell Gaither that was once the beloved of Johnny Shawnessy? Who was she that lay beneath these weeds? Did she rise once from serpent waters—a precise little face, gold hair streaming, wary eyes? Was her white back a stately column in the sunlight? Who was she that was once the beloved of Johnny Shawnessy, under these flowers?

Was she the same whose young mouth was moist with a taste of passion on a haystack in summer long ago beside the river? (O, legend written with an oar in the pale flesh of the river!)

Had she remembered Johnny Shawnessy in her last hour, or did she not rather cling to those who were living, to her husband, her friends? There must have been many sorrowing, and the preacher must have said a good deal about beauty cut off in the prime and God numbering her among his angels.

What became of precise little faces? What became of girls who swam palely naked in rural waters? What became of words of undying devotion written to soldiers away to war? What became of the soldiers and the wars and the names of battles and the columns of casualties in the back pages of the newspapers?

But what became of Johnny Shawnessy, the dead boy, the fleet of foot, life's innocent victor?

Here were immense symbols and tokens strewn beside the river. Here were legends for a young man to read, who had been dead for a time and had come back to life. Here were memorial verses and graven columns—fragments, only, it was true, and half-inscriptions.

What became of the old newspapers and the reporters of the news in the old newspapers and the news reported in the old newspapers?

Perhaps it was better to have no legends at all, no letters composed into rigid words and pressed on sheets of paper. Break up the forms and melt the letters back. Let there be no more legends on the earth. Let life live and death die, and let there be no names for sorrowful recollection. Let there be no words for the earth, for love, for life, for death, for beauty and piquant faces.

Let there be no sorrow or recollection of life. Let there be only the river and its odor of fish and flower, let there be the river, the nameless river, flowing from distant to distant summer.

Let there be no geologists, archeologists, biologists, collectors of specimens, classifiers of species. Let no one disturb mounds beside the river and give names to extinct peoples. Let all the fossils remain undisturbed around the watering places of the earth. Let no one sorrow for the extinct dinosaur. Let no one grieve for the three-toed ancestor of the horse. Let no one mourn beside the tomb of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. Who was Abraham Lincoln of Springfield, Illinois? Who was Uncle Tom of Uncle Tom's Cabin? Who was Johnny Shawnessy of Raintree County? And what was the Republic that they died to save?

Let there be no more historians of species, nations, races, suns. Let there be no nebular hypotheses. Let there be entire forgetfulness and beautiful and blissful ignorance. Let there be no lusting for forbidden fruits. Let there be no historian of the decline and fall of empires, ancient or modern, or of republics ancient or modern, or of Raintree Counties, ancient or modern.

Let there be only the earth, which does not weep or have vanity. Let there be only the earth and the nameless memories that the flesh has. Does the frog have a name? Would it make the green frog happier to know that he is frog? Only the namers have names; only the bald mammals with the adroit hands write names on stones.

Down with the alphabet. Let there be no symbols traced on stones. Take away the words and give man back to the earth. Let the earth have its own. Let there be no more songs about the Old Plantation; let no one sing of the Old Kentucky Home. Let Old Black Joe go back to the jungle from which he came. Let Dred and all the other blackskinned thousands sink peacefully back into the Great Dismal Swamp, and do not emancipate them from ignorance into grief.

Go out and ask the earth about loyalties and listen for a response. Go out and ask the river about permanence, and listen to its voice of change. But stay away from graveyards and mounds beside the river. As long as you can, hero boy. As long as you can.

Beside the stone that had the word ‘Nell' on it, Johnny Shawnessy
sat very still with bent head. Well, he had come marching home again (hurrah, hurrah). Life's victor had corne back from the South, in a uniform with brave brass buttons. He had come up flowerstrewn avenues with bugles and thumping drums. (Receive him with garlands, o, ye virgins!)

The Hero of Raintree County sat on his suitcase and looked around him. The day was a typical Indiana scorcher.

What good had he been to those who loved him, believed in him, and remained more or less true to him (at least as long as he was alive), while he went around getting into forbidden places and doing forbidden things? Had he been able to hold back this legend of the earth? Had he, the supreme poet of his people, the bard of the Shawmucky (
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear),
been able to un-write this single legend? While he sat bemused in theatres, assassins leaped from the wings. While he marched in parades, a victor among victors, his postwar dreamworld (which was really his prewar dreamworld) expired in agony and became a legend on a stone.

It was all very simple. It was not he who was the maker of legends. The earth was the maker of legends, and he was one of the little legends of the earth. And the earth had trillions of such legends and absolutely no way of filing them for future reference.

His sadness was for more than the now shattered dream he had had of coming back to Nell's soft arms. (After all, the earth was full of girls who would consider it a privilege to solace Corporal Johnny Shawnessy and keep him from remembering battles.) His sadness was a universal sadness.

Or maybe it was only a kind of self-pity because John Wickliff Shawnessy had been done out of a good thing and a sweet thing and a lovely thing. Maybe it was all mawkish vanity; and what he was really worried about was the lost boy, Johnny Shawnessy, who had been buried after all, six feet under.

Put up a stone for the lost boy Johnny Shawnessy. He ran for garlands in the Court House Square. He had a talent for finding beauty in the river. He had a dream of love and fame. Put up a stone for life's eternal young American.

Now here was a thing ended. Now here was a chapter closed.

He put his head in his hands and leaned over. His tired young
mouth drew down at the corners. He kept shaking his head and trying to understand.

It was not just one stone in the earth. What he beheld beside the river was the grave of mankind. The banks of all the rivers of America were filled with white bones. They died on the Ganges and the Nile and the Seine and the Tiber and the Rhine. The history of mankind was a mound beside the river.

Was it possible that all the beauty, life, and loyalty, the brave dreams and the young hopes had to die after all, after all! Was it so easy to dispose of that intense young person who went by the name of Johnny Shawnessy? This young man had held up whole worlds by his single strength. He had floated a universe by the simple expedient of filling his lungs with air. With a very sensitive pencil he had wrought the fairest republic since the beginning of time.

Perhaps it was right after all to worry about himself. If he fell and came apart, all things fell and came apart. Who else could save the streambegotten girl or find beauty by the river? Who else could discover the secret of the Shawmucky, except him whose name had also flowed from remote ages? If he triumphed, there would be triumphs for all, but if he died, there would be deaths for all. It was still his legend, and they couldn't take it away from him.

Cities on the land, dwellers in cities, republic of the races, red, white, brown, and black, and yellow—human thousands, hungerers after infinite satisfactions! Soldiers of the Republic, dead in stinking explosions, yellow sacks of bone, debris of the Great War! Slaves—dark millions, hunting for a way from Africa to light! you shall be rescued by one who includes you all, the sum of all that you are or ever were or will be—a single, simple person not easily overcome.