Raintree County (154 page)

Looking across the graveyard, he saw the new stone in the Shawnessy family lot. He got up and walked over.

The inscription was simple.

JOHN WICKLIFF SHAWNESSY
1839-1864
In Memoriam

. . . .

‘Sleep in thy hero grave, beloved boy!'

G. J
ONES

He took hold of the top of his tombstone and tugged on it. It was firm as if it had taken root. He gritted his teeth and pushed and pulled. The stone wanted to stay there. With a great effort he tore it loose from the earth and pushed it over. It fell flat, curiously solid and inert, the words staring up. In a fury of effort, he picked it up and carried it to the brow of the hill and rolled it down.

He picked up his suitcase and took his way back to the railroad. He climbed the embankment and began walking down the ties, peering through the woods in the direction of the Home Place. But the house was not, as he well knew, visible from the railroad. He reached a spot behind the farm, where he had always turned off before. He stepped down and pushed through weeds and little trees and found a path through the woods. In a few minutes he would be at the limit of the familiar earth. He was almost home.

He was coming through the great oak forest in the summer afternoon, carrying his suitcase. There could be no question about it now. He was going to get back home.

But as he neared the place where he had lived the strange legend of his life, as he thought of the land waiting there—a mysterious, indestructible
place
—as he thought of the human beings who were perhaps there and of his long absence from the place and from them, a mixture of joy and fear swept over him. All things around him—the still woods in the blazing afternoon, the separate, quivering leaves of the trees, the round bright ball of the sun overhead, the spongy earth underfoot, the sticks and stones and darting birds—acquired a miraculous immediacy and intensity. Thousands of separate, glittering objects surrounded him; yet all were impervious to him, bathed in an air that he could never invade. The whole thing was like an enormously vivid dream, becoming speedily more and more intolerable. He had a fearful thought. Perhaps in the woods near Columbia, South Carolina, he had actually received his death wound and everything since had been a dream taking no more of human time than the instant required to die, moving faster and faster toward this climax, in which he would approach his home and be about to touch loved hands and faces and hear the voices of people long dead to him, and then—in the very instant of attainment—the whole thing would explode into nothingness, and his death would be entire.

As if to reassure himself, he reached up and stripped a branch of oak from its parent bough. Still holding it, he reached and climbed the railfence at the limit of the land. Just on the other side was the rock against which one evening long ago he had leaned his head and wept. He was walking up the long slope. He came to the brow of the hill.

Below him beside the road was the Home Place. The little Office was under the lone, familiar tree. Things were grown up around. But there the Place was, perfectly still and completely familiar. He couldn't see anyone in the yard. Perhaps T. D. was in his Office. Perhaps Ellen was in the house. Perhaps they were gone. Perhaps the house was shut and there was no one there. My God, perhaps they were all dead!

He was walking with long strides, unconscious of the weight of the suitcase. He wondered why the house was so strangely blurred, as if great waters were washing across it, and why the earth seemed to rise and fall around him in misty waves. He fixed his eyes on the back door. He walked down the lane from the orchard. He walked through the barnlot. He walked into the backyard. The breath rushed in his throat. Flies buzzed on the screen door of T. D.'s Office as he went by. Someone was coming to the back door. Johnny Shawnessy's voice was a great cry in his throat.

—Mamma! It's me—Johnny! I'm back! I'm home!

And to Johnny Shawnessy in the moment of his homecoming, it seemed that he did indeed become life's eternally young, triumphant American. It seemed to him that he would never have to hunt farther than that moment of return, when the earth surged up from the lonely rock at the limit of the land and carried him into the place of memories. It seemed to him that he would never come any closer to the secret of Raintree County than the instant when he saw again the faces of his father and mother.

From an ancient wall engraving in T. D.'s Office, a tree grew whose fruit was for the healing of the nations. Johnny Shawnessy had discovered again the antique map of Raintree County, which was surely as old and as new and as eternal as the life of Johnny Shawnessy. Yes, he had come back from long wandering. He had learned the humility of the soldier, he had been purified by loathsomeness, he had been given back to life by death. His vanity would be greater
now, for he would have to be vain for millions living and dead. He would be an interpreter now. He had come back to Raintree County (if indeed he had ever really been away), and though it wasn't long after the homecoming that an old restlessness returned to him and some of the magic went out of the familiar objects around him (the Home Place badly needed a coat of paint), he knew that he must hold firm to revelation and express, so that it would never die, the legend of his life, which was the legend of his people, the story of the republic in which all men were created equal, the amiable myth of the river and the rock, the tree and the letters on the stones, the mounds beside the river,

THE ANTIQUITY AND SOURCE
OF THE NAMES
UPON

T
HE LAND
surrounding was lit by the flare of the last rocket, a big one painted red, white, and blue. It left the earth with a great gush of force and shot to a surprising depth. A fountain of fire burst on the climax of the arc. The spray bloomed white, faded into scarlet, lazily fell. Mr. Shawnessy stood, the burnt match in his hand, color of the rocket changing and fading on his face.

—Behold! John Wickliff Shawnessy is himself the Hero of Raintree County!

It was the hoarse voice of Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles, heard among the exclamations of the children.

The explosion of the great rocket was the climax of the Glorious Fourth in Waycross. The planned program was over. There was nothing to do now but to see the Perfessor off and get to bed.

Mr. Shawnessy walked over and said goodnight to Mrs. Brown, who was standing alone beside the fountain in the front yard. Some of the children were already taking down the Japanese lanterns.

—It's been a wonderful day, she said.

The Perfessor came over with the
Atlas.
He handed it to Mr. Shawnessy and put his long arms around the two, like a conspirator. The last lantern was out, leaving the garden dark.

—I don't know about the rest of you, he croaked, but I'm pooped! Was there ever such a day! They won't believe this in New York. Be sure not to miss my next column, which will be entitled ‘A Day Spent with the Americans.'

—When are you leaving, Professor dear? Mrs. Brown said.

—On the midnight train, dear, the Perfessor said. How about coming with me?

—Why don't you stay with us in Raintree County, Professor dear? And we'll reform you.

—My dear, the Perfessor said, you can take Raintree County, and rolling it into a neat parcel, stow it in the first appropriate place that occurs to you.

He straightened up and spat into a dark tangle of bronze limbs and lily stems.

—As for that
Atlas,
John, he said, you see, it was all a fraud.
There's no use trying to make Raintree County over, even in our imaginations. And no flybynight artist would be clever enough to hide something in it that could escape the subtle scrutiny of Shawnessy and Stiles.

—Wait! Mr. Shawnessy said, trying to remember something. Perhaps that was our mistake. We were
too
subtle. Perhaps the artist hid it by putting it in the most conspicuous place of all. Perhaps old Waldo found it precisely because he wasn't looking for it.

—Like Poe's ‘Purloined Letter,' the Perfessor said, instantly pleased with the idea. The arch-criminal fooled the police by putting the stolen object in front of their noses. It's true, John, that only a supersubtle mind detects the supersubtlety of simplicity. Now, following this line of reasoning, what is the most conspicuous location in the whole of Raintree County, children?

The Perfessor thought a moment.

—Obviously the Court House Square, Perfessor, he said, answering his own question.

—And in the Court House Square, children? he asked.

—The Court House, Perfessor, he replied.

—And on the Court House, children?

Mrs. Brown began to laugh, a low, bubbling contralto, as if perhaps the memory of the Raintree County Court House with its famous Statue of Justice over the Main Entrance, spattered with pigeondung, were a delightfully amusing thing, when seen from the proper—or the improper—angle.

But Mr. Shawnessy sprang forward, rested the
Atlas
on the shoulder of the fountain, and flapped the leaves to page five where the long form of the Raintree County Court House was couched in darkness like a sphinx. He tried to plunge his eyes into the space above the Main Entrance where in the standard copies the Statue of Justice stood. He saw a pool of shadow there, vaguely alive with sculpture. In his skipping examination of the
Atlas
during the day, he couldn't remember having looked at precisely that spot.

—Give me a light, Professor.

The Perfessor struck a match on his sole. He and Mrs. Brown bent over to see.

The flaring match illuminated for a brilliant instant something in the niche above the Main Entrance that left all three speechless.

The Perfessor, reaching for another match, recovered first.

—Zeus! he said. Let's put some more light on that!

He struck the match, but the head flew off flaming.

—Shades of Michelangelo! he said, fumbling for another match. Wasn't that terrific! It was there all the time, and we didn't see it.

Etched in flame, the imprint of the tiny group seen slantingly above the Main Entrance of the Raintree County Court House persisted as an afterimage. On the instant of seeing it, Mr. Shawnessy had felt that it was just as he had known it would be and where he had eventually intended to look.

And now that he saw it, it was (in the Raintree County sense) not at all naughty—for what was naughty about the oldest picture in the world, the frontispiece for the first book printed by man—the father and mother of mankind in beautiful nakedness, tasting the Forbidden Fruit! With what an exquisite feeling for paradox, an unknown artist had substituted his symbolic statue of Edenic rebellion for the stern yet necessary lady with the scales, whose upright form had ruled the conscience of Raintree County from the beginning!

He had displayed the inadmissibly beautiful reverse of the coin. He had unveiled the Eleusinian mystery to the Court House Square where it would be seen by all who came there—the Saturday hundreds, the platform speakers, the visiting dignitaries, the prodigal sons, the carnival barkers, the dancing girls, the freaks, the medicine venders, the storekeepers, the candidates for office, the horseback evangelists, the city councillors, the county functionaries, the loafers on the court house lawn, the marchers in the Memorial Day parades, the housewives, the travelling salesmen, the pigeons, the prostitutes, the farmers, the girls in their summer dresses, the small boys with fists of firecrackers—in short, the whole lusty tide of life that pooled and poured into the foursided enclosure of the Court House Square to appease a devout hunger as old as the gathering of mankind in crowds.

So from their infinity of vantage points, in the changing lights and seasons of this mythical Raintree County, they would behold the double figure hewn from a single block of marble, the
E pluribus mum
of the classic coin, the Paradisal pair in the moment of republican and pluviarboreal discovery, trembling nameless on the verge of names.

While the Perfessor groped in his pockets for a third match, Mr. Shawnessy gave him the
Atlas.

—Here, he said, you can bring it with you. I'll meet you in front of my house.

He stepped through the gate into the road to rejoin his wife and the three children. But they were already considerably in advance of him. He could just discern the form of the woman he had married entering the tree-pillared night of Waycross, and with her the forms of the three children.

Yes, he had overcome the aloneness of the garden. On an unsuspected path he had found her waiting. He had helped to fashion her, and yet she had lain at the very sources of himself. In her, he had rediscovered Eve. Bearing the name of an old reformer and Bible translator, Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy had rewritten into the landscape of Raintree County the great book of God in all its beautiful, disarming candor.

He felt immensely joyous and calm. The vision was not only Hebraic but Grecian. Had he not also been sent, chief of a visiting delegation of Cosmic Lithographers, to record in stone the eternal verities of the Republic!

Half-shutting his eyes, he seemed to see the statue of a goddess waveborn and beautiful, begirt with foam, a sign to travellers on the seaward approaches of the Republic. He had climaxed a lifetime of Phidian endeavor by erecting this wondrous symbol, the Lady Custodian of the Temple.

And perhaps when he approached the Temple, after tying his stonewheeled cart up to the rim of an antique fountain, when he walked past the stone clock with its stone hands fixed forever at nine o'clock (
'Tis summer and the days are long),
when he ascended the wide marble steps strewn with the bearded grain and fitted his gold key to the lock and thrust the bronze doors in, perhaps then he would see her standing on her pedestal in the robe and attitude of the island Venus. (
Hello, Johnny. How do you like my costume?
) And leaning down, her form would lose the look of painted stone for the warm imperfection of a living woman, and she would remind him in her stately voice (lingering like a caress along his name) that a real woman had posed for the goddess found on Melos and that the sculptor who strove with the marble had learned
ardently and well the lesson of those deepfleshed loins. (
Oft was I weary when I toiled with thee.
) And then, stepping down, she would walk before him, allowing her robe to travel off her graceful back. And they would go thus together through the Temple, while a white stony light bathed equally columns, roof, and floor, every line and plane distinct from end to end of the vast rectangular space. And the urge to impose form would possess him like fire and hunger as the Lady Custodian of his life, his mother-daughter-wife-and-sweet-companion, moved undraped between vast lumps of Parian marble newly quarried, in which slept the limbs of gods and goddesses, a world of linear perfections. And her unsandaled feet would make no sound, but he would hear the cold clang of hammers striking on stone.