Raintree County (24 page)

Under the tutelage of Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles, Johnny Shawnessy discovered classic columns beside the Shawmucky River and a memory of pagan peoples who worshiped the undraped human form beside the inland ocean, that fecund womb of ideas, before man had put on the garments of Hebraic morality.

All this the Perfessor accomplished by his words. For he had brought more words to Raintree County than had been there before.
Those days, the secret of all things still seemed to Johnny to reside in words. No tongue could pronounce the living language of the ancient Greeks and Romans, but the words remained, visual, plastic, like graven coins. The Perfessor himself was a man of words. Ideas seemed often less important to him than the words in which he framed them. He had thousands—and perhaps hundreds of thousands of words. And Johnny believed that if he himself possessed all words, he would possess all things. Then he would be expressive like a god, more expressive even than that parochial deity, Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles.

As time went on, Johnny learned that in the Perfessor's museum of quaint words there lurked a faunlike, baffled creature. This creature was perhaps the real man, a nameless deeper self, who gave blood and being to the words. It gave a flirt of its tail in wild, witty vulgarities. It showed sometimes its yearning, halfsorrowful face under the Perfessor's pince-nez glasses. It was tender and wistful. It was made distraught by beauty. It was neither good nor evif but was pure feeling and wished to be pure expression.

For curiously, Johnny felt from the beginning—and never quite lost the feeling—that the Perfessor, Raintree County's most unexpurgated talker, wasn't really a wicked person. His excesses of speech and idea had their own vigorous rationale. His gods were simply not the gods of Raintree County. And with all his faults, in all the time Johnny knew him the Perfessor remained a strangely gentle, humane person who never deliberately hurt anyone's feelings and was never vain, hypocritical, petty, or malicious.

During the summer of 1858 Johnny and the Perfessor often went together to the bank of the Shawmucky where they swam, talked, and versified. And because they were close to the river, where life was undisguised, they had few secrets from each other. To the Perfessor, Johnny described the vision he had seen in the Shawmucky and the desire that it awakened. The Perfessor laughed tolerantly.

—My dear boy, he said, you're an incurable idealist. A little country girl with nice breasts and a cute bottom takes a dip in the river on a hot day, and you act as if it's Venus reborn from the foam of the inland ocean.

But later the Perfessor told of a forbidden fruit that he too had seen temptingly displayed in the garden of Raintree County.

Lydia Gray, one of the students at the Pedee Academy, was the wife of the Reverend Ezra Gray, who had come to Raintree County from another state not long before. No one ever knew how this chilly January had got such a blithesome May, for the Reverend Gray was at least fifty and had withered lips and eyes like balls of blue flint, while his wife was young, artless, blonde, and endowed with a conspicuously lush figure.

In the Academy, Mrs. Gray was touchingly eager for knowledge. She adored the Perfessor, as did all women without exception. The Perfessor always addressed her formally as the Reverend Mrs. Gray (although the students called her simply Lydia), and adopted in her presence a sanctimonious air shot with flashes of ribald humor, all lost upon her.

—She's just a bucolic girl, pure and impulsive, the Perfessor said lightly during one of the boarding-house symposiums. Fate loves a paradox and so hitched her to that old frock, her husband, who can't even beget offspring in that fruitful garden of all delight. Have you noticed her bust, boys?

—I've been too busy parsing my Latin, Garwood said, always a fast man with a comeback.

—Plump twins of love, the Perfessor said. Really very nice—and I speak as a connoisseur.

After a while, the Perfessor no longer made fun of Mrs. Gray. He said nothing about her at all.

Then one day on the bank of the Shawmucky, when Johnny was translating from the
Aeneid,
the Perfessor, who had been lying in the sun with nothing on but his pince-nez glasses, suddenly sat up and spoke an irrelevant word.

—Ach! John! Think of her ripe body in bed with that ugly priest.

—Uh—what's that, Professor?

—When she sits there in the front row with those two softnosed fawns trembling under her blouse and her big blue eyes watching me, I melt, boy, like wax in a flame. I lose voice and utterance. I become inarticulate.

—O, Johnny said.

The Perfessor laughed a brief and bitter laugh and adjusted his pince-nez.

—Go on with your Latin, John.

That was the last thing he said to Johnny on the subject for a long time.

Thus for two years Johnny Shawnessy sought the answer to life's riddle in a little shrine of bookish words presided over by the wistfully pagan spirit of Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles. He had discovered a new place and a new person in Raintree County and at the same time had renewed an old craving. The whole conundrum of the County was now embodied in the person of Nell Gaither.

For Nell was nothing if not Raintree County. It had made her what she was, given her grace, demureness, tenderness, quick sympathies, strong enthusiasms, purity, endeavor, moral delicacy, religious fervor. Yet she was so habitual and easy in the ways of the County that she could doff the whole costume like a dress and return into her passively seductive attitude of Venus in the river. The more demure and sentimental she seemed, the more, by paradox, did she become to him a woman made for erotic and maternal uses, a strange meeting of the eternal feminine river with the illusory rectangle of Raintree County.

To him she was the unconquered paradise called Woman. He had glimpsed only the white gates of it in the river. He had discovered a strange thing—that nakedness is the most mysterious clothing in the world. When Nell Gaither doffed her dress, she put on a garment that concealed, while half suggesting, the secret of life itself.

What gave his whole dream of her a touch of mortal pathos was Johnny's knowledge that the ideal she embodied was subject like all things human to plunder and ruin in the random collisions of life. Johnny was Raintree County's one true aesthete and somehow managed to erect all things beautiful and ugly into an ideal existence. But the rest of the County went on living the old remorseless comedy, and the knife that had been driven into Johnny's heart behind the scenes of the Opera House was cruelly twisted from time to time.

Once during the harvest season of '58, Johnny had gone for a swim in the Shawmucky with some farmhands who along with him had been helping get in wheat on the Gaither farm. The boys were usual rural types, goodhumored, unlettered, lusty. When they had finished washing the seed and sweat off, they stretched out naked on the bank, smoking cigars and chewing tobacco, and the talk turned
on girls. Someone mentioned Nell's name. One of the boys was in the act of lighting his cigar.

—D'yuh—puff, puff—spose ole Garwood Jones has—puff, puff—been in there?

The words had the callous brutality with which boys in Raintree County often spoke of girls with whom they weren't very well acquainted.

—Reckon he would if he could, another boy said. If he ain't too busy stayin' on top a that girl what's-her-name over to Summit.

—Lizzie Franklin?

—Yeh, that one.

—Ole Garwood sure gits 'em.

—Garwood thinks he's some punkins.

—You'd think you was some punkins if you'd of had as many pretty janes under you as old Garwood.

—Them girls is all alike. Any of 'em ud lay down fer a guy with money and smart city talk.

—I'd like to roll in a haystack with that there Nell Gaither. I got as much as Garwood Jones any time.

—Hell, she wouldn't let a rube like you touch her little finger. She's too fancy for you.

—Hell she is. Garwood Jones—puff, puff—ain't got a—puff, puff—thing I ain't got.

While Johnny lay and listened, the frogs squawked hoarsely in the reeds, and the dialogue of life along the river went on and on, verbally stripping and pawing his beloved. It seemed cruelly proper that this pillage should occur on the banks of the Shawmucky, where life was conscienceless.

Johnny wasn't the only person who had detected the paradox of Nell Gaither, the image of erotic and spiritual beauty. Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles had taken special note of his star girl student, helped thereto, no doubt, by Johnny's vivid account of what he had seen in the river.

—There, he said, by your leave, John, is the most passionate little piece in Raintree County. She's so poised and invulnerably pure. Such women are always volcanoes of passion when aroused. There's something about her that reminds me of those old Greek statues which were painted in pure colors. It's marble, and it's also life.
Good thing you've staked out your claim to it. By the way, you don't suppose Garwood's been in there?

Some time later the Perfessor told Johnny that in his, the Perfessor's, opinion he, Johnny, could set all doubts to rest as to Nell's chastity.

—My word for it, he said, the young lady is—if not imperforable—at least imperforate.

—What makes you think so?

—A small bird, the Perfessor said.

He was gaily evasive, and Johnny didn't find out exactly what had given the Perfessor this assurance, unless perhaps he had gained it from some of his very private conversations with Nell in his office, where he sometimes remained closeted with his more promising female students after hours.

Meanwhile, Johnny went on loving in secret, hoping that one day he might find the river girl again. And in fact not long after the comic dialogue with the farmhands, he did see Nell again in the Shawmucky River.

A wave of holiness swept through the County in the summer of 1858 on the tide of a Great Revival Program to bring everyone back to the arms of Jesus. Almost everyone was taken back during this time except Johnny Shawnessy, who was not aware that he had ever left the arms of Jesus, and Professor Stiles, who had apparently never been there in the first place.

The Revival featured a succession of mass baptisms in the Shawmucky. Even T. D. yielded to the popular demand for total immersion and three times under. One Sunday night, almost the whole congregation of the Danwebster Methodist Church went from the church to the near-by river for baptism. Johnny stood on the bank watching with the Perfessor, who delivered a running fire of comment on the operation. Wearing nothing but sheets, a hundred people filed barefoot down the bank to T. D. standing hipdeep in water.

—God is doing his laundry, the Perfessor said.

They all sang ‘Wash me in the Jordan,' and what with the flaring torches and swung lanterns, the flickering shape of the church on its high bank, the wild stream of the river, the splashings, gurglings, stampings, snortings, cries of penitence, shouts of hosanna, everyone had reached a state of violent excitement.

Toward the end of the line came Nell Gaither. Her face was meek and mild. Her gold hair hung to her hips. Her long, graceful feet were bare. She carried a taper.

—This is your chance, my boy, the Perfessor said. Take her home after the baptism. When they're christbitten, girls will do practically anything. You might even get a kiss.

—Probably Garwood's waiting around somewhere, Johnny said. She's crazy about him.

The Perfessor held up his hand and recited,

—I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat!

In the confusion of the night, Nell's voice was perfectly audible as she stepped into the water.

—Dear Jesus, I have sinned and am repentant. O, dear Lordie Jesus, wash my sins away.

After she had come out, the Perfessor and Johnny went around to help her. She was shivering, the sheet was soaked to her body, her hair was plastered to her neck, but she looked happy and excited. The Perfessor arranged it so that Johnny put her in a buggy and took her home.

—Why don't you get baptized, Johnny? she said.

—I don't exactly believe in it, Nell.

—O, I do, Nell said. For sinners, that is. But then I suppose that wouldn't include you, Johnny.

She was tranquil and sincere.

—And are your sins so very great, Nell?

—O, yes, Nell said, smiling up at Johnny with her radiant and innocent smile. I'm afraid I'm not a very good person, Johnny.

She looked out at the warm purple night brooding with mist of stars on Raintree County.

—I feel so wonderful, she said. You have no idea, Johnny, what it will do for you. Garwood was baptized yesterday at my suggestion. But then he needs it more than you.

—I don't know, Johnny said. Maybe not.

That night he lay in his bed at the Home Place and wondered what were the mortal stains that Nell had tried to wash away in the
waters of the Shawmucky. Did they include a little misprint on the white nudity with which she had ravaged the heart of Johnny Shawnessy?

Johnny Shawnessy ached with the insufficiency of youth. He was never more erotically in love with Nell Gaither than that night when he saw her soaked in a sheet in the name of Raintree County's puritan religion.

Thus there was too much youth and love and wishing in this whole era of his life. All things were touched with sadness and beauty by this first erotic passion of his young manhood.

The most delicious and frustrating hours were those spent at the Academy, where Johnny and Nell often studied together in the little library. Both spent a great deal of extra time there. It was not unusual for Johnny to come over in the evening and find the library open and only one other person in it—Nell. The Perfessor abetted Johnny's hopeless passion by assigning to his two prize pupils extra readings in the Greek and Latin texts. Garwood Jones was, as everyone knew, too smart for his own good, but he never aspired to be, as the Perfessor once remarked, either a scholar or a gentleman, so that Nell was, next to Johnny, the best student in the Academy, especially in language and rhetoric. Gifted in versification, her muse was not so vigorous and facile as Johnny's, but it was fashionably feminine, specializing in affecting compositions about departed beauty, spent passion, withered roses, tombstones, dewy flowers, and unreturning springs. When she read these verbal confections, her face and voice were pleasingly mournful in the approved fashion of the time.