Raintree County (28 page)

—I think I'll go in and get
my
picture took, Garwood said. They give away such nice prizes.

—That boy is definitely ready to graduate, the Perfessor said.

—By the way, how did you know
my
name? Johnny asked.

—O, I've heard of you, the girl said. You write for the newspapers, and you're very shy around girls, and you're the most gifted boy in this County, and you're very idealistic.

—Who told you?

—A friend of yours.

—Ah, the Professor, Johnny said.

—He's the funniest man!

Susanna Drake began to laugh again, touching her throat with her left hand. Then suddenly serious, she said,

—I'm very idealistic too. Have you read
St. Elmo?

—Yes, I have.

—Don't you think that's just the most wonderful book! I think it's just marvellous the way she works for the redemption of that man's soul! I could really
love
a man like that marvellous St. Elmo. Isn't Mrs. Evans about your most favorite woman writer?

—I prefer Mrs. Stowe, Johnny said.

The girl stopped short and thrust him away with a violence that shocked him.

—That dirty slut! she hissed.

Fury poured up and down her body as if a big angry snake were coiling and uncoiling inside the satin. Some of his amazement must have shown in his face, for this voluptuous fury subsided as swiftly as it began, and the girl leaned against him affectionately.

—Don't pay any attention to me, honey. I just can't stand to hear that woman's name. It makes my flesh crawl. It really does.

In fact, her whole body went through a quick convulsion beginning at the knees and flowing up through her back and hunching her shoulders. She shivered violently and shook her head. That appeared to end it, for she emerged from her fit smiling sunnily and talking about other things.

—This is where I live, she said, when they had walked a block south of the Square.

They were standing at the bottom of a steep flight of stone steps that led up a high lawn to a house. Johnny thought he must have noticed this house before, as it looked vaguely familiar. It was not like any of the other houses in town. It was three stories high, and the front had five windows on it in the pattern of a five-spot in a deck of cards. The corniced roof had one little round window under the peak. There was a long, low verandah with small pillars.

—I just love this house, Susanna said. I always have ever since Aunt and I came to live here when I was a little girl.

—Do you live here all by yourself?

—I have two Nigro girls to do the work, she said. I'll say good-by now.

She held out her small hand, and he took it, supposing that he was about to say good-by. But she allowed her hand to stay in his and remained standing on the first step, so that her head was on a level with his own. From there, she candidly studied his face, her mouth pouting.

—Where did you get that nice smile? she asked.

—That's my St. Elmo expression, Johnny said, embarrassed.

That was just the beginning of it. It was half an hour before he had trailed her step by step all the way up to the door. Meanwhile they talked of a hundred things, Johnny listening for the most part, enchanted by this alien speech that flowed into his ears like a music vaguely remembered. Every word that she spoke and her manner of speaking, he reflected, was a legend of an alien way of life. This girl had been ferried through languorous days and nights and now stepped down into Raintree County, a barbarous creature with a stately name.

—You must come and visit me sometime.

—I'll do that, Miss Drake.

—I'm Susanna to special friends.

—May I count myself among that select number, ma'am?

—You may.

—Susanna. It's a beautiful name, he said. By the way, people call me Johnny, though it's not special like your name.

—Johnny, she said, pronouncing the name in a special way. It happens to be a name I love, Johnny.

He watched her go in and saw her face a moment looking out 'at him through the glass doorpane, the pouting mouth touched with an expression of tenderness. As he walked back toward the Square, he remembered the measures of an old tune, racy, yet vaguely unhappy.

I come from Alabama

With my banjo on my knee,

I'se gwine to Louisiana,

My true love for to see. . . .

O, Susanna,

Do not cry for me;

I come from Alabama,

With my banjo on my knee.

He found himself thinking of those steep breasts nodding a pointed invitation from below the Mason and Dixon Line.

But his yearning wasn't directed toward the girl he had just seen. Those days, all beauty reminded him of Nell. He was entirely faithful to this love that was entirely faithful to him by remaining in the image of unattainable beauty. Soon his innocent love-communion in the polysyllables of an antique tongue would end. Graduation Day was near. And besides there was a report abroad that Garwood Jones and Nell were going to be married.

As for Johnny Shawnessy, he had that day thrown off a garment of shyness. He had stood stripped to the waist in the Court House Square, shoulder to shoulder with the fastest runner in Raintree County. Who could say

WHAT IMMORTAL GARLAND WAS TO BE RUN FOR,
NOT WITHOUT DUST
AND

H
EAT
of the sun filled up the valleyground of the river. Mr. Shawnessy, climbing out of the surrey, carefully laid the
Atlas
facedown on the seat and covered it with a copy of the
Free Enquirer.

—Might glance through my article, Pet, while I run over here and have a look at things. You children can amuse yourselves hunting for relics of Danwebster.

He opened a copy of the paper to an inside section. Sunlight on the white sheet smote the fine print into a mist under the headline:

HISTORY OF RAINTREE COUNTY, INDIANA
by Prof. John W. Shawnessy

He took a sickle and a covered cardboard box from the floor of the back seat, opened the gate, and stepped into the deepgrassed field.

In my best historical style, a language of inscriptions.

The origin and early development of Raintree County . . .

He stepped over the ribbed and rotten skeleton of a picket fence. Flies whirled from dried cowpads. Weeds boiled rankly from a filled-in cellar. He walked through a tiny stonehenge, the still vaguely human arrangement of a foundation. He picked his way through tufts of marsh grass approaching the river bank. In a far corner of the field, some cows gazed tranquilly at the intruder.

Quo vadis?
Whither goest thou, disturbing this earth? In the marketplace of Rome, we ruminate the summer grass. We drop peaceful dung on the memory of Caesar.
Hie jacet
the noblest Roman of them all.

Among the earliest settlements in Raintree County was a community in the great south bend of the Shawmucky, a thriving town on the eastern approach to the County Seat, quaintly called Danwebster, in honor of the greatest name of the Ante-Bellum Republic. The swift decline and disappearance of this little town during and after the War is perhaps attributable to . . .

A pig thrust snogging and snorting from a hole under the remains of the mill.

Who goes there, bearing a sickle and a box of cut flowers? Where feet of lovers trod, our snouts grub roots.

He walked warily out on the remains of the dam and leaping from rock to rock crossed the river. He climbed the low bank on the other side, pushed into the river's fringe of trees, and plunged through nettles and horseweeds, unsettling mists of mosquitoes. He broke from the cool shadow of the river-bordering leaves. Heat and light dizzied him. The waisthigh weeds clung to his clothes. He leaped a marshy ditch, wetting his heels. He paused for breath at the base of the railroad embankment.

Who goes there with a hook of iron and the damp corpses of flowers?

Historian of a vanished culture. Who lies here, sleeping by the river?

Here lies the memory of a little town, of golden and agrarian days and sainted elders on the porches in the evening talking of the Union. Here lies the white republic, founded foursquare on the doctrine of universal law. Here lies a preflood name, Danwebster. Who goes there, with memorial flowers?

A maker of inscriptions.
Ave atque vale!
Hail and Farewell! What path is this, cutting through the cornlands of the County?

Here lies the clean bright knife that slew an old republic. Here lies the sickle-armed castrater of the elder gods. Tread warily, crossing the pathway of new gods.

He scrambled up the embankment. The slight elevation raised him cleanly above the river-valley. The railroad was a long line rising in a gentle grade from the east to the point where he stood and waning in a gentle grade to the west.

Who goes there hunting for memorial stones?

An archeologist of love. I hunt old mounds beside the river. Who lies there sleeping in a hill of earth?

Level with the railroad, south, some fifty yards away, rising from the waves of a vast cornfield like an island in the corn, was a mound of grass and flowers.

Here lies the enduring bone, more lasting than historians of cultures.
Here lies a white bone held in a bracelet of bright hair. Who goes there, bearer of a golden bough?

The hero of a lost inscription, the guardian of a talismanic name, an answerer of riddles. Who lies there buried in the earth of Raintree County?

He saw the stones grayly protruding from the grass and weeds, some nodding to the ground, and on their tranquil forms frail lines of

at the Pedee Academy marked the close of Johnny Shawnessy's schooling in Raintree County. The Graduation Ceremonies were the occasion of much sprightly newspaper comment. But no newspaper was ever to record an interesting thing that happened to Johnny on Graduation Day.

That spring, in nights of feathery leaves and sweet odors, Johnny lay awake thinking of the coming Graduation Exercises, the Class Picnic, and the Fourth of July Race. Waves of languor succeeded by waves of tumultuous energy made him mad with a springtime madness, and during these days, he decided that he would reveal to Nell Gaither that he was in love with her.

The way he did it was undoubtedly in the purest Johnny Shawnessy tradition.

The Graduation Exercises were in middle June. Everyone agreed that the write-up the following day in the
Free Enquirer
expressed with unusual felicity the spirit of the occasion. The article went in part as follows:

YOUTH FACES THE WORLD
(Epic Fragment from the
Free Enquirer
)

Frankly, we were touched at the sight of the blooming and blushful company of young academicians gathered for the final exercises in the yard of that little Parnassus of the West, Pedee Academy. We felt our own wasted boyhood resurgent in our breast as we looked upon those faces steeped in the immortal dreams of youth!

Before the conferring of diplomas, each graduate stood up and delivered an original composition. Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy, Valedictorian and Class Poet, recited by heart a long ode in which he bade farewell to classmates and academy. Friends and relatives of this upright young citizen were pleased to perceive that his poetical maturity has in no wise belied his early promise. Garwood Jones, Class Orator, delivered a bang-up oration in which he promised that the future of
the Republic could be safely entrusted to the graduating class of Pedee Academy. Miss Nell Gaither, the Salutatorian, than whom no fairer flower ever adorned with its cernuous and supple stem the bedded banks of the Shawmucky, read an original composition entitled ‘A Rose of Remembrance in the Faded Garden of Love.' This verbal bouquet, ornamented with some of the most odorous peonies of rhetoric, acquired no little of its charm from the circumstance of its being uttered by a young woman who unites in her person all the blandishments of beauty with all the witcheries of wit. At the end of this composition was a poem, which, we later learned, had been unexpectedly added by Miss Gaither. As we consider it a flower that ought not to blush unseen, we secured the author's permission to print it.

L
INES
C
OMPOSED IN
M
ELANCHOLY
R
EMEMBRANCE

In the day when my heart will cease beating

In the echoing cell of my breast,

And its music so fervid and fleeting,

Has forever subsided to rest,

If ever thou look'dest with longing

On her who has passed from thy ken,

O, believe that her heart was belonging

To thee, though all secretly, then!

O, then, when thine eyes shall discover,

Too late, how she doted on thee,

When the turf is upmounded above her,

And her love-fettered spirit is free,

O, then wilt thou pensively hover

And beweep by her desolate grave,

Thy pale, yet unpenitent lover,

Thy rejected, yet passionate slave!

So ardent was Miss Gaither's rendition of this empurpled effusion that both she and the audience were visibly moved, and the young lady delivered the last few lines in a scarcely audible voice before retiring in a pretty confusion amid the plaudits of the crowd.

Finally, from the hands of Professor Jerusalem Stiles, diplomas were dispensed to . . .

The graduates gathered in the Academy Yard after the formal exercises to converse with friends and relatives and to exchange gifts, signatures, photographs, and scraps of sentiment in keepsake books.
In everyone's book, Johnny inscribed the following statement enclosed in a border of ornamental penmarks:

A Concluding Specimen of my Writing with Jerusalem W. Stiles at Pedee Academy, Raintree County, Indiana, June 1, 1859.

John Wickliff Shawnessy

Johnny received a similar inscription from the other graduates. Additional sentiments, original or borrowed, were optional.