Raintree County (39 page)

The crops were dried and stunted. In the dark earth lay the rejected seed. It was a summer, too, of catastrophe and violence. In the prolonged heat men did strange deeds. The deep of the national character was troubled and cast up monsters. The newspaper columns were filled with rape cases. A woman was said to be running about a desolate part of the country naked. Members of a certain religious sect were reported to be waylaying and violating women with organized efficiency. A man fell into the vault of a privy and suffocated. Trains leaped trestles. The crops in the Middle States were stunted. In the dark earth lay the rejected seed.

On the morning after the Fourth of July, Johnny Shawnessy woke up slowly and reluctantly. He was troubled by a pagan memory. There had been a young man bold like a god. He had bestridden a whiteloined horse and had ridden beneath the sun. Winged and triumphant, he had taken no thought of the morrow. He had been naked, and he had no name.

Johnny kept telling himself that he had had one of his vivid dreams, and now he was waking up from it, and everything was all right. But he kept remembering new details. A sequence of sundrenched images hovered in his mind and refused to be dispelled.

He had a memory of swimming on still waters toward a wooded shore in the region where lake and river met. Of a sleeping in bright sunlight. Of an awakening on a bed of grass. Of a nude form reclined upon his own. Of mouths meeting in more and more perilous kisses. Of a young woman, garmentless, seen running toward an unguessed place. Of a pursuit and of an overtaking. And of a tree with a slender trunk and a shapely roof of foliage from which there sifted a rain of yellow pollen. And it had been as though the two beneath the tree, seizing the supple trunk, had shaken down (at first languorously and then more and more violently) forbidden fruit.

Fully awake, Johnny didn't want to get up. He himself had a name known and respected. He didn't want to have any responsibility for a nameless scamp who had acted as though time and causality didn't exist.

Nevertheless, when the naked ones of that memory had put on their clothes, they had put their names back on too. They were called Johnny Shawnessy and Susanna Drake. They had ridden back from Paradise Lake into Freehaven and had begun to look at each other with thoughtful looks. They were strangers again.

A few weeks before, Johnny Shawnessy had been the most innocent young man in Raintree County. Now he was the most guilty. In the space of a few weeks he had done incredible things. He had told a girl that he loved her and had promptly gone swimming with her naked in the river. Two weeks later he had gone with another girl, an almost total stranger, to a place where he had never been before, and he and she had performed the act of love.

It was useless to point out that by a freak of fate, which was by no means entirely his fault, he had been drunk the second time on whiskey and hard cider. That was merely another crime.

Apparently he had a fatal talent for picking out girls who liked to take off their clothes by lonely waters.

The thing that happened to him at Paradise Lake on the Fourth of July hadn't seemed evil at the time. Indeed, while he was in full career, he had felt like the Hero of the County, life's young American, who had discovered beauty by secret waters. He would no more have plucked himself from that terrific happening than he would have plucked himself out of existence. The feeling of guilt came afterwards when he returned to the familiar part of the County and the effects of the cider wore off. Guilt had not been in the act itself. It was superimposed upon the immutable act, as the map of Raintree County was superimposed upon the immutable earth.

He felt that he had always participated in two worlds. One was the guiltless earth of the river of desire, the earth big with seed, the earth of fruit and flower. The other was the world of memory and sadness, guilt and duty, loyalty and ideas. The two worlds were not antithetical. They were flesh and form, thing and thought, river and map, desire and love. Now the second world had reclaimed him with a vengeance, and he was sincerely penitent.

But his sense of guilt was not religious. If a huge voice had thundered down at him from the summer sky and had said, John Wickliff Shawnessy, thou hast lain with a woman named Susanna Drake for thine own lewd pleasure. Why hast thou done this evil thing, my son? Johnny would have been impressed, of course, but he wouldn't have had any strong sense of guilt. His answer would have been respectful, something like, I'm awfully sorry, Sir. I just drank too much cider and made a slip. I beg Your forgiveness, Sir.

This would be easy. God was impersonal. But Johnny couldn't even imagine a conversation that he might hold with his mother on such a subject. The mere thought of it made him want to climb into a hole and die.

—A great man, Johnny, is a man who does good for other people.

As an innocent child he had understood what Ellen Shawnessy expected of him—to be a good man, to be pure, to combat human suffering and wickedness. During his whole memory of his mother, she had been an angel of purity and good hope, standing at the gates of life and death, secure in the age-old faith that she and T. D. had conferred upon their last child and emphasized by the name they had given him. In his mother's Raintree County, there was no official recognition of the strong desire by which life cunningly furthered itself. There was propagation—but not pleasure. There was love—but not the act of love. Eros and his flametipped arrow had abdicated in favor of Jesus and the cross.

And yet Ellen Shawnessy's most gifted child, John Wickliff, bearing the name of the great reformer and Bible translator like a trumpet-peal of righteousness, had done the Unpardonable Thing. For pleasure, he had stripped the garment of shame from the body of beauty, for pleasure and pastime of his body, had clasped the forbidden whiteness of a young woman in his arms. This he had done in the formrevealing brightness of a July afternoon. Under the circumstances, God, whom T. D. and Ellen were always locating in the sky directly over Raintree County, couldn't have had any trouble seeing the trespass. Johnny might as well have done it on the court house lawn for all the world to see.

The guilt was peculiarly aggravated by the fact that he had committed this trespass with a young woman whom he scarcely knew, an alien from beyond the County. If he had fallen from the path of
righteousness with someone like Nell Gaither, a marriage could be quickly gotten up and the fault condoned by official sanction. Johnny had often heard T. D. say,

—High time them youngsters got married.

The truth was that something about the climate of Raintree County or the resilience of its haystacks encouraged the nuptial embrace before the nuptials. And in such cases, the County was inclined to be smilingly tolerant.

—Guess they just couldn't wait, was a common expression when a seven-months' baby had nine months' fingernails.

But there was nothing to condone what Johnny Shawnessy had done. The only rueful satisfaction that he could derive from his sin was that it had the quality of genius about it. An ordinary sinner couldn't have conceived and carried out such a brilliantly successful piece of self-damnation.

For nearly two weeks, Johnny holed up at the Home Place. Then, he received two letters at about the same time. The first said:

Dear Johnny,

I take my pen in hand and seat myself to say that I am as well as a distressed heart will let me be. Johnny, why haven't you come to see me again? Since a certain afternoon, I have thought about you a great deal. I'll be at home for you next Saturday afternoon, if you care to renew an acquaintance that has already meant more to me, Johnny, than it would be modest in me to say. Johnny, I have been worried and unhappy at not seeing you again. Please come if you can.

Yours trustingly,

S
USANNA

The other letter said: Dear Johnny,

Dear Johnny,

I take my pen in hand and seat myself to write you something that a more discreet, but, alas! less wounded heart would not disclose. Johnny, I have paid dearly for my foolish pride since I wrote you a certain note last spring. If I have hurt you, please forgive me, and believe, Johnny, that to see you again would gladden the grieving heart of

Your disconsolate

N
ELL

All over the County the rain was falling, as he drove through Freehaven to call on Susanna Drake. The rain came down, big drops vertical in dead air, and ran in rivulets on the sunhardened earth. He thought of all the seeds that lay wet in their tombs, beginning to feel an impulse stirring in hard rinds. The rain came as a kind of relief. It was a washing if not a purification.

Susanna's house on its high lawn gleamed palely under vast, rainy skies. Green branches of trees near-by dripped noisily against it. The gutters of the high roof spouted gray water. The house there on its lofty lawn was a shell of riddles, inscrutable against the veined and hovering skies. As he sat a moment bleakly in the raindrenched buggy looking up at it, a strong excitement possessed him. What waited up the stone steps, in the hollow rooms of the house beyond the five front windows to catch the soul of Johnny Shawnessy in a satin snare?

At the door knocking, he had an involuntary image of himself entering a room whose walls were scarved with scarlet; a naked woman whose olive body curved with sleek muscles pounced on him with catlike fury and thrust him upon a couch while her deeplipped mouth purred and stung his face with savage kisses and her black hair lashed his shoulders. He visualized himself as sturdily resisting this assault in the name of his late—and lamented—innocence.

When Susanna's face appeared at the glass doorpane, it was the eyes that dominated the face, those soft childlike eyes with their violet veins, which could be, he knew, all misty with passion. The black hair was now pulled back and chastely bound to show the ears and emphasize the forehead. The lips had their perpetual pout, of course, but suggesting now the wistful child rather than the barbarous little voluptuary who had drunk his kisses with such inexhaustible appetite on the shore of Lake Paradise.

The door opened.

—Hello, Johnny.

The girl in the doorway was chastely attired in black with just a few scarlet ribbons at the neck and shoulders. She held out her hand with a gracious ladylike gesture, and he bowed stiffly into the house.

—Won't you sit down, Johnny, and I'll have the maid bring tea.

A silent little Negress brought tea, while Johnny sat in a deep chair. Demurely lovely, Susanna poured two cups.

—You like tea, don't you, Johnny?

—I hardly ever have it, Johnny said.

—You'll
love
it, she said.

The expression disturbed him. She had said the same thing on the shores of Lake Paradise, and he had wondered about it ever since, though at the time he hadn't stopped to consider what it implied. Since then he had thought more calmly of it, wondering at the history of amorous pastime in which this elegant figure in the black dress must have participated. Perhaps he, Johnny Shawnessy of Raintree County, had merely contributed the latest chapter in a legend with the tantalizing title
You'll Love It.

He heard the same phrase many more times that afternoon, applied to a variety of things that were not his things, most of them things Southern, from New Orleans architecture to steamboat excursions on the Mississippi River. The phrase was clearly habitual with her; and indeed it did disclose a vivid, lush, romantic world to Johnny, a world he had always wanted to explore. Susanna dominated the conversation, and it soon appeared to Johnny that only thus was conversation between them possible. Her talk was an incessant self-exposure, candid, vivid, artless—yet somehow never giving a satisfactory explanation of anything. No girl in Raintree County, he was sure, had ever talked as Susanna Drake did that afternoon.

Sometimes he was charmed by her romantic views of life and love and, again, shocked by crudities of speech and anecdote, as when she got off on a whole repertoire of stories intended to show that the Negro was not a human being and that there was no use to talk of emancipating him, people who had any other view were just black abolitionists with Negro wives, and hussies like Harriet Beecher Stowe who didn't know a thing about the good old South, you had only to come down there and you would just love it. Some of the most offensive stories concerning black people were told in the presence of the Negro girl who carried the tea service in and out. To Johnny this was an inexcusable breach of good taste, and he blushed for it, but it was clear to him that Susanna didn't regard the Negro girl as a person.

She seemed to have a peculiar relish for sexual atrocities,

—The good Nigroes are just like children, she said. But if they once got equality ideas, we would all be raped in our beds. They're just like beasts in the jungle. Johnny, I could tell you stories about Nigroes assaulting white women that would make your hair stand up. Why, a few years ago a girl in one of the finest families in New Orleans was out riding in a buggy, and she was attacked by a big runaway Nigro, he made her get out of the buggy, and he tore all her clothes off, and she had to submit to him to save her life. And finally he let her go, and the poor thing drove back into town naked.

Johnny winced and put his head down at this torrent of invective against the immorality of the Negro, creature of the jungle and the Great Swamp. All the time he was remembering how he and Susanna Drake had rediscovered the Great Swamp in the middle of Raintree County, steaming in the sunlight.

A more charming manifestation of Susanna's absorption in herself was the album of pictures that she brought out toward the end of the afternoon.

—O, here's the picture taken the day I met you, he said, opening it.

—No, she said, that's another one.

It turned out that the album was full of pictures of Susanna in romantic attitudes like the one in which he had found her in the Freehaven studio. Usually her black hair was unloosened and her body was buried in a cloudy white robe.