Raintree County (44 page)

—I guess that story was too good to be true, the Senator said.

He tipped his chair back against the wall of the General Store, and nodding pleasantly at a group of hovering pedestrians, began to light a new cigar.

—John—puff, puff—how do you stand living in this little—puff, puff—burg? When I was a—puff, puff—kid, I couldn't wait to get out.

He sat back breathing hard, triumphant possessor of a lit cigar.

—These are good smokes, he said. I burn about fifteen every day.

—This is the first smoke I've had for weeks, Mr. Shawnessy said. My wife doesn't like the odor.

—Ten o'clock, the Senator said, consulting his watch. What do I do now, John?

—Just sit here and let the people gaze on the Man of the People.

All three men tipped their chairs back against the wall of the General Store.

—John, I remember how your dad, old T. D., was deadset against tobacco, the Senator said. What was that famous couplet of his?

Some do it chew, and some it smoke,

Whilst some it up their nose do poke.

He quaked with senatorial laughter.

Drinking the strong aroma of the cigar, Mr. Shawnessy felt heady and full of words.

Garwood the Great. Occupying the throne. And I in shadow sucking on a borrowed smoke. Well, I was too ambitious to be a great man in this age. We are definitely in the Garwood B. Jones Period of American History.

—Gentlemen, said the Senator, hooking his thumbs under his armpits, where would America be without the cigar?

Mr. Shawnessy watched the crowd go by in the thin mist of his cigar, incense of the Republic.

How will you find this manyness in one, this oneness in many, the Republic? It hovers in the smell of all the pullman cars and diners, and all the lobbies, court rooms, courthouse toilets, and all the senate chambers, hotel rooms, and statehouse corridors. The Republic is rolled up in thin brown leaves and smoked all over the Republic.

I will spend five cents and buy the earth. I will buy the subtle fragrance of sorghum, rum, molasses, dung, and dark flesh from below the Ohio River. For they have taken Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, and the Carolinas, they have taken Old Virginny, and distilled them into smoke.

I saw a halfburned butt beneath a vaudeville poster. The street outside the drugstore was littered with chewed fragments of the Old Kentucky Home.

Have a smoke, brother. Thank you, Senator. Give me a light, will you? Here's a good cigar. And don't forget, brother, I stand for free soil, free speech, and the rights of men.

Can I get more for a nickel anywhere than the memory of all those great white domes and statehouse yards on Independence Day and summer streets and sainted elders reading their papers in the evening?

The cigar is mightier than the sword. Our thin smokes curl upon the summer air, tracing the legend of an elder day. Our thin smokes curl upon the summer air, our thin smokes curl upon, our thin smokes curl . . .

—By the way, men, the Senator was saying, I am eager to have the opinion of two such erudite gentlemen on a book I am writing. As time and the pressure of public duty permit, I have been working on a little
magnum opus,
a record of my life and the crowding pageant of the Nation's history during my career as a servant of the people.

—Garwood, Mr. Shawnessy said, for goodness' sake, get off the platform and talk English. You're among friends now—not voters. You never got a vote of mine, and by the gods, you never shall.

—That's what I like about you, John, the Senator said. You make me feel right at home again. Remember how we used to maul each other in the partisan weeklies? Well, what I want you two smart bastards to do is to prod me a little, stir up my ideas about these things. I figure on calling the goddam thing

MEMORIES OF THE REPUBLIC IN WAR AND PEACE

What do you think of that?

—Why don't you just call it frankly

WHY I OUGHT TO BE PRESIDENT

the Perfessor said.

—I admit, the Senator said, that the appearance of this book, about two years from now, won't hurt my candidacy for the Presidency in '96. But all joking aside, boys, I have been turning over in my mind the whole question of what the United States of America stands for, and where we have been heading in the last fifty years. Or in the last four hundred years, for that matter. Do you fellows realize that we are in the Quadricentennial Year of the Discovery of America by the well-known Wop?

—America, Mr. Shawnessy said, is still waiting to be discovered.
America is a perpetual adventure in discovery. I've spent my fifty years of life trying to discover America.

—That sounds rather good, the Senator said. Whom are you quoting?

He made a lazy ring, fat breathing of the senatorial lips.

—Well, what is America? Mr. Shawnessy said.

The Senator laughed gently, became silent. At last he said,

—America is the most perfect form of government ever devised by man.

—A lawyer's definition, Mr. Shawnessy said.

—America, said the Perfessor, is where a great many beasts try to live under a government perfectly devised for men.

—A cynic's definition, Mr. Shawnessy said.

—We need a poet's definition, the Perfessor said.

—See my forthcoming opus, Mr. Shawnessy said, which, if the pressure of public duty permits, will appear just in time to strengthen my bid for the Presidency in 1948.

—John, the Senator said, where in Christ's name
is
that great book you were always going to write?

A deputation of citizens approached to greet the Senator, who got out of his chair and began shaking hands.

Mr. Shawnessy drew deeply on the cigar.

America is a memory of my pre-Columbian years. America is a cabin in the clearing and a road that scarcely ruts the earth. It is the face of my mother in the sentimental doorway of our home in Indiana. America is an innocent myth that makes us glad and hopeful each time we read it in the book of our own life. It is the same myth each time with multiple meanings. It has the same homeplace in the county, the doorway and the face in the doorway, the cabin made of logs, the spring and running branch, the fields around the house, and it has the same rock lying at the utmost limit of the land at evening.

—Boys, the Senator said, resuming his chair, whatever America may be, I'm sure of one thing—that in fifty years we have seen a radical change in this country, as much so as if we had adopted a different form of government.

—For good or bad? the Perfessor said.

—Why, for good, the Senator said.

—For my part, the Perfessor said, I think we live in the period of the Great Betrayal.

—How so?

—We've betrayed the martyrs of the Civil War. We've betrayed the Negro. We've betrayed the working man. We've betrayed the immigrant millions. We've betrayed each other. We've betrayed the early dream and promise of America.

Mr. Shawnessy drank the strong aroma of the cigar.

Betrayals. The saddest moment of our life is the moment of betrayal. To love someone is to betray someone.

Anguish welled up, a brackish water from dank cisterns. A thin smoke curling had lured him to this pitfall of memory.

Apostate sucking on a borrowed smoke in the Main Street of the Nation, reclaim your heritage. Decayed shell, incapable of tears. My God, how I wept in the old days! The terrible rivers of remembrance streamed from my eyes. Wandering, I went to the farthest limits of the land at evening.

Listen, I did not betray you. I remember you, though you are many years buried in the seed-dense earth. I remember your purity, your hurt eyes, and how I fled to the verge of our land in the evening. I remember the waning light of autumn day, all the land was a conflagration of the fallen and falling leaves, and I remember

immutable and lonely. Eggshaped, part-sunken in the ground, yet higher than a man, it lay in the South Field just short of the railfence. The land rose gently behind the farmhouse and then fell like a wave of waning strength to the limit of the field where the rock lay. The rock's immensely solid mass was tinged with red, and sometimes on summer evenings the great scarred shape would glow dull scarlet after the land had turned to gray. The moveless mass of it had been there before the settlers came, had been there when Columbus saw the flowering shores of western islands, had been there when the first man, wandering through the forests of the middle continent discovered a river winding to a lake. Centuries had flowed and faded around the rock as seasons did around the life of Johnny Shawnessy. And yet it had always seemed a stranger in this earth, a stranded voyager from other climes.

He could be sure that in the periphery of all his memories the rock had lain there at the limit of the land. If he had wished, he could have gone there at any time and put his hand on it. Perhaps he would have found the rough rind of it faintly warm.

But one day it seemed to Johnny that perhaps he discovered why the rock was there and what it waited for.

For the rock had been there too during that triumphant spring when Johnny Shawnessy had thrust himself to the inmost recesses of the County. When he lunged through the pollenous air of Lake Paradise and lay with one beautiful and alien, the rock had been there at the utmost verge of the Home Place though he had never given it a thought or wondered how it could be there at that same instant, or how it could be so abidingly at all.

And the rock had been there too when Susanna Drake went back to her own earth, and it was there when she came back to Raintree County.

In early November, Johnny got a letter that read:

Dearest Johnny,
     I'm back.
          
               Your own
                    S
USANNA

Grass was withering in the fields, and the rock at the limit of the Shawnessy land was a dull dome of color in the gray afternoon when he walked into Freehaven to see Susanna Drake. As he approached the house, standing white and mournful on its high lawn, his imagination involuntarily wished fire upon it, fire that would burn a vacant place against the sky and purge this shape and the memory of it from his life forever.

But after all he wasn't so badly off, if it came to that. He was not going to have his neck wrung like John Brown.

At the door, he was met by the Negro girl, who ushered him into the parlor. He sat down and waited. While he was waiting, he picked up the album and gloomily conned its pages. There were two or three new pictures of Susanna in various romantic attitudes. Susanna with Child, he mused, mournfully.

The daguerreotype of four people before the old Southern mansion was still there. He examined it more closely than before. When held to avoid reflection, this primitive legend of light and shadow had a precision of detail that more modern methods couldn't achieve. There were more than four faces in the picture after all. If you wanted to be pedantic, there were five, for the little girl was hugging a doll whose tiny features were clear like a cameo.

The father was a tall, lanky, bearded man, gentle and distinguished in appearance. The mother appeared to be a brunette, her face oval, her body fattish, her eyes distrustful, her mouth twisted. The little girl was a lovely, eager child, her face all eyes and mouth, as she clutched her doll with one hand and held her father's hand with the other.

Here was a fragment from the lost days of a little girl—innocent, scarless days, bathed in a brown light of arrested time. A secret lurked here in pools of shadow, like the lovely mulatto woman standing on the porch.

—Johnny!

He sprang up just in time to catch Susanna's half-naked body as she fled across the room in a white nightdress.

—O, Johnny! she said, don't leave me. I've been sick.

She was sobbing. It was no ordinary sobbing fit: it lasted a good hour by the clock. She clung to his neck, and when he sat down, she sat on his lap and wept on his coat and face. It was a fit of passion as violent in its way—and as seemingly authentic—as the one at Lake Paradise. Perhaps it was intended to have the same climax, for Susanna kept trying to press her mouth against his between fits of sobbing. But the superb young god of July had given place to a young man with gloomy November scruples. Johnny was terrified to think that he had caused a woman to weep in this way, and he found himself muttering reassuring affirmatives. When at last she seemed a little quieted, he started to say,

—But why didn't you let me know sooner, Susanna? Now it's——

At this point, the sobbing broke out afresh and with it an incoherent tide of explanation. She hadn't wanted to hurt him, she had tried to forget him, she had been very sick and unhappy, mysterious people—her own relatives and friends—had all turned against her in New Orleans, there had been shameful plots to get her property and her good name away from her, he had no idea what she had been through.

It was another half-hour before she subsided again, lying quiet in his arms with her head on his shoulder, like a heartbroken child, soothed but occasionally catching her breath and ready to break out afresh. He decided that the best thing he could do was to get away, if he could, and talk with her when she was calmer.

—I want a little time, he said, to think things out. I'll come back and see you again, Susanna.

The figure in his arms didn't stir, but continued to cling to him. Brusquely decisive, he stood up and lifted her to her feet. She offered no resistance, passively allowing him to use her as he pleased. Her eyes were faraway, mournful, pensive.

—I'll come back and see you again, Susanna.

She didn't say anything. He moved indecisively toward the door as she stood where he had set her, a picture of forlorn resignation. He felt ashamed of himself.

—Good-by, he said. And try not to worry. Things will work out all right.