Raintree County (56 page)

—Mr. Shawnessy! Mr. Shawnessy! she cried, panting hard, her voice shrill with love.

Mr. Shawnessy looked a little surprised to see this small girl with the intense brown eyes, who had apparently been running along the
path by herself and who now stood beside him gasping and holding up her small, determined face.

—Why, Esther, he said, how you have run!

Then, as if remembering, he smiled a little vaguely, and leaning over put his one free arm around her and brushed her cheek with his mustaches. She put her arms around his neck and held on passionately as long as she dared. His coat fell off on the ground. He leaned over and picked it up and then began to walk absently toward the school.

She could think of nothing to say and so walked along beside him holding his hand. She kept measuring the distance to the schoolhouse and wishing she might slow the walking down. He seemed lost in thought. To herself she was wondering whether he knew,

WHETHER HE HAD THE FAINTEST SUSPICION
THAT SHE WAS SO
HOPELESSLY

—I
N LOVE WITH HIM
, as he with her, Preacher Jarvey was saying, what a picture she makes, walkin' there hand in hand with her beloved!

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

This, brothers and sisters, is the brief period of the innocence of the race. O, transports of love and fellowship with the Lord God Jehovah in the dusk and sunlight of the Garden! O, rapturous evenin's and mornin's!

I pause to remind you that scriptural time is different from our own. One day, brothers and sisters, one day in the dawn of Creation is the equal of years of sinful life today. O, how they enjoyed the fruits of that beautiful garden, the yield of wildgrowin' trees, o, how they plunged and swam in the limpid streams of Paradise! Their bed at even was the pressed grass. God tempered the air to their nekkidness. And reachin' up they plucked the grapes of Eden that fell to their hands. Truly, brothers and sisters, truly, they fed on honeydew and drank the milk of Paradise!

This is the time of the testin' of the Woman. And the Lord God Jehovah walks unseen in the Garden a-watchin' this last work of His hand. He considers it His best job. Hit is a beautiful and wellproportioned bein', and He is well pleased. But as yet hit doesn't have a name. Hit is only Woman, bein' made out of Man. Hit is the time before the Woman became Eve. Hit is the time before she sinned against her wellbeloved Father.

Esther was filled with somber pleasure to remember the time when the Woman was at peace and without sin, alone in the world with her Father and her Husband, and beloved of both.

—Hit was the time of the testin' of the Woman. Hit was not the time of the Great Temptation. That time was to come, o, hit was
to come, brothers and sisters, hit was to come. Hit was the time of the Lesser Temptation. For durin' all this time, the Tree was still there and the red fruit a-hangin' out of it, and the Woman a-walkin' there. And she let the red fruit of the Tree brush against her nekkid back and breasts, and she brushed her face against the boughs smellin' the sweet smell of the fruit, and often she just touched her curved lips to the rind—just to test herself, not to eat.

The Reverend Lloyd G. Jarvey perfectly mimicked the Woman's temptation, twining and twisting about as if he dallied under the branches of a tree laden with forbidden fruit. His voice was louder, more rhythmed in its chant.

—She longed to eat of it, o, how she longed for that forbidden taste, but the time was not yet. The time was not yet, but hit was to come. O, hit was to come. Her womanly nature was sorely tempted. Hit couldn't be satisfied with the fruit of the other trees of the garden. Yet hit was good fruit, but hit didn't look as good to her. Hit was the old womanly failing. No daughter of Eve is free from it today. Hit's what we don't have that we want the hardest. Makes no difference to a Woman how good the old is, in her weak and womanly nature she longs for

Esther had ever seen. Below and behind the great tower, which stood out from the east wall, the main building was a strong rectangle of brick trimmed with stone at the corners, doors, windows, and eaves. The Main Entrance was through the base of the tower, where Justice, a life-sized woman with scales, stood in a niche above the door. The tower rose to a height of one hundred and ten feet, having at the top a foursided steep roof, dwindling to a small observation platform, fenced, from which stood a masted American flag. Each of the four faces of the tower roof had a clock.

The New Court House had been seven years building, after the Old Court House had burned down during the War. In the years when there was no court house in the middle of the Square, Esther and everyone else had felt as if a sacred object containing the innermost meaning of life in Raintree County had lost its tabernacle. But as the New Court House had begun to rise, slowly the feeling of security returned. It was good once again to be able to walk on one side of the Square without being able to see across to the other. The feeling that had been associated with the Old Court House crept, subtly changed, back into the walls of the New. For a while, only the main building itself was completed, but the tower, slowly taking form above it, so captured the imagination of the people that they quite forgot the Old Court House, which had had no tower. When at last in 1872 the tower was completed and the flag fluttered from an iron mast at the top, visible for miles around, a new era had begun in the life of Raintree County.

Children who had never seen the Old Court House were already referring to the present building simply as the Court House. For Esther, however, and for all the older people, this building would keep forever an indefinable look that connected it with the days when it was a brave new edifice, the finest in the County.

Esther had been in the Old Court House a few times but had never been in the new building until the day she went in for the Teachers' Examination. It was in the summer of the Centennial Exposition. She was nineteen and had decided to teach. A vacancy had occurred at the country schoolhouse where she had got all her learning, and there was a chance that she might have the place if she could pass the Teachers' Examination. She was nervous and excited, and it was good to have Pa with her as they hitched the horse on the east side of the Square and walked up to the Main Entrance of the New Court House.

As Esther started up the steps into the great building, she felt wobbly and scared. The Court House was a place of men. Any man might go into it or hang around outside of it, jetting tobacco juice. But a woman went into the Court House only for a very special purpose.

When she got inside the New Court House, she smelled tobacco and urine, the immemorial odor of all American court houses, the masculine odor of civic probity, justice, and official function. There was, however, a difference, perhaps a subtle remnant of the New Court House's newness.

Her anxiety increased, and she clung hard to Pa's big arm as they mounted the steep iron stair just inside the Main Entrance. In these gloomy rooms and corridors, the ancient rites of civic administration were performed. The priestlike titles, blacklettered on the door, awed her. Here were the County Commissioners, the Clerk, the Treasurer, the Judge, the Superintendent of Schools, gods who could make their faces benign for the humble aspirant and admit her to the select sisterhood of those who dispensed the sacred mysteries of education. Somewhere in these odorous, secret rooms reposed the State. The Court House was the Republic. The Capitol in Washington was only a greater and grander court house.

She and Pa hurried on up to the Court Room on the second floor, where the examination was to be held. Around the door were several girls and men, all laughing and talking. She looked in vain for her friend Ivy Miller, who was also taking the examination. Inside the Court Room, people were already finding places.

—Now, Esther, Pa said, just you go right in and don't be afraid. You'll do fine. You're as smart as any of them.

He held her hand in both of his, and some of his strength and bigness came into her. His big bearded face was serious, proud, a little flushed from the drive in. He was a handsome, powerful figure of a man, and being a man, felt no weak, womanly fear.

—I'll do the best I can, Pa, she said. I wish you weren't going away.

—I'll stay right here, he said. I'll be just outside the door. I'll get a chair and wait. Now go right in and do your best, Esther.

She left him then and went in through the door and took a chair at one of the tables brought in for the examination. The Court Room occupied most of the second floor of the building. Tall windows let in light from two sides on the gilded ornamental walls. Esther was so scared that she hardly dared look around. It would have been better had she stayed at home on the farm to tend the garden and help Pa in the fields. There were so many things that she didn't know.

Her friend, Ivy, a tall blackhaired girl with an aquiline nose, a big expressive mouth, and vivid brown eyes, came in and sat next to her.

—I'm scared to death! How about you, Esther?

They squeezed each other's hands and waited. Several men were there, looking supernaturally intelligent. One had spectacles, greased black hair, and a bowtie. He talked with a loud nasal twang and was very sure of himself.

—It's nothing to be afraid of, girls. It's a mere formality for a person of intelligence.

There was a fluttering of dresses, pens, and papers as a man came down to the front of the room bearing the examination books.

Esther started violently. It was Mr. Shawnessy. She hadn't seen him since that single year long ago when he had taught the school near the Farm. In the flood of emotion that came over her, she felt as though she were a little girl again, and she was ashamed for Mr. Shawnessy to see her here, a pretender to knowledge, presuming herself able to take the school that he had once taught.

Standing at the front of the room, Mr. Shawnessy said a few words about the examination and began to distribute the books. After that he wrote the questions on a large, moveable blackboard at the front of the room.

Mr. Shawnessy had changed very little, it seemed to her, since the year 1866, when she had seen him last. His temples were a little higher, but his hair had no gray in it, and despite his heavy auburn eyebrows and mustache, his face had a youthful look, much less than his years, which she thought must now be about thirty-seven. His eyes, she saw, had the same remote, sad expression that she had remembered of old.

She was so excited at this revival of an old emotion that she couldn't hold her hand still to write her name on the outside of the Examination Book.

The examination lasted for four hours. After her first panic passed, she found that she could answer most of the questions. From time to time, she looked up at Mr. Shawnessy. He was reading a book most of the time, although often he went over to an open window and stood leaning on it and looking at the Square. Once or twice in answering a question from a bewildered candidate, he smiled a little, and his face was so kind that she forgot her fear and wondered how it was that she had ever been afraid.

Once when she glanced up, she found him looking at her, and she wondered if he remembered her. But his eyes were remote and sad, and she hurriedly looked back at her paper.

As the examination drew to a close, several of the girls went up to hand in their papers. They giggled and joked with Mr. Shawnessy. Some of them, Esther noticed, were wearing earrings in the fashion then sweeping the County. Their round eyes, white teeth, and sharp, whispering voices, their jeweled heads, powdered faces, summerclad bodies assaulted the shy, lonely form at the front of the room as if to overwhelm him and bear him off a prize. Esther felt her face flushing with envy as she thought of her plain dress and her hair chastely bound over her ears.

Around five-thirty in the afternoon, Esther was the last one in the room with Mr. Shawnessy. She was violently excited as she took the paper up to the front of the room and handed it to him. She was going to turn away and leave without looking at him, but he smiled and said,

—Pardon me, but aren't you Esther Root?

—Yes, she said.

—You were a pupil of mine at the Stony Creek School back in '66?

—Yes.

—You had forgotten me?

—O, no, Mr. Shawnessy.

—Well, he said, it's nice to see you again.

She held out her hand gravely, and his strong hand closed around it for a moment.

—I hope you get your position, he said. Was the test hard?

—I think I passed it, she said. I don't really know a great deal. I think I learned more the year with you than I have ever since.

—You were a bright student, he said, the best in the school. I have no doubt you'll pass the examination.

They talked a little of the school system and the examination, as Mr. Shawnessy began to gather up the papers. She turned to leave. It was late afternoon, the light in the Court Room was changing, and the air held an odor of cigars, varnish, ink. She was very tired now that the examination was over. She said good-by and went to the door.

When she stepped out, Pa was there. She had completely forgotten his promise to stay for her. She was so glad to see him that she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth.

—I think I passed it, Pa!

—I been here all the time, he said, thinkin' about you, knowin' you was makin' out all right.

—I was the last one through, she said. I stayed to the very last.