Raintree County (59 page)

What was this mystery? What was this life? She could only say that life was the lake and the faintly luminous forms in its green depths. Life was the seed and the burst bloom and the withering flower. Life was also the words, the names, the poems that man, the wanderer, had brought to Raintree County.

Every word that Mr. Shawnessy spoke, every book in which she read during those fleeting days at the Teachers' Institute at Paradise Lake were graven upon her memory with a stylus of flame. Nature, Humanity, Liberty, Poetry, Passion, Love, these became meaningful concepts to her and summarized eternal images of life on the earth.

Come, o, come to Paradise Lake in Raintree County. There you will see Humanity in the guise of a lanky man of thirty-eight, clad in a wrinkled summer suit, his mustaches are long and roughly trimmed, his skyblue eyes are sad, he recites Byron to the solitary glades, he rows the young girls out across the lake at evening, and they wish he might express to them the Great Passion of which he is capable. Come to Raintree County, and behold primal forms of man and woman against a background of quiet woods and the long upland fields where clover fragrance floats upon the wind of summer. Here is Passion become serene, as among the most tranquil gods, here is life's purpose made clear, here are Truth, Virtue, Poetry, and Love—Love exalted and purified above all carnal contact.

After a few days, Esther began to have a strong desire to cross the lake to the other side and explore the marshy ground around the region where the Upper Shawmucky emptied. Mr. Shawnessy and others had spoken of the perils of this place and had warned the women not to attempt to find their way through it. But all week there had been a contest on to see who could find the greatest variety of tree leaves for the nature notebooks, and Esther had made up her mind to plunge into the steaming world of the lake's northern shore where perhaps she would be able to find for Mr. Shawnessy rare
leaves that no one else had found. She even played with the thought that she might by persistence and strength find the Golden Raintree in this wild region where the river joined the lake. Mr. Shawnessy had shown them pictures of the raintrees of New Harmony, Indiana, and she was certain that she could identify the leaf. A little after noon, then, on a cloudless day, she took one of the boats from its anchorage and rowed alone across the lake while the other students were relaxing from the heat in the shade of the Revival Tabernacle.

Before she had reached the center, she was half blinded by the brilliant reflections that leapt from the sheeted lake. In her white dress and swaybrimmed bonnet, she felt herself a great flower floating on the water. She saw now that the hotel and the buildings and tents around it were only a random collection on a small part of the shore and that all the rest of Paradise Lake was primitive, green, savage. She saw the low hills sloping to the water's edge on one side, the marshes and reeds where water birds flapped and cried, and at either end the inlet and outlet rivers, the Upper and Lower Shawmucky, flowing torpidly through shallows choked with rushes and the green paving of the lily pads. And then she thought of the great age of the lake and of the things that grew within and around it, and it seemed to her that it was a living pit, the soft navel-scar left by some old birth of long ago.

Come, o, come to Lake Paradise, the oldest scar upon the earth of Raintree County. See how the soft green hair of life blurs the old scar that is in the very center of Raintree County!. . .

She had a hard time finding a place on the opposite shore where she could run the boat in easily, but she finally tied the boat up to a tree branch and climbed ashore. The hotel looked impossibly small on the far side of the lake. She began to push eastward, finding herself immediately involved with nettles, rushes, berry bushes. But she was not at all afraid. From the moment she set her foot on this side of the lake, she had felt a wild excitement as if she were about to discover something hidden to everyone else. She was a strong walker and had often boasted that she never tired out, and she didn't intend now to turn back.

All along this side of the lake, the ground was lower. It seemed to her that the leaves were greater, greener, thicker. She found several new plants and placed leaf, bloom, and bits of stalk in a little
wooden box with a hooked lid, which she carried for her specimens. She saw big butterflies, amazing dragonflies, and again and again turtles and frogs that slipped from bank to water as she approached. Her luck with leaves was so great that she began to dream of herself as the discoverer of the Raintree, which she pictured as an incredible trunk whose fanshaped burst of foliage towered in isolation above the other trees.

Come, o, come to Raintree County and to the central gardenground thereof, where hills slope circularly to form the ancient scar. Here was an old uprooting. Here grew perhaps the Tree that flowered above the garden in ancient days. O, little transplant from the Asian homeland and heartland of the race! O, Biblical tree! O, mysterious seedling, lost and only vaguely remembered!

She pushed on toward the eastern end of the lake, finding her way ever more difficult. She was obliged to make wide detours to avoid swampy places and thickets; and as she tried to make her way back toward the lake, the water had somehow passed beyond the seeming shoreline and deep into the region where she was hunting. She finally took off her shoes and stockings, and holding up her dress, she waded on, feeling more and more determined to reach the place where the river emptied into the lake. She began to lose her bearings. Great waterbirds sprang shrieking into flight, the sunlight poured a furious brightness into open pools, frogs slithered away in troops of hundreds, green bugs buzzed by her, blind as bullets. She began to be afraid. She had come too far. She didn't know where she was. Her white dress was stained with the green blood of life, her bonnet was being continually knocked off her head, her feet were stung and bruised by stones and stalks. O dear, she thought, I'll have to go back. I'll have to give up. But then she saw not a hundred yards farther on, across bunches of horseweeds and rushes, a clump of trees, cleanroofed and stately as if rising from an island of firm ground.

Halfway there, she began to fear for her life. There was something sinister about this place. Savage and endless variety of forms, each form endlessly and savagely repeated, smote her with the frail uniqueness of her own form. A slender, sallowskinned girl with black hair, she felt foolish, lost, helpless in her white dress and bonnet, but she clutched her shoes and stockings and her specimen box and pushed on.

Then it was that she stepped on the snake, a long lewd fellow, writhing under her very feet and slithering away in the water with a gay fury. She had touched this green and yellow monster with her naked foot, and here she was now helpless in his domain, in the very sink and center of it. She began to run blindly through the water toward the high ground where the trees were.

Just then she saw something that shocked her almost as much as the snake had. It was a man sitting on a wide, flat rock beneath the trees.

Involuntarily, she called his name in a voice mingling surprise and relief.

—Mr. Shawnessy!

He turned and watched her, as, feeling very faint and foolish, she stood motionless, wishing she were miles away.

—Come on up here, child, he said. What in the world are you doing in this swamp, Esther?

It was the first time that week he had called her by her first name. She came up obediently and laid her belongings on the rock.

—I was hunting specimens, she said.

He shook his head and laughed.

—Have you found any?

—Some, she said.

—Well, you can add me to the collection.

He smiled, but Esther had always been of a humorless turn of mind like her Pa and made literal interpretations. She blushed violently and tried to think what Mr. Shawnessy might mean.

—How in the world did you get through the swamp there? What way did you come?

She told him, and again he shook his head and laughed.

—There's a path, he said, that you might have followed to this point. It curves wide around and comes out on the north shore about where you tied your boat. We can go back that way. My boat is tied along there too. Well, I suppose you're wondering what I'm doing here.

Strangely, she had not wondered, having immediately accepted his presence on the wild side of the lake as inevitable and right.

—No, Mr. Shawnessy.

—Why don't you call me by my first name? After all, we're fellow teachers now. People call me John.

—O, no, Mr. Shawnessy, she said. No, I wouldn't want to do that.

She knew that she could never under any circumstances call him by his first name.

—As you wish, he said, a little sadly. I forget how young you are.

—Not so young either, she hastened to say.

He looked at the surrounding tangle of grass, reeds, swamptrees, padded pools; mucky places, lost arms of river and lake, mudbars, thickets, flowers, weeds, all bathed in light and heat and stridulous with sound.

—A good place to get lost in, he said, and never found again.

—You seem to know your way.

—This isn't the first time I've been here, but I don't know my way. Few people have ever been through this place. It's a strange earth here. From here on to the river, it's even worse than where you were.

—You've been there?

—Once—long ago. I never came back until I came back today hunting for someone.

—Someone? she said, surprised.

—Yes, he said. A boy. A boy twenty years old, a joyous youth. He swam over here eighteen years ago and found his way into this region and never came out again.

He looked at her curiously to see what she was thinking. Later when she repeated this conversation over and over in her mind, she was amazed at what he had said. Now, in the savage light and beauty of the place, as they sat together on the rock, she with her bare feet chastely drawn up under her dress, she was curious to know his meaning but not shocked.

—He's lost here somewhere, this boy, Mr. Shawnessy went on in a low, pleasant voice that she thought was thrillingly sad and sweet. He's still here, I suppose, wandering around trying to find his way out. He was a very remarkable boy, you know—perhaps the Hero of the County. Do you know why?

She kept her face turned up to his and shook her head.

—Because, if I'm not mistaken, he's almost the only person who has seen the Raintree.

—O! she said. You think it's here then?

—I think it
was
here, he said. I think the boy found it but didn't know it at the time.

—Why not?

—He had drunk too much cider. He had swum too far. He was occupied with other things. Only later did he realize that he had seen the Raintree. It was then a slender tree with a rooty base, and it dropped its pollen on the boy's naked arms and shoulders and into his hair, for that was the season of its blooming.

—But if it was here then, it's still here.

—Maybe so, he said. But of course, everything changes here. Islands of solid earth dissolve, trees are rotted out and crowded away by others.

—Did—did he find it on firm ground?

—I think he found it on a little island of firm ground closer to the river. There were two stones for markers at the base with rude letters chipped on them—perhaps the initials of the man who planted the tree.

—This boy, she said, watching him intently, he came back?

He shrugged his shoulders again and smiled in a way that showed sadness rather than joy, and then he turned and looked at her a moment as if studying her face.

—I'll tell you about this boy, he said, if you won't think it foolish.

—I'd love to hear.

—I'd tell you his name if I could, but in fact he had no name. He left his name on the cultivated side of the lake. It was a hot, bright afternoon like this. He was a good swimmer, and he entered the water somewhere on the southern rim of the lake and began to swim across. This was in a time when few people came to the lake and there were no buildings around it. He swam for a while and landed here, but he found that there was no definable shore here where the Shawmucky flows into the lake. There was someone with him. A girl.

He turned and looked at her, and there seemed to be a gentle question in his eyes. He waited.

—Go on, Mr. Shawnessy, she said. What did he do?

—He didn't know precisely what he was doing, but at the time this youth believed that he had found the source and secret of all
life, beauty, and desire. He thought that he had found all wisdom and had become superior to good and evil. He thought that he was about to pluck the fruit of the tree of everlasting life. Do you understand?

—Maybe, she said.

—He was perhaps a beautiful young man—beautiful because he was young—his hair was thick and tawny and caught the sunlight, he was like a young god, and he had the living present in his hands. The girl was naked like himself and very beautiful. These two slept and awakened beneath a tree. They lay for an incalculable time between the two stones. They ate of a forbidden fruit.

He waited for a while.

—Yes? she said.

Her voice trembled a little, and she felt that for some foolish reason she was going to cry.

—That was when the boy was lost, he said. He never came back. He was nameless anyway, and it didn't matter if he was lost. But in the evening, a young man who had a name swam back across the lake with a girl and put on clothes and with them shame and a sense of guilt.

She felt a great anguish, because of the thrilling sadness of Mr. Shawnessy's voice. She understood that he was referring to something in his own life that had happened long ago and had changed everything for him.

—But it was long ago, she said. And it's all right now, isn't it?

—Nearly twenty years ago, he said. I wonder if the tree the boy found is still there.