Raintree County (69 page)

On following nights Susanna woke Johnny often to tell him dreams that she had been having. More often than not they were grotesquely distorted incidents of her childhood in the South, before the death of her parents. Little by little, he explored a Southland of her soul, from which a portion of herself had never been withdrawn. In the sleeptime, dark hands carried her back and back, and she was again a little girl in a landscape of dream-illumined rivers, rotting cabins, old plantation homes. Often in her dreams she saw the dug earth yield bodies of women dead in childbirth or children, mothlike, with crusted eyes, whose little pinched faces were faintly negroid.

As autumn advanced, she awoke often from this tainted land and would cling to him like a scared child and talk solemnly for hours in the night telling him stories of her childhood, as if by these recitals she could discharge at last the whole of a sick burden and be rid of it forever.

—Mamma was very queer, she told Johnny one night. When I was little, everyone said that Mamma wasn't well. I know now that she was crazy. I hated her.

—Was she that way when your father married her?

—Soon after, I guess. Aunt Prissy said that Mamma made life un-bearable for Daddy. I think her madness must have had something to do with his leaving Louisiana and taking her to Havana. He was there several years, and I was born there.

—Were you the only child?

—Mamma had another baby before they left Louisiana. It was a little boy, born dead.

—Do you remember anything about Havana?

—I was only four when we came back to the plantation. But I have some memories of when we lived in Havana. That was a happy time. Henrietta had more of the care of me then.

—Where did Henrietta come from?

—According to Aunt Prissy, she belonged to a rich man in Havana, and Daddy bought her freedom. She was a famous beauty, the most beautiful woman I ever saw. She was very gentle and sweet, and I loved her much more than I did Mamma. When I was very little in Cuba, we had a house in the country, and Daddy would come and visit sometimes. Henrietta was like a great lady and had her own servants. Those were the happy days.

—What made your father go back to Louisiana?

—Daddy was the only son, and when his father died, he went back to take the plantation. That was his great mistake. Everything changed. Not that I wasn't happy at first. When we first came back, Henrietta lived in a little cabin not far from the main house. She had a girl to wait on her. I used to stay at the cabin with Henrietta most of the time and play dolls there.

—Didn't your mother ever take care of you?

—No, Susanna said. Mamma had a room of her own on the third
floor and a special girl to attend to her. Every now and then, Daddy would take me up to see her. In fact, my earliest memories of Mamma are always the same way. She would be sitting in a chair looking at an album of pictures. She was a fat, darkhaired woman, not pretty any longer. When Daddy took me up, he would say, Here's your mother, Susanna. She would like to see you again. Mamma would smile as if she knew a secret no one else knew and would go on turning the pages of the album, hunting for something all the time. She never touched me, never said anything, never showed any sign that she recognized me or cared anything about me. Once she laughed in a way that frightened me. Your mother isn't well, Susanna, Daddy would always say when we left the room. That's why she acts the way she does. Then the bad time came.

—How was that?

—It wasn't very long after we came back that there was some kind of trouble. Aunt Prissy has told me more about it since. It seemed as if Mamma's relatives made a protest of some kind and wanted to take Mamma away. Aunt Tabby—that was Mamma's older sister—was at the bottom of it. Anyway, that was when Henrietta went away, and her cabin was shut up. I was terribly lonely. And for a while Mamma got better and came downstairs more. Daddy had a girl to look after me. But Mamma would sometimes watch me in her peculiar way and smile, and sometimes she would laugh at me. I believed that she had driven Henrietta away, and I began to hate her and fear her then.

Susanna's voice trembled. She turned restlessly in the bed, trembling.

—That was when I would go down to Henrietta's cabin, and I found a way of getting in through a loose board on the back door. And I would go upstairs to Henrietta's bedroom, where the window looked out on the river, and get on the bed and play doll and pretend that Henrietta was there. Then one day, Daddy came to the house and said, I have a surprise for you, Susanna. He took me down to the cabin with him, and there was Henrietta. I was so happy I cried. Daddy just smiled in his sad sweet way. He was the most wonderful man, Johnny.

—Then Henrietta stayed—for good?

The phrase seemed unluckily chosen.

Susanna's voice was hushed and solemn.

—Yes. Only, after awhile, she stayed up at the house and had the large front bedroom next to mine. That was when Mamma was so much worse, and two people had to watch her all the time.

Susanna began stroking her throat as if to rub away the memory of the thing that had suddenly devoured this tangled skein of love and madness. For these conversations between Johnny Shawnessy and his wife always ebbed into silence against one now nevermentioned scarlet fact, a night of fire whose secret was impenetrably lost on the river of years.

These verbal debauches came all at night. During the day, Susanna talked little. She became pale and almost ugly during this time, looking somehow younger, like a haggard child in the grip of an incurable disease. She was pathetically dependent upon him and the Negro girls. She could hardly bear to have him leave the house, and when he returned she was avid to hear of everything he had done and of everyone with whom he had spoken.

—Did they inquire about me? she would ask.

She was especially inquisitive about members of his family. When his parents called at the house in Freehaven, he felt constrained in their presence, knowing how entirely he had been taken out of the old life with them. He felt that they too were ill at ease in this house. Somehow he couldn't talk with Ellen and T. D. about Susanna's condition, and once when he suggested to her that T. D. might handle the delivery of the child, Susanna objected so violently that Johnny didn't mention the subject again. Indeed, it was months before she consented to see a physician at all.

During this time, the summer and fall of 1860, the year of the great campaign, Johnny Shawnessy felt that he had passed entirely from his years of sunlight and young aspiration into a somber maturity. At Susanna's insistence he had grown a mustache and beard, and in other ways she caused him to feel much older—by her utter dependence on him, her sickness, and her jealousy when she discovered some part of his present life denied to her. Her childishness became so complete that it dominated their relationship to each other and filled him with emotions that he couldn't define. At this very time when he had made her a woman fruitful, she had become to him most like a passionate, irresponsible child. And he in turn became
in his own mind like a father, grave, full of brooding anxiety and a persistent feeling of guilt. He felt that he was transgressing some ancient, most austere prohibition.

The only good thing about Susanna's illness was that she ceased to care about the political contest that was now shaking the land to its foundations.

Election Day, 1860, was the most memorable in the history of Raintree County as well as the Republic. For the first time, North was openly pitted against South on the question of slavery extension. The Republican Party had become the party of the North, reflecting the widespread moral and economic opposition to slavery, which had grown steadily greater for fifty years and had now swollen to an irresistible flood. The Democratic Party, which had until that time tried to remain the party of compromise—of North, South, East, and West—was hopelessly split and enfeebled. In separate conventions, the Southern branch of it, abandoning all compromise, had nominated its own candidate, while the Northern-dominated branch chose Lincoln's old senatorial opponent, Douglas. A fourth party, calling itself the Union Party, merely increased the confusion. In this chaos the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, presented a clearcut opportunity for voters to elect a President who stood firmly for the preservation of the Union at all costs and against the spread of slavery as a moral and political evil.

On Election Day the Republic made the fateful decision that it had been evading for fifty years. In Raintree County, the people went down to the polls all day long in a tide unprecedented, overwhelming, irresistible, and voted for Abraham Lincoln in the belief that they were voting for the future of America as one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Johnny Shawnessy, twenty-one years old, cast his first vote that day. He had never seen such wild excitement in the Square. As the dimensions of the Republican victory gradually became clear from reports pouring in from other parts of the land, the elation in Freehaven mounted until it broke all bounds.

One of the great moments in Johnny's life came on the night when Lincoln's victory was assured and had been posted in the windows of the
Free Enquirer
office. Johnny and Niles Foster were standing at the door watching a Liberty Parade go around and around the Square
waving banners, shouting Republican songs, ringing cowbells. Thousands of people were weeping, laughing, singing.

—We helped cause this, John, Niles said. I guess we have a right to enjoy it.

—We want Foster! We want Foster! the crowd chanted. And then,

—We want Johnny! We want Johnny!

A dozen hands reached out and lifted the two men up. They rode around the Square in the light of the victory bonfires. When Johnny finally managed to get back on his feet, dozens of men came up and shook his hand, and women hugged and kissed him.

In the midst of this emotional frenzy, outdoing even the Great Revival of '58, Johnny came face to face with Nell Gaither. She had apparently been marching with the crowd. Her furcollared coat—for it was a chilly evening—was pulled close around her chin. Her bonnet was knocked awry, and strands of her bright hair had come down. Her cheeks were streaked as though she had been crying. Her eyes were full of green excitement.

—Hello, Johnny, she said. Isn't it wonderful!

—Sure is, Nell.

They stood in the crowd unconsciously gripping each other's hands and arms, both trembling with excitement. They hadn't seen each other since Johnny's marriage.

—How is—how is everything with you, Nell?

—Just fine, she said. Johnny, you have a beard.

—I know it, Johnny said. We—we change.

—How is everything with you, Johnny?

—Just fine.

—I'm so glad, Nell said. Well, I guess this is a good time to say good-by, Johnny.

—Good-by?

—Yes, I'm going back East, Nell said. To stay with Mamma's people.

—O, I'm sorry, he said, without sufficient thought.

The crowd was all gone for him. The Election was forgotten. The bonfires had died away. The hundreds of faces pressing around him, shouting and singing, were all phantoms and unreal. Johnny touched his beard and smiled his wistful, affectionate smile.

—As the Professor would say, he said, I guess it's time for a little quotation, if I can lay my tongue to one. In the words of that dear book, which you inscribed to me, Nell,
Fare thee well! and if forever——

—Still for ever, fare thee well,
Nell said, smiling her bright smile.

Her hands tightened on his arms, and his on hers, and they let go of each other, and smiling, both were lost in the vast, victorious crowd that wound endlessly around the Court House Square.

Of course, there was an awakening from all this jubilation, as Johnny had known there would be. Raintree County had scarcely been elated by the news of Lincoln's victory when it was shocked by news of another kind. The Southern States were quitting the Union. Secession started with South Carolina and spread fast, engulfing, one after another, the great names below the Mason and Dixon line. Federal forts and arsenals were seized. Southern orators began to proclaim the New Republic in sonorous, confident phrases. They were through with the old Union, and they offered to the North peace or a sword. In contrast, the Northern leaders seemed pitiably inept. President Buchanan and his expiring administration watched impotently as the breach widened. The President-elect, Abraham Lincoln, whiled away his time in Springfield, Illinois, saying nothing much except that he expected the Union to hold together. Johnny began to doubt the wisdom of the political compromise whereby an obscure, untried Westerner had become President of the Republic in her most critical hour. In Raintree County, there was a feeling of complete paralysis, which deepened as weeks and months passed. The Republic appeared to be mortally wounded without ever having begun to bleed.

On February 18, Jefferson Davis became the President of the Southern Confederacy. In the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, an island fortress called Fort Sumter became a stormcenter of discussion as it continued to hold out with a small Federal garrison while the South demanded its surrender. Everywhere in the North men were asking themselves the same terrible questions: Would Sumter be evacuated by the incoming administration and a clear case of Northern acquiescence to the seceding states be established? Would Lincoln be inaugurated on March 4? Would there be a capital in which such a ceremony could take place? Would Washington, D. C.,
an old Southern City, remain a part of the Union? Would Virginia, lingering and indecisive, go with the seceding states? What would become of the border states between North and South, like Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri? What of the Far West, which the South was trying to win to its banners?

On February 11, Abraham Lincoln left Springfield for Washington. A little less than a month later, the new President was inaugurated at Washington without bloodshed. Johnny took some heart from the tone of the President's inaugural. He hoped that Lincoln's wise plea for reconciliation would be hearkened to, but in the following weeks no overt act, either of violence or concession, occurred on either side to change the situation. The most exciting headlines continued to feature Fort Sumter, still holding out in Charleston Harbor. The newspapers were filled with contradictory rumors: The Federal troops were to be withdrawn. They were to be reinforced. They had been bribed. Lincoln had sold out the Republic. Lincoln would stand firm. The South would give in after certain concessions to her hurt pride. The South was secretly preparing to attack the North. No one knew anything for certain, and everyone had a different idea as to what ought to be done.