Raintree County (73 page)

—Perhaps the fly himself dimly resents it, Mr. Shawnessy put in.

—But, the Perfessor continued, the death of a million men in a series of bloody explosions and stinking camps is called the Civil War and each man is lamented and remembered for a time, and people have banquets for fifty years, and Congress votes pensions, and schoolboys recite the Gettysburg Address. But
sub specie aeternitatis,
this is all nothing. Strictly speaking, there is no past. That which no longer is never was. Events, as you say, John, are something that never happened. The dead are simply nowhere. The new generations will look back on the Civil War with great calm. It's hard to feel sorry for folks who died a hundred years ago.

—The Civil War, Mr. Shawnessy said, drawing a deep breath and weighing his words, was fought for the Republic—or what Lincoln called the Union. The Republic transcends boundaries, triumphs over space. In America, a man not only possesses his home and his
local gods, but he possesses the Republic, which is a denial of tribal boundaries and tribal prejudice. The Republic is the symbol of man's victory over the formless earth. It may be an illusion, but to be human is to accept the human illusions, which were created by centuries of struggle. This Republic is, in Lincoln's phrase,
the last, best hope of earth.
It affirms that a portion of America—this earth discovered, adorned, and named by human labor—shall not be the property of a single generation to wrest it away and shape it to new things at will. The North didn't fight through a desire to acquire the South, to possess it, to invade it, to enslave it. They didn't even fight to destroy slavery within it. They fought to preserve the Republic, a mystical concept that affirms the humanity of man. The Southerners threatened to destroy the Republic on a point of inhumanity—the perpetuation of slavery. Thus their moral position was hopelessly weak from the start. The ante-bellum South was a proud, feudal, voluptuous dream. In their blind way, the Southerners imagined that they too fought for freedom. But it was freedom to enslave other human beings. Their so-called right was not the world's right nor humanity's right. Thus a war came to be, in which the North was lucky to find great moral leadership in the person of Lincoln, while the South—significantly—found great military leadership in Robert E. Lee. As a series of physical facts, we know how terrible the War was. As a series of Moral Events, it was necessary and even sublime. It had to be fought and won for the future of humanity. If the Civil War had been lost by the North or had never been fought at all, Balkanization of the American Republic would have resulted, and the last, best hope of earth would have been lost for a time.

—Will you philosophers pardon me while I do a little vulgar politicking, the Senator said, rising to greet an approaching delegation.

—Well, said the Perfessor, this may all be true. But what of the martyrs who fought and died for this noble dream, the Union? Where are the young men who died in the first battles? Where are the heroes of First Bull Run? For them—and forever—

Awakening sometimes in the summer night, Johnny would have this phrase on his mind, and he would remember that the War had been a long time fighting. In these awakenings, he would come back from dreams of better days to the dark, highceilinged room, the pale square of the window that looked down on the town, the recumbent body of his wife Susanna, and the child sleeping in its crib.

Then he would remember names of battles. They were old names already, belonging, as they did, to the first years of the War when it was believed that every battle might mean the end of hostilities. Sumter, First Bull Run, Shiloh, Corinth, Island Number Ten, Forts Henry and Donelson, The Seven Days' Battle, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg. Each of these names had swum slowly into the columns of the papers, had lain there wallowing bloodily for days, had swum slowly out again.

The Civilian's War had long ago assumed a pattern of uniformity in chaos that made it tolerable to the general public, North and South. Its landscapes, costumes, trappings had achieved the familiarity and fixity of myth. It had its epic rhythms, epithets, heroes. It was a newspaper Iliad of seasons, maps, and proper nouns. Antietam, Fredericksburg, Bull Run, Shiloh, Second Bull Run.

Summer (and this was the beginning of the third summer of the War) was the season of battles. It would be time, then, to have a map on the front pages of the more enterprising dailies. The map would be called the Theatre of Operations. On it, two mythical cities, Washington and Richmond, would confront each other across a tangle of rivers, roads, little towns. The roads would be firming now in the Theatre of Operations. The air would be warm and clear.

It would be necessary, then, to have a battle in the newspapers. There would be a certain keenness of anticipation on the editorial pages. Armies were moving now in the Theatre of Operations, were
reported here and there. But armies never moved as masses of soldiers. Only the heroes moved. McClellan, Burnside, Pope took up positions, advanced their flanks, forded rivers, fought sharp skirmishes. Lee, Jackson, Beauregard, Johnston, Stuart became alert, made cautious penetrations, conducted raids.

Then there began to be reports of a battle. Towns and streams were tentatively named. In the space of a few days, there had been a battle, there had been no battle, there had been a success, there had been a minor rout, there had been a glorious victory, there had been a partial setback, there had been a sharp skirmish. Lee was beat. Lee was bested. Lee was battered. Lee was prostrate. It was all up with Lee. Lee was still fighting. Various Union Generals had accomplished the impossible. A name would begin to be mentioned more often than others as the location of a battle. There began to be eyewitness reports.

Finally someone wrote confidently of the Battle of Such a Name fought on such a day. Thus long after the fighting, a battle had become the Battle. But the Battle was by no means over in the newspapers. Like a festering wound, it flowed on in crowded columns—with recriminations, conflicting claims, disappointed expectations, removals of leaders (who had accomplished the impossible), and finally the long, backwardwinding processions of wounded and dead.

Then the next battle began to fester in the newspaper columns, and men realized that the last battle was a museum piece enclosed in a glass case called History. Shiloh, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Bull Run, Second Bull Run.

But the battles were only the heavy stresses in the rhythm of the Great War. They were only crests of the waves. The troughs were the periods of waiting.
All's quiet along the Potomac
, said the newspapers.

All's quiet along the Potomac
. This phrase distilled the Civilian's War, which was the atmosphere of Johnny Shawnessy's life in the first years of the Civil War. Along a mythical Potomac, in the arena where the fate of the Republic was going to be resolved, in the eternal Theatre of Operations, usually all was quiet if not well. But this quiet was the time of gestation; this quiet was the womb from which vast, blooddrenched Events were born. This quiet was the unpictured swarm of life in camp and hospital, the letters home that said
that everything was all right but I'm homesick, the plaintive songs around the campfires, the families waiting for news of sons, the long labor in the factories, the audible hopes and silent despair of millions.
All's quiet along the Potomac.
This phrase would always recapture the hue and weathering of the years when the destinies of the Republic were being worked out in darkness. It would mean great dedications North and South; for the whole Republic, North and South, in its divided camps, shared a Potomac of human hopes and longings, courage and loyalty, a beloved earth threaded with rivers of Indian names.

During this time, the child was growing.

At first Johnny didn't love his son He had a strong feeling of pity and a sense of responsibility—but no love. He examined the little raw form with some care to see if he could find any evidence of a human soul. In the beginning, the Baby, as it was called during its first year of life, didn't even have any particular look. It was like some furtive creature pulled out of a river, half drowned, mysterious, mute, unidentified. This moist little visitor from silence and the fruitful night had not yet made itself a place in Raintree County. Johnny was embarrassed even to call it by a human name.

This, then, was the beginning of a human life. His own beginning must have been like this, for once he, too, had emerged from the river of darkness and had lain on the bank stranded, waving tiny fists of frustration, blinking in the strong sunshine of Raintree County. From among the millions and millions of little faceless swimmers, seeds that never found a principle of growth, he had won through, struggling to warm arms and summer. What was he, back in that time of namelessness, where had he been then, did he have any memory of the great deep from which he had swum? ‘John Wickliff Shawnessy,' they had called him in order that he might instantly be rescued from chaos and formlessness. The name had been the beginning of his education and the origin of Raintree County. In the beginning was the Word.

Now he had a responsibility to rescue another little swimmer from the void and make it human. ‘Little Jim' he would call it until at last somehow it
became
Little Jim.

The child lost its birthflush and was gradually a fairskinned little boy with thick reddish hair, clear blue eyes, and regular features. He
was a beautiful child, alert, quick-eyed, expressive. In a few months, if anyone rose up suddenly over the edge of the crib, he would laugh violently. There were times, too, when he would lie in his crib clenching his fists and turning red as if strangling for breath. He began to babble and to imitate the sounds of others.

By the time he was a year old, he had ceased to be called the Baby and was called Little Jim. His coloring was Shawnessy—vital, darkening hair with a touch of the sun in it, a softness and roughness of eyebrow, long lashes, fair skin. His eyes and the contours of his face and body were his mother's. He was gracefully formed. His eyes were dark blue, round, proud, intense.

At ten months he had begun to walk, and at a year he would run several steps, dropping lightly to his hands, only to rise and run again.

—He'll make a runner like his pa, everyone said.

Before he was a year old, he had a vocabulary of half a hundred words, among them the words ‘Daddy,' ‘Mamma,' ‘rock,' ‘tree,' and ‘Grandma'—variously mispronounced. By this time Johnny was very proud of his son. He spent hours with him, talking with him, teaching him the names of things, carrying him around the town on his shoulders. It got so that he didn't like to leave Little Jim at the house but preferred to have the child with him wherever possible. He lost all personal vanity in this son. He was delighted when Ellen observed to all comers that Little Jim was even brighter than Johnny had been at the same age. It was a common sight in the Square of Freehaven those days to see Johnny Shawnessy walking around with a little boy perched on his shoulders.

Often Johnny would take the boy out into the yard of the house in good weather and put him down to run barefooted in the grass. The child hardly ever walked. His straight feet seemed to be made for running; his legs were slender and for a child's long. While his father worked at a table, writing or reading, Little Jim turned, danced, trotted tirelessly in the summer weather, exclaiming, pointing, asking questions. Johnny was never too busy to answer the child's questions, and the Great American Epic suffered in proportion.

When Little Jim was a year old, Johnny began to tell him stories, short narratives repeating the child's own experience. From the out-set,
Little Jim was fascinated by stories. He would lie and listen attentively to the image-creating sounds; his round blue eyes would be earnest, all-believing, innocent. He soon learned to ask for a story and wouldn't go to sleep without one.

Johnny didn't suspect the depth of his love for Little Jim until a series of happenings seemed to imperil the child's safety.

After Little Jim's birth, Johnny had hoped that Susanna's morbid fears would be expelled with her pregnancy. She stopped walking in her sleep, and for a few weeks seemed greatly improved as she went about the business of taking care of the child. Then at the return of menstruation, she became pale and haggard, violent in temper, complaining of her hardships, finding no good in anything. During this time, Johnny and the Negro girls began to assume more and more the care of the baby, until it very largely devolved into their hands, while Susanna moped by herself hours at a time in the upper chambers of the house. Instead of establishing a bond between husband and wife, the child had erected a greater barrier. Johnny became gradually conscious that he and Little Jim were drawing apart from Susanna, that she regarded them as belonging together and not to her. He tried to break down this estrangement between mother and child, but Susanna clearly wished to give him the responsibility for Little Jim. Not that she disliked the boy. She was pathetically fond of him and would often come to him and do something for him, hold him and play with him, as if she were an older child who didn't quite know how to act in the presence of a little brother.

—Isn't he cute! she would say, as if in some surprise, as if she hadn't noticed it before, as if paying a compliment to Johnny for being the father of such a child.

It was rather charming to hear her at such times prattling at the child like a precocious little girl, mock-scolding him, hugging him, and calling him Jeemie.

Much of her strangeness, he ascribed to the fact that she felt herself alone in the North, away from her own people when they were fighting for what they considered their national existence. But although there were many Southern sympathizers in the County, Susanna took no interest in them and very little in the War either.