Raintree County (74 page)

In the spring of 1862, she expressed a sudden desire to ‘go about,'
to organize parties and entertainments. Johnny encouraged her, even if Susanna was a little feverish and hectic about it.

But excessive gaiety was almost always paid for by periods of extreme depression during which she would remain alone for hours in the secondfloor bedroom. Once when he peeped in noiselessly, believing her asleep, he was shocked to see her lying in the bed, restlessly turning the pages of her picture album. It came to him then that the album was always kept on the dresser in this room and that perhaps she spent much of her time looking at it.

One day in the early fall of 1862, he returned from the office to find Bessie and Soona waiting for him with worried faces. Susanna was gone. She had left in the early morning carrying a little suitcase and dressed in her best. She had refused to tell them her plans. Johnny made cautious inquiries around town and even tried to get in touch with Garwood Jones for help, but Garwood was nowhere to be found. At the train station, Johnny discovered that Susanna had bought a ticket to Indianapolis. Late at night, she came back, flushed, excited, talking volubly about a thousand little things that she had seen and done. When Johnny told her of his anxiety, she scolded him for it.

—I left you a note, Johnny.

—Where?

—Why, upstairs on the dresser.

He followed her upstairs. She went to the dresser in the bedroom and showed him the note. She had carefully wrapped it around the old daguerreotype of her home in Louisiana and laid it on the open pages of the picture album.

—There, you see! she said triumphantly.

When he made a motion to take the note, she laughed shyly, crumpled it up, and danced away from him, her eyes brilliant and excited.

—No, you can't read it!

That night, she didn't sleep at all, and she remained in a condition of unnatural elation for several days.

During this time, in the winter of 1862 and early spring of 1863, she began to sleepwalk again. Several times he awoke to find that she wasn't in bed. He would jump up and, hardly daring to think what it was that made him so sick at heart, would run into the next
room, where Little Jim slept. After reassuring himself that the child was all right, he would go from room to room and floor to floor to find Susanna. He would discover her walking in the hall with a stately, regular tread, or standing at a window, or even crouching in the cellar. He soon learned that it was wisest to approach her quietly and lead her back to bed without waking her up.

One night, awakening to find her place in bed empty, he went softly down the stair, aware that a light was burning on the lower floor. Susanna was in the parlor, bending over a table on which the lamp was lit. He was fascinated by what she was doing and remained at the door of the room watching her.

She was examining the photograph album, which apparently she had carried downstairs. With quick, restless gestures, she sifted the pages, bending over them and staring at the pictures with sightless eyes. She appeared to be in a great hurry as if she had only a short time in which to find whatever she was looking for.

When he stepped toward her, she seemed instantly aware of his approach. She turned, appeared to recognize him, smiled.

—I can't find it, she said.

—What?

—The letter. I left it here, you know.

—I know, he said. We found it. Don't you remember?

She searched his face with sorrowing eyes. She reached out and touched his beard with a childlike, delicate gesture.

—She didn't read it then? You don't think she read it, do you?

—I'm sure she didn't, he said.

A look of inexpressible relief softened her features. But it faded as quickly as it came. Emotions of confusion, anxiety, terror fled across her face.

—I must find it. Before it's too late.

—Perhaps you'd best go to bed now and look for it later.

—No, I must find it now.

She began to sift the pages of the album again.

—What was written on it? he asked.

She looked at him again, her eyes dilated, and smiled a fugitive, distrustful smile.

—I could never tell you, she said. I promised not to. You believe me, don't you?

—Of course I do.

—You see, I have had a great loss.

—I know, he said.

—The dearest thing in all the world.

She said the words with a lingering sadness that made him ache with pity.

—The dearest thing in all the world, she repeated mournfully. The dearest thing in all the world. The dearest thing in . . .

It was a long time before he could persuade her to give up the search. She kept looking through and through the pages of the album, these pages covered with images of herself posed in cloudy nightrobes. In his effort to win her back to quietude, he felt that he was battling something enormously persistent, rooted in the bedrock of her being, ineradicable, impervious to reason, sinisterly alive.

Another night, he found her holding a lighted lamp and standing before one of the two front windows on the third floor. She made elaborate ceremonial gestures, approaching the hot chimney so close to the curtain that the cloth began to smoke.

Instantly, he started toward her. She seemed to know him, appeared not to be sleeping at all. She smiled, put her finger to her lips, and leaning toward him, began to whisper hoarsely like a tragedienne in a crude melodrama.

—They're probably hiding in here!

—Who?

She came up to him and examined his face closely, then apparently satisfied with her scrutiny, withdrew a little, and narrowing her eyes to slits, said,

—Of course, I know about them.

—Of course.

When he spoke, she appeared startled and held the lamp close to him. As so often before, the inchoate emotions of her dreaming self stirred and faded in her face.

—Now where
is
that doll? she said, irritably.

—It'll turn up, Johnny said. It's late, you know. Let's go to bed. We can talk about it there.

—No, I must find it, she said. I came up here to find it.

—There isn't any doll here.

She seemed to reflect upon what he had said. He gently took the
lamp and led her away from the window and down the stairs. She went obediently enough until they were about to get into bed. Then she began to cry out with terror, and it was some time before he could wake her and quiet her. He tried scolding her about the lamp.

—You might have burnt down the house and killed us all, Susanna, he said. You must simply try to get hold of yourself.

She wept distractedly and held him very tight.

—What did I say? she asked him.

—You were hunting someone. You thought they were hiding somewhere in the house. You asked about a doll.

She had stopped crying and was listening attentively.

—Is there something you would like to tell me, Susanna, something about your childhood or your parents. Maybe it would relieve your mind.

He had asked her the same thing before, but always in vain. Now, however, to his surprise, she said,

—Yes, there is something.

She expelled her breath in a long sigh.

And suddenly he was afraid.

He was afraid of what this woman could tell him. He wished almost that he might have remained in ignorance. He wanted to say, No, don't tell me, Susanna. No good can come of telling me. Perhaps what you are about to tell me ought not to be told at all—to anyone—ever.

—It's—it's about the fire, she said. Something I know about it that no one else knows. I never told anyone—not even Aunt Prissy.

She paused. He didn't encourage her.

—It was something that happened not long before the fire. You remember I told you that Henrietta had been away, and then she came back?

—Yes.

—Well, the day she came back to the little cabin, I stayed and played there, and I left my doll there—Jeemie, you know.

—Yes, Johnny said.

He knew only too well the doll Jeemie. Perhaps he was going to get at last the secret of that hideous little idol from a stained and tragic era, and the secret, too, of all his bright little successors.

—Well, that night, the night Henrietta came back, I was very
much excited, and I lay in my bed in the big house and couldn't sleep. I wanted to have my doll, who usually slept with me, and I remembered that I had left him in the cabin. I wanted to see Henrietta again too. The doll was sort of an excuse. So when everything was still, I slipped out of bed and crept down the stair and went outdoors. It was a warm night, and it was a holiday, the Fourth of July The Nigroes were all singing down by the river, and there was a big scarlet fire burning on the river bank just over the woods from the cabin, and the cabin was all lit up scarlet from the fire. Well, I went down there to the cabin, and I tried the front door, but it was locked, and then I went around behind and slipped in the back door. It was all dark in the cabin except that the light of the fires outside flickered through the windows. I listened and didn't hear anything. Then I crept up the stair because I had left the doll upstairs. There was a light of some kind burning up there, and I could see myself in the mirror at the landing. I had on a white nightgown, and my hair was all shaken down. And then——

She paused, and he was afraid that she wouldn't finish and afraid that she would. But she was entirely in the spell of her own story and had paused as if to contemplate her child's image in the mirror. Her voice had slipped down to a low swift monotone as if it automatically recorded an experience that she was reliving in a center of consciousness far removed from the present in which she lay.

—And then I peeped up over the landing into the upper floor of the cabin, and there were two people on the bed together, and the light from the big fire on the riverbank burned right in through the window, and it made the woman's skin all dusky and scarlet like wine, and the man's skin pale white against it. I don't think I'd ever seen grown people without clothes on before then. I didn't quite understand at the time, but I knew I oughtn't to be there, and I slipped down the stair and went back to the house, and no one ever knew what I saw.

She paused, and Johnny waited. In the night over Raintree County, this other archaic night had made itself a place, and the two figures in the flaring darkness of it were tragically real to him, more real than the great war fighting beyond the borders of the County, on far rivers of the Republic, where armies lay in siege. These two figures embracing in forbidden love were the emblem of a lost republic;
flames licked and flared suddenly around them; they turned in his mind, twisting and twining in their exquisite torment.

—So then, Susanna went on, still talking swiftly to the dark night, I had some dim notion of what it was like between Daddy and Henrietta. And I was proud and glad because I loved them both. I didn't feel so strong then the difference between the races. That came later. Then, a few days later Henrietta came up to the house to live—Daddy was that headstrong—and she had the room next to mine—she was like the lady of the house. And that was when Mamma was so violent. She had had the house by herself while Henrietta had been away. And one day when Daddy was away, Mamma came down and found me in Henrietta's room, and there was a terrible scene, Mamma called her a nigger whore, and screamed and carried on, and said dreadful things to me, and all the time Henrietta just stood there and put her arms around me. And some of the men came and Mamma was led off.

Susanna began to stroke her neck.

—So then, that was when I hated Mamma, and I wanted to hurt her. And I had been reading a novel in which a person wrote an unsigned letter to hurt another person, so I wrote a letter and I managed to slip into her room once when she wasn't there, and I put it in Mamma's picture album that she was always looking through. It was just a little note. It said, ‘Daddy loves Henrietta. Yours truly, A Well-meaning Friend.' Wasn't that silly?

Neither one laughed, and Susanna went on, talking faster all the time as if she had to tell it all now and get rid of it.

—So then I wished I hadn't written it. But it was too late to get it back.

—Of course it couldn't have made any difference, Johnny said. Your mother knew about it anyway. Down South, it wasn't an uncommon thing for——

But Susanna hadn't heard him. She drew another deep breath, and her voice was now so low he had trouble hearing it.

—So then after that awful scene with Henrietta, Mamma was shut up more carefully, and she was very violent for a while, and then for a while she must have been much better, because Daddy took me up to see her again. And she became so much better that Daddy had a photographer come and take a picture of us all in front of the house—you know, the picture I have in the album. That was just a day
before the fire, and three of the people in the picture never even got to see the picture. And Daddy was planning some big change, I think we were going to go away again back to Havana. There was a lot of packing and excitement. And then that night I was in bed and asleep and all excited about us all going to go away, and sometime in the night I woke up, and someone was in my room with a lamp, I couldn't see who it was, and I leaned out of bed and said, Who's there? I thought it might be Henrietta as she often went through my room at night and her room was next to mine with a little hall between. And whoever it was put the lamp out. I listened and heard a door shut, but no one said anything. There was a lot of noise outdoors that night, there had been a barbecue for the slaves because Daddy was going away again, and they were singing and making a lot of noise. And then all of a sudden I heard something like firecrackers, sort of low and muffled in the next room or maybe in the hall. I couldn't say for sure, and at the time I hadn't any way of knowing what it was. Then I must have gone to sleep. And the next thing I knew, I woke up coughing. It was terribly hot in the room, and I could hear a crackling sound, and my doll was on fire. I began to scream and tried to beat the fire out on the doll, and someone kept saying, Get her through the window! and a man came in through the window, it was one of our Nigroes, and wrapped me up in a blanket, and there was a lot of yelling and a timber fell down on us, and I felt a terrible burning pain across my neck and chest. Then somehow I was out in the yard and they said, She still has her doll, and I had this burn on me. And then I said, Where's Daddy and Henrietta? and they just told me not to worry and took me away. Then they took me to stay with Aunt Prissy to get well from my burn, and she didn't tell me about Daddy and Henrietta and Mamma until quite a while later. Then finally Aunt Prissy took me away, and that was how I first came up here, and Aunt Prissy had this house built—she and I were Daddy's heirs—and we lived here.