Raintree County (76 page)

THE INVASION OF THE NORTH

Just where the main Rebel Army was, no one in the North could tell. It seemed strange that an army of one hundred thousand men could be lost sight of for days, and yet that was the impression created by the newspapers. In the North it was generally agreed that this daring advance marked the supreme effort of the Confederacy, flushed with victory, to win a decisive battle and the War. The reports, confused and tentative as they were, made one thing clear: Lee's infantry were choking the roads of Pennsylvania and flowing northward with little yet to stop them.

In Raintree County, Indiana, far from battles, these days were blue and lovely, and Johnny Shawnessy had the civilian's feeling of paralysis more strongly than ever before. He continued the old routine of his life, nodding at familiar faces, climbing familiar steps, entering familiar doors, while his future and the Republic's were being shaped for better or for worse in a distant valley of rivers, roads, and sleepy towns. There had to be men somewhere who would be willing to die with skill and resolution in a field of corn or behind a railfence lest the Republic be dissolved and something indefinable and holy lost forever to Raintree County.

He had been away for four days; and returning now to Freehaven on the morning of Thursday, July 2, he had an uneasy feeling. Susanna's condition had grown much worse in the last few weeks,
and the situation had been badly complicated by the sudden departure of Bessie and Soona, who had at last taken advantage of their freedom and left for parts unknown. Then had come this trip for the newspaper. When Johnny had suggested that Little Jim be left at the Home Place during his absence, Susanna had flown into a violent passion, and he had been obliged to hire a woman to stay at the house with Little Jim, a seemingly dependable widow named Mrs. Gray, who lived near-by. He had told Mrs. Gray that Susanna wasn't well and that he wanted someone to stay and help her.

—You'll be responsible for the child, he said. Just look after him. My wife has been upset lately. The War is very distressing to her and has affected her nerves. It's better not to leave her alone with the child.

As he spoke, he watched Mrs. Gray to see if she had any inkling of the seriousness of Susanna's condition.

In fact, he had told no one, hoping that somehow or other matters would improve. He couldn't imagine a greater indignity than to go before Raintree County and confess that he was married to a crazy woman. In fact, he could hardly bring himself to admit the gravity of Susanna's condition. He told himself that it was a case of overwrought nerves and would improve, especially when the War was over. For some reason, no one else was aware of her illness; he himself had been slow to realize the extent of it. With other people, she was gay and talkative. She sometimes accepted invitations to social functions that Johnny was unable to attend and had been escorted by young bachelor friends of Johnny's, like Garwood Jones and Cassius Carney. Johnny knew that Raintree County was critical of such wandering from its age-old way of complete marital respectability, and he himself wouldn't have approved under ordinary circumstances. But now he was almost glad for Susanna to have these diversions.

The one encouraging thing about her illness was that she had shown no further desire to leave town or to take Little Jim away.

On the train, he kept craning his neck to get sight of the house. He always got some kind of comfort after absence from seeing its elongate front and the pattern of the five front windows. It was as though he feared that the house would change and reveal some new shape of itself, the old one having been only a mask with which for a long time it had deceived him. But he wasn't able to see the house from the train. It wasn't until he walked the block from the
station to the Square that he saw it on its high yard a block away. He decided to stop at the office on the way and pick up his mail and report to Niles.

Niles was glad to see him.

—Have you heard the latest news? he said. There's a battle in Pennsylvania.

—Where?

—It's not clear, Niles said. Rebels were last reported heading for Harrisburg, the capital. There's been a skirmish of some kind, and the Army of the Potomac may be making a stand. Several little towns are mentioned—Chambersburg, Emmitsburg, Gettysburg, and so on. I have a feeling this may be the showdown battle of the War. If Lee wins this one, we're through—that's all. On the other hand, if we can whip him and trap him that far from the Potomac, the Rebs are through. Hope you can give me a lot of help the next few days, John. Folks are making a big demand for papers—news of any kind. This invasion has the whole county in a tizzy.

Johnny found some letters on his desk, among them one from Professor Stiles. He read it hastily. The Perfessor, now a war correspondent attached to the Army of the Potomac, gave a discouraging picture of the War in the East. The letter ended:

. . . Sorry to hear about your domestic troubles, John. Bear up as best you can, my boy. But whatever you do, for God's sake don't get into the Army.

Martially yours,                             J. W. S
TILES

He poked hastily through the rest of his mail. One letter arrested his attention. The handwriting on the envelope was a large, almost childish scrawl. His name was misspelled.

Mr. John Shaunessy, Esq.

He tore the letter open and read it, while Niles went on talking about the news of the battle.

Dear Frend,

Peraps its none of my bizness, but I think somebody shold tell you your wife is in Indianapolis with another man, they are staying in the Maddon Hotel and frend I am not lying to you when I tell you she is having herself one hell of a time.

A well-wisher

—God, it gets you, sitting around waiting for the dispatches to creep in, Niles was saying. Right at this very moment the greatest battle of all time may be shaping up a few hundred miles east of here, and we sit around on our backends, twiddling our thumbs and waiting for the news. Doesn't it make you feel queer?

—Yeah, Johnny said. Excuse me, Niles. I've got to hurry home. I'll see you later.

He left the office and ran down the alley to the house. He ran up the stair and threw open the door.

—Mrs. Gray! he called several times and then, Jim! Jim! Susanna!

The house was empty.

He was about to leave when, remembering something, he ran upstairs to the bedroom. Sure enough, the album on the dresser was open, and several pages of letter paper had been wrapped carefully around the daguerreotype and tied with a ribbon. He picked the little package up and ran downstairs and out of the house, breaking the string as he went and hastily glancing over the letter. In a minute, he was at Mrs. Gray's, only a block east on the same street.

—Why, hello, Mr. Shawnessy, Mrs. Gray said, startled to see him breathing hard and obviously worried.

—Where are Susanna and the child?

—Why, it was just the day after you left, Mrs. Gray said. Your mother called at the house and talked with your wife. A little while after she left, Susanna said that she had been invited to come out to your Home Place and bring Little Jim with her.

—How—how did she seem when she said that?

—Why, very sweet, Mrs. Gray said. And a little excited too. She acted as if she was going off on a trip. She took a suitcase with her. Did I do wrong?

—No, Johnny said. But I did.

When he reached the Home Place, a half-hour later, T. D. and Ellen were out on an emergency call, but one of his sisters was at the house. She said that neither Susanna nor Little Jim had come to the Home Place and that so far as she knew Ellen had merely stopped to say hello three days ago in Freehaven.

It was about noon when Johnny got on a train at the Freehaven station. He found when he was aboard that he still had Susanna's
letter and the daguerreotype in his coatpocket. He now took time to read the letter over carefully. It was several pages of coarse notebook paper hastily scrawled, running on at great length, full of repetitions and becoming more crowded and incoherent at the bottom of each page as if the writer had felt a barrier approaching at that point and had attempted to say everything before reaching it, and then had decided to go on, bursting over onto the next page with a huge, wild scrawl and gradually cramping it again as the bottom of the page loomed up. Thus the letter was like a series of convulsions. It said in part:

Don't be alarmed about me, darling. They can't follow me. I am outwitting them this time. They thought I would stay longer and they will not be watching the station now if I go right away. I have thought this whole thing through carefully and am doing exactly what I know is best to do. If you saw it the way I do and knew what had happened, you would understand, darling. Johnny, I know now that if I had gone down to the station with you, they would have seen me and my life would not have been worth a puff. You have simply no idea the things that I have seen and heard just since you left. That woman is one of them, I instantly suspected it, and I am perfectly convinced of it now, but I think I have her fooled at least for the time being. For myself I don't care, you know that, it's the child I am worried about, especially after what I know, and as I have friends in Indianapolis this is the best plan. If you knew how I have schemed and what I have had to do to get the best of them, you would never believe it. They will go to any lengths now, I can see that, just as I told you, and they will stop at nothing, simply nothing. My life is simply not worth a puff now, I know that, but this way I know I can give them the . . .

As he read the letter again, he pictured to himself his wife Susanna boarding the train with the child. Doubtless she had been smiling her little crafty smile as she slipped down between the seats carrying the child. Doubtless she had looked furtively out of the window to see if They had followed her.

But of course she had soon discovered that They were on the train too. They had been sitting toward the back of the car pretending to read a newspaper. They had been watching her with deceptive amiability from the bland face of the conductor. They had walked down the car as if to get a drink from the watertank, but it had been really
to make sure that it was she. When she had got off at the station in Indianapolis (assuming that she had really gone there), of course They had been waiting for her there. They had pretended to be in conversation with someone at the gate but had turned after she passed and had begun to follow her at a distance. And when she reached the hotel (assuming that she had gone to the hotel), of course They had taken the room down the hall from hers. It was useless for her to try to escape Them now. She had tried it several times, and it hadn't worked. They were everywhere.

It was touching in a way that she no longer thought he belonged with Them. For a while, she had thought that he might be in collusion with Them. During those weeks life had been intolerable. She had accused him of gross sexual infidelities with Them, of going to meet Them when he went out walking with Little Jim, of inviting Them to the house when she was gone. During those days he had argued with her about Them, trying to prove to her that They were the figments of her imagination, but she had a thousand excellent reasons for believing in Them.

—See, she would say, there is one of Them now.

And going to the window, he would see someone perhaps standing under the tree on the Square doing nothing at all.

—He's not even looking this way, he would say.

—That's just it, she would say. He
was
looking, but
now
he's pretending he doesn't know anything. You didn't see the signal he made.

—What signal?

—A motion he made with his hand.

They all had their signals. The women had a way of touching their pocketbooks, and the men a way of touching their hats. They were infernally clever, persistent, tireless, innumerable, sleepless, implacable. They watched the house at night when she was asleep. They followed her when she went downtown. They pretended to nod and smile at the child, but in reality They were watching her. They were incredibly gross beings, who said and did the vilest things imaginable when she wasn't close to Them. They had gradually formed an organization for the purpose of observing her activities and keeping a full record of them.

Sometimes when he listened to her describing Them, her voice low and fluent, her eyes dilated, They seemed almost real to him too. There was a horrible plausibility about Them, the intricacy of their manoeuvres, the relentless tenacity of their persecution, the weblike ramification of their system.

This last acute phase of her illness had begun with her belief that members of his own family and some other people in the town disliked her for her Southern origin and Copperhead sentiments. Like a malignant growth, the system of accusation had spread. His own family and other known individuals were soon lost sight of or became of secondary importance. She no longer directly accused anyone that he knew of being a part of the huge conspiracy to do her harm. Strangers, newcomers in the neighborhood, passers in the street, employees in public places, these became the favorite objects of her accusations. They multiplied their numbers with a hideous rapidity. There were a million indications of their ingenious malice. And all these she noted and assembled in her mind and repeated over and over, spinning out of herself ever more swiftly the enormous web of her delusion.

For a very little while, he thought she was faking the whole thing and consciously lying, but he soon knew that she was utterly sincere. That was the horror of it.

He had tried his best to reason her out of the delusion, but he had soon found that the chance to talk about it only confirmed her in it. Her energy in the construction of this vast empire of persecution was appalling. When he subjected any one of her bits of ‘evidence' to the clear light of reason, she produced others equally convincing. At last he gave up attacking the fabric in detail.