Raintree County (78 page)

—Why, yes, John, he said, puffing deliberately, watching the cigar take smoke, why, yes—goddamn this cigar—yes—puff, puff—I did see her.

A red circle blazed at the cigartip, and Garwood's face was dimmed behind a fog of smoke. His voice was his oratorical voice, measured, deliberate, affected.

—Why, yes, I saw her yesterday, I think it was, for a little while. To tell you the truth, she
did
seem a bit unstrung. Said something about coming up for the Convention, talked a bit—goddamn this cigar—puff, puff—talked a bit wild. If I were you, I wouldn't put too much trust in—goddamn these goddam wartime smokes—put too much trust in anything she might tell you. War's getting on her nerves—all this goddam killing and murdering for niggers, and after all she's a sensitive—puff, puff—woman, and she's unstrung.

—Did she have the boy with her?

—No, I didn't see the boy. She didn't say anything about him. I just saw her a little while in passing. I think it was day before yesterday, I got a note saying she was in town, and I dropped over to her lodging to pay a courtesy call and invite her to the Rally today, but I haven't seen anything of her here. I wouldn't worry too much, my boy. I think you're unnecessarily alarmed. The Big City has frightened you.

Garwood attempted a jovial laugh and put one arm affectionately around Johnny's shoulder. There was a look of real anxiety in the usually cynical eyes.

—Anything I can do for you, John, let me know. By the by, what do you think of our Rally?

—I think it stinks to heaven, Johnny said. You traitors picked a fine time to have your meeting, with the Union Army fighting for its life in Pennsylvania.

Normally Garwood, always a fast man with a comeback, would have had a retort, but now he merely shrugged his shoulders.

—Who can say where the Right is? he said. God Himself must have a hard time choosing sides in this poor distracted nation. Both camps pray to Him. Whatever you do, for Jesus' sake, John, don't get into the Army. Now let me know, boy, if I can do anything for you.

Outside the Convention Hall, in the hot late afternoon, crowds were crushing in around the windows of the newspaper offices. Reports were still coming from Pennsylvania. Newsboys sold papers as fast as they could peel their packs and make change. Johnny bought a paper, with a sick misgiving that there might be something in it about a lost child or a mad woman. But he found only the latest reports of the battle in Pennsylvania and miscellaneous news. The fighting had continued. Several places were mentioned—Emmitsburg, Chambersburg, Gettysburg. It was impossible to tell who was winning or what was happening, whether the main battle had been joined or was about to be joined. But it was clear that fighting had begun deep in Northern territory, and the tension of a great battle had somehow shot in waves outward from its fiery center across the Nation.

Before it was dark, Johnny had reported his case to the police
station, where he had trouble making the situation understood to a tired sergeant at the desk. The sergeant told him to keep in touch with the Force.

Leaving the station, Johnny spent a long time walking with crowds. Buggies, wagons, carts ground past him on loud wheels. the nameless faces of the city passed him by, there were no faces to which he could appeal, there were no remembered faces. His panic grew stronger by the hour. He only kept it down by redoubling his efforts, halfrunning, halfwalking for hours in the streets of Indianapolis. He returned several times to the police station and to the hotel, but there was nothing to report. Belatedly, he thought of having the police post someone at the train station, and late at night he spent several hours there himself, hunting among beggars and bums, decayed monsters whom the retreating tides of the city left stranded on the shores of night.

Johnny got no sleep that night. Several times, in the small hours of the morning, he passed the newspaper window where tomorrow's headlines were being manufactured. The bulletins had changed a little. Now they said:

DEFINITE REPORTS OF BIG BATTLE AT GETTYSBURG
. . .
LEE ATTACKING HEAVILY
. . .
VAST LOSS ON BOTH SIDES
. . .
ACTION CONTINUING

Johnny kept going. He hardly felt his fatigue. As before in moments of crisis, he found a reservoir of strength that seemed to have no bottom and on which he drew as need required. Tirelessly all night long, he walked between the railroad station, the police station, and the hotel. But there was no further news.

The next day, Friday, July 3, it was the same story. Susanna didn't return to the hotel. There was no news from the police. The papers carried the little notice that Johnny had requested on a lost last column of the inside pages. Buried in the epic terror of the
battle news, it was a piteous little item. It said only:

LOST

A young woman, black hair, blue eyes, pretty, medium size, scar above left breast, talks with Southern accent, may be demented, name, Susanna Shawnessy. May be accompanied by child, James, two years old, blue-eyed, reddish brown hair. Both well dressed when last seen. Report to police station.

Johnny continued to hunt the City. He bought a little breakfast, his first bite in twenty-four hours. Eating it, he was reminded that only the day before he had stopped at the office of the
Enquirer
and had picked up the fateful letter.

He kept up the hunt all that day and into the night. Like a somber background for his search was the growing news of battle. There was no doubt now that a great battle was in progress. Reports were that on both the first and second of July, heavy actions had been fought, but a decision had not yet been reached. The fighting was now located beyond a doubt in the little town of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania.

So then they were still fighting that great battle. It began to seem to Johnny that the battle and his own search were enduring things, lasting for centuries, ages, perhaps forever. As the second night wore on and he found himself a hundred times in the same places, asking the same questions, retracing his steps from hotel to police station to train station, getting the same responses, smelling the same foul air, looking at the same halfdead human faces, seeing the same nighttime shabby cityscapes, gasillumined walls, sooty curtains, bleared windows, he knew that he was building himself a solid hell of memory.

Toward one o'clock in the morning, it began to rain, and he decided that he might as well go back to the hotel as the rain might drive Susanna in. He went upstairs to the room and lay in the bed and listened to the rain drumming on the flimsy roof. He wondered if it were raining so on the distant battlefield. Toward morning he dropped off to sleep and dreamed a brief, dreadful dream. He dreamed that Little Jim was in the hands of lechers and diseased people, a helpless child lost somewhere in a wasteland of dirty hotels, poolrooms, saloons, whorehouses. In the dream it was raining too,
a dreary, sopping rain, and at the end of his dream he saw thousands of rainbloated corpses lying on the familiar fields of Raintree County, bodies of young men fallen in battle. He thought that he approached one of these bodies, and was about to pull away the dead hand from the rainsodden face and discover who it was, when he awoke to see the gray curtain at his window flapping in gusts of rain.

He got up and looked out on the drenched backyards of the city swimming in filth. It was dawn. He was careful not to go to sleep again. Besides, there was a noise of firecrackers in the streets, growing louder and louder until it was almost a continuous roar as of battle. When he went out, he found that the skies had cleared.

It was the Fourth of July, 1863.

He went down past the newspaper window. The reports of the battle were confused and contradictory. The latest dispatches reported that the bloodiest battle of the War or a series of battles had been fought on the first three days of July around the town of Gettysburg, reaching a climax on the third day. The Rebels had attacked violently and the outcome of the struggle was still in doubt.

There were still no reports of Susanna. The sergeant at the police station was beginning to be openly uncivil. After all, the Force had better things to do than to be plagued every halfhour by a hayseed who had gone and lost his wife and child in the Big City. This was the Fourth of July, and there were important speeches and celebrations. Cops would be needed to control the crowds. The watcher had already been taken from the train station.

Johnny kept looking. Dizzy with sleeplessness and lack of food, a little after noon he found himself wandering on the fringes of a crowd on the grounds of the Capitol Building, listening to scraps of oratory. The speaker was someone who had led a charge in the Mexican War. He reviewed the Growth of the Nation and the Progress of the War. He expressed it as his opinion that the present battle would be Crowned with Victory and that the War would soon be over as the God of Battles would not endure any more defeats at the hand of Bob Lee. The speaker said that he wished he were right out there in the Front Lines with the boys but the Heavy Responsibilities of Public Office prevented it. The speaker said that the Rebels had underestimated the Power of the North. He verbally brandished the Grand Old Flag and said it would never be Shot Down while he had
a Breast to Expose to the ruthless rending of Bloodyfanged Rebellion. The speaker affirmed that the Union was Undying while there were men to defend it and that the Starspangled Banner was yet Waving over the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. There was a volley of applause for every other sentence.

Johnny got up and started back to the hotel. He was dripping sweat, dirty, unkempt. He hadn't been out of his clothes for two days. He shut his eyes; the hot sun rained on the lids like fire. He was afraid he would faint. He hadn't eaten since yesterday morning. Yesterday morning. They had been fighting a battle then in Pennsylvania. He opened his eyes.

Somewhere in this same brilliant day, they were perhaps still fighting. Two armies were lying around a little town not even named on the map. Two hundred thousand men had rushed at each other, finding and giving death on the green earth of some rural county where brown roads met in summer. This was History, this was the Shape of the Future, here was the Destiny of the Republic, tossed on the horns of the herding armies. At this moment, that mythical being, the leader of the Confederate Armies, General Robert E. Lee, was studying maps in his headquarters and checking the disposition of troops. His voice was making edges of sound in the hot air. Men listened, rode away, gave orders. Flags advanced and receded. Maps, maps, maps, and the shape of the earth, the lay of the land—this was the whole thing. Everything depended on it. The Battle was for a little theatre of hills and roads called Gettysburg. Whoever won this earth won republics of the future, fair and fecund republics, which, alas, might also be split with endless war in summers to come.

Yet all was chance. Blind chance decreed the battle, the bullet, and the patriot grave. What made chaos a Battle? What made ten thousand murders a sublime Event? Who had agreed to disagree? Who was it that decided to come to these decisions? What gave meaning to the Battle?

And why must he, John Wickliff Shawnessy, be torn with fear because a darkhaired woman with a scar on her breast wandered somewhere carrying a little boy? What business was that of his? Weren't all human beings forever shut off from one another? Had he ever really known or understood her? Was the touching of their bodies any true exchange of themselves, one for the other? Was he
the father of this child? Suppose those two were really lost, suppose their poor ruined bodies were found in some back alley of the City? Must he weep for that—he, the young god with sunlight in his hair? Couldn't he simply turn his conscience back like a clock to the time exactly four years ago when he had just run in the Fourth of July Race but hadn't yet gone to Lake Paradise with a girl from the South? Why must he suffer for this thing? What gave it meaning, except to this weakness called a conscience and these faint nothings, composed of shadow and unsubstance—memories?

Then he told himself that he had to acknowledge this connection and these meanings because these lost children had names. They had his name. Perhaps then it was only the names of things that rescued them from utter vacancy, appalling chaos. Only because he could give a comfortable name to this city, to himself, to all the objects that he saw, did they have any meaning at all for him or for anyone else. Without the names, they would instantly slip back into incoherent, frightening nothingness. No, not nothingness, because all these things
were,
they horribly and palpably
were,
and would go on
being,
but they would go on being without any care for one another. They would merely be
things,
nothing would integrate them, they would be forever meaningless.

Names, names, names. Susanna, Little Jim, Ellen, T. D., Raintree County, Indiana, United States of America. Names, names, names. Vicksburg, Mississippi River, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Names, names, names. Lee, Longstreet, Sherman, Grant, Hooker, Meade, Davis, Lincoln. All were names only, senseless deformations of the lips and tongue, vague cries shaking down clusters of memories. How could one justify the vast structure of names except by the names themselves? If one pulled the words away one by one, the edifice would crumble altogether, and no two things would hold together any longer.

Perhaps John Wickliff Shawnessy was only a transparent awareness in a universe of chance and blind fruitions, an odd sort of newspaper in which certain mythical Events were reported.

It seemed to him then that he was groping helplessly outside his own world and trying to get back into it. He must not give up. He must go on bearing the burden of the whole implacably connected universe of himself.

—Hello, Johnny.

The name was softly personal, like a caress. The voice that uttered it was low and sweet and touched with infinite concern and kindness. He blinked owlishly at the faces around him.