Raintree County (81 page)

The Senator shuffled
Memories of the Republic in War and Peace
into a neat square pile, which he then folded and stuffed into his coatpocket. A westbound freight screamed up its sunbright highway to the crossing and went longly by, following the path of the sun toward distant sheds of smoke and tumult. The voice of the Trainman sounded in stations of the far years, calling the cars to home, to home. In the valleys of a lost republic, the cars were changing in the stations. When did the great trains come to rest!

—Tell me, John, the Senator said. Is Evelina as lovely as ever?

—Don't tell me you know her too! the Perfessor said.

—Why, certainly, the Senator said. Mrs. Brown has been in
Washington several times over the last decade to lobby for woman's rightful position in the world.

The Senator wheezed, and the Perfessor shook soundlessly.

—Did you help her achieve it? the Perfessor said.

—Did my best, the Senator said. How do you happen to know her?

—She and I collaborated in certain feminist propagations in New York.

The Perfessor shook soundlessly, and the Senator wheezed.

—Well, I'm glad to have her in charge of the program, the Senator said, standing up. Where does the little lady live around here?

—She lives, Mr. Shawnessy said, standing up, in a lavish mansion just at the edge of Waycross. There are castiron nymphs in her shrubbery. She's the bewilderment of the local ladies.

—Evelina, said the Perfessor, standing up,
Atlas
under arm, is a darling. She writes dear, bad poetry which now and then over the years I have printed in my column.

—What in the devil is she doing
here?
the Senator said.

—Frankly, the Perfessor said, I can't fit her into this picture either. But I'm responsible for her being here. Some years ago, she got acquainted with our boy John through the instrumentality of my column. She admired the philosophic pearls now and then dispensed by the Poet Laureate of Raintree County. She was looking for a place in which to withdraw from the world for the contemplation of her navel—one of the most cunning in my wide acquaintance—and she selected Raintree County.

—How long's she been here? the Senator asked.

—Two years, Mr. Shawnessy said. She bought, rebuilt, and landscaped an old brick house just outside Waycross here. She wanted a house by the side of the road. Something like that. Solitude. Meditation.

—Where did she get her money? the Senator said. Who was her husband? I've always wondered.

—I don't know, Mr. Shawnessy said.

—Nobody knows, the Perfessor said. She turned up in New York ten years ago, a young widow with a baby girl, a pile of money, and a lot of feminist ideas. Who her husband was, she never would tell. She's a figure of mystery, and the biggest mystery is why she sheds
the sunlight of her lovely countenance on John and the local anthropoids.

He lowered his voice.

—A number of whom I see approaching.

A halfdozen farmers in Sunday suits shifted uneasily in shiny shoes and tried to rub smiles from their faces. Their leader was a middleaged fat man with a chin beard.

—Howdydo, Senator.

—Howdy, Bill, the Senator said.

He shook hands around, permitting it to be known that he and Bill Jacobs had been close friends in the Old Days and that there wasn't a better farmer in Raintree County, or in the whole nation, by God, than Bill Jacobs.

—Uh, Garwood, while you was waitin' around fer the program to start this afternoon, Mr. Jacobs said, we thought you might be interested in seein' a little special attraction fer men only. Now me and these fellers is all members of the Raintree County Stockbreeders Association, which I am the president of. Now, I don't know as you'd be interested, but I happen to own the bull that took first prize at the State Fair last summer, and Jim Foley here, he has a Jersey heifer he wants bred, and I told him we might hold it as a special attraction on the Fourth over to my barn. If you'd care to come, it's going to be right soon.

The Senator cleared his throat.

—All aspects of farm life interest me, he said. How about it, John, have we got time for this?

—We'll get the pictures taken first, Mr. Shawnessy said. Bill's farm is close. I suppose we'll have time. Want to go along, Professor?

—All aspects of farm life interest me, said the Perfessor.

Leaving the General Store, the three men walked slowly under elms and maples toward the site of the Senator's birthplace. Peering ahead, Mr. Shawnessy could make out a young man setting up a black box on three legs just beyond the shadetrees at the point where the sidewalk ended.

He had been entangled in an Old Southern Melodrama, reshuffling memories of war and peace in a lost republic. Time now to find again the everliving present in which a radiant god was zestfully
tracing images of forbidden things. With a finger of light, there where the shadow ended, he drew his legend, forever new, forever old—a garden of strange delight where nymphs were hiding nude in balls of shrubbery watching the motions of

A White Bull

STOOD
in a small pasture a little way from the National Road. On three sides he was imprisoned in barbed wire, on the fourth by a tall iron fence flanking an unseen garden. His large brown eyes were fretful and melancholy. North and south, the July corn was an ocean of soft arms in which he was islanded, a great strength formed for love and strife. Brutely propulsive from tight rump to mounded shoulders, he stood lovetortured peering at a world without depth. He did not know what festive day it was. He did not know what month or year it was. He did not know his name. He did not know that he was bull.

. . .

T
HE
R
EVEREND
L
LOYD
G. J
ARVEY
, shaggily virile, strode back and forth in the little tent beside the Revival Tent. The flap was down. He was alone. Even with his glasses on, he could see nothing clearly except that the sun blazing on the canvas dome filled the tent with a brown mist. Dripping with sweat, back and forth he strode, his eyes glaring savagely with a penned-in, fretful look. Through dull walls he could hear a liquid rush of voices, laughter, wheels. It was a sound like surf beating on an island in which love-tortured a god lay pinioned in a shape of earth.

. . .

M
RS
. E
VELINA
B
ROWN
stood in the lower hall of her mansion east of Waycross. Looking into her mirror, she saw a gracefully formed woman in a modish green gown with emphasized hip lines. A small green hat perched on her titiancolored hair. Her face was fullcheeked and fair. The large graygreen eyes and finely drawn uplifted brows gave to her face an eager girlish look though there were faint lines on the forehead and in the corners of the eyes. Nose
and chin were pert. The mobile, shining mouth had the full under-lip of passion.

Around her gloomed the brick broad walls of her Victorian home, stocked with twisted chairs, bewildered sofas, sentimental pictures in writhing frames, grotesquely antlered light fixtures, flowersplashed wallpapers, and glassdoored bookcases ranked with gilt volumes of Tennyson, Dickens, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, Victor Hugo, and a great deal of libertarian literature, calculated to achieve woman's rightful position in a thoroughly reformed world.

The house which enclosed her small lonely form looked as if ten different architects had begun work on ten different projects in the same place and had been obliged to reconcile their conflicting designs as best they could. Thin windows pierced thick walls; a green mansard roof looking like elephant rind squatted on the confused pile; ironwork bristled along the eaves. Across the front was a manycolumned verandah. A round tower was rooted obscurely in the gloomy mass. A fence of iron spears enclosed a vast lawn, full of clipped balls of bushes and topiary shapes of bulls, deers, archers, gods. Nymphs stood nude in the shrubbery, castiron buttocks wound in vines. To the rear were a servant's house and a gardener's shop, both brickly respectable. In the back part of the lawn was a little summer house, a roofcone on slender columns. In the east front corner of the yard near the road a fountain made a flower of spray over two bronze children, whose naked forms were halfsubmerged in a pond of waterlilies.

In this house and lawn, Mrs. Evelina Brown, a figure of mystery, had built herself a place apart, from which she looked forth upon a flat world of cornfields and frame houses. In Raintree County, she had constructed something pagan and contrived, an island of wistful feminine aspiration in the corn.

. . .

A
CHORUS
of loud guffs and snorts followed the Senator's virile remark. The Raintree County Stockbreeders Association withdrew to a respectful distance still savoring the senatorial wit in wheezy chuckles. The Senator, the Perfessor, and Mr. Shawnessy had meanwhile stopped at the site of the Senator's birthplace, where the Photographer under a hood sighted through his box at a big gnarled
halfdead appletree standing in a vacant lot at the edge of town. Drawn up to the curb was an odd hooded wagon with the black legend:

E. R. ROSS, PHOTOGRAPHER
Freehaven, Indiana

—Here it is, the Senator said, hooking his thumbs in his armpits and looking sad.

—The humble spot of a heroic birth, the Perfessor said, removing his hat.

—I suppose it was a log cabin, Senator, Mr. Shawnessy said.

—Matter of fact, it was, the Senator said.

—Garwood B. Jones, recited the Perfessor, was born in 1835 in a little log cabin, which he built in the year 1892.

—Some people have no poetic feeling, the Senator said.

—Now, Garwood, Mr. Shawnessy said, if you'll just distribute yourself under that tree, this young man will preserve your outline for posterity.

The Photographer was a pleasant young man with unusual blue eyes, shiny darkbrown hair, and dimples, who did not seem at all disturbed by the confusion in which he worked. People kept coming up and asking him questions about his apparatus, and every now and then, while he was under the hood correcting the focus, a small boy would come up and peer into the lens. Unperturbed, the Photographer waved him away and went on with his work, walking swiftly back and forth from his covered cart to his camera, carrying plates, making adjustments, bobbing in and out of the hood. In this scene, he alone was the artist-contriver as he prepared to trace with a radiant pencil a legend of light and shadow, some faces on the great Road of the Republic.

. . .

The flap lifted. A blurred head pushed through the opening. As Preacher Jarvey walked forward to greet the visitor, the head swam into focus, hovering in a vitreous world like a fish seen through a glassbottomed boat.

Nodding hugely in at the tent flap was the broad bald head of Gideon Root, seen with monstrous precision through the Preacher's thick lenses.

—Praise the Lord, Brother Root!

—Praise the Lord, Brother Jarvey!

The two big voices filled the tent with a harsh, booming sound. The two big bearded faces wagged solemnly at each other.

—Brother Root, I am ready to bring these two sinners before the bar of God.

—When?

—The Literary Society is havin' a meetin' tonight at the home of this errin' woman, and I have gathered a select group to march in a procession, bearin' torches. We will apprehend them in the midst of their profane rites.

—I don't care how you do it, Brother Jarvey, just so you show this Shawnessy up for the rascal he is. I'm not a wealthy man, but I'll gladly contribute another hundred dollars to the cause of God in Raintree County if you can pull this thing off.

—Of course, it would be better, Brother Root, if we caught the guilty pair
in flagrante delicto.

—What's that, Brother?

—Brother, that means in the livin' act. That means couplin' in lust!

—I reckon that would be hard to do.

—Brother, we will have to proceed without the full evidence of things seen, but we have the evidence of things unseen to prove their lustful love. Sister Lorena Passifee, who lives close to the home of this errin' woman, has observed things and heard things. I have a note from her here to the effect that he was seen in the late hours of last night leavin' her guilty embrace, and the woman was seen in the nakedness and confusion of her shameless passion. O, Brother Root, lust is a terrible thing. Praise the Lord!

—It is a terrible thing.

—Hit is a terrible thing, and hit is tenfold more terrible when hit is embodied in the person of a beautiful woman like Sister Brown. Such beauty ought to be bestowed on the altar of God, but, alas! hit is turned aside and polluted by atheistic doctrine and pagan heresy. Praise the Lord!

—Praise the Lord!

—O, hit is a dreadful thing, hit is tenfold more dreadful when the seeds of lust are sown in a beautiful garden that ought to have
been matured to Christ. I had hoped to save this errin' female from her fate, but the emissary of Satan in this County, by name John Wickliff Shawnessy, toils day and night to undo the work of God. But their hour has come, Brother Root. Their hour has come. Hosanna!