Raintree County (84 page)

—Mrs. Lorena Passifee. I'm afraid she doesn't approve of me. It's amusing, too, because she used to entertain men regularly over there, and everyone would get tight on dandelion wine for a purpose which I will leave to your own tender charity. Her dandelion wine is famous.

—How delicate! the Perfessor said. Dandelion wine!

—Then last summer she got religion, and the parties stopped for a while. About time, too, because the good people of the community were ready to run her out. Now she's a prop of the church and the watchdog of virtue in the community—mostly my virtue.

—By the way, I've heard of your interest in the local Revival Preacher, the Perfessor said. Really, Evelina, don't you think you're getting a bit bucolic?

—He's a magnificent primitive specimen, she said. You know, I've had a lot of talks with him, and he's told me a great deal about himself in an effort to convert me. Lloyd—that's his name—came right from one of those Southern hillfamilies. He had congenital myopia that amounted almost to blindness, and they never put any glasses on him. But in spite of that he grew up to be a shrewd, powerful, ignorant young man. He was a terrible sinner. He gave rein to the lusts of the flesh. He's handsome in a savage way, you know. He drank, swore, gambled, and goodness knows what besides. Isn't that interesting?

—Hmmmmm, the Perfessor said.

—It was an incredibly backward environment. The people in those hills live just like the old clans, feuding and killing and carrying off each other's women. There were ten sons in Lloyd's family. The father was a tyrant, and his word was law to his sons and their women and the whole clan. Lloyd was the oldest son, and in spite of his blindness was hated and feared more than anyone except his father. He was called the Blind.

—My God! the Perfessor said.

—Then when Lloyd was about twenty, he and his father had some kind of terrible fight. He won't tell me much about it, but anyway he left the hills. Then a missionary got hold of him and put some kind of special glasses on him, and for the first time in his life he saw the shapes of things. It was like an awakening. Along with it he got religion and became a wonderful preacher, and——

—Don't tell me any more, the Perfessor said. I can see the whole thing for myself. What you have described is the very process out of which our Old Testament religion came. In the beginning, the hill and desert anthropoids who later became the ancient Hebrews were an incestuous, lustful, dirty collection of families, like the rest of primitive mankind, clothing their filth in skins and killing and raping each other like beasts. The son lusted after his mother and the father after his daughter. The head of this hideous delegation was of course the patriarch, the strong man, who maintained his power through brute force and low cunning, and after the force was gone, through the loudness of his voice and his old prestige, beating and cowing his rebellious sons and leading them in rapine. The only law was the law of the family. Whatever the Old Man did was right, and any crime committed in the name of the family was right. The sons had the choice of staying and submitting to the Old Man's rule or getting out on their own and starting their own family clan. The only way the Old Man could be succeeded was by murder. So some particularly rebellious son would finally kill the old bastard with a club, taking a guilty delight in pounding his sire's gray skull to a pulp. Then all the women became his. From some such background, slowly evolving over centuries, emerged the Jehovah religion: the tribal patriarch was elevated to deity, and the crime of parricide and incestuous lust became the memory of an original sin, for which mankind waxed penitent. So morality was born, which
was merely tribal law created to strengthen the chosen people against their enemies. No more incest, no more lust. But the object of worship and the source of power remained the same, a violent, lustful, self-glorifying old despot-god, who punishes his children for his own crimes and whom they worship because they hate him and fear him. Now, the hillpeople of America, especially the Southerners, have a special fondness for Old Testament Christianity because they've degenerated into the very savagery from which it came. Paganism made a much more beautiful adjustment of this old crime of mankind, our memory of being beasts. As for your preacher, for God's sake never get alone in the same room with him. The man is dangerous and quite probably insane.

—I've never invited him to my place, Evelina said. And I haven't been to see him for a long time. Of course, he's made an amazing transformation. When he left his people, he studied and read widely and even attended a little theological seminary in Kentucky. He quotes Milton and the Greek and Latin classics. Naturally the essential crudeness remains, a sort of primitive frenzy. You should hear him preach.

They were just about to pass the iron fence which marked the western boundary of Evelina's lawn, when the Perfessor stopped short.

—Jesus! What a brute!

He was looking across a cornfield at a white bull fenced in a small pasture.

—I have nightmares about that thing, she said.

Looking back, she saw the Senator and his entourage turning in at Mr. Jacobs' place.

—Frankly, the Perfessor said, you don't belong here at all, Evelina. What the devil do you want to stay around here for, providing food for local gossip? If you want to reform something, start with me. You can do a lot more for the world from my apartment in New York City than you can from your house in Raintree County. It's a weeping shame that a lovely, eager, warmhearted girl like you ever left New York.

He looked at her shrewdly again.

—Be as objective as you please about your amusing hillbilly preacher, Evelina, but you've become a religious fanatic yourself.

—It's true, she said, looking down.

—And this religion, he said. It is——

—The religion of humanity, she said.

The Perfessor looked somewhat sadly about him.

—So you have found your gentle god at the crossroads. Well, it's a strange martyrdom—and it will pass. My God! When the world isn't crucifying us, we crucify ourselves!

She said nothing but, nunlike, kept her eyes down lest he should see a sudden mist that was in them. . . .

EVELINA'S DREAM

The dungeon cell had a single window, singly barred, through which fell a single ray of light. She stood in her long gown,
décolletée,
hands tied before her, reciting,

—Eternal spirit of the chainless mind,
Brightest in dungeons . . .

It had something to do with the French Terror and the execution of all the fine people who believed in liberty. What her own crime was, she couldn't exactly remember, except that it was a very romantic one, for which society would never forgive her. The other woman in the cell was Mrs. Stowe, who sat at a writing table, adding and subtracting dates, juggling the names of children, making marginalia in a complete volume of Lord Byron's
Works.

—My dear, it's no use, Mrs. Stowe said. You know you slept with him, and that's all there is to it. Not that I blame you. But you might have considered his wife and the nearness of your relationship. Nothing for us to do now but wait for the carts. But haven't we been tumbriled in a worthy cause!

Metal doors clanged. She arranged her little cap so that the painter David might make an offhand sketch of her on her way to the knife. There was a distant rumbling of drums. The executioners passed in the connecting corridor leading Mr. Shawnessy, his hair damp curls on a marble brow, his white shirt open at the neck. He walked with a slight limp, his eyes flashing with soft fire. Looking back at her, he said,

—My sister! my sweet sister! if a name
Dearer or purer were, it would be thine. . . .

The rolling drums grew louder. She was riding through massed thousands in the streets of New York, London, Paris, or some other great
city. As she approached the platform, she saw Mr. Shawnessy walking up the steps toward the guillotine. He smiled his gentle, pensive smile and lifted his hand in farewell.

The crowd intervened, she was lost in the confusion of faces and savage shouts, but she could hear his voice ascending and ascending, highpitched, slightly nasal, reciting,

—It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. . . .

Before her home she and the Perfessor had stopped between the flungopen gates.

—If you find anything in the
Atlas,
let me know, she said. It would go well with the Senator's collection. He showed it to me once in Washington.

—I trust he didn't add you to it, the Perfessor said.

He ran his eyes over her house and garden.

—Lovely place you have here, he said. It's so like you, dear. It's so—so charmingly bewildered. May I come in?

—You'd better hurry back for the Titian, dear, she said.

—Too bad you can't see it, dear, the Perfessor said.

His voice was somewhat remote and his eyes kept playing over the lawn sloping longly up to the brick house.

—Who built the house?

—I did.

—What for?

—To live in, silly.

He smiled sadly, preparing to leave.

—My dear, it's just as I told you in my letter. At the age of thirty-five, you've become a museum piece.

EVELINA'S DREAM

She had on a little torn frock that came barely below her knees as she stood in the slave mart. The auctioneer, bullwhip in hand, ripped her dress off with a brutal jerk.

—And there she stands. Will't please you sit and look at her?

While she stood clasping a Bible between her breasts, the planters crowded around feeling the flesh of her calves and thighs. Senator Garwood B. Jones eyed her with shrewd appraisal.

—I bid one thousand dollars. This ought to go well with my
collection from the old masters,
Neptune, taming a seahorse, thought a rarity.

Other poor colored people standing near her had been turned into little statuary groups mass-reproduced by machine lathing. Buyers and connoisseurs wandered through the rooms of the museum (which resembled a private home), inspecting its treasures. Professor Stiles approached her as she stood in an alcove, her body painted bronze, in her hand a lamp burning smokily.

—Exquisite craftsmanship, he said. In the Italian fashion. Perhaps one of old Cellini's lost pieces.

She maintained her heroic attitude, reciting,

—I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

She had hoped that among all the people thronging through the vast metropolitan museum, Mr. Shawnessy would take particular notice of her and buy, but already the crowd was thinning out, and he was gone with the others into the murky night, gone in the long train snaking across the land and carrying people home from brown decades and metropolitan adventures, and she hadn't even touched his hand for a last . . .

—Good-by, dear, she said to the Perfessor. I'll see you this afternoon. I will keep the
Atlas
for you if you insist, and you can pick it up later.

With the
Atlas
under her arm, she walked swiftly to the house and up the steps to the verandah. Entering, she continued without pause walking up the steps from the hall to the second floor, turned and walked to a door at the front end of it, and began to climb a spiral stair ascending the squat tower rooted in the foundations of the house. Panting with heat, exertion, and excitement, she came out into a little circular room at the top of the tower and going over to a halfmoon window looking west, she peered down at a foreshortened world. . . .

. . .

In flagrante delicto!
Preacher Jarvey pacing restlessly in the tent was tormented by the words. He saw them writhing on a ground of scarlet flame, fiendishly alive, their heads darting and hissing. The flames withdrawing disclosed two forms, a man and a woman naked, turning round and round, their lips and hands and yearning limbs touching and twining.

Preacher Jarvey walked with a rapider stride. He was panting. His eyes glared viewlessly. A vision of profane love tormented him with a whip of shrewd lust as often it had when he lay at night waiting for sleep. In this vision, a hated figure walked through Waycross in the hovering darkness, looking covertly to left and right. Arriving at stately gates east of town, it paused a moment, then darted into a contrived garden that Preacher Jarvey himself had often passed but never entered. And the sinful intruder glided stealthily past vague balls of shrubbery on the lawn, reached a verandah prickly with filigree, knocked stealthily at a door. And the door opened. And the stealthy form was lost in the dark and scarlet depths of a voluptuous mansion.
In flagrante delicto!

—Hosanna! the Preacher panted under his breath. The hour is here. Hosanna! Hit has come!

And suddenly he burst through the tentflap.

The day was hostile with radiance, walling him in with green and golden mist. He set out walking toward the intersection. As he approached it, laughter, cries, clangs, explosions enveloped him. Wheels and trampling hooves threatened him. The lightfilled intersection of Waycross, which had endeared itself to him by its visual simplicity (four beginnings of streets losing themselves in peaceful summer), erupted with strangeness.

The time had come to destroy this disobedient world and its multiplying eyes.

The Preacher turned east at the intersection. As he walked, he pulled out his watch and held the face of it close to his own. Black hands and numerals swam into the green globe of his vision and wavered there, enormously precise. Eleven-thirty.

Hosanna! The hour had come!

Like sadness and tears, a traitorous feeling surged up from the mist around him. The way here was magical with soft anticipation. Many times in vanished summers he had gone along this street in the late morning and had passed Mrs. Evelina Brown on her morning walk into Waycross. Often and often (for he had learned to depend upon the regularity of this walk) his yearning eyes had plucked her from the oceanic void of the increate and held her, softly writhing, flushed, exhaling a mist of breath. He would exchange a few amenities with her, as the godshout raged unuttered in
his breast, and then reluctantly he would let her gracious form slip once more into the stream of the inactual.