Raintree County (87 page)

—Not as often as he likes, I can see that, the Perfessor said.

—Listen to her squeal, the Senator said. Christ, wouldn't you hate to be a woman!

—Pull him around again, boys, the owner of the heifer said.

He held the bawling heifer steady, while three men struggled with the bull, who reared blindly and kept falling clumsily and jarring his jaw on the heifer's back.

—Help 'im there, Bob, Mr. Jacobs yelled.

—I'm tryin' to.

—Pull 'im around, Pete.

—My God, the Perfessor said, the old brute's a terrible artist.

The four men, the heifer, and the white bull sweated, struggled, shouted, panted, heaved under the noon sun. The bull was like a hero betrayed. His noble strength had been tricked into this mortal weakness. Now he was beset by pestering inferior creatures who used him according to their own designs.

—No wonder they gave him first prize, the Senator said.

—I wonder if he'd trade with me, sight unseen, the Perfessor said.

—I feel sorry for them, Mr. Shawnessy said. But they don't seem to mind our watching. I suppose it's only human beings who make love in secret.

—We miss a lot that way, the Perfessor said. It's part of the great
human denial of origins. We prefer the dark. But in our beginnings, like the gods we made love by day. Noon is the best time for it, high noon, in the drench of the sun. Let all the world behold. What cares bull!
Io Hymen Hymenaee!

—That ought to do, Mr. Jacobs said, after a while, shoving the bull down. Think that's enough, Jim?

—Should be, the man holding the heifer said.

They talked like two businessmen discussing an order of feed.

—Are they kidding? the Perfessor said. I predict quintuplets.

Mr. Jacobs opened the gate, and the heifer's owner pulled her through. The white bull followed and, in spite of blows, reared at the whole struggling mass of men around the gate. The gate was shoved to in his face. He nudged it with his horns.

—He looks sad, the Perfessor said.

—So would you, the Senator said, if you knew that you might have to wait weeks for another piece. Well, that was some show, Bill.

All the men walked slowly down the lane except Mr. Shawnessy and the Perfessor.

—Behold! the Perfessor said, leaning on the fence, life's a great white bull, beating itself to love's ecstatic death.

He looked sharply up at the tower protruding above the iron fence and the trees of Mrs. Brown's garden.

—A face at the window, he said. Naughty girl.

Mr. Shawnessy, who had also noticed the face at the window, lingered indecisively.

—There she is, the Perfessor said, immured in her private garden, watching from time to time the love-frenzy of a bull. What has humanity gained by putting the bull in his pasture and Evelina in her tower? Have you ever stopped to think, John, that the progenitors of mankind were once all amoral like the bull? Today we cluck with horror at the degraded hillfamilies down South because father consorts with daughter, brother with sister, and the hired man with grandma. Yet the human race was all once more degenerate than these trolls and troglodytes. They were filthy, they were incestuous, they were lousy. They lived contentedly in their own muck. From that universal sink came every man and woman living today, king and commoner, president and prostitute. Our own little Evelina is the
product of God knows how much violence, incest, murder, rape, pillage, an incredible history of the corruption called life extending back to the first cell in the dawn slime. Strip away her dress and let down her hair, knock the nonsense of feminism out of her head, unlearn the letters in her brain, and what do you have? A healthy little she-ape of a hairless sub-variety.

The Perfessor shook soundlessly.

—Make a damn cute pet too, he said.

—But what an achievement! Mr. Shawnessy said. In her tower, Evelina has risen above the muck of the Great Swamp. It cannot, will not reclaim her. From her tower, she looks down on a garden of classic alignments. She has achieved beauty—and some of the sadness that goes with it. Perhaps she knows love there too, love which gives her the world. From her tower, she exercises all the dearly bought feminine virtues. She can be tender and sad and piteous. She pities bull, who pities not himself. She pities Professor, who is loveless and forlorn. This feminine pity, this love, she fixes as a beacon there at the top of her tower. This light must not be extinguished, for it equals the sun.

—Do you know, John, the Perfessor said with his usual candor, I think I'm in love with that woman. Now, tell me, what do I love?

. . .

A lady in the window of a tower looked steeply down at two gentlemen slowly walking away from a bullpasture, leaving a white bull stupidly standing. Walking on the National Road, a senator with an entourage of farmers and hangers-on entered the shade of the town, sauntering slowly. Somewhere in town, a band played martial airs. She had not yet returned into herself. Through her window she had been possessed by sunlight. She had been smooth and grassed like the lawn beneath her and rounded with delicious hills. She had run naked in the wondrous garden of herself, had known wild passions, excessively visual pleasures. And still her lover went down bright lanes of her garden in noontime, and shook down on the ticklegrassed lawn a rain of blossoms.

EVELINA'S DREAM

Her garden was very dark now. She was standing like the other nymphs in an ivied recess, a special one near the front of the lawn,
with a fountain playing on her body. At her feet bronze figures of a man and a woman were all interlaced with each other among the lily stems. Lonesome, faroff was the sound of the train, for everyone had gone and left her alone with her statues and the vague balls of shrubbery on the lawn. Now at this lost late hour of the night, might she not conjure up her beloved by an old enchantment! Warm water gushed over her as, with a slow bending leap, she sprang from her pedestal and began to run on the lawn, with gestures of conjuring.

Somewhere in the darkness there was a sound of something coming, a fabulous beast—perhaps the unicorn with a wondrous white body and a single great horn in the middle of his head.

She was running up the steps of her house, laughing and sobbing together. She was running up the circular stair of the tower while someone followed her. She was running, fearing that she might awaken before she reached the place of rendezvous, then turned to accept this strong, white-muscled visitor, this father and preserver, eternal triumpher and maker of legends. . . .

—God, said Mr. Shawnessy, is the object of all quests, and love is the desire with which we seek Him.

—I have been winding through the labyrinth, lo! these many years, the Perfessor said, as they came out on the National Road, and my clue has led me to the Answer. God is a Minotaur, who demands the blood sacrifice from us all.

Mr. Shawnessy saw his two oldest children, Wesley and Eva, standing with Libby Passifee and Johnny Jacobs, peering into a front window of the Passifee home. As he watched, they all turned and ran through the gate to the road. He stopped, waiting for them. They looked startled and shy.

—Hello, children. Oughtn't you to be at the school?

—We came home with Libby for a book they were supposed to have for the rehearsal, Wesley said.

They went on rapidly toward town. Mr. Shawnessy saw no book.

—The Answer, he said, is in us, around us, everywhere. The Answer is every moment of ourselves. The Answer is a single unpronounced and unpronounceable Word, that could at one and the same time denote everything and connote everything.

—Sometimes, John, the Perfessor said, your reasons are better
than reason. What's next on the program? Must be after twelve.

They were entering the shade of the town. In the middle of the distant intersection, several men in blue coats and queer hats were awkwardly milling around.

—The G.A.R. Parade is forming up there, Mr. Shawnessy said. As soon as General Jake Jackson shows up, we march, and then we eat.

—Fine, the Perfessor said. I have the devil's own appetite. I've seen a cow climbed, and now I want to fill my belly. After that, maybe I can see somebody killed. Thus in a single day, I shall have participated in the three main pastimes of man, fluting, feeding, and

Fighting for Freedom

FROM SHILOH TO SAVANNAH

is the name of the goddam thing, the General said. I happen to have a few hundred pages of it stuffed into my coatpocket here, Shawnessy, and if you have a little time, I'd like to have you glance it over and tell me frankly what you think of it. There you are.

—Thanks, General. Be glad to look at it.

—By the way, you were in the War, weren't you? the General said.

—Yes, Mr. Shawnessy said.

He and some fifty other members of the Raintree County Post of the Grand Army of the Republic were standing in a shapeless mass at the middle of the intersection, waiting to form ranks and march down to the Schoolhouse for the outdoor banquet. General Jacob J. Jackson, Raintree County's outstanding military figure, a hero of two wars, had arrived in Waycross only a few minutes before to lead the march.

The General, a hearty man in his middle sixties, was a little shorter than Mr. Shawnessy. Broadshouldered, deepchested, he was built like an athlete except for the hard bulge of his belly. Freeflowing gray hair fell thickly from his thinning dome to lie upon his shoulders and blend over his ears into the great ball of a beard. Out of this beard his voice blew like a horn of cracked brass, having no variations in pitch or volume between a hard bray and a hoarse whisper. The General was now standing in one of his characteristic postures, arms folded over chest, head thrust back, left foot forward. One could see the bulge of his right calfmuscle in the army trousers. His small blue eyes glared. The muscles around his cheekbones twitched as if under his beard the General were gritting his jaw teeth. A dress sword and two Colt revolvers hung from his belt. He held a broad Western hat adorned with military cord.

The General made everyone else look like a supernumerary. Most of the other veterans were in uniform too, but only the General seemed clothed in heroic dignity.

—I 'm a practical man, the General was saying, a man of action, and I hate like hell to write.

—For a man who hates to write, General, you've ground out a lot of copy in your time, Mr. Shawnessy said. Let's see, how many books is it now?

The General's chest swelled, and there burst from his throat a series of distinct hahs, of exactly the same timbre as his speaking voice.

—Well, let's see, he said. I began with
Fighting for the Flag,
and followed it up with
Memoirs of a Fighting General.
Then there was
Four Years at the Front or Fighting for the Cause
and of course
A Fighting Man's History of the War in the West.
I've also done that series called
Fights I have Fought from Chapultepec to Chickamauga or Tales of Two Wars.
Then, there's that goddam thing my publishers have had me doing called
Fifteen Historic Fights from Marathon to Manassas.

—I hadn't seen that one, General, Mr. Shawnessy said. I didn't know you went in for the European battles.

—Once you understand war, the General said, one goddam battle is like another. By the way, it's time to march, isn't it?

—Just about, Mr. Shawnessy said. I think the band's about ready.

—Fall in, boys! the General barked.

A little sheepishly, the veterans formed in a column four abreast. Senator Jones stood in the front rank. Mr. Shawnessy stepped unobtrusively into the last row with other men in civilian garb. The General strode strongly to the head of the column, took a stance twenty paces behind the band, and drawing his sword shouted,

—Ready, boys! Column, Harch!

The cracked brass of the command set off a series of explosions from the horns, unsynchronized at first, and then acquiring a noisy pattern that Mr. Shawnessy recognized as the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic'

He marched briskly with a shortened stride, walking as he never walked in ordinary life and as he seldom had in the Army. His arms
swung stiffly. His chin jerked. A troop of small boys marched much more smartly alongside. One of them tossed a lit firecracker into the middle of the veterans' column. A half-dozen men broke ranks, and the whole column lost step and alignment at the explosion.

—Hi, Grandpa! a boy yelled. Playin' sojer again?

Mr. Shawnessy kept his eyes front. The column soon reached the schoolhouse yard, turned in, and marched to a position in front of the banquet tables, which had already been set with plates of food.

—Column, Halt! brayed the General. Fall out for mess!

Professor Stiles, Mr. Shawnessy, the General, and Senator Jones took their seats in that order from left to right, facing west at the main long table, reserved for the veterans. Since for some reason the Reverend Lloyd G. Jarvey hadn't turned up yet, a visiting minister was called upon to say a grace, and the meal began.