Raintree County (9 page)

All made fine well mixed and formed into pills with butternut syrup. Dose—take one every hour—until they purg or take 4 and they will puke.

There followed many testimonials of people who had been cured by the Botanical Medicines. One read:

This may certify to all whome it may concern that I David Farnsworth of the County of Raintree in the State of Indiana have ben for years subject to repeted attacts of the pleurecy and have ben brought (as I and others have thought) very near the gates of death.
In April of 1822 I had another attact of this distressing and painful complaint. I was taken on Satterday with cold chills and flashes of heat with pains in my bones and headach and a severe pain in my
left side, with other disagreeable symtoms which continued until monday with increasing rapidity, when I sent for T.
D.
Shawnessy to cum and bring with him sum medicines and when he had examened me he stated that I had better be taken through a corse of medicine without delay. Prepperation was made and I began to drink of the hot medicine to rase the internel heat. I was then steemed, and an emettic of Labelia with its appendents was afterwards administered and then steemed again and showered with cold water and vinnegar then wiped off dry and put to bed with a warm rock to my feet still drinking of the warm teas to keep up a perspiration and by the blessing of kind providence through the means of those medicines administered and good nursing I was soon restored to health, and will further add that I never was cured in so short a time of so vilent atact of this complaint. My family has also used his medicine in other complaints and find them to answer the purpose in all cases and are so well convinced of their suppererorety over those used by the medical docters that they seek for no other then the Botanical Medicines.

D
ANIEL
F
ARNSWORTH
E
LIZABETH
F
ARNSWORTH

August 5th, 1822

Farther over in the book were some original poems—hymns and moral diatribes. One poem, inserted on a separate sheet of paper, had been written in purple ink, and although it was in T. D.'s hand, the letters were more carefully formed than usual and the capitals had ornamental flourishes. It seemed to Johnny perhaps a hymn—but a strange one.

It was a morning in the Spring.

Beneeth a hawthorn tree we lade,

Drunk with the od'rous blosoming,

Togather, kissing in the shade.

Heaven! how lustily we played!

It was a day of frollic wind.

We heard the insecks drone and buz.

God's purest angle would have sinned

And i, no angle, did becaus

My God! how bewtifull she was!

It was a morning in the prime.

I struv the bewteus prize to win,

And if our gaming was a crime,

And if our luving was a sin,

Dear Jesus! let me err agin!

On a few pages in the back of the book were recorded some baffling particulars about the Shawnessy family tree. One entry read:

Eliza Shawnessy, mother of Timothy Duff Shawnessy, came from Scotland to the State of Delaware in 1805 and departed this life in 1820 at the age of forty-six.

Fair from my natif place

A strainger in this Land was I.

I go to my eturnel rest

And shall live no more to die.

From Scottish earth I came to this.

From here I go to endless bliss.

There was no mention of a Grandfather Shawnessy. Johnny knew that T. D. had come over from Scotland with his mother when he was a boy. T. D. would say only that his own father had ‘passed on' before mother and son had left Scotland. But there must have been an interesting family connection there, for when Johnny—by far the most gifted of the children—would show a flash of precocity in memory or expression, T. D. would say,

—Well, the boy ought to amount to something some day. He's related on my father's side to one of the greatest living writers of the English language. Some day maybe he will make the name of Shawnessy as great in America as the name of Carlyle has become in England.

Then T. D.'s blue eyes would flash, his thin shoulders would snap back, and he would walk rapidly back and forth, coattails flapping, showing the restless energy that had brought him all the way from Scotland to the middle of America.

T. D. himself was a famous man in Raintree County. Whether driving about with a buggyload of the Botanical Medicines or standing in the pulpit of the Methodist Church in Danwebster, rocking back on his heels, he had but one aim—to improve the spiritual and physical welfare of the County. Devoid equally of grammar and guile, he had become known beyond the borders of the County for his sermons, which were sometimes composed in spirited doggerel.
He got continual requests from other parts of the State for his poems, especially the one about the Evils of Tobacco, which Johnny had heard so many times that he knew it by heart, including the two celebrated lines:

Some do it chew and some it smoke

Whilst some it up their nose do poke.

There was no special mystery about this everyday T. D., but Johnny was always discovering secrets where no one else could and was endlessly curious about the origin of things and their occult relationships to one another. For him the mystery of his father's origin and his own was signed and sealed into a ledger of recipes and poems and into a legend of a tree of golden rain.

T. D. Shawnessy, his father, was a tall tree with a golden top, the carrier of a strange seed from the East planted deep in Raintree County. That was why a tree with a black legend beneath, taken from the Bible, grew in the little shrinelike office. T. D. Shawnessy was a tall, windshaken tree of life, and from the branches and the leaves thereof was a healing balsam shaken on the minds and bodies of men. And the seed of this tree had fallen on the County in secret for many years, but none there was who could say the place and the purpose and the meaning thereof.

There was also the secret of his mother, Ellen Shawnessy. His earliest memories, archaic fragments saved out of otherwise razed eras of his life, were all pervaded with the presence of his mother. These memories appeared to have been plucked out of an eternal summer and preserved by an access of strong light that burned the images more lastingly on his awareness. Perhaps the oldest memory of all was one of his mother's face bending down to him from a vague tumult of sound and color. Painted by the strong light, it was a slender face, the cheek and jawlines emphatic, the skin fair but freckled, the nose pert, the mouth large and mobile, the eyes a vivid blue in dark lashes, the hair a dark, smouldering mass. A smile suffused this precise small face with beauty and warmth. The lips moved; there was a sound, beautiful and talismanic,

—Johnny!

With this word, spoken in his mother's quick, girlish voice, he had been called from the murmurous world where he had been lulled so
long in the prehistoric age before there was any Raintree County. Thus his origin was a kind of virgin birth, as if a word had touched him into being.

Later it never ceased to disturb him that he had been a somewhat belated accident in his mother's life, the last of nine children.

Ellen was universally beloved in the County, more so even than T. D., who, because he was a Methodist minister and an advocate of reform, stirred up antagonisms. In both manner and appearance she had a young charm that made her more like an older sister than a typical Raintree County mother. She was quick to laugh and joke, having an infectious gaiety lacking in T. D.'s amiable but unhumorous nature. Her enjoyments were spontaneous like a child's, and it was always fun to go with her to one of the typical Raintree County gatherings—family reunions, Saturdays at the Court House Square, church picnics, ice cream socials, patriotic celebrations. She entered into the pastimes of the younger people, even played at the running games. It was a common saying in the County that Johnny had got his great fleetness of foot from his mother. Men would say,

—When your mother first come to this county, son, she could outfoot most of the men.

Among the fairest images of his life were the occasions when Ellen Shawnessy would take some younger person's challenge to a footrace and sitting down would slip off her shoes and stockings. With shyness and wonder, Johnny saw the white feet, slender and elfin, appear suddenly where he was accustomed to see the prim-buckled shoes.

Ellen was also an excellent horsewoman, never bothering to saddle a horse but jumping on like a man and riding away bareback. This she often did, leaving at a moment's notice for the home of a friend or relative. In the supreme emergencies of life—childbirth, marriage, death—she was as much in demand as T. D., her small radiant person arriving like an omen of good luck and good hope.

Together she and T. D. were like two invulnerable angels as they went about the County dealing in life and death.

One of Johnny's most poignant early memories was of standing in the yard of the Home Place waiting for Ellen Shawnessy to come back from one of her sudden missions at a distant home. The girls had prepared both dinner and supper and had left Johnny to his own
devices. He heard the talking from time to time in the house and yard.

—I wonder what can be keeping Mamma so long.

It was nearly nightfall. He couldn't remember when she had stayed away so long. He walked back and forth before the gate, looking east along the road in the direction she had taken. He had never before felt so miserable and lonely. The house, the fields surrounding, and the road had lost all purpose and significance, seeming empty and forlorn at the top of the world. At last, in the fading day, he saw Ellen's erect form riding swiftly up the road. He ran from the gate, his voice shrill:

—Mamma! Mamma! It's me—Johnny!

She rode up to him and leaped lightly off the horse, her face flushed, her hair blown and tangled.

—Why, Johnny! she said. Why haven't you gone to bed?

He was very happy to walk with her into the house and see the usual bustle and excitement on her arrival as she began to tell in her fast, crowded speech some narrative of birth, of life hanging by a thread, of what people said out there in the limitless, enchanted world of Raintree County.

His mother's being was woven into the substance of his surroundings, unchanging essence of a changing earth. There had been two distinct Home Places. Johnny's first memories preserved the earlier Home Place, the pioneer Shawnessy dwelling in Raintree County. The central shrine had been the log cabin, a sturdy, competent dwelling well floored and chinked, with two partitions downstairs and a loft above for sleeping. Behind the cabin were T. D.'s office, an outhouse, and the small barn where a few horses and cows were kept: T. D. wasn't primarily a farmer and had only twenty acres of land. Some distance from the house was a spring welling up from a small rocky hollow to form a trickling branch that made its way circuitously across the field and northward to the river. Back of the house was the main pasture, the South Field, its grassy undulations strewn with firescarred rocks, negligent droppings of some condor-winged bird of time in the ages before the first human beings had come to Raintree County. The South Field rose to a gentle summit behind the Home Place and then fell like a wave of waning strength to the limit of the Shawnessy earth. There, just inside the railfence,
was the greatest of the glacial boulders, a rock much taller than Johnny, egg-shaped, faintly red, half sunken in the earth, immovable and lonely. Beyond it was the oak forest, a place of tranquil and great trunks. Johnny could remember when the South Field was stubbled with stumps, having been, some years before his birth, part of the great oak forest which apparently had covered several square miles of the land around the Home Place when T. D. first came to the County, being itself a remnant of that legendary great forest which extended clear across the Mississippi Valley and of which there were still some dim recollections handed down from the earliest settlers and explorers.

In this simple setting of cabin, road, railfences, pasturefield, cornland, forest, spring and branch, the infant Johnny Shawnessy had grown up. Then one day in his ninth year, the family returned from a Saturday on the Court House Square to find the log cabin in flames. From its ashes rose the new Home Place, a plain board farmhouse built in the fashion of the middle forties. Slowly, too, the land lost its raw unfinished look. New outbuildings and a larger barn were built. The farm was entirely fenced in. The road was widened and corduroyed.

But under the thin veil of the new Home Place, under the tidal rhythm of the seasons, Johnny seemed always to be trying to remember and restore a pattern primitive and simple, of which only tantalizing traces remained.

Once in his tenth year he went a long way back of the land and entered the great oak forest and walked a long way through its druid aisles, wondering if he might not find in it somewhere the fabulous Raintree. He stayed longer away than he had intended. Darkness came suddenly among the broad trunks, which even at noon were steeped in a kind of twilight. He hurried back through expiring noises of the day. It seemed to him that he was going much farther than necessary to find the railfence at the limit of the land. A feeling possessed him of the fragility of his life on the earth and of the transiency of all human habitation. He had a sensation of long absence and return, or as if he had reawakened into some earlier time. Suppose he should come out of the forest and find the Home Place as it was in its early and now all but forgotten form. Nay, suppose it wasn't there at all, the road, the railfence, and the log
cabin having been erased by the backward-travelling years. The primeval forest might extend once more in majestic solitude all over the lost earth of Raintree County. He was suddenly afraid, uprooted from his familiar world. He ran like mad between the trees, lashed by branches and weeds.

Abruptly, he came out at the railfence. The rock was there, faintly red in the declining light. He sprang over the fence and ran up the slow bulge of the field. Below him, across the long earth, were the yellow windows of the Home Place. A bell sounded, calling for supper. It was not so late as he had thought. His small fleet legs found a new strength. He ran on slow, floating strides down the slow hill watching for his mother's form across the land.