Raintree County (91 page)

—O, dear, Aunt, I'm so glad you're up. Just a minute, and I'll tell Mr. Shawnessy. We've been working late at the Commission to get off a rush order of bandages. Garwood was busy and had his friend Mr. Shawnessy bring me safe home. Aunt Hepzibah, Mr. Shawnessy.

—Good evening, Ma'am, Johnny said. Pleased to meet you.

—Good morning, young man, Aunt Hepzibah said.

—I'll be right in, Aunt, Nell said. Mr. Shawnessy, I think you have my purse.

She stepped down off the porch, while Aunt retired.

—I'm sorry, Johnny. Isn't that bad luck! But you'll call on me again, won't you?

—Sure. Of course, the Army gets me today.

—You'll get a leave or something, Nell said. And the War can't last forever. Especially now that we've found each other again, Johnny.

Johnny didn't get Under the Raintree that night; yet he had the most intense possession of a person he had ever known. He walked for ten minutes before he remembered that he didn't have a place to stay for the night. A memory of the afternoon came punctually back to him, and he hunted up the Greer House.

It was a dive.

Inside, the clerk was sound asleep on a couch, and the lobby was empty. Johnny found Flash Perkins' name and room number in the register. He walked up to the second floor and knocked on a door. He could hear voices and laughter in the room.

After a significant pause, the door opened, and Flash Perkins stuck his face out. He had on his big Western hat and from what Johnny could see, nothing else.

—Jumpin' Jehosaphat! Flash said. Jack Shawnessy!

He looked perplexed for a moment, his eyes childlike and troubled. Then the fierce smile came back, and the skin on his forehead ridged up.

—Listen, I got a dame in here.

—O, Johnny said. Excuse me, I——

—Shucks, no bother at all! Flash said. She's a good sport. Mabel,
meet my old friend, Jack Shawnessy, same place I come from, one a the smartest son-of-a——

—Don't bother, Johnny said quickly. I just came to tell you I've got a place to stay for the night and I'll see you tomorrow, so long.

As Johnny walked down the hall, he heard Flash Perkins yelling after him,

—Hey, come on back, pardner! Have a little drink with Mabel and I. Cuss it, it's our last day, ain't it, before we sojer! Hell, I figger we're entitled to . . .

A SOLDIER'S FAREWELL
(Epic Fragment from the
Free Enquirer
)

It is a heart-warming and spine-tingling sight to see, this leavetaking of young men for the unpredictable hazards of war. The most pulchritudinous damsels of the community attired in their Sunday best come down to the station to see them off. And many manly young brows receive the chaste kiss of parting, the tribute due

TO THOSE WHO ARE ABANDONING
ALL THAT THEY
HOLD

—D
EAR
me, whispered the Perfessor, the General goes right on acting as if he were in the middle of a Civil War battle.

The banquet was over, and the General was addressing the crowd. He stood like a boxer, left foot forward, right shoulder back. His words came in short hard bursts, as though he were barking commands or trying to shout above cannon. His pauses were decisive and rhythmical, but often without conformity to the grammatical pattern of his sentences.

—I am reminded—he was saying, looking at my old—comrades of the Grand—Army of the Republic——

Applause came from the two hundred people who had been eating at the banquet tables. As the sound of the clapping roared and subsided, the General kept his chin high, his martial eye fixed on a distant point. His right hand crept to his coat and slipped two inches inside.

—I am reminded of—the great effort necessary—to form and fashion—the noble instrument—with which in her hour of peril—the Republic was saved. In these days of peace—it is hard to conceive—the monstrous labors—by which this country was preserved one Nation—indissoluble—with Freedom—and Justice for All!

The General thrust his hand unashamedly all the way into his coat and waited for the applause to die.

Then did you fight in that old war to preserve the Union? Were you a soldier and . . .

—Brave men are not—moulded in battle only. The fashioning of a soldier—is a long and costly—and strenuous process. We had to take men—from every walk of life—shopkeepers, farmboys—teachers, students, factory workers—and hammer them into shape. In the sanguinary glories of combat—we are likely to forget—the long hours of drill—the frequent sickness—the prolonged watches—the rough comradeship and complete democracy—of the training period. Perhaps we even complained a little——

Laughter began at the Veterans' Table and ran lightly over the swaying faces in the schoolhouse yard.

—But somehow there emerged—from this period—the survivors—the strong of heart—the sound of limb—the men who fought—for freedom and the flag—from Shiloh to Savannah!

Applause in the schoolhouse yard was a brief beating of hands in the immensity of the plain through which the National Road pierced thinly, its progress marked by telegraph lines that distantly touched the earth.

—Those hours of camp were not—without their memories of fun—and boisterous comradeship—and in the alembic of time—even the dark—shines with a kind of brightness—as we—veterans now of the greatest armed—force ever assembled on—the face of the earth—the lone survivors of—those scenes, remember . . .

Tents beside the river, and faces of soldiers on green plains beside the river. Remember.

Faces of dead men, you are gone like light words or the forms of flowers, you that were once young in the harsh day beside the river.

Faces of comrades, faces of tenters, I remember your mobile and changing expressions. For you I shall build a private monument of recollection. For you the greatest shaft ever erected by mankind! For you great wreaths of stone and the stone mouths of cannon and petrifactions of beauty!

Say, did you fight in that Great War for the Preservation of——Did you know such a one named——Did you camp by the river called——Did you know so and so who is——

I remember swimmers in rivers, bodies of young men stripped of names, bathing in the webbed waters of the Republic. I remember beauty, corruption, death beside the river. I will strike a tableau that never appeared on stone. I will wind the river through it, and there shall stand upon it a city of tents that is gone forever, the little city of a homely name.

You shall have your poet and your sculptor of forms, you lost young men, whose names I remember. You shall not any one die. You shall be stone, and the tides of the Republic will flow forever past the base of your shaft.

Tell me then, did you—fight in that Great—War for the Saving of—the American Republic and—do you remember

what names he heard, what jokes he laughed at, what hours and hours he lay at night on a hard cot wishing, what letters he wrote and received, what endless talk he listened to of home, girls, food, politics, news—all this was recorded in the diary of his memory, day by day, during the summer that he trained for the fighting. All this was part of the gray debris of the War as he knew it, all this was part of the process by which confusion became a kind of form, by which the Republic made men into soldiers. During this time he became almost as nameless as when he crept out on the savage side of Lake Paradise and sought desire Under the Raintree, flaying it down with a branch of golden pollen. By that other namelessness he had lost Raintree County for a time, but by this namelessness, he became more fully than ever before a creature of the County, or of that vast extension of it—the Republic. The clothing that he wore was the badge of his alliance to the County, as surely as nakedness was the badge of his alliance to the earth. In his soldier suit he acknowledged oneness with the Republic and with his comrades. He lost himself in them as they in him. He lived for them and was in some measure indistinguishable from them. A whole republic of Raintree Counties had bequeathed these integers to the sum of the Army. And though there was a part of him that remained deeply rooted in the old life, he was amazed by how quickly he blended into the colorless, inchoate mass of the Army. Only so could a soldier be soldier and survive. Only so could the Republic be served. For a time he ceased to be critical of the beliefs that he had set himself to defend. He became naïve, acquiescent; he was content for a while to be the instrument of an idea, instead of its engenderer.

And yet it was an intensely individual experience that he had in the Army. It was somehow all conducted in the purest Johnny Shawnessy tradition. And if he had been obliged to choose from his memories of the training period one to be graven into stone, as
worthy to survive from all the others, it would have been a casual and rather unsoldierly experience that he had about three weeks after he began his training.

That day five tentmates had been set to digging holes in the ground at the far side of Camp Shanks. Several hundred yards distant were buildings and tents, an orderly pattern lying beside the river outside Indianapolis. In the heat of the August afternoon, he could see the first lowlying houses of the city, farmhouses on an entering road, and trees along the river. Through the trees, the cold green water shone.

For three weeks he had been living in the camp, eating, working, drilling. He and the other soldiers walked in long rows together with poles on their shoulders and moved their hands, heads, feet all together at barked commands. They wore suits that were all alike, got up and went to bed all at the same time, touched their stiffened hands to their foreheads in the same way. Everything was punctual and precise. There was a way to do everything. But today this rigorous pattern of life was clearly ephemeral, like the brown tents and wooden barracks that would some day vanish, giving the earth here back to itself. For that matter, the distant city had a temporary look. Only the land looked permanent, and the river flowing among the trees.

—Cuss it! Flash Perkins said. You even have to crap by the book. I don't know about the rest of you bastards, but I'm fed up with the Army. Right now, I'd sure like a souse in that river.

The soldiers stopped working and looked at the river. Besides Johnny, there were three other men, tentmates. Thomas Conwell was a calm, thinfaced boy from an upstate farm. Nate Franklin was a husky, beardless boy from a farm close to the Ohio River. Jesse Gardner was a city-bred boy from Indianapolis, where he had been a bankclerk and an exemplary member of the Methodist Church. Like the majority of trainees, they were all three under eighteen. Johnny felt old by comparison, and Flash Perkins, who was twenty-seven, was referred to sometimes as Pappy and the Old Guy.

Jesse Gardner was having a hard time. At first he had endured the vulgarity of camplife in shocked silence. Then he had begun to object to the rough fun and strident nakedness with which he was surrounded. Soon, he was called ‘Mamma's Boy' and ‘Sister Jessica'
by camp wits like Flash Perkins. During the last week, he had gone silent again and had eaten little. He kept hanging around Johnny, who was the only person to befriend him. The night before, Johnny had heard Jesse crying in his cot.

Flash Perkins had been having as hard a time becoming a soldier, but for different reasons. While Jesse was prompt in accepting discipline, Flash was incapable of taking orders. He had spent hours in the guardhouse. He talked in ranks, wore his uniform in improper ways, and played crude practical jokes, preferring officers as victims. Whenever he obeyed an order or accepted discipline of any kind, he had an insulting grin on his face. He would take any kind of punishment rather than wipe off the grin or curb his tongue. He had upset three officers on a latrine, had set fire to the commanding officer's bed, and had had a woman named Velma in his tent. At night, he woke up the whole camp by imitating screech owls, loons, crows, cows. He had left signs in the latrines reflecting on the ancestral purity and moral character of the commanding officer.

All this was not merely an expression of a fun-loving nature. From the start Flash was deeply contemptuous of the Army or at least that part of it he had seen. He hated the captain of his company, a man named Elmer Bazzle, who had been selected for the position because he had been a lawyer and had booklearning. In reality, Captain Bazzle was a precise, earnest officer, who took his duties to the Republic seriously. But he was a small, pale, nervous man, he had never fired a gun in his life before, his voice was high and uncertain, and he had made some laughable mistakes by sometimes adhering too closely to the book.

As for Johnny Shawnessy, he felt sorry for the Captain and sincerely wished that Flash Perkins would get out of the Army.

But on the day they were digging the ditch, he had been quick to second Flash's suggestion about a swim in the river. He hadn't had a good swim for a year.

—Let's go, he said. They've forgotten about us here. We'd have time to take a dip and get back.

—It's a breach of regulations, Jesse Gardner said. They'll put us all on special duty.

They argued with him, but he maintained his point with finical persistence.

—All right, Jessica, Flash said, you stay and we'll go.

—My name isn't Jessica, Jesse said.

—Reckon it oughta be, Flash said. Maybe you're scared to swim naked. Think you was a girl the way you cover and yelp around. I'm sick of you cryin' around, Jessica.

—My name isn't Jessica, Jesse said.

—Come on, boys, Johnny said. Let's all have just a little dip. Do us good. Come on, Jess.

Jesse put down his spade and followed the other four down to the river. He didn't say another word for a long time.

On the bank of the river, they peeled off hot woolen uniforms and heavy shoes and plunged in. Swimming breaststroke, Johnny could see the pale sheet of the river dwindling to a railroad trestle. The white bodies of his soldier-comrades splashed in the water around him. They had taken off their soldier skins. For a little while, they had resigned from the Republic.