—Not that I know of, Johnny said.
—Good, Cash said, as if that solved the whole problem. Fine! Now let me think. Jesus, John, you should have been more careful.
—I know.
—Coming back in a couple of weeks, she says. That gives us some time. Now let me see.
Cash chewed his cigar thoughtfully, but he didn’t say he had a plan.
Nevertheless, Johnny felt much better to have someone else sharing the burden and thinking about it along with him. Good old Cash! It was good to have a man that bit down hard on his cigar and figured out ways to beat the game and come out on top, a practical man, a business man. Cash Carney would grab hold of a problem like this and whip it. Personally, he, Johnny, was helpless.
In the following days, the only relief Johnny Shawnessy had from the burden of his guilt came from reading about the famous raid and its aftermath. The trial of the wounded old man dragged on for two weeks. The Nation was drenched with rivers of black words in narrow columns—questions, counterquestions, legal jargon, names of witnesses, conspirators, friends, innocent dead. One day Johnny went into Freehaven and heard that John Brown had been sentenced to die. He read the record of the old man’s last words to the Court, words that would remain in the Republic’s memory after all the hundreds and thousands of words of that year had been washed away in the acid bath of time.
. . . I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.
Also at that time, Johnny saw in the Square pictures of John Brown, which could be bought in lots of a dozen for a dollar. During those days the face of the foremost American of the hour loomed above the land like a face of stone. Looking at that face, men knew that the appointed time was nearing when John Brown would go out and the rope would be tied around his neck and the trap would be sprung and his body would drop jerking at the rope’s end and the face with the accusing eyes would be the face of a dead man. Men had a little time to wait and think how and why this death was being done. It was only a question of time.
For Johnny Shawnessy, too, it was only a question of time. Time had become again a real duration that had a seed in the past and a flower in the future. In the Court House Square, he had had his being sown with small black words, and they had become a promise he could neither alter nor diminish. They would remain within him and grow upon him in magnitude and terror.
Always and for all men, he knew, time had been bringing dark events to birth. Some men were passive and let time bully them. But brave men acted. John Brown was such a man. He had performed the living Act and had dared the consequence. Like an Old Testament prophet, in whom trembled the fury of an avenging God, he had made the people mindful of themselves, awakened them from slumber. Somewhere now in darkness and agony, jailed, wounded, spat on, lay John Brown’s body. It was a tough seed that couldn’t be killed. And all men felt that when that body was given to the grave, it would be only that it might go on in darkness preparing for a mightier birth because that name, that body, and that face were chosen.
History had thrust a torch into John Brown’s hand. He had become an image-bearer of the Republic.
The night after hearing of John Brown’s sentence, Johnny Shawnessy got out of bed and silently putting on his clothes, slipped down to the place beside the tracks where he had said good-by to the Perfessor. A train approached, coming from the east. The lone red eye blinked at him, the train chugged up the grade, flame flared from the smokestack in the dark. Johnny Shawnessy rose and ran toward the embankment, slipping and scrambling through dead vines and withering grasses by the river. For an instant, he saw in the engine’s scarlet glare the vision of a new life for him. California, on the Golden Shore! There rushed over him the images of a future of achievement, such as he had always dreamed. He saw himself among the intrepid thousands who went west with the Republic. He would take up again the Quest of the Shawnessys. One of that restless, messianic seed, he would push on and leave the past behind. He would say good-by to Raintree County and go forth and fearless to a land where purple hills were drenched with golden fire at evening.
For a tumultuous instant, the necessary words were rising to his tongue, the words that said farewell and made it possible for him to turn his face from the faces of his people. In that instant, as the last car rolled over the crest of the hill, he looked backward. The river flowed in darkness making its great south loop. On the Home Place leaf-fires were charring in the darkness, and a lonely rock lay at the limit of the land. Then all the summers of his life rushed back upon him. He remembered his mother standing at the back door and calling the boys in from the fields for dinner. He remembered T. D.’s tall, gentle form in the cluttered Office among the squarecornered bottles. Johnny Shawnessy’s voice made a hoarse cry in his throat, and at the same time he heard the lonely wail of the departing engine. Then all that he was and all that he had been, like a hundred feminine and pleading hands, held him fast; he lay entangled with the vines and grasses of the autumnal earth beside the river. He knew then that he could no more uproot himself from this memoryhaunted earth than he could pluck body from soul. He lay in wet weeds at the base of the embankment and wondered at the image of himself departing from himself, of the disinherited one whom he had just sent down the tracks to westward and never would behold again
THE EARTH WAS ODOROUS WITH AUTUMN;
ACROSS THE FIELDS DRIFTED A SCENT
OF
SMOKE curled up from the cigars of three men seated in front of the General Store.
—Let’s try page 65, the Senator said.
He was wedged into the middle one of three chairs. The Perfessor on his right and Mr. Shawnessy on his left were bent over to see the Atlas lying open in the Senator’s lap. The Perfessor licked his lips. His eyes were beady.
—I must say, he said, I never thought I’d take so much interest in the face of Raintree County. What a priceless opportunity that artist had!
—I’m beginning to think that the whole thing was the figment of an old man’s diseased mind, Mr. Shawnessy said.
—It must be here somewhere, the Senator said, studying page 65. If there weren’t so many interruptions——
Page 65 showed the farm residence of Robert Ray. Hugely passive in the foreground stood Jocko the Strong, blueribbon bull, surrounded by lesser bovine gentry.
—There goes another possibility, the Senator said. Doggone it! Let’s see—have we looked through it carefully?
—Let me try for a while, the Perfessor said.
He began to flap through the pages, holding the book at various angles and removes. He had the air of slipping up on the pictures before something could run away.
—I guess that story was too good to be true, the Senator said.
He tipped his chair back against the wall of the General Store, and nodding pleasantly at a group of hovering pedestrians, began to light a new cigar.
—John—puff, puff—how do you stand living in this little—puff, puff—burg? When I was a—puff, puff—kid, I couldn’t wait to get out.
He sat back breathing hard, triumphant possessor of a lit cigar.
—These are good smokes, he said. I burn about fifteen every day.
—This is the first smoke I’ve had for weeks, Mr. Shawnessy said. My wife doesn’t like the odor.
—Ten o’clock, the Senator said, consulting his watch. What do I do now, John?
—Just sit here and let the people gaze on the Man of the People.
All three men tipped their chairs back against the wall of the General Store.
—John, I remember
how your dad, old T. D., was deadset against tobacco, the Senator said. What was that famous couplet of his?
Some do it chew, and some it smoke,
Whilst some it up their nose do poke.
He quaked with senatorial laughter.
Drinking the strong aroma of the cigar, Mr. Shawnessy felt heady and full of words.
Garwood the Great. Occupying the throne. And I in shadow sucking on a borrowed smoke. Well, I was too ambitious to be a great man in this age. We are definitely in the Garwood B. Jones Period of American History.
—Gentlemen, said the Senator, hooking his thumbs under his armpits, where would America be without the cigar?
Mr. Shawnessy watched the crowd go by in the thin mist of his cigar, incense of the Republic.
How will you find this manyness in one, this oneness in many, the Republic? It hovers in the smell of all the pullman cars and diners, and all the lobbies, court rooms, courthouse toilets, and all the senate chambers, hotel rooms, and statehouse corridors. The Republic is rolled up in thin brown leaves and smoked all over the Republic.
I will spend five cents and buy the earth. I will buy the subtle fragrance of sorghum, rum, molasses, dung, and dark flesh from below the Ohio River. For they have taken Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, and the Carolinas, they have taken Old Virginny, and distilled them into smoke.
I saw a halfburned butt beneath a vaudeville poster. The street outside the drugstore was littered with chewed fragments of the Old Kentucky Home.
Have a smoke, brother. Thank you, Senator. Give me a light, will you? Here’s a good cigar. And don’t forget, brother, I stand for free soil, free speech, and the rights of men.
Can I get more for a nickel anywhere than the memory of all those great white domes and statehouse yards on Independence Day and summer streets and sainted elders reading their papers in the evening?
The cigar is mightier than the sword. Our thin smokes curl upon the summer air, tracing the legend of an elder day. Our thin smokes curl upon the summer air, our thin smokes curl upon, our thin smokes curl . . .
—By the way, men, the Senator was saying, I am eager to have the opinion of two such erudite gentlemen on a book I am writing. As time and the pressure of public duty permit, I have been working on a little magnum opus, a record of my life and the crowding pageant of the Nation’s history during my career as a servant of the people.
—Garwood, Mr. Shawnessy said, for goodness’ sake, get off the platform and talk English. You’re among friends now—not voters. You never got a vote of mine, and by the gods, you never shall.
—That’s what I like about you, John, the Senator said. You make me feel right at home again. Remember how we used to maul each other in the partisan weeklies? Well, what I want you two smart bastards to do is to prod me a little, stir up my ideas about these things. I figure on calling the goddam thing
MEMORIES OF THE REPUBLIC IN WAR AND PEACE
What do you think of that?
—Why don’t you just call it frankly
WHY I OUGHT TO BE PRESIDENT
the Perfessor said.
—I admit, the Senator said, that the appearance of this book, about two years from now, won’t hurt my candidacy for the Presidency in ’96. But all joking aside, boys, I have been turning over in my mind the whole question of what the United States of America stands for, and where we have been heading in the last fifty years. Or in the last four hundred years, for that matter. Do you fellows realize that we are in the Quadricentennial Year of the Discovery of America by the well-known Wop?
—America, Mr. Shawnessy said, is still waiting to be discovered. America is a perpetual adventure in discovery. I’ve spent my fifty years of life trying to discover America.
—That sounds rather good, the Senator said. Whom are you quoting?
He made a lazy ring, fat breathing of the senatorial lips.
—Well, what is America? Mr. Shawnessy said.
The Senator laughed gently, became silent. At last he said,
—America is the most perfect form of government ever devised by man.
—A lawyer’s definition, Mr. Shawnessy said.
—America, said the Perfessor, is where a great many beasts try to live under a government perfectly devised for men.
—A cynic’s definition, Mr. Shawnessy said.
—We need a poet’s definition, the Perfessor said.
—See my forthcoming opus, Mr. Shawnessy said, which, if the pressure of public duty permits, will appear just in time to strengthen my bid for the Presidency in 1948.
—John, the Senator said, where in Christ’s name is that great book you were always going to write?
A deputation of citizens approached to greet the Senator, who got out of his chair and began shaking hands.
Mr. Shawnessy drew deeply on the cigar.
America is a memory of my pre-Columbian years. America is a cabin in the clearing and a road that scarcely ruts the earth. It is the face of my mother in the sentimental doorway of our home in Indiana. America is an innocent myth that makes us glad and hopeful each time we read it in the book of our own life. It is the same myth each time with multiple meanings. It has the same homeplace in the county, the doorway and the face in the doorway, the cabin made of logs, the spring and running branch, the fields around the house, and it has the same rock lying at the utmost limit of the land at evening.
—Boys, the Senator said, resuming his chair, whatever America may be, I’m sure of one thing—that in fifty years we have seen a radical change in this country, as much so as if we had adopted a different form of government.
—For good or bad? the Perfessor said.
—Why, for good, the Senator said.
—For my part, the Perfessor said, I think we live in the period of the Great Betrayal.
—How so?
—We’ve betrayed the martyrs of the Civil War. We’ve betrayed the Negro. We’ve betrayed the working man. We’ve betrayed the immigrant millions. We’ve betrayed each other. We’ve betrayed the early dream and promise of America.
Mr. Shawnessy drank the strong aroma of the cigar.
Betrayals. The saddest moment of our life is the moment of betrayal. To love someone is to betray someone.
Anguish welled up, a brackish water from dank cisterns. A thin smoke curling had lured him to this pitfall of memory.
Apostate sucking on a borrowed smoke in the Main Street of the Nation, reclaim your heritage. Decayed shell, incapable of tears. My God, how I wept in the old days! The terrible rivers of remembrance streamed from my eyes. Wandering, I went to the farthest limits of the land at evening.
Listen, I did not betray you. I remember you, though you are many years buried in the seed-dense earth. I remember your purity, your hurt eyes, and how I fled to the verge of our land in the evening. I remember the waning light of autumn day, all the land was a conflagration of the fallen and falling leaves, and I remember
November—1859
HOW THE ROCK HAD LAIN THERE ALWAYS AT THE LIMIT OF THE LAND,
immutable and lonely. Eggshaped, part-sunken in the ground, yet higher than a man, it lay in the South Field just short of the railfence. The land rose gently behind the farmhouse and then fell like a wave of waning strength to the limit of the field where the rock lay. The rock’s immensely solid mass was tinged with red, and sometimes on summer evenings the great scarred shape would glow dull scarlet after the land had turned to gray. The moveless mass of it had been there before the settlers came, had been there when Columbus saw the flowering shores of western islands, had been there when the first man, wandering through the forests of the middle continent discovered a river winding to a lake. Centuries had flowed and faded around the rock as seasons did around the life of Johnny Shawnessy. And yet it had always seemed a stranger in this earth, a stranded voyager from other climes.
He could be sure that in the periphery of all his memories the rock had lain there at the limit of the land. If he had wished, he cou
ld have gone there at any time and put his hand on it. Perhaps he would have found the rough rind of it faintly warm.
But one day it seemed to Johnny that perhaps he discovered why the rock was there and what it waited for.
For the rock had been there too during that triumphant spring when Johnny Shawnessy had thrust himself to the inmost recesses of the County. When he lunged through the pollenous air of Lake Paradise and lay with one beautiful and alien, the rock had been there at the utmost verge of the Home Place though he had never given it a thought or wondered how it could be there at that same instant, or how it could be so abidingly at all.
And the rock had been there too when Susanna Drake went back to her own earth, and it was there when she came back to Raintree County.
In early November, Johnny got a letter that read:
Dearest Johnny,
I’m back.
Your own
SUSANNA
Grass was withering in the fields, and the rock at the limit of the Shawnessy land was a dull dome of color in the gray afternoon when he walked into Freehaven to see Susanna Drake. As he approached the house, standing white and mournful on its high lawn, his imagination involuntarily wished fire upon it, fire that would burn a vacant place against the sky and purge this shape and the memory of it from his life forever.
But after all he wasn’t so badly off, if it came to that. He was not going to have his neck wrung like John Brown.
At the door, he was met by the Negro girl, who ushered him into the parlor. He sat down and waited. While he was waiting, he picked up the album and gloomily conned its pages. There were two or three new pictures of Susanna in various romantic attitudes. Susanna with Child, he mused, mournfully.
The daguerreotype of four people before the old Southern mansion was still there. He examined it more closely than before. When held to avoid reflection, this primitive legend of light and shadow had a precision of detail that more modern methods couldn’t achieve. There were more than four faces in the picture after all. If you wanted to be pedantic, there were five, for the little girl was hugging a doll whose tiny features were clear like a cameo.
Raintree County Page 33