During this time, the child was growing.
At first Johnny didn’t love his son He had a strong feeling of pity and a sense of responsibility—but no love. He examined the little raw form with some care to see if he could find any evidence of a human soul. In the beginning, the Baby, as it was called during its first year of life, didn’t even have any particular look. It was like some furtive creature pulled out of a river, half drowned, mysterious, mute, unidentified. This moist little visitor from silence and the fruitful night had not yet made itself a place in Raintree County. Johnny was embarrassed even to call it by a human name.
This, then, was the beginning of a human life. His own beginning must have been like this, for once he, too, had emerged from the river of darkness and had lain on the bank stranded, waving tiny fists of frustration, blinking in the strong sunshine of Raintree County. From among the millions and millions of little faceless swimmers, seeds that never found a principle of growth, he had won through, struggling to warm arms and summer. What was he, back in that time of namelessness, where had he been then, did he have any memory of the great deep from which he had swum? ‘John Wickliff Shawnessy,’ they had called him in order that he might instantly be rescued from chaos and formlessness. The name had been the beginning of his education and the origin of Raintree County. In the beginning was the Word.
Now he had a responsibility to rescue another little swimmer from the void and make it human. ‘Little Jim’ he would call it until at last somehow it became Little Jim.
The child lost its birthflush and was gradually a fairskinned little boy with thick reddish hair, clear blue eyes, and regular features. He was a beautiful child, alert, quick-eyed, expressive. In a few months, if anyone rose up suddenly over the edge of the crib, he would laugh violently. There were times, too, when he would lie in his crib clenching his fists and turning red as if strangling for breath. He began to babble and to imitate the sounds of others.
By the time he was a year old, he had ceased to be called the Baby and was called Little Jim. His coloring was Shawnessy—vital, darkening hair with a touch of the sun in it, a softness and roughness of eyebrow, long lashes, fair skin. His eyes and the contours of his face and body were his mother’s. He was gracefully formed. His eyes were dark blue, round, proud, intense.
At ten months he had begun to walk, and at a year he would run several steps, dropping lightly to his hands, only to rise and run again.
—He’ll make a runner like his pa, everyone said.
Before he was a year old, he had a vocabulary of half a hundred words, among them the words ‘Daddy,’ ‘Mamma,’ ‘rock,’ ‘tree,’ and ‘Grandma’—variously mispronounced. By this time Johnny was very proud of his son. He spent hours with him, talking with him, teaching him the names of things, carrying him around the town on his shoulders. It got so that he didn’t like to leave Little Jim at the house but preferred to have the child with him wherever possible. He lost all personal vanity in this son. He was delighted when Ellen observed to all comers that Little Jim was even brighter than Johnny had been at the same age. It was a common sight in the Square of Freehaven those days to see Johnny Shawnessy walking around with a little boy perched on his shoulders.
Often Johnny would take the boy out into the yard of the house in good weather and put him down to run barefooted in the grass. The child hardly ever walked. His straight feet seemed to be made for running; his legs were slender and for a child’s long. While his father worked at a table, writing or reading, Little Jim turned, danced, trotted tirelessly in the summer weather, exclaiming, pointing, asking questions. Johnny was never too busy to answer the child’s questions, and the Great American Epic suffered in proportion.
When Little Jim was a year old, Johnny began to tell him stories, short narratives repeating the child’s own experience. From the out-set, Little Jim was fascinated by stories. He would lie and listen attentively to the image-creating sounds; his round blue eyes would be earnest, all-believing, innocent. He soon learned to ask for a story and wouldn’t go to sleep without one.
Johnny didn’t suspect the depth of his love for Little Jim until a series of happenings seemed to imperil the child’s safety.
After Little Jim’s birth, Johnny had hoped that Susanna’s morbid fears would be expelled with her pregnancy. She stopped walking in her sleep, and for a few weeks seemed greatly improved as she went about the business of taking care of the child. Then at the return of menstruation, she became pale and haggard, violent in temper, complaining of her hardships, finding no good in anything. During this time, Johnny and the Negro girls began to assume more and more the care of the baby, until it very largely devolved into their hands, while Susanna moped by herself hours at a time in the upper chambers of the house. Instead of establishing a bond between husband and wife, the child had erected a greater barrier. Johnny became gradually conscious that he and Little Jim were drawing apart from Susanna, that she regarded them as belonging together and not to her. He tried to break down this estrangement between mother and child, but Susanna clearly wished to give him the responsibility for Little Jim. Not that she disliked the boy. She was pathetically fond of him and would often come to him and do something for him, hold him and play with him, as if she were an older child who didn’t quite know how to act in the presence of a little brother.
—Isn’t he cute! she would say, as if in some surprise, as if she hadn’t noticed it before, as if paying a compliment to Johnny for being the father of such a child.
It was rather charming to hear her at such times prattling at the child like a precocious little girl, mock-scolding him, hugging him, and calling him Jeemie.
Much of her strangeness, he ascribed to the fact that she felt herself alone in the North, away from her own people when they were fighting for what they considered their national existence. But although there were many Southern sympathizers in the County, Susanna took no interest in them and very little in the War either.
In the spring of 1862, she expressed a sudden desire to ‘go about,’ to organize parties and entertainments. Johnny encouraged her, even if Susanna was a little feverish and hectic about it.
But excessive gaiety was almost always paid for by periods of extreme depression during which she would remain alone for hours in the secondfloor bedroom. Once when he peeped in noiselessly, believing her asleep, he was shocked to see her lying in the bed, restlessly turning the pages of her picture album. It came to him then that the album was always kept on the dresser in this room and that perhaps she spent much of her time looking at it.
One day in the early fall of 1862, he returned from the office to find Bessie and Soona waiting for him with worried faces. Susanna was gone. She had left in the early morning carrying a little suitcase and dressed in her best. She had refused to tell them her plans. Johnny made cautious inquiries around town and even tried to get in touch with Garwood Jones for help, but Garwood was nowhere to be found. At the train station, Johnny discovered that Susanna had bought a ticket to Indianapolis. Late at night, she came back, flushed, excited, talking volubly about a thousand little things that she had seen and done. When Johnny told her of his anxiety, she scolded him for it.
—I left you a note, Johnny.
—Where?
—Why, upstairs on the dresser.
He followed her upstairs. She went to the dresser in the bedroom and showed him the note. She had carefully wrapped it around the old daguerreotype of her home in Louisiana and laid it on the open pages of the picture album.
—There, you see! she said triumphantly.
When he made a motion to take the note, she laughed shyly, crumpled it up, and danced away from him, her eyes brilliant and excited.
—No, you can’t read it!
That night, she didn’t sleep at all, and she remained in a condition of unnatural elation for several days.
During this time, in the winter of 1862 and early spring of 1863, she began to sleepwalk again. Several times he awok
e to find that she wasn’t in bed. He would jump up and, hardly daring to think what it was that made him so sick at heart, would run into the next room, where Little Jim slept. After reassuring himself that the child was all right, he would go from room to room and floor to floor to find Susanna. He would discover her walking in the hall with a stately, regular tread, or standing at a window, or even crouching in the cellar. He soon learned that it was wisest to approach her quietly and lead her back to bed without waking her up.
One night, awakening to find her place in bed empty, he went softly down the stair, aware that a light was burning on the lower floor. Susanna was in the parlor, bending over a table on which the lamp was lit. He was fascinated by what she was doing and remained at the door of the room watching her.
She was examining the photograph album, which apparently she had carried downstairs. With quick, restless gestures, she sifted the pages, bending over them and staring at the pictures with sightless eyes. She appeared to be in a great hurry as if she had only a short time in which to find whatever she was looking for.
When he stepped toward her, she seemed instantly aware of his approach. She turned, appeared to recognize him, smiled.
—I can’t find it, she said.
—What?
—The letter. I left it here, you know.
—I know, he said. We found it. Don’t you remember?
She searched his face with sorrowing eyes. She reached out and touched his beard with a childlike, delicate gesture.
—She didn’t read it then? You don’t think she read it, do you?
—I’m sure she didn’t, he said.
A look of inexpressible relief softened her features. But it faded as quickly as it came. Emotions of confusion, anxiety, terror fled across her face.
—I must find it. Before it’s too late.
—Perhaps you’d best go to bed now and look for it later.
—No, I must find it now.
She began to sift the pages of the album again.
—What was written on it? he asked.
She looked at him again, her eyes dilated, and smiled a fugitive, distrustful smile.
—I could never tell you, she said. I promised not to. You believe me, don’t you?
—Of course I do.
—You see, I have had a great loss.
—I know, he said.
—The dearest thing in all the world.
She said the words with a lingering sadness that made him ache with pity.
—The dearest thing in all the world, she repeated mournfully. The dearest thing in all the world. The dearest thing in . . .
It was a long time before he could persuade her to give up the search. She kept looking through and through the pages of the album, these pages covered with images of herself posed in cloudy nightrobes. In his effort to win her back to quietude, he felt that he was battling something enormously persistent, rooted in the bedrock of her being, ineradicable, impervious to reason, sinisterly alive.
Another night, he found her holding a lighted lamp and standing before one of the two front windows on the third floor. She made elaborate ceremonial gestures, approaching the hot chimney so close to the curtain that the cloth began to smoke.
Instantly, he started toward her. She seemed to know him, appeared not to be sleeping at all. She smiled, put her finger to her lips, and leaning toward him, began to whisper hoarsely like a tragedienne in a crude melodrama.
—They’re probably hiding in here!
—Who?
She came up to him and examined his face closely, then apparently satisfied with her scrutiny, withdrew a little, and narrowing her eyes to slits, said,
—Of course, I know about them.
—Of course.
When he spoke, she appeared startled and held the lamp close to him. As so often before, the inchoate emotions of her dreaming self stirred and faded in her face.
—Now where is that doll? she said, irritably.
—It’ll turn up, Johnny said. It’s late, you know. Let’s go to bed. We can talk about it there.
—No, I must find it, she said. I came up here to find it.
—There isn’t any doll here.
She seemed to reflect upon what he had said. He gently took the lamp and led her away from the window and down the stairs. She went obediently enough until they were about to get into bed. Then she began to cry out with terror, and it was some time before he could wake her and quiet her. He tried scolding her about the lamp.
—You might have burnt down the house and killed us all, Susanna, he said. You must simply try to get hold of yourself.
She wept distractedly and held him very tight.
—What did I say? she asked him.
—You were hunting someone. You thought they were hiding somewhere in the house. You asked about a doll.
She had stopped crying and was listening attentively.
—Is there something you would like to tell me, Susanna, something about your childhood or your parents. Maybe it would relieve your mind.
He had asked her the same thing before, but always in vain. Now, however, to his surprise, she said,
—Yes, there is something.
She expelled her breath in a long sigh.
And suddenly he was afraid.
He was afraid of what this woman could tell him. He wished almost that he might have remained in ignorance. He wanted to say, No, don’t tell me, Susanna. No good can come of telling me. Perhaps what you are about to tell me ought not to be told at all—to anyone—ever.
—It’s—it’s about the fire, she said. Something I know about it that no one else knows. I never told anyone—not even Aunt Prissy.
She paused. He didn’t encourage her.
—It was something that happened not long before the fire. You remember I told you that Henrietta had been away, and then she came back?
—Yes.
—Well, the day she came back to the little cabin, I stayed and played there, and I left my doll there—Jeemie, you know.
—Yes, Johnny said.
He knew only too well the doll Jeemie. Perhaps he was going to get at last the secret of that hideous little idol from a stained and tragic era, and the secret, too, of all his bright little successors.
—Well, that night, the night Henrietta came back, I was very much excited, and I lay in my bed in the big house and couldn’t sleep. I wanted to have my doll, who usually slept with me, and I remembered that I had left him in the cabin. I wanted to see Henrietta again too. The doll was sort of an excuse. So when everything was still, I slipped out of bed and crept down the stair and went outdoors. It was a warm night, and it was a holiday, the Fourth of July The Nigroes were all singing down by the river, and there was a big scarlet fire burning on the river bank just over the woods from the cabin, and the cabin was all lit up scarlet from the fire. Well, I went down there to the cabin, and I tried the front door, but it was locked, and then I went around behind and slipped in the back door. It was all dark in the cabin except that the light of the fires outside flickered through the windows. I listened and didn’t hear anything. Then I crept up the stair because I had left the doll upstairs. There was a light of some kind burning up there, and I could see myself in the mirror at the landing. I had on a white nightgown, and my hair was all shaken down. And then——
She paused, and he was afraid that she wouldn’t finish and afraid that she would. But she was entirely in the spell of her own story and had paused as if to contemplate her child’s image in the mirror. Her voice had slipped down to a low swift monotone as if it automatically recorded an experience that she was reliving in a center of consciousness far removed from the present in which she lay.
—And then I peeped up over the landing into the upper floor of the cabin, and there were two people on the bed together, and the light from the big fire on the riverbank burned right in through the window, and it made the woman’s skin all dusky and scarlet like wine, and the man’s skin pale white aga
inst it. I don’t think I’d ever seen grown people without clothes on before then. I didn’t quite understand at the time, but I knew I oughtn’t to be there, and I slipped down the stair and went back to the house, and no one ever knew what I saw.
She paused, and Johnny waited. In the night over Raintree County, this other archaic night had made itself a place, and the two figures in the flaring darkness of it were tragically real to him, more real than the great war fighting beyond the borders of the County, on far rivers of the Republic, where armies lay in siege. These two figures embracing in forbidden love were the emblem of a lost republic; flames licked and flared suddenly around them; they turned in his mind, twisting and twining in their exquisite torment.
—So then, Susanna went on, still talking swiftly to the dark night, I had some dim notion of what it was like between Daddy and Henrietta. And I was proud and glad because I loved them both. I didn’t feel so strong then the difference between the races. That came later. Then, a few days later Henrietta came up to the house to live—Daddy was that headstrong—and she had the room next to mine—she was like the lady of the house. And that was when Mamma was so violent. She had had the house by herself while Henrietta had been away. And one day when Daddy was away, Mamma came down and found me in Henrietta’s room, and there was a terrible scene, Mamma called her a nigger whore, and screamed and carried on, and said dreadful things to me, and all the time Henrietta just stood there and put her arms around me. And some of the men came and Mamma was led off.
Raintree County Page 56