Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge Jr.

  —I’m goin’ to drive the wagon out, Flash said.

  He jumped into the seat and began to flail the mules. The wagon shook off down the road. In the shelter of the ditch, Johnny and the Perfessor ran along beside. Bullets sang by. Two or three wine bottles gurgled dark blood on the road.

  A large foraging party approached, mounted on motley beasts and led by a captain.

  —What’s going on? he asked.

  —Just a few Rebels, Johnny said.

  —The bummers are whippin’ ’em for yuh, Captain, Flash said.

  Flash parked the wagon and jumped down. He and Johnny joined the newcomers and began to exchange shots with the Rebels, who retired into the grove where they had left their horses.

  —Some of you men go around and flank that grove, the Captain said.

  Flash and Johnny left the lines and crept through a ditch and up a hill. The field seemed to be swarming with Union soldiers, most of them irregulars, who had concentrated like magic at the sound of the shooting. After a little while, the flankers, including Johnny and Flash, rushed the grove yelling. The Rebels broke out of the timber, riding. There was a wild discharge of rifles at the fleeing butternut uniforms, and one of the horses went down on his knees and skidded forward, flinging over on his twisted neck and lying still. The rider was thrown heavily, rolling free. He started to get up, shaking his head. Johnny and Flash lit out for the place. The Rebel had lost his rifle and had only a sabre. He spat in disgust.

  —That’s what comes a leadin’ militia, he said.

  He was a tall, broadshouldered fellow, with thin lips, light silken mustache and beard, blue eyes. He was only shaken up.

  —By God, we got a captain! Flash said. A sure-nuff captain.

  —I trust I’m in the hands of gentlemen, the Rebel said, looking apprehensively at Flash Perkins and the other bummers who were moving up around him.

  —Give me your sword, Captain, Johnny said. And come along with us. We’ll take you to the proper place.

  The Rebel seemed relieved.

  —Hell of a way to git caught, he said. That’s what comes a leadin’ militia.

  They put the Rebel on the wagon seat between them, and drove away. About a mile down, the Perfessor sat in a ditch smoking a cigar.

  —Just taking a little rest, he said, to relax my legs. Been riding so much I——Hey, who’s that?

  —Just a Rebel captain, Flash said. We picked him up after the scrap.

  —Charmed to make your acquaintance, Captain, the Perfessor said. I’m Jerusalem Stiles of the New York Dial.

  —James Rutherford, captain in the Georgia Cavalry, the Rebel said. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.

  Introductions were completed all around, and the Perfessor climbed up.

  —Now, Johnny said, we have to find the Army. You have any idea where it is, Captain?

  —If you mean your Army, sir, I reckon it’s all over the place.

  The Unionists roared, and the Rebel smiled mournfully.

  —How about a drop of something, Captain? the Perfessor said.

  —Don’t care if I do, the Captain said.

  They gave the Confederate a bottle, and he took a long drink.

  He sighed.

  —Well, he said, this is the goddamnedest war! I fought in six major engagements from Gettysburg to the Wilderness and never lost a horse. Then I gits captured by two foragers and a war correspondent. That’s what comes a leadin’ militia.

  —Say, Flash said, this guy’s all right. I hate to turn him over to the Army.

  From the crest of a gentle hill, they saw the Army again. It was past noon. The men had turned out for dinner. Muskets were stacked. Fields and yards on each side of the road were littered with soldiers.

  Before reaching the main road, Flash drove up a side road that brought them across the Georgia Central Railroad. Coming over a hill and out of the woods, they could see a long stretch of the railroad extending for a mile east. Along this line were a thousand infantrymen, and all on the left side. Shouts of command ran up and down the line. The men bent over, some using levers, many taking the iron rail in their bare hands. The whole line strained and tore a mile of track shrieking from its bed.

  —Tell me something, said Captain James Rutherford of the Georgia Cavalry. You Yankees claim this land belongs to the whole nation, don’t yuh?

  —Sure.

  —Then why in hell are yuh tearin’ it all up for? There won’t be anything left down here for y’all or anyone else, after the War’s over.

  Along the railroad, men were stacking the wooden ties. The iron rails were laid across the tops of the bonfires. When a rail was redhot in the center, two men would take each an end and running with the rail fold it neatly around the nearest tree.

  —That’s what they call Sherman’s neckties, Flash said to the Captain.

  —I can tell one thing, the Captain said. Sherman don’t intend to come back this way.

  —And he don’t intend to let anyone else come back either, Flash said.

  They rode all afternoon through scenes of jovial devastation. The Army was happy in its work of wreckage. Back of it, trailing to westward, lay the burned-out trail of the railroad and hundreds of ravaged homes. The Army passed like a plague of giant locusts: they settled on the land for a night; they rose and left the land bare.

  Sometimes Johnny could hear the Army singing. The husky thunder of its Northern songs echoed in the woodlands of Georgia, filling the soft aer with unfamiliar rhythms.

  Meanwhile, all day long, the wagontrains filled themselves to bursting. Nearing a wellstocked farm, they would stream off the road, around through a gate and past the corncrib. As each wagon passed, men would stuff it with forage. Without stopping, the train would exhaust the contents of the crib and come back to the road.

  Everywhere along the Army’s path were the Negro people. Each day, with pathetic trust, additional hundreds left their old homes, from which their masters had fled before them, and attached themselves to the Army. Their pitiful wagons were stuffed with junk and pickaninnies. Eastward they went as though to a promised land, although in fact there was nothing that Sherman could do with them when he reached the sea.

  On this day especially, the uprooted thousands came out of the earth until they seemed to outnumber the Army. Johnny and the other three men in the wagon were vaguely disturbed by this spectacle of a people marching, unbidden, toward a resurrection.

  —I just hope, the Rebel Captain said, that the whole goddam race keeps right on marchin’ up North with y’all, and settles right down with yuh. In another fifty years, we’ll have another Civil War with the situation reversed.

  But the Army thought nothing of that. They didn’t trouble themselves with consequences. Now there were blue days on the breast of the land, they were marching. Each day, each hour they passed through new scenes. It was a beautiful country, and they took their toll of it like drunken lovers. They sang, they were carefree, they feared not death or the devil, they were young men, a strong tide, a swift river, which must somewhere come to the sea.

  By evening of that day, the Army had moved about fifteen miles, through a dense maze of incident, accident, excitement. New hundreds of black people had been added to its impedimenta. A broad swath of country lay stripped and blackened in its wake. The Army left its spoor not only in destruction, but in a debris of empty cans, papers, letters, caps, a few bodies. The Army of the West had made one more sevenleagued stride on its way to the sea, gathering to itself uncountable legends.

  In the early evening, the Perfessor, Johnny, and Flash began to hunt for the regiment which they had abandoned in the morning. All day long it had been moving in its appointed path beside them, and now it was somewhere in this widebosomed evening dense with crowding wagons, tired soldiers, and the brighteyed, inextinguishably jubilant darkies. The men were calling back and forth to one another.

  —Hey, Sam, I can smell that old coffeepot a-bilin’ right now.

  �
�Say, I’m a-goin’ to eat me a whole chicken all to myself.

  —Reckon we’ll have to do any fightin’ tomorra?

  —Hell, no. This time Sherman’s flanked ’em so wide, they ain’t an army within a hundred miles.

  —Yes, but I heerd they was fightin’ up ahead today at a place called Sandersville or somethin’ like that.

  —Let the calvary handle that.

  —Sure, let the damn horseboys do the fightin’ fer a change.

  Then it was very dark. Breaking out on both sides of the road far up ahead were the first fires of the bivouacking troops. The wagoners were calling back and forth.

  —Hey, anybody heard a the Twenty-second Indiana?

  —They done got drowned in a river a piece back.

  —Get your goddam corpsecart out a the way, and let a man past that knows how tew drive.

  —Son, I was drivin’ an Army ambulance when your maw was removin’ snot from your chin.

  —Reckon ole Jeff Davis’d like to know where we are.

  —They say ole Abe hisself don’t know where we are. Folks at the North ain’t heerd from us since we left Atlanta.

  —Lost—an Army of sixty thousand men. Please return to the owner. Signed, Abe Lincoln.

  With laughter and with cursing, the wagons crowded toward their camps. Johnny and his companions found the regiment at last, bivouacked in a trampled cornfield beside a forest.

  —Hey, what you got there? the men said, crowding around the wagon.

  —We have a little of everything, Johnny said, from fat shoats to a plump Rebel officer. This is Captain Jim Rutherford, boys, of the Georgia Cavalry.

  —Pleased to meet yuh, the men said.

  It was good to see the comrades again, their faces lit by the flickering glare of pineknot campfires. Fragrance of burning balsam wood perfumed the air. A score of skewered turkeys dripped on the fire. Corporal Johnny Shawnessy was ravenously hungry.

  By nine o’clock they were sitting at the fire gorged on cooked flesh, leaning back on beds of straw, cornstalks, and branches, drinking the stolen wine and smoking pipes and cigars. The entertainment was varied but familiar, the only new feature being the presence of the Rebel captain, whom the men permitted to stay in the camp for the night on parole d’honneur and whom they plied with wine and questions in their eagerness to learn about the Enemy.

  —When this war goin’ to end, Reb? Reckon it can’t go on much longer now.

  —Why, sir, I look to see right smart of fightin’ yet. General Lee ain’t whupped by a long shot.

  —Suppose ole Sherman takes him in the rear, then what’ll he do?

  —Why, then, I reckon someone’ll just have to take ole Sherman in the rear.

  They compared notes on army food, combat experiences, women. Everyone agreed that the Rebel captain was a capital fellow.

  —Jim, Flash Perkins said, I’ll tell yuh the truth. For two cents I’d a blowed your head off this afternoon and never thought a thing of it. Now, I’m glad I didn’t do it. If all the traitors was like you, damn me but I think I could git along with ’em O.K.

  —They ain’t any different from me, the Rebel captain said.

  —I talked with a whole lot of Rebel prisoners in Atlanta, a soldier said. They wan’t no different from us fellers. They don’t like the War no more’n we do. They acted real human.

  —Trouble you damyankees, the Rebel said, is you never knew anything about us. You had to start a damn war to come down and find out what nice folks we are.

  —You believe all this truck in the papers, Reb, Flash said, about us rapin’ your women and all?

  —No, I don’t. That there’s civilian talk. I don’t take no stock in anything I read in the newspapers.

  —There, you see! a soldier said.

  —Way I look at it, the Rebel said, all the soldiers in both armies oughta go back home after the War and whup hell out of the speculators and newspapermen, beggin’ your pardon, Mr. Stiles.

  —Don’t mind me, boys, the Perfessor said.

  He was propped up so that he could read his stolen books, a volume of Shakespeare’s Plays, a translation of Les Misérables, and a copy of Scott’s Life of Napoleon.

  —Willie, Walter, and Victor, he said to Johnny, are true classics. Your true classic confines himself to the classic view of life, which is that men are most alive when fighting and loving. The blood-thirstiest writing ever, is in Shakespeare’s historical plays. They are singularly devoid of what we miscall humanity. The heroes kill, rape, murder, and loot equally with the villains. And the whole strong drench is washed down with magnificent verbal poetry alternating with rude Falstaffian comedy. When you write your American historical plays, John, keep in mind that the prime ingredients are blood, lust, and laughter.

  Johnny lay and listened to the good soldier talk, which, to illustrate the Perfessor’s remark, continued to revolve upon its two eternal subjects, the War and the Women. The Rebel captain contributed affably to the discussion. There was a heated argument about the respective beauty of the ladies North and South. Blondes, brunettes, and redheads were compared as to their intrinsic talents in the art of love. Flash Perkins described in robust detail and with gestures his last contact with a woman. Notes were compared on the campfollowers of the armies North and South.

  On all these subjects, the Rebel captain was well informed and entertainingly vivid.

  The Perfessor now and then joined in the discussion and now and then read aloud a choice bit from Henry IV. Corporal Johnny Shawnessy was never so happy in the whole war as on that night.

  Later on, the soldiers began to sing. As he lay listening to the simple soldier ballads, the songs of mother, home, the Union, and the girls they left behind, Johnny felt epic fulfillment. Encamping for a night on alien earth and far from home, he had become at last the Hero of Raintree County. There was no hero like the veteran soldier, the comrade of comrades. In after years, he would be able to say with pride, Yes, I was one of those soldiers. I made the Great March with Sherman to the Sea. I was part of that Army. I saw those places. I remember that earth.

  Now for the first time he felt that the War was really coming to a close. Many comrades might be lost, but the end was in view.

  —A few more days for to tote the weary load,

  No matter, ‘twill never be light,

  A few more days till we totter on the road,

  Then my old Kentucky Home, good night.

  Yes, a few more days, and good night to the Old Kentucky Home, the sentimental republic founded on a crime, good night to flags, bands, uniforms, good night to valors and enthusiasms. He and his comrades had conquered more than they supposed in this avenging sweep from Atlanta to the sea.

  —Weep no more, my lady,

  O, weep no more today!

  We will sing one song for the old Kentucky Home,

  For the old Kentucky Home, far away.

  Later, the singing died, and the bugles sounded taps. Soon the large, low stars of the Southern night whited the upturned faces of fifty thousand young men, sleeping in bedrolls. Sleep touched with mystic wand the face of Private Flash Perkins, closed his savage eyes, erased the ridges from his forehead, stole the insolent laughter from his mouth. Sleep put its soft enchantment on the face of Jerusalem Webster Stiles, correspondent for the New York Dial, and turned him into a sharpfaced child in a chinbeard. It touched the face of Corporal Johnny Shawnessy with the beginning of an affectionate smile and discovered, beneath the stage whiskers, Johnny Shawnessy of Raintree County. They slept, these children of far-off counties, in their costume of the Civil War, each one reprieved from time and soldiering, each one escaping into a private world of memory and desire. The Southern night silvered in deep sleep the ravagers of Georgia, Sherman’s terrible men.

  Where was the sleeping soul of John Wickliff Shawnessy? It was lost in a classic dream of love and war, whose ingredients were blood, lust, and laughter but transmuted from inhumanity by the humane poetry which was the idiom of Johnny
Shawnessy’s mind. The Southern earth had touched a young Northerner with a sword of silver light, and in his breast a not unamiable warrior leapt alive and was off to the wars in his own private historical drama. . . .

  Sleeping, Corporal Johnny Shawnessy dreamed that he was standing in the wings of the Old Opera House while Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles in the guise of a Chorus stalked out before the curtain and read from a scroll.

  CHORUS

  —Scene One. Off to the Wars!

  The stage and orchestra of the Opera House were lit scarlet with an eruption of soft fire. Behind the scenes Johnny saw a young woman ascending a spiral stair, beckoning with lips and eyes. The dim loft of the theatre turned out to be the upper floor of a house on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  NELL GAITHER

  lying under a sheet in a huge fourposter bed, bare arm beckoning,

  —I do hope Aunt isn’t up.

  NEWSBOY

  popping head in at roomdoor, throwing newspaper,

  —Extra! Read all about it! Young soldier off to the Wars. Most affecting were the farewells exchanged on this occasion.

  COMMITTEE FROM THE LADIES’ AID

  fussy spinsters, sitting on bed, folding hands solicitously,

  —Corporal Shawnessy, is there anything we can do to assist you in this trying hour?

  DELEGATION FROM THE DANWEBSTER METHODIST CHURCH

  blackfrocked elders, cleaning teeth with whittled sticks, taking armchairs in a halfcircle around bed,

  —Brother Shawnessy, have you been baptized?

  T. D. SHAWNESSY

  rocking blandly back on his heels, hands behind back, surveying scene from a great height,

  —I see, my boy, that you’re just a good cleancut Shawnessy. I think this calls for a little prayer.

  The old man held up his hand. As he did so, someone pulled him violently through the curtains with a loop of rope, and a cardboard train crossed the stage with a rhythmical, butting motion, forlornly wailing. The sound turned into the trumpet voice of the

  CHORUS

  —Scene Two. An incident in the French Camp. . . .

  He was wandering through the backstreet of a shabby little Southern river town. On the highbreasted hills of Tennessee, he saw wan fires burning. Repeating an ancient act of soldierdom, he knocked at the door of a flimsy building shaken with rough merriment.