Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge Jr.

  —We’re goin’ home, boy, he said, fiercely nodding his head as if trying to convince someone doubting.

  —Sure we are, Johnny said.

  Flash searched Johnny’s face with bloodshot, staring eyes.

  —No use worryin’, boy, Flash said. Hell, you ran a good race. Hell’s fire, it ain’t no disgrace to git beat. Hell, I ain’t been beat in five years.

  Flash’s mouth remained open. His eyes dilated. He gave a hoarse cry, as if something strong and masterless in him had just felt the wound for the first time. His hold on Johnny’s shoulders let go suddenly, and he fell back, holding his chest and groaning. His eyes rolled. He panted like a runner who had just finished his race. He clutched at his throat coughing, choking.

  —I—can’t—breathe! Goddammit! Let go my throat, you bastards!

  —Flash! It’s me—Johnny!

  There was a faint red light in the forest. Johnny could see Flash plainly now. He was gurgling and twisting in spasms. Suddenly, Johnny realized that Flash was laughing. He listened to this terrible laughter coming from the big shattered breast.

  —Come on, you bastards! Flash yelled. Where I come from—

  He went on panting and laughing. His forehead made ridges.

  —Git a hat! he yelled. Go on, git a hat! Let’s see the color of your coin! Hell, where I come from—

  He coughed, his forehead was ridged, his eyes glared savage and exultant.

  —Hell, I can lick any man here! I can outrun any man in Raintree County! Hell, where I come from——Where I come from, why, hell, where I come from——

  He coughed for nearly five minutes, blood gushed from his mouth, he rolled back and forth. Johnny clung with one good arm under his comrade’s shoulders. Here, surely, was the strongest life that ever lived, and it was dying, it was beating itself out in blood and fury.

  There was nothing good about the way Flash Perkins died in a forest near Columbia, South Carolina. He died choking with his throat full of blood, still trying to beat some unseen competitor who was too much for him.

  But at last the big thing that lashed him to fury was still. When it was over, Flash Perkins lay on his back, mouth open, blood blackening on his beard and lips, toes turned out, shoulders slightly hunched, chin thrust up in that terrible repose that sleep couldn’t counterfeit. Johnny had seen a lot of men lying like that in two years. He sat trying to accept the immense stillness of this form that lay in an alien forest far from Raintree County.

  There was a peculiar red light under the trees as Corporal Johnny Shawnessy managed somehow with his one good arm, his feet, and his gun barrel to scoop out a shallow grave in the riflepit. Over the body of his comrade, he piled leaves, dirt, and the stones of the makeshift barrier. On a tree near-by, he carved with his knife the words

  Flash Perkins,

  Feb. 17,’65

  A Union Soldier

  Later, he was walking down through the woods along the river, trying to find a road and open ground. He saw now that the red light in the forest came from a big fire east. Later still, he was on a road choked with Union troops. A city was burning in the night. He was half out of his head with the pain in his shoulder. He lay down once in a ditch by the road and rested. Then he got up and went on toward the flames.

  Later still, he was entering the town. Troops were singing ironically:

  —O, Columbia, the gem of the ocean . . .

  In the glare of the fire was the same building that he and Flash had seen at a great distance in the afternoon.

  —That there’s the State House, someone said. They never finished building it.

  Union soldiers were halfheartedly trying to extinguish flames in a little tangle of worksheds in the yard of the capitol building. The fire roared on ravenous through the sheds. Inside, fragments of pediments, capitals, friezes, meant to complete the building, were chunks of incandescence.

  The air was thick with flakes of flame that softly dropped as if the sky rained fire.

  —It’s cotton, men said.

  Johnny kept asking for his unit. Finally, an officer was holding him by the arm.

  —Say, son, you’re wounded. Better get to a surgeon.

  Later, he woke up somewhere in a tent, crying out with pain. A surgeon was working over him, washing out the wound in his shoulder.

  —What about it, Doc?

  —You’re all right, the surgeon said. It got a piece of the bone. You’ve got to be quiet. You’ve got a touch of fever.

  —What about the fire?

  —O, that! the surgeon said. It was a good one, wasn’t it?

  Johnny knew then that the War was over for him. He sank back into fever and dull pain. For days and nights thereafter be lay, dreaming of Raintree County, seeing the earth of it ravaged and dry as if the source of its life had been scorched to a trickle. When the Army made contact with the Navy again, he was shipped with other sick and wounded up the coast and left in a hospital in Washington.

  But what happened to Corporal Johnny Shawnessy was only a contemptibly minor incident in the progress of Sherman’s Army north from Savannah in the spring of 1865. And as the army that had marched from Atlanta to the Sea cut a path of flame through the state where the War had started, men saw that the gods were tiring of this lengthy game of murder. Like bored children, they began

  TO SMASH AND SCATTER THE PIECES

  IN WANTON VIOLENCE

  AT

  THE END of the Grand Patriotic Program was nearing. The Perfessor slept on, his face relaxing from its look of pert cynicism. His sharp chin rested on his breast, his glittering eyes were shut, his face was childlike and almost tender. As the drums and bugles of the band assaulted his sleeping ears, he faintly moved his lips.

  With a start Mr. Shawnessy realized that Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles had once been young in Raintree County.

  For thirty years and more the Perfessor had been a wanderer. Now perhaps in sleep he remembered a home. So also did the heart of Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy yearn for the home of his youth, remembering road and river, a tree that stood by a house, a rock, and the scent of clover. A jocund music smote him almost to tears.

  I wish I was in de land ob cotton,

  Old times dar am not forgotten;

  Look away, look away! look away!

  Dixie Land.

  Americans, the eternal children of humanity! Rootless wanderers, creators of new cities, conquerors of deserts and forests, voyagers on rivers, migrants to westward, they kept eternally in their hearts the fact or fiction of the childhood home.

  Let each remember the face of the earth as it was in his childhood—mystical, brooding, and maternal. Let South remember South, let North remember North, let each remember the Republic. O, wandering one, far from the childhood rivers, o, soldier far from home, do not try to solve the riddle of Raintree County. Do not try to push back beyond the antiquity of the Republic’s memories. Do not seek beyond the Old Kentucky Home. Do not try to rediscover the lost source of the river of mankind. Let these inquiries cease. Sleep, inquisitive explorer, sleep and dream of your home in Indiana, the mythical America that is called Raintree County, the map that is like a face or a human form and that is written upon with the unconscious penmanship of the dreamers who came from the Great Swamp, never, we trust, to go back in again.

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. . . .

  Now we have reached the penultimate ring in the greatest monument ever erected to the private soldier. The prize we sought, in the guise of a woman thirty-eight feet tall and holding aloft a torch, is near.

  And I will show comrades together for the last time at the end of their marching, young men holding aloft victorious banners. Forever, they shall approach the Reviewing Stand. Forever an unheard music shall be sounding, stone bugles of the Republic, stone drums of triumph and thudding exultation.

  River of stone forms pressing forward between walls of stone on a stone street!

  But a voice tells me that the tides o
f the Republic will beat at the base of this column, men will grow old and die, generations of lovers will walk beside the river, men will forget, and the words on this shaft will be meaningless words: Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Resaca, Pine Mountain, Kenesaw Mountain, New Hope Church, Peach-Tree Creek, Atlanta. People will already have forgotten before dirt falls on the face of the last incredibly old comrade of the Grand Army.

  In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

  With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:

  As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

  While God is marching on.

  There is an Army marching on Pennsylvania Avenue, strong lads and many. Let it always be there and marching. Let it be composed also of those who fell in the first battles, who never saw the Enemy, who died in prison pen or fever camp, let it be composed of the hundreds of thousands who never reached the top of the column, the ultimate ring, for those who never went home to Raintree County.

  Did any of us ever go back to Raintree County after that War?

  O, martyrs, waiting for a resurrection, bearded, blasphemous saints, clotted harvest of a hundred fields! March with us too on Pennsylvania Avenue! Rise with us too

  May 24—1865

  FROM THE LAST ENCAMPMENT IN A HUNDRED FIELDS AND STREETS

  around the Capitol Building in Washington, boisterously the Western Army rose. Early in the morning legions of Westerners stirred from bivouac, putting on battlegear for the last time as an army. Metal flashed in the clean sunlight, harness jingjingjingled, hooves rang on pavement. The morning streets, already filled with flags and faces, carried the manifold tremendous sound of an army preparing for a march.

  On sidewalks, lawns, and open fields, the Army breakfasted. Soldiers polished their metal and tried to make their uniforms presentable, but they couldn’t change the look of veteran toughness and careless savvy that hundreds of miles of marching and fighting had given. They talked of the coming parade in raucous Western voices, shouting back and forth from camp to camp. Then they began to crowd toward the streets in response to the marshalling bugles.

  —Got to look dandy for the ladies.

  —Hey, Bob, you goin’ to trim your facefuzz?

  —I’ve had it tied up in curlpapers all night. I’m just about to let it down.

  —When does this damn fuss start?

  —Any time now. We don’t leave till about the middle of the thing.

  —Hey, Johnny, where you goin’ now that you’re mustered out?

  —Back to Indiana.

  —I mean after that. What you goin’ to do?

  —Haven’t decided yet. What are you going to do?

  —I’m goin’ West.

  —Ain’t anybody goin’ to stay in the Army?

  —All of a sudden, they ain’t goin’ to be no Army.

  At nine o’clock, a gun boomed to signal the beginning of the parade. The head of the column, with General Sherman and his staff leading the way, marched out on Pennsylvania Avenue. Johnny’s company waited in shade. The song of the leading band dwindled in the bannered distance and was presently drowned in the blare of another band near-by starting up and moving off. Band after band marched out with the troops. The great marching songs of the War pursued each other in overlapping waves down the milelong stretch of the Avenue. Minute by minute, the thick crowds of soldiers around the Capitol continued to feed their mass into the flagbright channel. The men in Johnny’s brigade chafed restlessly.

  —I pretty near forgot how to march. Reckon I can still keep step?

  —The head of the column must be about in front of the stand.

  —What kind of a stand is it?

  —Why every great man alive is settin’ on it. It’s right in front a the President’s House, and the President is on it, and Grant, and the whole dern Cabinet.

  At high noon, three hours after the Review had begun, Johnny’s brigade fell in and marched out of the lawns south of the Capitol and into the Avenue.

  Marching before the Capitol, Johnny saw steps, walls, terraces black with people. The same great crowds from all over the land who had seen the Army of the Potomac march on the preceding day were there to see the Western Army. As his own company debouched onto the Avenue, Johnny had a lateral view of the column along its whole length from the Capitol to the Treasury Building at the far end of the street. On either side crowds made solid walls, sometimes flowing out from the sidewalks and touching the marchers. Flags fluttered from windows, housetops, towers. Hands waved. Hats went up. Garlands of flowers pitched from windows. Down the Avenue, the ranks became a solid stream of brightness riding on a bed of blue between vague banks of faces.

  Then Corporal Johnny Shawnessy was marching with his comrades down the straight of the Avenue, on the last mile of the two thousand he had marched from Chattanooga to the Last Encampment. It was eyes front and shoulders back for the bronzed young saviors of the Republic; it was a strict dress on the guides; it was a rhythm of long strides, thirty-six inches to the take, the ground-devouring tramp of the Western Armies, the longest martial stride in the world.

  —When Johnny comes marching home again,

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  A girl ran out, pointing to the regimental banner and shouting,

  —Hello, boys! Here’s a delegation of Indiana people!

  Several young ladies screamed, recognizing the flag of an Indiana regiment. The crowd laughed, egging the girls on.

  —Kiss ’em, dearie.

  —Give ’em a hug for me.

  Flowers pelted the soldiers. One excited girl ran into the ranks of the marchers. Her arms clung around Johnny’s neck, she kissed him, the crowd cheered.

  —I’m from Evansville. Where you from, honey?

  —We’ll give him a hearty welcome then,

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  The men will cheer, the boys will shout,

  The ladies they will all turn out.

  And we’ll all feel gay,

  When Johnny comes marching home.

  Play on, strong horns of the Republic. Beat, drums of exultation. Receive us in your garland arms, young women of the Republic, pelt our lips with kisses: we have come home from battle. We have come back from the gray days and the many deaths.

  —The old church-bell will peal with joy,

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  To welcome home our darling boy,

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  The village lads and lasses say

  With roses they will strew the way. . . .

  Corporal Johnny Shawnessy didn’t look to right or left. He was thinking of his return to Freehaven. He would arrange things so as to arrive on a Saturday when the Court House Square would be jammed with people. He wouldn’t tell anyone of his coming. Then, in a casual way, he would drop in at the newspaper office. His friends would swarm around him, shaking his hands, slapping him on the back, asking questions about the Great March. Then he would step outside. T. D., Ellen, and the girls would be sitting in the old wagon at the accustomed place, eating their lunch. Ellen’s vivid eyes would pop with surprise, and she would clap her hands and jump down and run to him.

  —Why, it’s Johnny! O, dear God! he’s back!

  She would kiss him and cling to him in her small fierce strength.

  —Johnny! How thin you are! You poor child!

  T. D. would come over blinking, smiling, leaning far back, taking an unusually hopeful view of the whole situation. Everyone would help Johnny into the wagon as if shielding him from something.

  But the best of all was that Nell Gaither would be sitting in a buggy on another part of the Square. Her wide green eyes would be all shining with tender excitement, and her full, flowerlike mouth would curve into that radiant, promiseful smile.

  —Hello, Johnny.

  He could hear the name said like a caress. He would walk over to the buggy, thin and pale in his uniform. Gravely she would offer her little hand, and grave
ly he would take it.

  —Hello, Nell. How have you been?

  —Just fine, Johnny.

  The Square and its holiday hundreds and its immense, victorious tumult would be gone, the Great War and its memories would be dispelled like phantoms of an uneasy sleep, and he would be floating again on the wide green river of summer toiling with a white oar lakeward. This time for certain he would find the Raintree, and life’s young hero would have the golden apples.

  Blow on, bright bugles of the Republic. Beat, drums of triumph and crowding exultation.

  Flags fluttered from the windows. Branches of trees brushed against him passing. Children shouted. Girls waved from housetops. The band had struck up a new tune.

  —Sing it as we used to sing it, fifty thousand strong,

  While we were marching through Georgia.

  As the jaunty music of this new song swept along the Avenue, the crowd roared its approval. Washington was getting its first view of the men who had marched from Atlanta to the sea.

  —How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound!

  How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found!

  How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,

  While we were marching through Georgia.

  In the rear of Johnny’s company came a motley crowd of contrabands, shouting and dancing, laughed at by the crowd and laughing back. The Army had not yet entirely lost the black human baggage that it had acquired on its famous march. The commissary wagons came by, crowded with Negroes, cooks, campfollowers. Chickens clucked, geese quacked, turkeys gobbled; full jugs, pots, tubs, barrels shook on the loaded wagons. Bummers rode by on donkeys.

  —’Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the jubilee,

  Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!’

  So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,

  While we were marching through Georgia.

  The regimental flags, flapping bullettorn, moved steady and proud. In the streets, people looking at the faces of the soldiers said again and again,

  —How young they are!

  —We will rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again,