Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge Jr.

  In front of the speaker’s platform, people were shaking hands with the distinguished guests. General Jake Jackson strode suddenly from the confusion, vigorously wagging his head and laughing as he waved good-by to friends. He saw Mr. Shawnessy and the Perfessor and came over.

  —Maybe you better let me have that manuscript, Shawnessy. Just remembered I want to show it to some friends in Willkieville.

  With the Perfessor musing at his side, Mr. Shawnessy walked slowly from the schoolhouse to the intersection, where he turned and followed the broad back of General Jacob J. Jackson through crowds of buggies and pedestrians toward the railroad station.

  —There goes, the Perfessor said, a case of arrested development. The General there is strictly a pre-Appomattox American. To feel alive, he has to surround himself with other anachronisms like himself. He has to go on fighting that goddam war to his last gasp. He’ll probably die in a home for aged and infirm veterans, wearing full Civil War regalia, draped in the flag, and growling something like, Send McPherson to hold that flank, and give ’em hell in the center, boys! I can see the newspaper article now. The General ought to rate page three in the New York papers with a small engraving of his valorous old puss. I wouldn’t mind writing it up myself in my best blackbordered bow-wow style, reserved for the demise of Civil War generals.

  —Where else but in America, Mr. Shawnessy said, do famous generals become old hat so soon? Let’s give the General his due. When the Republic needed him and his big voice and his bull courage, he was there. And how much more innocent it is to reminisce about old wars than to start new ones!

  Mr. Shawnessy watched the bluff form of a certain illustrious commander blending with the crowd at the Station, lost from view in the tired afternoon. He thought then of monuments approaching but not quite reaching their apex. Of love approaching but not quite reaching a climax. Of blind seeds struggling in the swamp and not quite reaching a matrix. And of trains, the great trains coming into stations. Of the miracle of arrival and consummation. Of life incessantly defeating the paradox of Zeno. Of the riddle of Raintree County incessantly proposing itself as its own solution.

  As usual the thought of a train coming filled him with excitement. He took from his pocket a telegram received the day before and reread it.

  CANT COME FOR PROGRAM BUT WILL ARRIVE ON FIVE OCLOCK TRAIN IN WAYCROSS FOR BRIEF VISIT ON WAY TO PITTSBURGH STOP HOPE TO SEE ALL OLD FRIENDS STOP LAURA MAY COME

  CASSIUS P CARNEY

  Mr. Shawnessy wondered then if it was still possible to walk through the late afternoon (when the Grand Patriotic Program was over and crumpled leaves of it were strewn among the burst firecrackers) and find strong love and a great wisdom among the faces of

  Waycross Station

  WERE THE WORDS painted on the building by the tracks. Eva realized that always before when she had seen the Station, it had been empty, a bleakly official structure where trains passed and never stopped. Now the Station like the town was filled with people, and all the trains were stopping.

  The Reverend Lloyd G. Jarvey stood somewhat apart from the crowd at the Station talking with her Grandfather Root. The two big heads wagged solemnly at each other. The town had been filled today with perilous encounters. She remembered how at noon, she and other children had seen through a window at Mrs. Passifee’s a great white creature in a darkened parlor. This creature had looked blindly at her as it stood in the act of placing a pair of spectacles on its nose.

  General Jacob J. Jackson was climbing into a carriage before the Post Office and waving good-by to friends. Standing near the track before the Station was Senator Jones and his entourage, while somewhat apart her father talked to a tall, thin man with a cane.

  On this one day, the little town where she had lived for two years had been briefly touched with splendor, and its homely mask had fallen to show an immense tide of faces, arriving, passing, and departing. She felt that they had always been there really, and were part of what the town had always been and meant.

  Waycross was the place where straight roads crossed on the breast of the land. It was the Shawnessy lot extending from the Road back to the Railroad. In this time-enchanted world, rectangular between two paths of change, the rooms were always quiet in the summer, and in the bookcase in the middle room the same books held their places on the wall. On fall nights an apple dropping on the woodhouse roof made a one, solemn, hollow, haunted sound. Always the cellar underneath the house was cold incredibly, smelling of waxen rims of cans of apples, peaches, pears. A cold jet came from the driven well at the southwest corner of the house. The smokehouse smelled of woodchar and rinded pigfat, an odor steeped and stained into its boards. The cherry tree beside the cistern bled a clear jellysap from clotted wounds where armies of ants collected. The barn, the woodhouse, and the walk to the outdoor toilet were eternal things. Waycross was this bordered plot of earth, scarred, built on, hived in, inhabited—an ancient, man-created ground.

  Waycross was the General Store at the intersection, the Post Office in the sleepy street, the Station, a huge, decaying toy, left to rot functionless beside the track. It was the Schoolhouse down the Road, divided by absolute decree into two rooms.

  Waycross was this ancient fixity of things, but it was also the thunder and butting rhythm of trains passing with a cry of desperate haste back of the lot across the land.

  And Waycross was at last the broad Road cutting through the town. Endlessly the carriaged faces came, swept by on the low rush and rumorous sound of wheels, arriving, enlarging, impending, passing, receding, fading.

  Eva knew that she, too, like the town of Waycross was a being filled with a becoming. Seasons, tides, fruitions poured through this waycrossing with the changeless name of Eva. Today the long road widened and beckoned her beyond her present self, the Waycross Eva. In this town to which her father had come to live his life out, she was perhaps only to build the last edifice of her childhood and then go forth herself and become one of those faces on the Great Road, one of those passengers on trains. . . .

  EVA GROWS UP

  (Epic Fragment from the Eva Series)

  And so, indulgent little readers, as we bring Eva near the end of her happy child life and leave her on the threshold of woman’s estate, we will agree, I think, that the little heroine of our moral pilgrimage is not wholly unprepared to face the great world in which doubtless she will have many troubles—for such, alas! is the fate of us all in this perplexing world. But if she keeps the happy faith of childhood, may we not hope that all her cares will come to nought and she will find her way through all vexations homeward at last along

  1890—1892

  THE ROAD, THE GREAT BROAD ROAD, THE NATIONAL ROAD WAS A HUNDRED FEET IN WIDTH

  from curb to curb. When Eva ventured across it, she always felt scared until she reached the other side. Out in the middle, she lost her ancient footing in the County. Space attacked her. Tides of force rolled in from blue horizons east and west. What she was seemed annihilated, levelled, trod under, thinned out, and spread over the whole of the United States of America.

  Except for the Road, Waycross was like any other town in Raintree County, and a few days after the family arrived in the summer of 1890, Eva felt at home. But it was at Waycross that she herself changed with amazing swiftness. In the spring of 1892 the tide of growth completed its inexorable rhythm, and Eva became in form a woman, though in spirit still a child. The child, the sexless, anachronistic child, still lingered on, ill at ease, unhappy, reluctant to give up. And in a last desperate orgy of self-assertion, this child did strange devotions.

  Her jealousy toward her brother Wesley was violently exaggerated. She threw herself with excessive zeal into her studies. She forced her awkward body to the limit of its strength in the schoolyard games. But she was getting plump, her hips were broad, her hands were stubby, and it looked as though she never would be slim and pretty like her mother. She knew that anything she got in the world would have to be achieved through character and
intelligence. When her father got her a piano at a serious strain to the family pocketbook, she practiced like a fanatic, sometimes six hours at a stretch, until she was so dizzy and cramped she could hardly stand.

  Her mind was feverishly active, wandering off into daydreams in which she was one of the greatest authors of her time. She greatly admired Mrs. Brown and, like her, became an ardent feminist. She was convinced that women were downtrodden creatures: they had never had a fair chance; everything conspired to keep them from asserting their true capacity. She was determined to become a great woman and make the name Eva Alice Shawnessy famous as the names Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Augusta Evans, Rosa Bonheur. She selected a pen name—Eva Westward, in honor of her father—and began to write fragments of stories, novels, poems, which she hid from everyone, being painfully dissatisfied with them.

  It was during these years at Waycross that Eva conceived her great plan to write her father’s life so that nothing that he was would be lost to posterity. She kept the plan secret from everyone and even began to make some small notes. But the whole thing became absurd when she realized how little she knew about her father in the Pre-Eva age. Whole eras of his history were buried beneath the debris of the indifferent years. Like the evolutionary biologist, she had to be satisfied with a leafprint on a rock or a fragment of fossil bone, sole remnants of gigantic life-fabrics that flourished on the earth in lost ages.

  Strange, wonderful, and fearful must have been that ancient life before there was any Eva. Now and then, unexpectedly, a pale ray was cast across those old times, and she beheld her father briefly in an attitude of his youth. Once she had found a little wallet full of newspaper clippings, among them some which reported her father’s death in the Civil War. She knew something, of course, about that famous mistake. But she had a feeling that there were meanings and happenings buried in his homecoming from the War that she would never learn. What had it been like to come back to Raintree County after being reported dead? What had he found waiting for him after that homecoming?

  This sacred, lost person—her father in his younger days—moved, as it seemed to her, through a mystic web of adventures, loves, dreams, exertions which had nothing in common with the life he lived now. The lost eras of his life were all bathed in the golden light of legend; they were inexpressibly remote; they were fragmentary, scriptural, symbolic—like the gospels.

  On the other hand, when Eva thought of writing about that part of her father’s life in which she had had a part, she was surprised by how little there was to tell. Her father had taught school and written poetry and read books and talked with people; the children had grown up; the family had lived in several little towns in Raintree County. That was all there was to it. Yet even here, she felt the presence of a meaning sacred and momentous, if she could only express it.

  Slowly the town of Waycross became for her the perfect image of her father’s life in his latter years. To this waycrossing on the breast of the land, the family had been meant to come. Between the two broad roads of change, they had found perhaps a lasting home. She had often heard her father say to her mother,

  —This is a good place to spend the rest of our days, Esther.

  During these years, Eva became more appreciative of her father’s rare literary gifts and began to wonder at the paradox of a man so gifted living contentedly in a little country town and teaching the half-formed minds of children. And yet he seemed perfectly in context, and it was a happy life that the family had in Waycross. Sometimes in the midst of reading something, Eva would lift her eyes from the book and, not yet having left the land of legend, would see the life in Waycross in a perspective as of time and years remote. And then truly it seemed a golden and serene existence to her. This feeling was strongest when she would hunt out certain old manuscripts of her father’s—Tennysonian lyrics written in his youth. One such was a little song called ‘One Summer Morn,’ which perfectly expressed for her the color of the years in Waycross.

  My muse and I, one summer morn,

  Built, dreaming we were cunning fays,

  A castle on a cloud-isle borne

  Adrift on blue, ethereal bays.

  Our blessed isle was far away

  From earth. It swam down eastern skies,

  Whereon in bright pavilions lay

  Glad choristers with joyous eyes,

  And from their sweet throats woke the song—

  ’Tis summer, and the days are long.

  Far east o’er pure empyreal seas,

  Our happy souls that morning sailed,

  Light-seated on our isle at ease,

  Unheeding earth from whence we hailed.

  Forgotten was all touch of care.

  An age was lived in one sweet dream,

  As in our castle built in air

  We swam the blue celestial stream

  Safe into daybreak with the song—

  ’Tis summer, and the days are long.

  Summer was his season and his temple. The perfect weather of his soul was in the season of the long midsummer days that rose and blazed and waned above the Road and the Railroad, while the carriages passed in dust and the trains in wailing fury all day long; and in the little rectangle of the family ground, becalmed between the two great bands of change, close by the cornfield in the backlot, beside the sundial with the inscription, I record only the sunshine, her father would be sitting in his old rocker, his long blue eyes enclosed in their intricate net of suncreated lines and wrinkles, propping his head on his hand, holding a neglected book, a copy of the Indianapolis News-Historian, or perhaps notebook and pencil; and the sleepy noises of the little town—cries of children, murmur of women at backfences, jingle of harness—would rise and fall like surf on white sands; and the whole level, sun-enamored earth of Raintree County would lie in a bland repose outward from the intersection of Waycross—and it was summer and the days were long.

  At such times, Eva too would generally be reading, lying on her stomach under an appletree or curled up in the swing on the front porch. She would be walking high meadows of summer in the land of the sentimental novels, stories grave and gay for the instruction of all the wellbroughtup little girls of America.

  Then she felt as though she were living in some wise enchantment, and when she came down from the dreamland of her books, it was merely from one circle of her dream into another still more glorious and legendary. Then she felt like the Alice from whom she got her middle name, the fabulous little girl who had walked hand in hand with a gentle elder spirit, lapped in legends old, and herself dreaming of legends. Eva read the last paragraph of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland over and over. It anticipated (in a dream within the dream, as it were) how the little storybook Alice

  . . . would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman: and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

  It was one of Eva’s favorite daydreams to imagine herself grown and returning to Waycross in afteryears, a famous woman who had succeeded in glorifying her father’s life and imprinting it forever on the memory of mankind. Rarely, too, in her nightdreams she had nostalgic sensations as of return after long years to the scenes and places of her childhood. In these dreams, remarkable like her father’s for their vivid realism, she would be riding in some odd sort of vehicle on the broad road from west to east, a woman returning to the little town where she had been a girl fifty years before. She would be trying to reconstruct the old tranquil life just as it was in those faded, lost years at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

  Yes, she had come back to the old, the archetypal Waycross. She was walking down the unpaved sidewalk beside the tidy fences. Each house
was like a homely, once-familiar face. Behind the gray-eyed windows were rooms she had never entered but had always vaguely wondered about. And it gave her a queer start to think that they were all furnished down to the last exquisite detail with the furnishings of a lost era and that they were peopled with faces that were long since gone from the indifferent years. How still and deep the lawns looked and the spaces between the houses!

  And now she was approaching the little house behind the white fence. She paused with her hand on the gate. They were all there, yes, they would surely be there in the changeless world between the Road and the Railroad. Her mother would be working in the kitchen where smell of sealing wax lingered forever. The lost Eva and the forever lost Wesley would be in the middle room reading, each one absorbed in a sentimental dream, which was itself peopled only with dreamers. And somewhere she would find little Will, another lost face of her childhood. And if she went behind the house, she would see the sunlight falling through the appletrees, the outhouse papered with clippings, the barn, the narrow backfield stretching to the railroad. And perhaps, even as she watched, one of the trains of those departed years would go roaring by, carrying to westward a hundred mysterious faces.

  But no, she wouldn’t go in for a while yet. Probably school was in session, since there were no children in the streets. She would turn, then, and approach the schoolhouse—not one of the newer schoolhouses built since her departure from the County but the old frame school where the famous celebrations were held back in those tattered, stained, and lovely years of the early nineties. Yes, it was the old school, and the children would all be there in the holy communion of the schoolroom, half a hundred precise child faces, enclosed in the ambercolored light of those many and many photographs taken before the schools of Raintree County, with her father standing unobtrusively in a corner of the picture, his tall, gentle form half-dissolved in sunlight.