Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge Jr.

  For his part, he had been seeking the Tree of Life as an act of self-glorification. In affirming himself, he hadn’t affirmed the best part of himself—Humanity. Meanwhile, he carried in his pocket a message from Raintree County, recalling him to himself again, a message that had come down all the wires and the ways of the world since the world began to find him unerringly in the City

  AND AWAKEN HIM FOREVER

  FROM HIS

  CITY

  —DREAM on, boy! the Perfessor was saying. It’s all a great chamber of self-reflections that you’ve constructed.

  Mr. Shawnessy was startled by the coincidence, wondering if the Perfessor had ever been in a certain room himself on the top floor of an ancient brownstone mansion, now a bank with gilded letters. He was wondering if, for that matter, Cash Carney had ever been there, or whether it was only the innocent hero from Raintree County who had got so far.

  But the Perfessor gave no sign, and Cash Carney was putting his watch in his pocket.

  —There she is, he said. Right on time.

  An eastbound train was coming.

  —Well, boys, Cash said, standing up, it’s been nice to see you two anarchists again. Don’t let this old devil corrupt you entirely, John. If you see Laura, tell her——

  The telegraph operator came out of the Station, with a paper in his hand.

  —Special message for Mr. Cassius P. Carney, he said.

  Cash took the message and read it.

  —Well, I’ll be goddamned! he said.

  He handed the message to Mr. Shawnessy and began to stroke his little ballshaped beard. His eyes burned with apostolic fervor. Mr. Shawnessy and the Perfessor read the scrawled dispatch:

  HOMESTEAD SITUATION VERY THREATENING STOP RUSH HELP STOP GET HERE FAST STOP WE NEED YOU

  Cash retrieved the message, crammed it into his pocket. His face muscles twitched. He took out a new cigar, viciously bit off the tip.

  —Now, let me see, he said, fixing his eyes on a distant point. I can get two or three hundred men through my agency in Detroit, and they’ll be in Pittsburgh day after tomorrow. Now, then——

  The train had been approaching all the time, and Cash was walking down the platform, trying to light his cigar while Mr. Shawnessy carried his grip for him. Cash was like a general, calling on his reserves, throwing them into a battle that he would never see himself, except from a distant hill. He had a match to his cigar. The train roared up and stopped, trembled, spat steam, howled, like a black hound held in leash.

  —So long, Cash, Mr. Shawnessy said. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to invite Laura to see us because—

  —Those Bastards never will learn sense, Cash said. I’ll get a couple hundred toughs down from Buffalo. That dick in Philadelphia ought to be able to scrape up something. And—

  Mr. Shawnessy handed the grip to a Negro porter who had jumped down, bowing and smiling at Cash.

  —Good-by, Cash, Mr. Shawnessy said. Just take it easy. Stop worrying. Remember there are only several hundred thousand men on the other side.

  Cash didn’t hear the remark. He paused before the open door of a coach, while the engineer hung out, impatient for the start. Cash leaned forward, trying to get his cigar to burn. He was still talking between puffs.

  —Take several days—puff, puff—to bring in a carload of strikebreakers from New York. If we can hold the lid on till then—puff, puff—Those Bastards will find out who’s—

  The cigar glowed and Cash threw the match down, stepped briskly up on the platform and turned. One hand was hooked in his vest holding his coat back from the gold watchchain; he waved his cigar with the other.

  —. . . boss around here, he said, on a crisp crescendo. Good-by, Perfessor. Good-by, John. Don’t let anything happen to Raintree County, John. If you ever drop into Little Old New York, Laura and I’ll be glad to put you up and show you a time.

  He pulled out his watch.

  —Five-fifty-six.

  The train was moving.

  A thin yellow man, dipped in a preservative acid, was visible only for a second, as he looked out from the moving wall of the train. Then the speeding coaches expunged the image of Mr. Cassius P. Carney, the Distinguished Financier, reading his watch.

  —There goes, the Perfessor said, the most friendless person I know. Nobody loves him, including the woman he married. Say, do you really plan to invite her down?

  —We’re going to have a County Teachers’ Institute at Paradise Lake starting next week, Mr. Shawnessy said. I’m in charge, as usual, and I doubt—

  —You really ought to see Laura again, boy. What’s the matter? Didn’t you like what you found up the Grand Stair that night?

  Mr. Shawnessy smiled a little sadly.

  —I tried awfully hard, the Perfessor said, to blast my way into that room on the top floor, both before and after you left New York, but I never made it. What in the devil did she keep up there anyway? The bodies of her ex-lovers?

  Mr. Shawnessy smoked slowly on his cigar.

  —Damn you, boy, the Perfessor said. You can be the most uncommunicative person when you want to be. Well, you got back down anyway. You got out all right.

  I wonder? In a way, I suppose I’m still up there, reflected and rereflected.

  —I hate to beg, the Perfessor said, but I’m damn curious. Tell you the truth, I always thought there was something wrong with that woman. Maybe she had a harpy’s body under all the fancy clothes. Hell, boy, you can tell me. I’ll keep it out of my column.

  —Professor, there are a few things in this world you’ll never know or understand.

  —All right, all right, the Perfessor said. After all, I wasn’t born yesterday. Matter of fact, I was born a long time ago, and right now I feel every minute of it. What a devil of a day this is! Will it ever end? What’s on the agenda now?

  They were walking toward the National Road, passing the Post Office. Mr. Shawnessy remembered then the letter from Roiville he had picked up in the morning and hadn’t yet read, but he allowed it to remain unopened in his pocket.

  —Now for a picnic supper at Evelina’s, he said. The Literary Society is entertaining, and you can be the Guest of Dishonor.

  —I don’t see how I can go through with it, the Perfessor said, coughing, unless I get a little more fuel. Mind if I stop off at your house and get another flask out of my suitcase?

  —Not at all.

  —The Atlas is at Evelina’s, you know. By the way, boy, I suppose you know that woman’s in love with you.

  —Professor, you always exaggerate.

  —Everything but you, the Perfessor said. People who believe my lies implicitly don’t believe me at all when I tell the truth about you. Mrs. Evelina Brown is no ordinary butterfly either. I spent a good deal of time trying to collect that gorgeous specimen myself in New York a few years back. Well, I guess Laura came about as close to corrupting you as any woman ever will. Confess, it was just the body that you were after that time. We made a materialist out of you for a little while in Little Old New York.

  Mr. Shawnessy heard the noise of the Eastbound Special, the Thunderer, as it went wailing toward a distant crossing, making its eternal sound of departure and . . .

  Farewell. Arrivals and departures. And farewells. Farewells to cities of the East, and gilded days and dreams, farewells. To meet again is only to repeat an old farewell that means, I never can go back again to the City of my young manhood, my barriered wishes, and my gilded dreams.

  Arrivals and departures. Appointments and reunions. But are not all farewells forever and everlasting? Is it not well, and very well to say farewell when one is young and never to meet again after the hair has faded from the temples and the innocent brightness has gone out of the eyes? Who loves an old man? And who that loved strength and beauty can love the shattered shape thereof? Ah, God, I have clung too hard to my youth. To become old is merely a form of resignation.

  I went to the City a vagrant day. And I was many days in the City from a summer
to a summer, and I was lost in the City like one who wanders in a dream. O, hero boy, did you then entirely fail to find the face that was waiting among the faces in the station where the cars were changing all the time, or did you see it for a little while in the City’s winking night and gaslit chambers, where you were dreaming in a spell

  Between Two Worlds

  CONTENDING at the intersection, the Nation east and west and the County north and south, Esther Root Shawnessy was passing in the early evening, coming from the Schoolhouse, where she had stayed to help clean up after the Patriotic Program. She was thinking now that she liked Waycross best of the towns in Raintree County, perhaps because the National Road passed cleanly here through the troubled earth of the County, crossing the old boundaries, dissolving the old obligations.

  Approaching the intersection, she watched Pa drive by in his buggy beside the Reverend Lloyd G. Jarvey. Pa saw her and nodded but said nothing as he and the Preacher turned north toward the Revival Tent. She had heard that there was to be a special meeting of some kind at the Tent tonight, but she hadn’t been invited.

  The warning Pa had given her earlier was in her mind. He had said that she would find out before the day was over that her husband was fooling her. All day she had vaguely wondered at the threat. Perhaps it meant no more than that the voice of scandal, easily raised in small towns, had accused some woman of being in love with Mr. Shawnessy.

  If that was the case, Esther wasn’t disturbed. She had always known that other women loved her husband. When she had been a little girl, the other girls had loved him, though of course none so passionately as she. Now that she was older and married to him, she still expected that other women would be in love with him. It was impossible to know him without being in love with him—or so it seemed to her. For that matter, Mr. Shawnessy might love other women—as he loved and admired Mrs. Evelina Brown. Whatever was virtuous, beautiful, and feminine, he loved. But as for his being to any other woman what he was to her, Esther considered the idea simply absurd. She used to wonder if she ought to be jealous of Mr. Shawnessy’s first wife and of other vaguely rumored loves of his through the years. But none of these associations had any reality for her. Mr. Shawnessy could no more cease to be her husband, through any ‘act of his own, than her father could cease to be her father.

  Her mood today had been tinged with more than sadness. It verged on fear and at times even panic. Once during the Patriotic Program, she had slipped out of the crowd to the parked vehicles and finding Pa’s buggy, had searched it, hunting she knew not what. She had found nothing to frighten her except Pa’s blacksnake whip, the handle standing stiffly from the whiprest. But then she had been unable to open the rear compartment, which was locked.

  At the intersection, she looked south in the direction of the Station, where more than an hour ago she had heard a burst of band music and applause, indicating, she supposed, the Senator’s departure. Now as two figures came from the Station, walking toward her, she recognized her husband and Professor Stiles and wondered what had happened to Mr. Carney, who had been expected to stop in Waycross and perhaps bring his wife.

  The children, she supposed, had already gone on to Mrs. Brown’s for the picnic supper, where she too must go as soon as possible to help prepare the food.

  It seemed to her that all the important symbols of her life had gathered today in Waycross. A world abandoned long ago was trying to win her back. Her reason told her that she had made her new world so securely that nothing could take her from it. But some unregenerate portion of herself had never lost the instinct of return, return to her father’s farm.

  She had no desire to go back. The feeling was more dangerous than desire. It was the feeling of belonging, as if somewhere inside her a tough spring had been stretched out nearly straight and had to be held there by an effort, lest it spring back to the old shape. Even here where the broad road had given her a sunlit promise of a life far from the crooked county road that passed her father’s farm, even here the old strife was joined again,

  1877—1878

  A CONTEST FOR HER SOUL WAS WAGED BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

  in the year that followed the Teachers’ Institute at Paradise Lake.

  One world was Pa’s, wholly now and formidably his. Esther’s mother, her sad, wistful, tired mother, died in December of 1877. Her brothers had all married and left the Farm. Her sisters, Sarah, Fernie, and even the youngest, Mollie, only sixteen, were busy being courted and were expecting engagements and early marriages. With these changes the family had assumed a new form, which had perhaps only been waiting for years to disclose itself. The ancient solidarity of the family now took its last refuge in the strong love of Esther and Pa. Pa consulted her in everything he did and gave her the place that had been her mother’s in the old days.

  During this year, she knew that her love for Pa was the most ancient part of herself—and as such unalterable. The round fair face, Jovian beard, now turning handsomely gray, black passionate eyes, mouth so terrible in its denunciations—all made an image in her life so old that it was no longer to be questioned or changed.

  Perhaps her destiny was simply to live forever in this relation to Pa. Sometimes, even, there was a stern joy in the thought of such a dedication. Always she felt as though it would take impossible courage and sinful audacity to sever the ancient tie. Pa’s will was right simply because it was his will, and she never questioned his right to keep her entirely to himself.

  It was clear to her that Pa loved her more than anything else in the world, had always loved her more, far more, than he had loved her mother. His love was a somber, enduring fact. She didn’t expect it to change. She would have been shocked if it had changed, as much so as if some morning on awakening she had found that Raintree County had turned into a desert.

  But during the year after the Teachers’ Institute at Paradise Lake, especially after her mother’s death, there was a change in the way Pa expressed his love for her. He now could hardly bear to have her out of his sight, and when she was at the Stony Creek school, where she taught, she knew that he was thinking constantly of her. As often as he could, he came to meet her in the evening and rode home with her, asking her about her day as if he wanted to relive and repossess every minute of her. When he drove into town, he took her with him. At night before she went to sleep in the room that had been her mother’s, he would wait until she was in bed, and then she would hear his heavy footfalls on the creaking stair, there would be a timid knock at the door, and she would say,

  —Come in, Pa.

  He would come in, always fully clothed. He would come over to the bed where she was now tucked in with only her face showing above the sheet. He would bend over without a word and kiss her mouth, and would pat her hand and hold it a moment, and then say,

  —Good night, Esther.

  —Good night, Pa, she would say.

  Then he would get up and leave the room, firmly shutting the door. The ritual hardly ever varied, and had it varied even a little, Esther would have been deeply disturbed and perhaps even a little frightened, as any change would have meant some disturbing change in Pa.

  She was bound as by great cords to the earth of her father’s farm.

  Nevertheless, there was another world in which she moved during that year and which she tried desperately to keep separate from Pa’s world.

  The other world had begun a long time ago when she was a little girl in her first term of school with Mr. Shawnessy. For a long time afterwards, only a memory persisted of that world, like voices faintly calling from a remote place. Then for two weeks in the summer of 1877 the voices had become loud and joyous; she had discovered their source one evening when a buggy carried her down sloping hills to a place of waters. For two weeks she had lived entirely in this rival world, had bathed in its green lifegiving pool, had become almost lost in its primitive serenity, had shared its images of beauty, goodness, truth. Then Pa had appeared dreadfully on the threshold of that world and had reclaimed her.


  For Esther, too much happiness always had something forbidden and wrong about it. To be really good was to be a little unhappy and engaged in a task that demanded all of one’s strength and somewhat more than one’s inclination.

  She knew from the beginning that there was no way of reconciling her two worlds. They were night and day, with no twilight between. They were stone and fire. They were earth and air.

  Not long after the Teachers’ Institute, Ivy Foster called on her and left a letter from Mr. Shawnessy, the first of many she was to receive and answer.

  This letter all by itself was as strong as Pa’s world. It brought back the memory of Paradise Lake. The very handwriting had the curving look of that other world, of its lifegiving foliage, luxuriant shapes, and springing forms. She read the letter over and over, hid it under her pillow at night, carried it always on her person, as a token, a blown leaf, unspeakably precious, of that other world. Of course, she concealed all knowledge of this other world from Pa, knowing the futility of making him understand it or accept it.

  She answered Mr. Shawnessy’s letter, and there were other letters. They were all very simple. His letters told her that he loved her and wanted to make her his wife in spite of all. They were full of images and recollections of Paradise Lake. Her letters said that she loved him, but that she didn’t know whether she could ever come to him. In the earlier letters, he addressed her as ‘Dear Esther,’ and she addressed him as ‘Dear Mr. Shawnessy.’ In the later letters, he addressed her as ‘Darling,’ ‘My Darling Esther,’ ‘Dearest,’ and ‘Dearest Pet.’ She addressed him as ‘Dearest One’ and ‘My Darling.’ These forms of address seemed right to her, but she never called him John and knew that she never could. Such a thing was unthinkable.