Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge Jr.

  —And what is the Republic? the Perfessor asked.

  Mr. Shawnessy was aware of having spent a day of definitions.

  —The Republic is the world of shared human meanings—ideas. A man voluntarily votes himself a citizen of the Republic, this great fruitful fiction where men and women exist in time and space, desire each other, perceive beauty, beget children, create institutions, share words. In a very real sense we live in Humanity, that being the only place where we can live.

  —Give me a cigar, John, will you?

  —I have a couple of Garwood’s left.

  —I suppose that big pompous fiction is nearing St. Louis by now, the Perfessor said.

  He put a match to the cigar-tip.

  —Just a moment while I destroy generations unborn.

  He puffed the cigar into a glowing tip.

  —From Abraham Lincoln to Garwood B. Jones in thirty years, the Perfessor said. Does American History have a meaning? What is a Great Historic Event anyway? Take any three at random—Caesar stabbed in the Senate Chamber of Rome, Christ crucified at Jerusalem, Abraham Lincoln shot in Ford’s Theatre in Washington.

  —An Historic Event is one of those clever fictions that Humanity fashions from infinite causal intersections. The world’s incredibly daring, erected by gigantic human labor, a vast dream, for which each of us is responsible. One doesn’t even become a self without entering into that dream. But we become citizens of that world so slowly that we forget the miracle of the process in which we participate. It’s perhaps well that we do, for otherwise life would be unbearably exciting. As it is, we every now and then are touched with the feeling of historic participation. We are with crowds. We feel beyond ourselves. We partake festively in the old communion of Humanity. We do it in moments of intense love and great national crisis, on festive days like this. We do it also when we study Great Men and Great Events. Great men—Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln—give us the feeling of a human life lived in relation to Humanity, more fully partaking of the sacred communion.

  —True, the Perfessor said. All so-called great men are the result of human collaboration before, during, and after the fact. With a little cooperation from Fate, you might have been America’s Shakespeare, John, but you lacked the human context. A whole age worked to create the Plays, which are not unwisely attributed to a dozen other men besides the man who penned them. And today we still work at the Myth of Shakespeare, conferring glamor on the Bard beyond his merit.

  —Are you about to deflate Shakespeare?

  —The truth is, the Perfessor said, that Shakespeare is still only a fad, for we are all his contemporaries more or less, as we are of the Greeks. Mankind has only just begun to write. Man’s been thinking man maybe a hundred thousand years, and only in the last few thousand has he been writing. Shakespeare’s no older than yesterday’s newspaper. There are no serious barriers between his mind and ours. But ten thousand years from now his plays may be pretty precious stuff to an age which, for all we know, will have kicked over the nonsense of romantic love, tribal honor, historical pride, feudal class divisions, and even—perish the thought—wit and humor, which are just human ways of viewing a very unwitty and unhumorous universe. In due time, Willie the Shake may become an old-fashioned curio whose verse-dramas were popular among the curious barbarians of the second, third, and fourth millenniums after the birth of a quaint religious figure called Jesus. The Plays won’t seem picturesque or even obscure—but quite simply pointless and dull. Shakespeare is part of the dream of our time. We have an atmosphere of consent for him as for the Myth of Jesus and the Myth of Plato. This is the era of the glorification of the individual and his works. But there may well be a time when art itself will be dead as a mode of human activity.

  —Shakespeare’s greatest play, Mr. Shawnessy said, was one he never set words to.

  —Entitled? the Perfessor said.

  —The Tragedy of Abraham Lincoln.

  —Goody! the Perfessor said. Another riddle!

  —A Study in Fate, Mr. Shawnessy said. Picture to yourself a balding, plain-looking businessman-poet-bonvivant sitting down in his London rooms some evening fin de siècle to goosequill a surefire historical drammer full of daggers, ghosts, and mob scenes. He conjures up some stage-prop citizens along a concourse and a soothsayer bidding Caesar to beware the Ides. Keen student of human fate that he is, he doesn’t know that his fastflowing goosefeather is writing the prelude to another red drama of assassination in a Republic as little known to him as Caesar’s Rome. He has no idea that he is adumbrating one of his maddest young men.

  —Ah, I begin to follow you, the Perfessor said.

  —John Wilkes Booth would never have killed Lincoln except for his background as a Shakespearean actor. Booth had been brought up before the footlights. His father, Junius Brutus, was the most popular Shakespearean actor of his time. To young Booth, living in! a dream of pompous tirades, great leaps before footlights, heroic attitudes, but never achieving the stature or fame of his gifted brother Edwin or his father, there came an opportunity to make the most impressive stage entrance of all time.

  —And to think, John, that you and I were tangled in the close web of chance that caught the Great Commoner and the Assassin in Ford’s Theatre!

  —The republic of John Wilkes Booth was not in any real sense the republic of Abraham Lincoln. Booth knew nothing of Lincoln, the real Lincoln. As far as Booth knew, he was killing a vulgar baboon-president who had been strangling a sentimental republic. Little by little, Booth made his plans, revising them as chance required, until at last he came into Ford’s Theatre, one night of April, upon the stage of his great act of affirmation. He slinks up through the crowd in the darkness of the balcony, where everyone is staring at a play. Where is he, in what space and time, this strange young man, approaching the footlights of History! He enters the private corridor to the President’s box. He fits the pre-contrived bar into the pre-contrived niche to secure the door. All is going as he has planned. He’s controlling Fate. For a few minutes, he’s all alone on the threshold of History, as he sets his eye against the pre-contrived hole in the door to the President’s box. He sees there the outline of his intended victim, a man he doesn’t really know, whose hand he has never touched, with whom he has never exchanged a word. There is a burst of applause, and the stage is empty. He opens the door and, still unseen, he aims a pistol at the demon of his self-created nightmare. And in the next instant, by the inexorable law that makes human lives share each other, whether they will or not, President Abraham Lincoln, one of the kindest men who ever lived, tired from the terrible burdens of war, about to take up the equally great burdens of peace, watching a fifth-rate little fiddling farce, is stunned into darkness.

  Darkness had thickened into night on Waycross. Over the cornfield straight ahead, Mr. Shawnessy could no longer see the line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, where twenty-seven years ago a train had passed bearing the body of a great man home.

  Then he remembered, as if he had heard them all, the dirges in the night (Let the great bell be tolled!) and the sound of the women wailing. He remembered, as if he had seen them all himself, the torches, the faces of the grieving thousands (Lower the starry flag!). He remembered a train that pulled with sobbing breath from the trainshed in the smoky dawn (Let the great bell be tolled!) and the line of the flagdraped funeral coaches, passing through vacant squares, passing on the great bridges, passing through little stations on the plain, day and night journeying westward. And he remembered the crowds in the stations (Lower the starry flag!) and the dark body of the train in the dark night going forever to the place where the great trains come to rest (Let the great bell be tolled, be tolled, let the great bell be tolled, and the voice of the mourners be heard in the grieving dark).

  In the station of himself the trains were changing.

  In me, all trains are leaving on the roads to home. In me, the unrelinquished faces press through vacant worlds. In me, lost time is restless for a resurrection. Ha
il and farewell to all the lost horizons.

  This was a face that I made up from the columns of the country weeklies. This is the tragedy that I portended from the primeval slime. This is the play for which I made old marble words, when I was a gay scrivener, actor-redactor of plays, a country boy completely citified back in my old Cheapside days.

  For one dead, a sprig of Raintree County lilacs. For one of the great dead, in whom the Republic died for resurrection’s sake, a few lines graven on a monument, some faces struck in stone. For one of the great, tender faces, the tribute of a simple soldier, himself—alas! dead also long ago and far from home.

  Now I will find out the seed of Great Events. I will hunt for assassins and accomplices through delicately intersected times. I think I will follow the path of a young murderer and the path of one who was murdered. They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. I will take up a trail of huge and cloudy indications across a forum to a Senate Chamber. Caesar shall be a hundred times reassassinated and Christ a thousand times recrucified, but I shall go to a train station and find a young republic

  April 14-—1865

  WEARING A BATTLE WOUND, SCARCE HEALED, CORPORAL JOHNNY SHAWNESSY DESCENDED FROM A COACH

  and walked across the station. It was the first time he had been in the Nation’s Capital, Washington, D.C.

  He looked around in vain for an expected face. Being early, he sat down on a bench and waited. He felt very weak, and although the day was not at all warm, he was in a cold sweat. He wondered if he had been wise to leave the hospital and come into the City for the day.

  It had been less than two months since Corporal Johnny Shawnessy had got his battle wound near Columbia, South Carolina. During that time he had gone through a hell as bad as the fighting part of his war. He had been sick. On the physical side, his sickness might have been variously diagnosed as dysentery, wound-fever, loss of appetite, general debility, battle shock—but Johnny knew that something more profound and terrible had happened to him. His fever fevered everything he saw. Or perhaps all that he saw was really fevered by the old wound of the War. Before his wounding, he had seen death in battle often, forms torn forever from the shape that they were meant to be, faces suddenly touched with a stillness from which after a while all personality and meaning drained away. But he hadn’t yet seen the backwash of the War, the hospital camp, the sickness, the long dying. He hadn’t yet seen the total fever and decay of men’s souls behind the battle lines. He hadn’t yet realized that for many of the soldiers of the War, a lightning-sudden death in battle would have been merciful.

  Corporal Johnny Shawnessy’s hospital experience was not unusually bad for the times. In fact, care and treatment of the wounded had improved during the War. Soon after he had got his wound, he had been transported by boat to one of the hospitals near Washington, where he received the best care available for the wounded and sick soldiers of the Union. During this time, he lay in a long whitewashed hospital ward of thirty beds. The hospital was short of expert help, and there was some callousness and indifference among the orderlies and nurses, but no more so than in any other hospital of the day.

  Those who took care of him would have described him as a typical case. He was Patient Number 23, Shawnessy, John W., shoulder wound, dysentery, and fever—and he didn’t make out badly at all. His morale seemed good. He complained little, made no undue demands on the help, seemed to be a rather sweet-tempered, soft-spoken person. His wound suppurated nicely and was not difficult to wash and bandage. The discharge of pus was normal and proceeded exactly as wounds were supposed to in the year 1865. The gangrene that had set in before he reached the hospital was not overly serious, smelled no worse—nor better—than any other gangrene, and soon went away. The patient did have a pretty nasty fever when he came in and was out of his head at times in a harmless way. He was a nicelooking boy with dark hair touched with red but a light—almost sandy—beard. He was very weak at first and languid and the life seemed to be beaten out of him, but most of the patients were that way after they had been jostled over rough roads, carried by boat, loaded and unloaded from stretchers. The fever had stayed a while, and the patient had had a bad case of dysentery, with loss of appetite. After the wound was well on its way to healing, the dysentery hung on, and the patient lost weight, so that, like the majority of dysentery patients, he looked like an anatomical chart, with everything taken away but the essential bone, muscle, nerve, blood, and organic structure—and the mysterious principle of vitality. He went down, as most such cases did, and wavered around the boundary line that so many boys crossed, but he never quite crossed it, and in fact never awakened any special anxiety in the staff, as men without a mark on them were dying all the time in spite of all that could be done for them.

  After Patient Number 23, Shawnessy, John W., perked up a bit, he had a very pleasant wit and was well liked by the other men.

  All in all, the hospital record of Shawnessy, John W., was quite unpicturesque.

  From his own point of view, Johnny went down into hell and stayed there for weeks. No one knew it, because he never told anyone, but there were whole days when it seemed to him that he was dying. Death was approaching all the time, touching with a gradual hand all around him. Other men died who had as much right to live as he, who looked stronger, who were unwounded; and his reason told him there was no good reason why he shouldn’t die too.

  Whether he died now or not, he knew what death was, and he knew that he could never wholly escape it. Death was an impersonal thing that happened to a person who was alone and far from home.

  So he lay in his bed and watched human souls sicken and die, and fought back the thought in his own mind that he too might be sinking beyond the point of recovery. So he clung tenaciously and with a coward fear to a shrunken, mysterious thing, his body.

  Meanwhile, he knew the hopes and despairs of the sick soldier.

  He knew the indescribably sweet rush of confidence when the surgeon looked at his festering, smelling wound, and with a trace of brightness said,

  —Well, my boy, you’re coming along. Not bad at all.

  The man said the same thing automatically up and down the line, and to boys who were obviously on the brink of death. But those words were as necessary to Johnny as food. He would speculate on just exactly what made the surgeon say them, and he would interpret every little nuance of the surgeon’s voice as having special significance.

  The surgeon was a sort of god because he walked upright where men were prostrate and pronounced sentence upon life without being fearful of his own. And yet Corporal Johnny Shawnessy, who had a fund of common sense and a good deal of medical knowledge, knew that the chief surgeon was a mediocre fellow who did only what anyone else could do in such cases and who had no real knowledge of what was taking place in the wounded body of Corporal Johnny Shawnessy.

  He knew also the awakenings at night, when he was covered with cold sweat and his heart beat hard and swift, as if to run its course and expire in a rush of failing palpitations. At such times, he wanted to talk with someone or have someone rise up and say,

  —Johnny, you’re all right. It’s probably just the air in here. I feel it too.

  He wanted people to lie to him about his condition, as if words were facts. He knew the wild joy and black despair aroused by the sound of certain words—‘crisis,’ ‘recovery,’ ‘suppuration,’ ‘pulse rapid,’ ‘fever down.’ He came to love the beautiful, holy sound of the word ‘normal.’

  He saw men die suddenly. He saw men die with a grotesque slowness.

  He saw soldier after soldier come into the ward with a belly wound. He never saw one go out alive.

  He learned to know the look of death before death came. When a new patient was brought in, Johnny and the other veteran cases (one week or more in the same ward) silently made a diagnosis. Sometimes, Johnny would turn his face aside lest the silent, hardbought knowledge show in his eyes.

  He knew the pitiful conversations
of the sick and wounded, memories of the past or aspirations for the future, fabrics of sheer hope built in the house of despair. He knew the nostalgic words of the wounded, which were mostly the names of things, places, and people in America.

  He knew the sympathies and fierce loyalties of the sick. He found that it was possible to know another person so well in three or four days that his death was like the loss of a lifelong friend. He knew the awful void caused when one of the veteran comrades died.

  He knew the unhappy little pleasantries of the hospital, grins carved on the mask of suffering. One of the most cheerful patients was a man who had a leg gone, a chest wound, and dysentery with complications.

  He saw boys of eighteen age visibly in a few days and act and talk like old men. He wondered at the courage of the dying. In all the time he was in the hospital, he heard hardly a word of bitterness or disillusionment about the Cause for which these men had suffered.

  He saw at least a dozen Rebel wounded brought in during this time. He noticed the lack of bitterness between the wounded of both sides and their dispassionate reference to battles and places. Their wounds had made them historians instead of rivals.

  He noticed that Rebel wounded looked like Union wounded, their wounds smelled the same, they died pitifully in the same way. In death they were the same debris of a human being that had to be hurried away and buried.