Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  Watching him with wistful eyes, she had begun to bind up her hair, fastening it behind her ears with silver coins.

  —What creature is it that in the morning of its life——

  She paused and opened her left hand, color of the pallid stone on which she lay. The hand was excitingly feminine, though perhaps too broad, too fleshy for perfect beauty. She put her arm on his shoulder. Then with her hand gently plucking and pulling at the base of his neck, like one wishing to uproot a little tree without hurting it, she pressed his head down to hers. Reminding himself that she was an old friend of the family and perhaps even a relative, he was about to kiss her.

  Just then she turned her face aside and handed him a rolled newspaper.

  —Our Semicentennial Edition, dear, she said, with a special column devoted to the history of the County. The fragments from your own unfinished epic occupy a prominent place on page one. You’ll find a picture of the authentic Raintree——

  Opened, the paper was a parchment warm to the touch, engraved with a map of Raintree County so exquisitely made that the principal landmarks showed in relief with living colors. In the middle of the County, Paradise Lake was a pool of shimmering green. Its shore eastward where the river entered dissolved into the steaming substance of the Great Swamp. The roads crisscrossing on the flat earth were brown and gravelly. Tiny shiny carriages moved on the National Road, which, side by side with the Pennsylvania Railroad, cut across the County close to the southern border. Westward on the railroad, a darkly lovely little locomotive pulled a chain of coaches covered with patriotic bunting. The intersection at Waycross was dense with human faces. All over the County, the bladed corn swayed softly in the fields. In the Square of Freehaven, a mile and a half southeast of the lake, the Court House stood in a lawn of slender trees. A flag fluttered from the brave brick tower, and the four clock faces told the time of day. From the northeastern to the southwestern corner of the County, the Shawmucky River lay in loops of green, halved into upper and lower segments by the lake. On the road east from Freehaven two bridges spanned the upper river’s great south loop, and in the halfcircle formed by the road and the river, relics of the vanished town of Danwebster lay in deep grass. Across the river was the graveyard, a mound of pale stones. And somewhat beyond the bridge on the south side of the road was the Old Home Place, a little collection of farmbuildings on a gentle hill, the ancestral Shawnessy home in Raintree County, where Mr. Shawnessy had been born fifty-three years before. So precise was the map that he could see the great rock halfsunk in the earth at the limit of the South Field.

  He was certain that in the pattern of its lines and letters this map contained the answer to the old conundrum of his life in Raintree County. It was all warm and glowing with the secret he had sought for half a century. The words inscribed on the deep paper were dawnwords, each one disclosing the origin and essence of the thing named. But as he sought to read them, they dissolved into the substance of the map.

  With a feeling suspended between erotic hunger and intellectual curiosity, he looked for the young woman. She was no longer lying on the stone couch. Her voice was passionate, musical, receding.

  —Johnny! Tall one! Shakamak!

  He could see her pale form turning over and over in a slow spiral floating away on green waters. From time to time, one hand rose beckoning while the other untwined her hair. The loose gold cord of her hair was at last all he saw of her, untwisting, prolonged in the water to a single shimmering thread.

  Holding a branch of maize loaded with one ripe ear, he stood on the threshold of the door, about to lunge into the delirious crowd. The ceremonial day that he had spent a lifetime preparing, a web of faces and festive rites, trembled before him. The girls in their summer dresses were twirling their parasols and shouting hymen. The official starter of the Fourth of July Race was raising his pistol. A path was opening through the crowd to a platform erected in a distant square. Beyond, beside a sky-reflecting pool, he saw white pillars and a shrine. He heard a far voice calling. The sound was shrill, appealing, with a note of sadness. . . .

  He awoke. The whistle of a train at the crossing had at last pressed its way into his sleep. It was early dawn. He lay in bed, among the glowing fragments of the dream. The dream had been vivid with the promise of adventure, consummation. He rewove its tantalizing web, contrasting it with the simple reality into which he had awakened.

  His wife, Esther, eighteen years younger than he, lay beside him, her Indianblack hair screwed into curlpapers, her regular features composed by sleep into a look of stony, almost mournful serenity. In the next room slept the three children, Wesley, Eva, and Will, thirteen, twelve, and seven years old. The family slept in the two upstairs rooms of the plain white wooden house. There were four main rooms down—parlor, middle room, dining room, and kitchen, running in that order from front to back. A pumproom adjoined the kitchen, and a small spare bedroom was annexed to the dining room. A cellar with outside entrance was under the kitchen. A porch extended along the front and halfway down the east side of the house. The house was set well forward in a trimly kept yard, fenced in with white pickets in front and on the two sides. Almost against the house behind was a small frame building of two parts, smokehouse and woodshed. A path started at the backdoor and ran along a garden to the outhouse. At the rear of the lawn was a small barn. A narrow field planted in corn extended a hundred yards back to the railroad.

  The town of Waycross, where Mr. Shawnessy had lived for two years, had an equally austere pattern. The business buildings were at the intersection of the roads—general store, barber shop, bank, feedstore, blacksmith shop. Half a hundred houses were scattered along the four arms of the cross. On the south arm were a church, the Post Office, and the Railroad Station. The Schoolhouse, where Mr. Shawnessy and his wife were the only teachers, was on the west arm. On the north arm was a huge tent where the Reverend Lloyd G. Jarvey had been conducting his Summer Revival Series. Among the dwellings on the east arm were the Shawnessy house, lying on the south side of the National Road, and the mansion of Mrs. Evelina Brown somewhat beyond the town proper.

  In the naked pallor of dawn, Waycross seemed to him devoid of visual complexity, as if to reduce the problem of place to its basic ingredients. And Raintree County also aspired to spatial symmetry, being a perfect square twelve miles to the side. What could be more certain than the location of Raintree County, whose western border was sixty miles from Indianapolis and whose eastern border was fifty miles from the neighboring state of Ohio? And yet, the dream had left him with an uneasy feeling of being anchorless, adrift on an unknown substance. The formal map of Raintree County had been laid down like a mask on something formless, warm, recumbent, convolved with rivers, undulous with flowering hills, blurred with motion, green with life.

  He mused upon this mingling of man’s linear dream with the curved earth, couched in mystery like a sphinx.

  Had the woman of his dream, whose face had been teasingly familiar, known the answer to this riddle? And what token could she have given him of himself, he who also escaped name and definition in his long journey through time, a traveller from dawn to darkness, and all at once a child, a man, an old man?

  He should have asked this gracious lady about time past. He should have followed her beckoning hand down the mystic river of the years back to the gates of time, the beginning of himself. He should have traced a tangled thread to the source of a life on the breast of the land.

  It was dawn on Raintree County, and in a little while he would have to yield himself to the ritual day. Past midnight, he had lain awake thinking about the big Fourth of July Program, in which, as principal of the local school and an old friend of the Senator, he had a leading responsibility. First he would drive to Freehaven, where he had some matters to see to before the Senator arrived. Despite the necessarily early hour of the trip, the whole family planned to go along as usual. On the way back, he would stop at the Danwebster Graveyard for his annual visit to the family lot. At
nine-thirty the Senator’s special train was due in Waycross, and the substance of Mr. Shawnessy’s dream would be repeated—minus, no doubt, the interesting lady in the Post Office. Then he would entertain the Senator until the G.A.R. parade and banquet at twelve-thirty. The main program was planned for two-thirty, and after that he would see the Senator off at the Station. In the evening there was to be a lawn party sponsored by the Literary Society at the home of Mrs. Evelina Brown. It promised to be the most exciting day since his second marriage fourteen years ago.

  He could still hear the thunder of the train on distant rails receding. Its passing echoed in the eastern valleys of his sleep. The lone shriek of it at the crossing had been like a calling of his name. The sound of it ebbing down gray lanes of dawn into the west was the lonely music of a century, awakening memories of himself and the Republic. He would lie awhile and chase a phantom of himself that was always passing on a road from east to west. He would hunt for the earliest mask of an elusive person, a forgotten child named Johnny, the father of a man.

  What creature is it that in the morning of its life . . .

  It was dawn now on Raintree County, and he would begin with things of the dawn. He would pursue awhile his ancient pastime of looking for the mystic shape of a life upon the land, the legend of a face of stone, a happy valley, an extinct republic, a memory of

  Election Day—1844

  HOW ON THE MORNING OF ELECTION DAY

  THE MOTHER AND THE LITTLE CHILD WERE WAITING

  before the cabin. At the bottom of the yard, a rudely sculptured head stood on the gatepost by the road. Johnny had helped T. D. make it, and they called it Henry Clay, maybe because it had been made out of clay from the river bank.

  —Henry Clay, T. D. had said, is the Greatest Living American.

  T. D. had also said that Henry Clay was running for President, a matter of interest to Johnny, who for his age was considered a very fast runner himself.

  The head on the gatepost had had an ugly, eyeless look when T. D. and Johnny first made it, but now at this distance it had an expression of greatness and distinction.

  A few days ago when Johnny was in the yard by himself, a man had driven past in a covered wagon. He was a bearded man in a big hat, his wagon was pulled by two big oxen, it was all stuffed up with things, there was a thinfaced woman on the seat beside him, and a pretty little girl with vivid brown eyes kept peeping out of the wagon and shaking her pigtails at Johnny.

  —Hello, son, the man said, stopping the wagon.

  Big white teeth flashed through the thick bush of his beard.

  —Hello, Mister.

  —You look like a smart boy, son. Maybe you could tell me if this here is the road to Freehaven.

  —Yes, sir, this here is it.

  —How fer is it, son?

  —You go on down the road, Johnny said, pointing west, and you git there after a while. They’s a court house and a lots of people.

  —Ain’t he a smart boy! the man said, winking at his wife. Maybe you can tell me, son, what that there head is on the fence there.

  —Henry Clay, Johnny said.

  —Who’s he?

  —The Greatest Living American, Johnny said.

  —You don’t say, the man said. Who tole you so?

  —T. D. did.

  —Who’s T. D.?

  —My pa. He’s a doctor and a preacher.

  —Well, you go tell T. D. that that there head ain’t Clay. It’s mud. Anyhow it’ll be mud after the Election.

  —It ain’t mud, Johnny said. It’s clay. It was made out of clay, and it’s Henry Clay.

  —It’s mud, dad burn it! the man said. You tell your pappy somethin’ else. You tell him a man passed said Henry Clay ain’t the Greatest Livin’ American. He’s nothin’ but a goddern Whig protectionist. Can you say that?

  —Yessir. A goddern Whig protectionist.

  The man roared, and the woman said something to him. The man leaned out again.

  —You tell your pa you saw a man, and he told you the Greatest Livin’ American was James K. Polk. Yessiree, James K. Polk is the man that’s goin’ to win that election. James K. Polk.

  The man was motioning big and violent with a whip.

  —James K. Polk. The Lone Star Republic and the Oregon Trail. Can you say that, son?

  —The Lone Star Republic and the Oregon Trail, Johnny recited.

  —Listen to him say that, the man said. How old are you, son?

  —Five.

  —You’re a smart boy, son. You’ll amount to somethin’ some day. Don’t fergit that slogan. James K. Polk is the man that’ll win the Election, and he’ll make Clay’s name mud.

  —It ain’t mud, Johnny said. We got it down along the river. Mud’s black. This here’s red, and it’s clay.

  —O.K., son, the man said. But all the same, don’t fergit to tell your pa what I said. The Oregon Trail. That’s where I’m a-headin’ right now, and if your pappy was half a man, he’d be a-goin’ there with me to settle out there and git that land fer America instead of votin’ fer Harry Clay and Protection.

  The man made his whip lash over the backs of the oxen.

  —Oregon, here we come!

  As the oxen pulled away, the girl with the pigtails leaned from the wagon and waved her hand. She waved a long time, and Johnny waved back.

  It seemed to him then that he had always been a small boy who stood beside a road and waved to people going west.

  Later when he had told his father about it, T. D. had laughed and said to his mother,

  —I wonder what they were doing off the main road.

  —Where is the Lone Star Republic and the Oregon Trail? Johnny had asked.

  His father told him something about them.

  —Are there Indians out there?

  —Yes, I reckon there are, T. D. said.

  The Indians used to live right around the Home Place before T. D. and Ellen Shawnessy had come there in 1820. The Indians were naked and had red skins, and they lived in tepees, and they killed and scalped you with tomahawks. They were marvellous people, and they had lived all over America before the pioneers came and made the stumps. Now all the Indians had gone out West, where the man in the covered wagon was heading.

  Next to the Indians, the most interesting people were probably the Negroes. Men would get together in front rooms and around the Court House at Freehaven, shake fists, spit tobacco, and talk in loud voices about the Negroes and the Election and Polk and Clay and Texas and the West.

  The Negroes were black slaves in the South. It was a bad thing to keep them slaves and make them work. Johnny had walked through the South Field once and had gone a long way back hoping to see a Negro. He never did see one.

  But that same day he kept on going and wound around back north until he crossed a road and came out at the Gaither farm. Nell Gaither was playing in the orchard under an appletree. She was a thin, serious girl with long golden hair, big blue-green eyes, and a freckled nose. She had a quiet, grave way of talking in contrast with Johnny’s older sisters, who were very giggly and loud.

  —You’re Johnny Shawnessy, she said.

  —Yes, I am.

  —I’m Nell.

  —Is the river back of your house?

  —Yes. I’ll show you.

  The river was a big mystery to Johnny. Now he and Nell walked a piece and pushed through some trees and came right out at the edge of the river. It was wide and pale green, and it had a cold green odor. He and Nell had played a long time by the river building little mud and stick huts. They both waded out looking for crawdads and frogs. Johnny forgot all about the time until he noticed that long shadows were falling on the river.

  —Your folks’ll be after you, Johnny, Nell said.

  —Let ’em, Johnny said.

  You had to run away from home to have a good time like that.

  When he started down the road that evening, he ran into a lot of people, and they all rushed at him and grabbed him and took him home.

/>   Later his mother had come home on a horse, all hot and dusty and her dark red hair in strings down her face. She began to cry when she saw Johnny in the front yard surrounded by people. She hugged him very hard and kept saying, Thank God! and laughing and crying at the same time. Johnny cried too from sheer excitement. It appeared that he had been lost and found again. People said that his mother had ridden all over Raintree County looking for him.

  —Poor Ellen! people said. Johnny, you pretty near killed your poor mother.

  They never let him go back and play along the river again with Nell because it was too much fun.

  That was when he learned that he was a person of great importance and that his exact location in Raintree County was a matter of intense concern to everyone.

  Ellen Shawnessy, his mother, was short and slight. Though not pretty, she had a young girlish look. Her hair, dark with glints of red like Johnny’s, was entirely ungrayed. Johnny was the last of her nine children, four boys and five girls. Two of the girls had died in an epidemic that swept through Raintree County in the early forties, and they lay beneath two stones with letters on them in the Danwebster Graveyard, across the river from the board church where T. D. preached.

  —What is a great man, Mamma? Johnny asked as they waited in front of the cabin for T. D.

  —A great man is somebody everyone looks up to. He’s a good man who does things for other people.

  —Like Pa?

  Ellen Shawnessy smiled. Her smile was like Johnny’s, quick and affectionate. More often than not she smiled for no other reason than that she felt animated and happy.

  —Well, T. D. is a mighty good man, she said, and he’s smart too. But usually a great man is a wellknown man. That is, he’s famous.

  Johnny’s father, T. D. Shawnessy, preached and wrote poetry and delivered babies and made sick people well. He was very tall and thin, and his head looking down at Johnny from a great height always nodded blondly and benignly and smiled confidently and spoke very hopefully of God and the future.