Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  The runners lined up, the crowd began pushing out of the street, the starter’s pistol went off, and everyone yelled and pushed and shoved down toward the Square where the race was to end. Johnny got a passing glimpse of Flash Perkins, white teeth bared, fists churning, far ahead of his competitors as he ran toward a distant string.

  There was a vast yelling in the Court House Square, and several cannon crackers blew up simultaneously. The band played ‘Hail to the Chief.’

  When Johnny and Zeke got to the Square, they saw Flash Perkins on the shoulders of a throng. He was borne toward a platform where a girl sat holding a ring of oakleaves. Bare to the waist, sweating, magnificent, he accepted the circlet of victory and fitted it down over his tangled hair. His teeth were clenched on an unlit cigar.

  —Speech! yelled the crowd.

  —It was easy, folks, Flash said. They give me a good race, but like I said, I can beat any man in Raintree County.

  —Hello, Johnny.

  It was his mother. She had been standing at the finish line. Her eyes were still shining with the excitement of the race.

  —That Perkins boy is the fastest runner I ever seen, she said.

  She looked a little wistfully at the broadshouldered victor sitting on top of a crowd of men and boys, puffing his cigar. Perhaps she was remembering her own fleetfooted days. It had been a long time since Johnny had seen his mother run a race.

  Everyone was crazy with excitement. Johnny and several other halfgrown boys organized races on the court house lawn. Johnny ran wildly through the crowd, hoping someone would notice how fast he was for his size.

  Later he saw a man who was walking through the streets with a big sign saying,

  GIVE A PENNY FOR WASHINGTON’S MONUMENT!

  MAKE YOUR COUNTRY BEAUTIFUL!

  The man gave a short speech:

  —The Washington Monument has reached a height of 154 feet of the projected 500. A national appeal is being made to the people to finance the erection of this beautiful and costly monument. Contribution boxes will be found here and there all over the Square. Remember the Father of Our Country on the day of our Country’s birth, and let us all contribute generously and freely to the erection of this great shaft. First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Hearts of his Countrymen.

  That night there was a fireworks display on the court house yard. Rockets rose over the dark town, burst into sparks, and went down, feebly flaming, in distant fields. Some exhibition pieces were hung on trees, and the climax of the whole day came with a contraption called ‘The Glorious Union.’ It was supposed to burn like a lot of stars and stripes in the shape of a shield, but it fizzled at first.

  —It ain’t goin’ to go, everyone said.

  Then it did go after all; in fact it caught on fire and blew up all at once with a terrific bang.

  As they drove home that night, Johnny told T. D. about the book on Phrenology.

  —What do you think about it, Pa? Is it any good?

  —Sounds scientific, T. D. said. I seen the man giving you a going-over. Of course, it might of been a fraud. You shouldn’t of spent all that money for it, John. You could of looked at someone else’s book.

  Rob, the oldest boy, said he heard a fellow say that the phrenology man and the vender of hair tonic had both been at Middletown just a day or two before and that they had put on the same act they did in Freehaven. The baldheaded man had pretended to buy hair tonic from the vender just the same way, and they made the same remarks, and the baldheaded man was just as bald now as he was then, no more and no less. Johnny was a little disturbed at this, but T. D. took a serene view of the matter.

  —Probably just a story, he said. Why would anybody want to do that? Besides, he was practically giving those bottles away at that price. I have spent my life studying the beneficent effects of botanical medicines, and the ingredients in those bottles sounded good.

  T. D. talked a good deal about the condition of the country.

  —This here new party they plan to form up there in Michigan may be just what we need, he said. I’ve voted the Whig ticket faithful for twenty-five years, but it seems to me we need stronger stuff now. If they can just get some big man to head the new party up, someone, say, like John C. Fremont, who is, in my opinion, the Greatest Living American, why, we might bring the country right out of the fix it’s in.

  —Things will work out all right, Ellen said.

  Johnny Shawnessy looked up at the purple night thicksown with stars that brooded warm and yellow over Raintree County. Yes, things would work out all right. He closed his eyes and seemed to see, ascending in a starless night, the thin, bright streaks of rockets. So would the years go speeding through the purple night of time and bring him all good things before they dropped, feebly flaming, in the distant meadows of the future. So would he too some day know fame and fortune and a great love, and the people in the Court House Square would cheer him. Time and the secret earth of Raintree County would bring all good fruits to him who knew the secret. One day, he would be the fastest runner in Raintree County, because he willed it to be so. One day he would stand with breast expanded, bright with medals, and the crowds would cheer the savior of the Nation. One day he would have the lucid self-understanding that would enable him to say and do everything that he desired, and he would become greater than Charles Dickens or Thomas Carlyle or even William Shakespeare, and he would speak and write words that would resound along the corridors of time forever. And the Court House Square would give place to a more spacious arena, there would be domed tremendous buildings, steps ascending, a platform bigger than was ever seen in Freehaven. And a tall monument would pierce the sky, erected in his memory. All things could be accomplished by him who had the key, who knew the secret, who could pronounce the talismanic word. And in that shining future, he would stand among the greathearted citizens of a perfect America, their heads would be bright with lush and streaming locks, they would all be superbly phrenological in the greatest republic the world had ever seen. And somewhere too in that golden day a vaguely beautiful girl was waiting, her bright hair streamed on delicate shoulders and steep breasts, and on her fruity lips was the highly personal and softly uttered word ‘Johnny.’

  When they went to get out of the wagon at the Home Place, Johnny knocked something over.

  —Careful there, John, T. D. said. Here, let me have that stuff. It was a couple of bottles of

  MRS. ALLEN’S WORLD HAIR RESTORER AND

  DR. HOSTETTER’S CELEBRATED

  STOMACH

  WATERS of the Shawmucky River flowed beneath the clattering board bridge. The surrey passed over and, jogging southwest, started along the quarter-mile stretch through the valleyground in the great bend of the river. Reeds, swampgrass, thistles grew where the town of Danwebster had been before the War. Across the river, due south, Mr. Shawnessy could see the hill and the white stones of the graveyard.

  —Well, children, he said, feeling old and inarticulate, here’s where I used to shine when I was a boy. Here’s where the old town was.

  —I don’t see a thing of it, Will said.

  Weeds, swampgrass, thistles, and the river. All is gone. And where is the young Shawnessy, the lover of the river, the budding bard of Raintree County? Where are the Complete Works in a single volume, with biographical preface and notes? Where are the pilgrim thousands and the graven stone beside the river? Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear——

  —All around here, Mr. Shawnessy was saying, motioning vaguely with his hand, his voice fading, was the little town of . . .

  DANWEBSTER ON THE SHAWMUCKY

  (Epic Fragment from Preface to The Complete Works of

  John Wickliff Shawnessy)

  A vague rapture fills the breast of the pilgrim, as he approaches the very earth which was the birthplace and burial spot of the greatest bard of all time. And indeed these pastoral glades seem as undesecrated by the hand of man as erst they did, so many years ago, when an obscure stripling sauntered through
the rural glades, never dreaming that one day his name would be the brightest and loftiest star in all the constellations of the great.

  Let us follow a little with reverent feet and pensive tread the windings of this little stream. Each bend and shallow is sanctified to the memory of a great name. In this deep pool beneath a hoary oak, we muse, the young Shawnessy perhaps did plunge and swim. Here his shouts mingled with those of his village companions. Perhaps he came to this haunt sometimes to escape the vigilant eye and stout ferule of the village scholarch, never dreaming that his own name would become both bane and blessing to generations of schoolboys. On the limb of this ancient oak, beside the circling waters of the Shawmucky, perhaps he swung in sportive play. In this open space, he urged the festive ball. How often, too, did he not walk, solitary and pensive, beside the river, bearing perchance a few stray leaves of paper and a quill, stopping now and then to indite the first utterances of a muse that has had no peer in all the annals of mankind!

  Then let us proceed farther until we reach the thrice-enchanted ground where stood in ancient days the little village of Danwebster, in whose purlieus the young bard must often have walked, a beardless stripling upon whom, even then, we must believe there dwelt some halo of potential greatness. What unrecorded words, flung random on the ears of laughing comrades, betokened the genial humor, which, running the entire gamut from rude and ridiculous to subtle and sophisticate, was destined to be a perpetual wonder and entertainment for the generations of mankind?

  Here, too, along the meanderings of the dulcet Shawmucky, he must have felt the first raptures of love—love, the most holy passion of the human breast, love, which he was later to express in the immortal verses of his great productions.

  Aye, it is sacred ground, every inch of it. And we are happy indeed to make one with the thousands of reverent pilgrims who pay each year this tribute to the eternal greatness of the human spirit, which can cause to flower unexpectedly the rarest growth of all the ages on the banks of . . .

  The Shawmucky River went south from the road, making its great bend, and returned to meet the surrey at the second bridge. The river flowed beneath the bridge, it was choked with bushes and mudbars, it was a length of savage, swarming life through the cornlands of the County.

  —I thought you were going to stop at the graveyard, Wesley said.

  —On the way back.

  He looked up and down the river, sniffing. The bridge was like a crossroads. The lazy highway of the river beckoned, luring down banks and shoals of memory. Now briefly, the river lay again across his life, opaque and green, a serpent water.

  On the banks of the Shawmucky, I had a vision of beauty. I held the river deity between my hands, it was a white flesh and lovely, its eyes were green, but this was long ago.

  Little river of the blurred and murmurous name, you still rise from your Delphic cavern in the northeastern corner of the County and come uncoiling to the lake, with greater and greater divagations. Curious fleshes squawk, shriek, spout seed, die, and decay in your reedy marge. But where is the brighthaired boy who lay beside your waters, beholder of beauty in the antique summertime before the War? Where is the innocent young man, beloved of the gods, whose name was secret like your own and carried from afar?

  On the banks of the Shawmucky River, I had a vision of beauty. I slept near the earth of the three mounds. I slept and dreamed beside the Indian river.

  Yes, I remember now how I came down from haying in the long summers before the War—the smell of the clover was sweet on the upland meadows—and gave my body to your cold arms. O, circling goddess tracing a word of prophecy on the earth of Raintree County, you took the warm seed and the sweat from my body, you loved the plunge of mortals in your cool waters.

  I had a vision of beauty on the banks of the Shawmucky River. What dream was that I dreamed of summertime and cities far away, and of corn growing in the valleyplains? What civilization of the maize did I introspect beside the little snakeriver of Raintree County?

  On the banks of the Shawmucky, I had a vision of beauty. I lay at the brink of the river. I shut my eyes against the greening brightness. I lay in soft grass. I was sleeping.

  I had a vision of beauty

  Summer—1856

  FLOWING FROM DISTANT TO DISTANT SUMMER, THE RIVER

  was a place of archaic lifeforms and primitive sounds, and it was a cold green flowing and a place for beautiful nakedness that summer. That summer Johnny Shawnessy was seventeen years old. His body shot up like a stalk of July corn, he got his man’s height of six feet, his shoulders widened, his arms and legs lengthened and were covered with light hair, his beard had to be shaved. Often in the afternoon, when he had finished working on the farm, he would go barefooted, dressed in blue jeans, shirt, and straw hat down the road to where the river approached from the north, and then cutting across a field would come out on the bank of the Shawmucky. He was free then from the geometry of fences, roads, and railroads, and he plunged naked into the river, re-entering some ancestral part of himself.

  The river was the oldest pathway of the County, a place of frogs, fish, waterbirds, turtles, muskrats, coons, wildcats, groundhogs. The life within and upon its banks had not changed for centuries. And the river’s name was the oldest name in Raintree County.

  In fact, ‘Shawmucky’ was the only Indian name left in the County. No one knew for sure what the original Indian word was or meant. Some agent of the first land-office in the County, writing the name of the river on the earliest land-deeds, spelled it Shawmucky. In this disguise of English misspelling and mispronunciation lurked a vagrant Indian word, a name never spelled but only spoken, a relic of pure language, the utterance of a vanished people. For within two or three years after the settlers came to the County, the Indians were forever gone.

  Johnny Shawnessy probably had a better guess about the river’s name than anyone else as he was the only person in the County for years who made any research into the Indian culture. He finally decided that the river’s name was related to the Indian word ‘Shakamak,’ meaning long fish or eel. There was a Shakamak River in southern Indiana; and in the northern part of the state, an Eel River, which in the Miami tongue had been called the Kenapocomoko, or River of Snake Fish.

  The only drawback to Johnny’s theory was the fact that he never found an eel in the Shawmucky River.

  Johnny’s interest in the Indians was stimulated by the poem Hiawatha, which he read not long after its publication in 1855. He wished to emulate Longfellow by writing an epic of the people who had given his state a name and who had left the music of their forest language on most of the important rivers of the Middle West, from the Ohio to the Mississippi. Yet the Indians, who had lived less than fifty years before in Raintree County, had vanished utterly, leaving only a few traces, almost all, as it happened, along the Shawmucky River and close to Johnny’s home.

  In that summer when he acquired the form of a man, Johnny found a favorite place on the river where it veered away from the road not far from the Shawnessy farm and ran northerly more than a mile as if it intended to flow out of the top of the County. Here on both banks of the stream, he used to find arrowheads and stone heads of tomahawks. As there was no record that the Indians had ever had a city on the banks of the Shawmucky, it was believed that these were relics of a battle that had been fought beside the stream perhaps long before the white men came. Johnny called the place the Indian Battleground.

  Still more mysterious were the three symmetrical mounds on the right bank of the river near this place, relics of a much older people than the Indians, who were known simply as the Mound Dwellers.

  Hardly anyone visited this part of the river except Johnny Shawnessy. The spot to which he came most often was halfway up the long northerly arm, on the right bank, close to the lowermost of the mounds. There was a place near-by where he would ford the river, book in hand. He would undress and swim in a deep, quiet pool under an oak, whose gnarled roots reached down into the water and fixed thems
elves in the bank like a giant hand clutched in the coil of a snake. Lying in the shade, he could see up and down the water a halfmile either way. And here he lay and thought about the river.

  Then, indeed, he seemed closest to the secret of the County.

  It was, he was certain, a water secret in the beginning. What secret lurked in the reedy, fishy, muddy word ‘Shawmucky’? Was this name the memory of a strange creature that the first man discovered in the river? For the river had been there before any man had come. The river was there when the great icesheet withdrew and left the land virginal, dripping, devoid of life. The river was there when the first green life surged up from the south. The river was full of shining fleshes when the first man came wandering into the forest country that was now called Raintree County. And with him man brought names, and the river became a name.

  Who was the first man who named the river? Ancestor of the Indian, he had come from those obscure migrations in which mankind, rootless wanderers on the earth, had left their Asian homeland and wandered east and west. They had come across the island bridge from Asia to America and down into a manless continent, bringing the already complex tongue and culture of their homeland. The first man who named the river was not an Indian, nor perhaps even a Mound Dweller. He was, however, a man. He made a husky sound as he saw in the river—or imagined that he saw—a fabulous creature. But the first man standing by the river was himself a fabulous creature. And the word that he pronounced was, like all words, a fabulous sound. He had brought it with him from the far-off source of humanity, which, like the Shawmucky River, had risen from a mysterious place and flowed down between widening banks in huge divagations, seeking for a lake. Words were the music of this murmurous water. All language was a stream flowing from distant to distant summer. Perhaps it all was sprung from some parent word, the first word uttered by the lips of man in the oriental garden of his birth. And the name of Raintree County’s Indian river was thus a palimpsest upon a palimpsest, a wandering, ancient, mutilated sound, a pilgrim from remote shores like man himself.