Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  Johnny Shawnessy ached with the insufficiency of youth. He was never more erotically in love with Nell Gaither than that night when he saw her soaked in a sheet in the name of Raintree County’s puritan religion.

  Thus there was too much youth and love and wishing in this whole era of his life. All things were touched with sadness and beauty by this first erotic passion of his young manhood.

  The most delicious and frustrating hours were those spent at the Academy, where Johnny and Nell often studied together in the little library. Both spent a great deal of extra time there. It was not unusual for Johnny to come over in the evening and find the library open and only one other person in it—Nell. The Perfessor abetted Johnny’s hopeless passion by assigning to his two prize pupils extra readings in the Greek and Latin texts. Garwood Jones was, as everyone knew, too smart for his own good, but he never aspired to be, as the Perfessor once remarked, either a scholar or a gentleman, so that Nell was, next to Johnny, the best student in the Academy, especially in language and rhetoric. Gifted in versification, her muse was not so vigorous and facile as Johnny’s, but it was fashionably feminine, specializing in affecting compositions about departed beauty, spent passion, withered roses, tombstones, dewy flowers, and unreturning springs. When she read these verbal confections, her face and voice were pleasingly mournful in the approved fashion of the time.

  Sometimes she and Johnny would sit in the library to late hours in the evening studying together. They shared each other’s passions in literature, and would sometimes read aloud, but each was too shy to read original poetry to the other. Their great common enthusiasm for a long time was Lord Byron.

  —I think Lord Byron was the most fascinating man who ever lived, Nell said once while they were alone in the library. He seemed so much in need of a good woman to love and to love him, and he never really found one. What’s your favorite passage in Lord Byron’s works, Johnny?

  —I like the opening sections of Don Juan best, Johnny said.

  —I haven’t read that yet, Nell said. My favorite is ‘Fare Thee Well.’ I’ll read the opening passages of Don Juan if you’ll let me have the book.

  Johnny had been using the Academy’s unique copy for some time past. He gave Nell the book, but as it made him a little uncomfortable to see her sit down and become absorbed in the exquisitely beautiful canto in which the young Don Juan falls from innocence with Julia and is apprehended and sent off on his travels, he got up and left the Academy. Some days later, Nell gave him the book back, with one of her radiant smiles mixed with a trace of bepuzzlement and concern. Inside the book in the Juan passage, he found a note for him.

  Dear Johnny,

  I’m surprised at you. But the poetry is very beautiful.

  Nell

  The happiest hours in Johnny’s life during this time were those spent in translating some of the Metamorphoses of Ovid with Nell. They were both deeply touched by the myth of Daphne and Apollo. Both had been essaying a translation of it and met one evening to compare their respective efforts. They sat at the table in the library where they had done so much of their work together. The Perfessor, who was usually hovering about somewhere like the resident deity of the place, had obligingly retired to his quarters upstairs. In the gaslight, Nell sat across from Johnny, wearing the green dress that he had come to associate with her in all his daydreams. She seemed more than usual remote and pensive as her hands nervously played in the loose sheets of her manuscript.

  —You read yours first, Johnny.

  His composition was in blank verse. In the yellow light of the oakpaneled library, walled in with the softly glowing backs of hundreds of classics, his young voice, which understood so perfectly the music of English verse, re-created the legend of the sungod who sought and was denied the love of a river nymph. The little library was peopled with the Ovidian images—the love-pursuit beside the river, the fleeting nymph, the ardent god. Some of the musical passion of the old republic which had given this myth to the world crept into Johnny’s voice. He too had known the rhythmed pain of love along the river, had seen a white flesh in the reeds, had felt the barky shadow climb up forbidden limbs and cover them from view. He too had come away with a laurel branch to requite him for a frustrate love. His voice was husky with the poem’s music of renunciation and farewell.

  He had hardly finished when Nell said in a trembling voice,

  —O, Johnny, it’s beautiful! Yours is much better than mine.

  A sudden moisture in her eyes increased their green brilliance. Her parted mouth was a scarlet stain on her white face, which had two flushes of scarlet high on the cheeks. Her voice was husky with earnestness.

  —Johnny, you know what I think? I think you will be a great poet some day.

  She sat across from him, her eyes full of admiration and humility.

  —You are the best of us all, she said. I know it.

  —No, you are the best of all, Nell.

  —No, no, Nell said. You have a gift that can’t be learned. It’s something sacred. To see beauty and to say it—like Byron or Ovid or Shakespeare. It’s really so fine to have known you, Johnny.

  He was startled by this strangely elegiac expression.

  —Well, he said. Which is better—to express beauty or to have it?

  She looked puzzled, and he felt that perhaps he had said more than was wise.

  —How now! said a voice from the library door. Up so late, children?

  It was the Perfessor, leaning into the door. He came in and bent over Nell’s shoulder.

  —The Ovid—eh? How did it go?

  —Johnny has a beautiful translation, Nell said.

  She was blushing.

  —Our boy John, said the Perfessor, has the golden touch. Let me see.

  He picked up Johnny’s translation and ran his eyes over it.

  —Not bad, not bad, he said. Though rather too full of alliteration.

  Garwood came shortly after. Johnny and the Perfessor stood at the gate of the Academy and watched Nell leaning out of Garwood’s buggy smiling her radiant, tender smile, full of Ovidian enthusiasm.

  —We’ll have to work out the next liber together, Johnny!

  Garwood took Nell away.

  —Is there such a thing, Professor, Johnny said, as one man possessing a woman’s soul and another her body?

  —You read too much, John, the Perfessor said.

  Johnny watched the buggy receding. How well that wise old Roman poet of the protean earth and its mixing and mating forms had understood the only possible reward for the lover of ideal beauty! He shall pursue a lovely flesh and be rewarded with a branch of laurel.

  During those years the lyrics of Stephen Foster, especially the more romantic ballads such as ‘Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming’ and ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,’ became the musical image of Johnny’s love. This love could have existed only in an adolescent republic that tried to dream itself to perfection by ignoring the realities of life’s remorseless comedy. This love could have existed only in a sentimental America of bright, running streams and high, grassy lawns, where girls in shimmering gowns walked with their lovers hand in hand till starlight faded into morn.

  Meanwhile, the real republic of the slave and free controversy, growing ever closer to open conflict, loomed menacingly on the horizons of Johnny Shawnessy’s private universe of Raintree County. The students at Pedee Academy gravely debated the issues of the great struggle. Lincoln and Douglas, the western champions of the opposing camps, were quoted everywhere during their contest for the Senate in 1858. But for Johnny Shawnessy, the issues of that day—slavery and emancipation, free lands in the West, senatorial and presidential candidates, new states, supreme court decisions—were shadows and echoes compared to the image of a girl with enigmatic green eyes in a small piquant face, sitting at a table in the Pedee Academy, making pagan polysyllables with her fullflown mouth.

  Her image suffused the whole of Raintree County, until the County was changed from what it
had been. Somewhere along the way, the County of Johnny’s childhood had been lost. In that County, which would always lie beneath the rest as the parent stratum, his mother, Ellen Shawnessy, had been the dominant image. Then he had been the favored child whose quest was to solve the secret of his origin; and Raintree County was the garden of this quest, an auroral and maternal earth. Now this earlier earth and the myths that embodied its secret (myths not of Eros but of Oedipus) had changed with the changing body and mind of Johnny Shawnessy. He was no longer the child of this earth—he had become its aggressive lover. The old myth of origins—the Raintree in its primitive garden—had temporarily lost its place to the myth of the love-pursuit and conquest of beauty.

  Yet the secret of the County was still feminine. It had taken for its image the Venus Callipygos in exchange for Mother Eve in her figleaf.

  For this love, which was so intensely ideal that it had absorbed to itself the whole being of Johnny Shawnessy and the whole landscape of Raintree County, was also fiercely erotic, dreaming over and over the image of possession and endlessly inventive in the technique of this possession. And of these dreams the most persistent involved the Academy itself. Pedee Academy enshrined then, as it would forever, the image of his young desire.

  Now this was the favorite daydream of Johnny Shawnessy in the days of Pedee Academy and Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles: He imagined that he came some time of a winter evening to the Academy Building to get a book. Sleet and fine snow were blowing on the fields and roads. He opened the door and found that the Perfessor was not in and that the building was empty. He went back then into the lecture room and along the passageway to the little library where he turned up a lamp and looked for the book. In the Academy the air was close and warm, redolent of ink, varnish, and books. Then he was surprised to see that someone else had entered from the winter night. It was Nell Gaither, who was standing at the library door muffled in her long furcollared coat. As he looked at her, the lamp burned out, and he could see her face, a pale stain in the dark. She held up to him this face with parted lips and unaverted eyes and by a motion of her body invited him to help her off with her wraps. He began with the coat and then, assisted by her, slowly removed her garments one by one. All this they did together without a single word, while she looked back over her shoulder at him. At last her tranquilly seductive form was posed in entire nudity, like a tinted marble in the warm murk of the Academy Building. Her demure face and bound-up hair were strangely in contrast with the pale, deepfleshed mounds, on one of which he saw the tiny imprint of the river. And then among the benches and the books, where their young mouths had said the antique words of the rivered earth, love, death, beauty, and the gods, here in the very center of Raintree County, in its most Delphic cave, here where only a faint light shone, while all around them in the blustering night the fields and roads were swept with sleet, he too became naked, like a young god, and his mouth would touch at last her warm mouth. And love would be tall and imperious, it would be a young man seeking, it would go into the most secret places in Raintree County, where lake and river met and shore and shallow were hardly to be told apart. And his desire, clothed in eager flesh, would find at last the secret source and secret destination, would ache in the anguishingly tight caress of the river girl, her warm breath would beat upon his halfshut lids, her slippery body would writhe in his arms, and she would

  DRAIN FROM HIM THE POOLED-UP ANGUISH OF HIS BODY,

  TOO YOUNG, TOO AMOROUS, TOO BESET

  WITH

  —LONGING, said Niles Foster, as he and Mr. Shawnessy stepped out into the street, won’t bring those days back. Sure you won’t have a glass with me, John?

  —Sorry, Niles. Have to be back in Waycross in time to meet that nine-thirty train.

  He walked past the Saloon and turned in at the Photographer’s. The stair was rickety and dark. The building had a stale smell of tobacco and chemicals.

  There was no one on the stair. He stopped, hugged the bundle of papers under one arm, opened the Atlas, and flapped the leaves swiftly to page 37. A block of brick business buildings started into life, all the familiar legends and doors of the south side of the Square (including the one he had just entered), little changed in the seventeen years since the artist had drawn the picture.

  But the gracefully made lady just stepping into the drygoods store was fully clothed, like all the other precise little figures in the picture.

  Nevertheless, this flat, inactual world of light and shadow seemed about to do something, mean something. Buggies passed on wheels of finedrawn spokes, haunches of horses gathered into lumps of muscle, the clock over the jeweler’s read eighteen minutes past eleven. Enmeshed in a thin web of pencil marks was a lost America and a departed Raintree County, struggling for expression. And in the middle of this web, an imagined lady stood, clothed in the possibility of all feminine nakedness. The coil of her dark hair swung between bare shoulders, the long furrow of her back was faintly curved with the walking motion of her body, the palm of her right foot was arched and thrusting from the toes.

  With a rush of desire, he seemed about to pluck away a veil of light and shadow and lay bare the shape of beauty and forever.

  The door banged open, a rush of light blinded him, and a blocky woman in a hideously white dress burst in.

  He slapped the book shut and sprang three steps at a time up the stair to the Photographer’s Shop. He entered a little reception gallery and laid the Atlas on a table, concealing it under the newspapers. He listened as the woman mounted the stair, paused at the landing, breathing audibly, then entered another room.

  From oval frames along the wall, the tinted faces of young women looked at him wistfully. He had a mission this day to resurrect the past in pencil sketches and faded photographs.

  The door opened at the end of the gallery, and a sallow man of middle age looked out.

  —Hello, John. See you made it.

  —Morning, Bill. Sorry to get you out so early. Well, what luck?

  —I found the plates all right, the man said, preceding him into a room flooded with white light from a glass window slanting from roof to floor.

  —I can’t thank you enough, Bill, Mr. Shawnessy said. Did you——

  —I’m sorry, John, he said. I didn’t get the prints made. I didn’t have time.

  —It was my fault for not writing sooner. The idea occurred to me at the last minute. I’m delighted that you found the plates.

  —My father, the first Mr. Huddleston, the man said, kept everything. I dug into some old things in the cellar and found the plates last night stored away with the date of exposure and name of subject on each one.

  He opened a package and took out a half-dozen glass plates, three by five inches, each with a strip of paper glued at the bottom edge containing a name and date in ink.

  —Perfectly preserved, he said. The old wetplate process. I’ve used it myself.

  Mr. Shawnessy picked them up one at a time and read the captions. They had all been taken on the same day, May 26, 1859.

  —These are the six I wanted, he said. I had copies of them once, but lost them all.

  He carried them to an open window and held them up to the light. Through a glass darkly, he saw one by one four men and two women, hovering in chemical prisons.

  —The Senator and Mr. Carney will be pleased to see themselves as young men, the photographer said. As for Mr. Stiles, I don’t remember him, and the two women are unfamiliar. Any relation?

  —No, not exactly, Mr. Shawnessy said.

  He dwelt a long time on the images of the two women, holding them side by side. Under one picture was the caption N. Gaither; under the other, S. Drake.

  Bodies of beautiful women floated in a pale river of remembrance, white flesh dissolving in green acid of years. Traced on the plate of memory with a finger of light, their lost forms wavered, a vaporous smoke on the sullen and triumphant earth.

  N. Gaither. Ovidian statue starting into life, Daphne in a mesh of Raintree
County reeds. We parted in the springtime of life, Nell and I.

  A sweet anguish vexed him, and he turned to the other plate.

  S. Drake. Little sleepwalker from an alien earth, bearer of a scarlet mark. O, Susanna! Do not cry for me.

  J. Shawnessy. Lost boy whom girl mouths once called Johnny, just risen from the tumult of the Square where all is sunlight and the greatest athlete in Raintree County stands with cocked arm bulging. O, innocent and unforgotten boy!

  But where were all the other images that mixed on the plateglass windows of the Square, each window recording the image of a clockless Court House?

  He held a vitreous world, the creature of a god whose radiant finger wrote all the legends that were ever written. Musing, he studied a vanished Raintree County reflected on

  May 26—1859

  THE PLATEGLASS WINDOW OF THE SALOON HELD THE SQUARE

  in a golden prism, including the form of Cash Carney, who leaned against the window reading a copy of the Clarion, and the form of Johnny Shawnessy, who had just stopped to say hello.

  —Had your face friz yet, John?

  —My appointment’s for three o’clock, Johnny said.

  —I’ve had mine, Cash said. To while away the time, listen to Garwood’s latest potshot.

  He read aloud:

  —A report comes from the Upper Shawmucky that Seth Twigs got kicked in his think-box by a mule and sustained a slight injury (the mule cracked a hoof). Seth has been having delusions of grandeur since and has got the idea that he can beat any man in this county footracing, including the great Orville (better known as Flash) Perkins of Freehaven. Now we do not want to discourage the roseate dreams of youth. Nor do we wish to underestimate the speed of foot Seth may have acquired keeping away from various citizens he has slandered in the Enquirer. But when we mentioned this matter to Rube Shucks, Rube said, ‘Seth Twigs is the laziest critter in Raintree County. He never runned a step in his life. Seth Twigs once let a hive of bees swarm on ’im ruthern break out of a shuffle. Flash Perkins kin run faster backways with a pianner on his neck than Seth kin frontways. If Seth Twigs beats Flash Perkins in a footrace, I will personly plunge my haid into the Shawmucky and swaller the fust big ole stinkin’ catfish comes along, horns and all.’