Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  LINES COMPOSED IN MELANCHOLY REMEMBRANCE

  In the day when my heart will cease beating

  In the echoing cell of my breast,

  And its music so fervid and fleeting,

  Has forever subsided to rest,

  If ever thou look’dest with longing

  On her who has passed from thy ken,

  O, believe that her heart was belonging

  To thee, though all secretly, then!

  O, then, when thine eyes shall discover,

  Too late, how she doted on thee,

  When the turf is upmounded above her,

  And her love-fettered spirit is free,

  O, then wilt thou pensively hover

  And beweep by her desolate grave,

  Thy pale, yet unpenitent lover,

  Thy rejected, yet passionate slave!

  So ardent was Miss Gaither’s rendition of this empurpled effusion that both she and the audience were visibly moved, and the young lady delivered the last few lines in a scarcely audible voice before retiring in a pretty confusion amid the plaudits of the crowd.

  Finally, from the hands of Professor Jerusalem Stiles, diplomas were dispensed to . . .

  The graduates gathered in the Academy Yard after the formal exercises to converse with friends and relatives and to exchange gifts, signatures, photographs, and scraps of sentiment in keepsake books. In everyone’s book, Johnny inscribed the following statement enclosed in a border of ornamental penmarks:

  A Concluding Specimen of my Writing with Jerusalem W. Stiles at Pedee Academy, Raintree County, Indiana, June 1, 1859.

  John Wickliff Shawnessy

  Johnny received a similar inscription from the other graduates. Additional sentiments, original or borrowed, were optional.

  The Perfessor signed all the keepsake books. In Johnny’s he wrote:

  To John Wickliff Shawnessy, the budding bard of Raintree County,

  Life’s eternal young American,

  Ave atque vale

  J. W. Stiles

  The Reverend Mrs. Gray came around sniffling and wrote in Johnny’s book a wistfully inappropriate sentiment:

  Many the changes since last we met.

  Blushes have brightened and tears have been wept.

  Friends have been scattered like roses in bloom,

  Some to the bridal and some to the tomb.

  Johnny retaliated with:

  Lydia, now I’ve heard your accents please,

  I know what is meant by Lydian melodies.

  In Garwood Jones’s book, Johnny wrote:

  This is tew surtyfie that I Seth Twigs of the County of Raintree, State of Injianny, in the Yewnited States of Amerikee, am acwainted with the owner of this book, and I have no hezzitation in sayin to all and sundry that he kin read, spel, and rite (tho not ellygant like myself). Single men without funds can employ him with the utmost confidents that they hev nuthin to Iooze by the transackshun.

  Signed, Seth Twigs

  Garwood, always a fast man with a comeback, wrote in Johnny’s book:

  Tew hoom it may consurn:

  The owner of this book is wun of my closest pursonal ennumies. I hev no reluctuntz in recommending him fer enny kind of ordeenary household work, inclooding ginneral carpentry (his fabreekations are noomerous and unsurpassed), but vurgins over fiftee wood dew well to keep him out of there drawers.

  Signed, Rube Shucks

  After a half-hour or so, Johnny found that he had collected the following additional posies in his keepsake book or on the backs of photographs:

  Remember me as your friend

  From now until time shall end. Sarah Peters

  A place in thy memory, Johnny, is all that I claim.

  Wilt thou pause and look back when thou hearest the sound

  of my name! Matilda Thackett

  Forget me not.

  Bob Fraser

  Remember well and bear in mind

  A constant friend is hard to find.

  And when you find one that is true,

  Change not the old one for the new. Cassius Carney

  Remember me, when this you see,

  Your righthand man at old Pedee. Thomas Smith

  The weakest scholar in the graduating class had polished a special gem for the occasion which he inscribed in all the keepsake books:

  O, may your pathway ever gleam

  With sincere love and joy supreme.

  May Him whose eye is felt, not seen,

  Bless you with thousand blessings e’en,

  With all that fairest love could dream.

  Such is the wish of your friend, T. F. Greene.

  Then by prearrangement all the graduates gathered in a ring around Professor Stiles, and Mrs. Lydia Gray blushingly presented him with an ornamental cigarbox, which Johnny and Garwood had driven all the way to Middletown to buy. The graduating class had pooled its resources and paid thirteen dollars for it. Lydia’s presentation speech started out bravely enough:

  —We the members of the First Graduating Class of Pedee Academy wish to tender to you, Professor Stiles, our beloved mentor and friend, this little token of our deep admiration and abiding esteem. May . . .

  From here on Lydia’s voice steadily diminished in strength so that Johnny never heard the concluding words.

  —Madame and members of the First Graduating Class of the Pedee Academy, the Perfessor said, accepting the box and gingerly peeping into it like Pandora expecting troubles, I am deeply touched by this manifestation of your affection, which I hope I may have deserved. Let me only say . . .

  The Perfessor went on with a shameless collection of clichés and delighted everyone with the classic roundness of his periods and the aptness of his sentiments. The applause was loud when he finally concluded his remarks and began to pass out the cigars.

  At that moment, standing in the shade of the Academy Yard, a tall youthful form, his brilliant black eyes glancing about him, Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles reached the summit of his popularity in Raintree County.

  In a short time, Johnny himself had collected the following gifts: four beautifully bound and illustrated gift books entitled Friendship’s Album, Autumn Leaves, The Heart’s Treasure, and Pearls of Memory; a framed picture of a farmhouse with a mother standing in the doorway and waving to her departing boy, whose earthly belongings were bundled to a stick on his shoulder; a framed picture of a farmhouse with a mother standing in the doorway and waving to her returning boy, whose good success in the world was reflected in the neat city clothes and fine suitcase he held in his hand; a handful of carte de visite photographs variously inscribed on the back; and a large blue bowtie. He had also been kissed violently by a young girl graduate, whose great passion had kept itself in hiding until then, and by a dozen female relatives from various corners of the County, some of whom he had never seen before in his life. Most of the girl graduates were weeping here and there on the Academy grounds from emotions of farewell.

  Johnny himself had distributed various keepsakes, pictures of himself, and gifts. But the most important sentimental remembrance had not yet been exchanged.

  He had watched Nell Gaither all the time after the Exercises were over. It was essential for his plan that he catch her alone and suggest that she come with him to the library where he had something to give her. She had been peculiarly quiet and pale as if she hadn’t yet recovered from the emotion that had betrayed her while she was giving her Graduation Composition. At last she walked away from the crowd and stopped under an elm in a remote corner of the yard, but before Johnny could react, Garwood Jones walked across the lawn to join her.

  Garwood had something in his hand which he presented with a courtly motion. In her white graduation gown and bonnet trimmed in green, Nell seemed untouchably aloof. Yet she smiled up at Garwood in a very lovely way. Garwood fastened a necklace around her neck, and she gave something to him which Johnny couldn’t make out; but whatever it was, he could imagine Garwood’s voice mellowly throbbing with gratit
ude.

  At that moment, a relative came up and hit Johnny on the back and shook his hand, and Johnny didn’t see the climax of the scene. When next he looked, Nell was alone, walking along the fence. Then abruptly, as if remembering something, she turned and went swiftly to the porch of the Academy. Just before entering, she swept the yard with her eyes, which rested finally on Johnny Shawnessy. She looked at him a long moment with lifted brows, lips parted. Then she turned and went into the Academy Building.

  —Excuse me, Johnny said, rudely leaving the group he had been with.

  His chance had come, the moment he had rehearsed in fancy so often that the actuality became many times more exciting than an improvisation. Heart pounding, he followed Nell into the building and down the dim corridor to the library. She was inside, sitting at the table with her head on her hands. He picked up a big book which some hours before he had carefully hidden in a corner of a bookshelf. He put the book on the table in front of her.

  —Here’s a little graduation remembrance, Nell.

  It was a brandnew leatherbound giltedged copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. It had cost Johnny seven dollars and fifty cents and weighed six pounds.

  —Sort of in memoriam, he recited in a hoarse voice, for all the good times studying together, Nell.

  Nell raised her head. Her eyes were wet. She picked up the huge book and held it helplessly. It struck Johnny that he had done a touchingly brave and also quite pitiable thing. Nell ran her hands wordlessly a few times over the big book, looking up at Johnny and then down at the gilt words on the cover. She tugged at the book, and it opened suddenly, the pages, newly gilded, sticking. Where it opened, the picture of a young man looked out from a carte de visite photograph which had been inserted in the book under the printed words

  VENUS AND ADONIS

  It was the picture of a youth of twenty in a dandy suit. The shoulders were well back, the chest well forward, the arms fixed at the sides but thrust a little back, the left foot slightly advanced. The head was held high as if forced up by the bowtie at the throat. The eyes were steeped in visions. The mouth was firm but gentle, as if about to smile. The heavy eyebrows were slightly raised as if touched upward with a mild surprise. The whole image had a quality of youthful, affectionate charm.

  Johnny winced as he saw this sudden image of himself planted in the immense book of William Shakespeare.

  —Please don’t let anyone else see what I wrote on the back of that picture, Nell, he said.

  Then he walked swiftly out of the door and down the corridor.

  On the back of the picture he had written:

  ACTAEON

  One day a vision was vouchsafed to me,

  That filled my burning heart with bright emotion,

  A sight more fair than Venus was when she

  Came streamingly from the Ionian ocean.

  I had been lying by a riverside

  And as I lay, I slept and dreamed a dream,

  And then awaking, from my covert spied

  A girl—and beautiful—bathed in the stream.

  Like one enchanted, swooningly I lay

  And watched her. She was naked. And her bare,

  Brightlimbed, and slender body was at play

  With the green water dropping from her hair.

  Her name, which even now I dare not tell,

  Rang in my stricken heart a lovely kNELL.

  John Wickliff Shawnessy,

  June 1, 1859.

  No one else had yet seen this sonnet, upon which Johnny had expended all his technical resources, except Professor Stiles, who had remarked,

  —Shall the Shawmucky be another Avon? I see our rural bard has been sleeping, by a virgin hand disarmed. You may get your face slapped for that poem. Undressing Raintree County damsels even in pentameters is a pretty risky business.

  The summerclad forms of the graduates and their friends bloomed suddenly on Johnny’s vision as he burst from the dusk of the Academy into the sunlight of the yard. The white dresses hurt his eyes; the blithe voices stung his ears. He walked slowly out into the lawn, appalled by the exquisite wickedness of the thing that he had done.

  At this very moment, the girl in the Academy Building held in her two hands the soul of Johnny Shawnessy, a throbbing, vulnerable thing. Words were more naked than flesh, and he could never get them back. He had once held her white beauty imprisoned in his cruelly eager eyes; but now she was returning the favor with a vengeance. He had tried to be life’s young Greek in Nineteenth Century America. His poem was wellnamed ‘Actaeon.’ Like the hunter who beheld Diana bathing in the stream and was changed to a stag and hunted by his own dogs, he could hear howling after him already the bloodhounds of Raintree County’s puritan conscience.

  —Here’s the boy now, Garwood said, his booming voice calling everyone’s attention to Johnny emerging from the building. Garwood walked importantly through the crowd and taking Johnny by the arm led him to a group of men near the front gate.

  —This the boy? one of the men said.

  Johnny shifted uneasily. The whole crowd turned to watch.

  —Think you got any chance to whip Flash Perkins on the Fourth? the man said.

  —I mean to try.

  —Garwood here has been offering me odds of three to one Perkins’ll beat you. I thought you and Garwood were friends.

  —Garwood and I hate each other affectionately, Johnny said.

  —Tell ’em how good you are, John, Garwood said. I’ll give you half my winnings.

  —A bet on John Shawnessy’s a sure thing, mister, Johnny said.

  —Sure to lose, Garwood said. Ha, Ha, Ha.

  —Johnny! Yoo hoo, Johnny! Come here.

  It was his mother calling. He walked over to her. As Valedictorian he was a noteworthy object and was expected to show his face and say bright things. Ellen was very proud of him, her great, handsome, likeable Johnny, who had led his class and had been called by the distinguished Professor Stiles ‘the most gifted young man I have ever had the good fortune to teach, Madame.’

  —This is Cousin Hurlbut Shawnessy from Middletown, Ellen said. He’s quite a scholar himself and has similar interests to you, Johnny.

  —O, is that so? Pleased to meet you.

  —Pleased to meet you, young John, Cousin Hurlbut said.

  Cousin Hurlbut obviously favored the bigframed, fatfaced, bucktoothed branch of the Shawnessys. He had jawlength sideburns and a portentous manner.

  —Cousin Ellen tells me you’re the author of the Will Westward articles in the Freehaven Enquirer, young John, Cousin Hurlbut said.

  —Yes, I guess so, Johnny said, watching the door of the Academy.

  —I have read your inditings with interest, Cousin Hurlbut said. Maybe you’ve seen some columns appearing in the Middletown Radiant under my numdyploom, Peter Patter.

  —Uh, yes, I believe so, Johnny said. Very fine.

  He had some memory of having seen some clippings from Cousin Hurlbut’s muse, which specialized in poems about looking backward down the years and realizing that one’s youth was spent.

  —John’s the scholar of the family, T. D. said, rocking pleasantly. The boy always had a knack for saying things from the time he was a little shaver.

  Johnny excused himself and withdrew from the crowd. He skirted the edges of the yard. He thought of slipping through the side gate and going down to the train station. He had always wanted to go West anyway. In the West, a man could do as he pleased. In Raintree County there were too many barriers and too much beauty.

  He was standing alone under the big elm by the side gate when Nell came out of the Academy and picked her way sedately through the yard coming directly toward him. Under her arm was a huge book.

  It was clear that she was returning his present.

  —Here’s something for you, Johnny, she said in her low, soft voice, lingering her mouth along his name.

  As she gave him the book, she put her head to one side in one of her unconsciously sta
tuary attitudes, the sidepoised head communicating its evasive gesture musically down the length of her body and somehow suggesting the emotion of farewell.

  The book was a brandnew leatherbound giltedged copy of The Complete Works of Lord Byron.

  —I knew you didn’t have a copy, Johnny, and I thought you might want one to keep. Your poem was beautiful.

  She turned and walked away with the same undulant, unhurried step and, accepting the arm of Garwood Jones at the gate, climbed into his buggy. As she gathered her dress in, she looked over her right shoulder and her eyes found Johnny’s in a lingering look.

  Someone was coming toward him. He walked hurriedly to the Academy and ran up onto the verandah and through the door. The library was still empty. He carried the book over to the recessed window. He pulled at the stuck gilt leaves. Where the book opened, the picture of a girl looked up from a carte de visite photograph underneath the poem ‘Fare Thee Well.’

  It was the picture of a young woman standing with her body in profile, so poised that she appeared to be just rising to her toes. Her face was in half-profile, her eyes looking back over her right shoulder and directly out of the picture. The whole pose was an unconsciously classic attitude. It was the river nymph inviting the love-pursuit.

  On the back of the photograph were the words

  Johnny, please keep forever this image of her who has been for longer than you guess

  Your pale, yet unpenitent lover,

  Your rejected, yet passionate slave.

  Nell

  To his ears came the distant sound of voices and laughter. They beat softly on the brick walls of the Academy Building, echoing in its empty shell. They were like the sound of surf, a blue surf churning on immemorable shores. They poured languor and sweetness of love over the listening soul of Johnny Shawnessy.