As he drove nearer to the Road, the tonal ingredients of the chord emerged. Bandmusic spouted, firecrackers crumped, wheels ground on gravel, hooves clanged, horses whinnied, human throats bubbled.
Beyond the intersection, the long aisle of the street was swollen with parasols, derby hats, flags, blurring and brightening around the railroad station. Stranger even than Mr. Shawnessy’s prophetic dream of the early dawn was this glut of people on the wide and quiet crossing.
At the intersection, he felt the pull of the Great Road. It sucked him out of the narrow county road, picked him up, flung him about in a whirlpool of traffic. Engulfed in the Mississippian stream of the Republic, he navigated the surrey carefully against the tide. He reached his own yard, went into it between parked buggies, and drove into the barn, where he quickly unharnessed President and put him into a stall.
He picked up the Atlas and the newspapers, planning to run into the house and tidy up before going down to the Station. As he went around to the front porch, he saw a man in a white linen suit sitting on the porchswing.
—Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy, I presume?
The voice was a pleasant, hissing sound.
—Yes? Mr. Shawnessy said, tentatively.
The man stood up and walked briskly down the steps, plucking the cigar from his mouth and switching it to his canehand.
—Glad to see you again, my boy.
—Professor! Mr. Shawnessy said, taking the thin, strong hand.
Nodding amiably, Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles exhaled aroma of distant places and metropolitan manners.
—Don’t you grow old like other people, my boy?
—You haven’t changed much yourself, Professor.
—I grow old, the Perfessor said. Deep scars of thunder have entrenched, and care sits on this faded cheek. But happily I still have my teeth. Both are sound and sometimes leave a signature of senile passion on the shoulders of the most beautiful women in the City of New York.
The Perfessor shook soundlessly. His skull was bonebright under thin hairs that were still defiantly—almost obscenely—black, slicked back from a middle part. His long, narrow face seemed all features and wrinkles. But the tall form was still erect and jaunty, the malacca cane swung with practised ease, the black eyes darted restlessly about. The essential Perfessor was still there, seen as through a frosted glass.
—You fooled me, Professor. Your letter didn’t say——
—At exactly seven forty-five this morning, the Perfessor said, trainborne I crossed the borders of Raintree County. I haven’t been back since that day thirty-three years ago when the preacher’s shotgun goosed me over the border. When did we last see each other, John?
—Fifteen years ago. July of ’77. Night of the Grand Ball at Laura Golden’s in New York.
—Ah, yes, the Perfessor said. The night you ascended the Great Stair. I envied you that night, John. Tell me the truth, my boy, what did you do up there?
—I was hunting for the exit.
—Hmmmmmmm, the Perfessor said. Won’t tell, eh?
He looked around, twirling his cane.
—So this is where the Bard of Raintree County has elected to spend his declining years. Really, John, isn’t it a bit bucolic for a man of your talents?
—I have a good pure life here.
—Unavoidably! said the Perfessor. What in the devil is that big book under your arm, John?
The Perfessor peered keenly at the Atlas, covered up with newspapers.
—Something I promised to get for the Senator. By the way, is this a professional visit?
—Strictly, the Perfessor said. I persuaded my paper to let me cover this thing. These days, when Garwood moves, the stars zigzag in their orbits, the stock market fluctuates, and the virgins bedew themselves with ecstasy. What an opportunity, I thought, to return unobtrusively to Raintree County, drop a tear once more on the soil that gave me birth, and touch again that magical, mystical time, John, when you and I were young, Maggie.
—Does Evelina know you’re coming?
The Perfessor shot a quick glance at Mr. Shawnessy.
—I did write her a letter, he said. How is our little poetess?
—Lovely as ever, Mr. Shawnessy said.
—Where does she live?
—An improbable big brick mansion just outside town, Mr. Shawnessy said, pointing east. You can’t quite see it from here.
—I’ve never forgiven you, John, for luring the little woman away from New York.
—I had nothing to do with it, Mr. Shawnessy said.
—Of course, I blame myself too, the Perfessor said. You two got together in my column. By the way, do you read it these days?
—It’s been scintillatingly naughty of late, Professor. How do you get away with it?
—The secret is this: The truth, the real truth, sounds so preposterously false to the average citizen of the Republic that he thinks I’m kidding. So they let me go my lonely way as the New York Dial’s Special Reporter on Life, the only man in America who reports the news as it really is.
—Some time, Professor, I want you to publish a newspaper of your own and call it the Cosmic Enquirer.
—Right now I’m cosmically thirsty, the Perfessor said. Where’s the local hell?
—The town is teetotal.
—How lucky, then, that I happen to have a little on me, no?
From a backpocket, the Perfessor pulled a flat bottle of corncolored fluid, uncorked, lipped, gurgled.
—Have some?
—No, thanks, Mr. Shawnessy said, looking warily to see who watched.
—By the way, would you conduct me to the Chair of Philosophy?
On the way back, Mr. Shawnessy said,
—The Senator arrives in a few minutes. I’m supposed to be at the Station to meet him.
—What kind of country is it, the Perfessor said, pushing back the crescentcarved door, that permits itself to be run by such bastards! If we’re not careful he’ll be the next President. Hi, there, Apollo invades the Privy!
The interior walls of the little twoseater were covered with clippings from books and newspapers.
—Wherever Socrates and Plato converse, there is the abode of the Muses, Mr. Shawnessy said.
RURAL PHILOSOPHERS CONGREGATE
(Epic Fragment from the Cosmic Enquirer)
Some of the brainiest savants in this section of the country assembled recently for high metaphysical discourse. The scholarchs are reported to have sought out a meetingplace suitably quiet for their deliberations. Occupying the Boylston Chair of Oratory and Rhetoric was that engaging wiseman and wit . . .
Professor Stiles adjusted his glasses and read aloud from one of the clippings,
—Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence. The palaces of kings are erected upon the bowers of Paradise.
We have a text. Mr. Shawnessy, will you elucidate to the goodly and handsome company assembled?
Mr. Shawnessy consulted his watch.
—To be naked is to be either god or beast, he said. Eden is man’s memory of godlike appetite and animal satisfaction, uncurbed by moral law. The forbidden fruit is the act of love resulting in discovery of another and not simply affirmation of oneself. In this act, man becomes man—moral, responsible, parental, and the Republic is born. By the way, Garwood’s train is about due. I have to tidy up a little. Meet me in front of the house.
Walking up the back path, he glanced at the sundial. Inside the circular inscription, I record only the sunshine, the sharp shadowhand darkened the numeral IX. He reflected that in the Atlas, which he carried under his arm, the same hour was fixed forever on the face of the Court House Clock. A radiant god was writing nine o’clock all over Raintree County. With his golden finger he traced a hundred images on great soft sheets of earth, and all proclaimed the magical, morning hour of nine. Without selection or distinction, he traced all legends with a brush of light and shadow. In his bright book of simultaneously existing images, was one thing more f
orbidden than another?
In the house, Mr. Shawnessy spent a few minutes running through the Atlas, but without success. Remembering the Senator’s request, he carried the book outdoors, sandwiched in copies of the Free Enquirer. On the sidewalk, the Perfessor waited, intoning words for the music which the band at the Station was playing.
—Blow ye the trumpet, blow
The gladly-solemn sound!
Let all the nations know,
To earth’s remotest bound,
The year of Jubilee has come.
—John Brown’s favorite hymn!
—John Brown! the Perfessor said. How well I remember those days! All that summer and fall of ’59, when the War was coming on and no one knew it. Those were the days of our paradisal innocence, John. Let me see, what were J. W. Shawnessy and J. W. Stiles doing that summer?
—That summer, Mr. Shawnessy said, J. W. Shawnessy left the estate of youth and innocence and entered upon the estate of manhood and bitter wisdom.
—That summer, the Perfessor said, J. W. Stiles left the County of his Birth lest it become the County of his Demise.
—That summer, J. W. Shawnessy discovered the Source of Life.
—And where is that? said the Perfessor.
—Where the river joins the lake.
—That summer, J. W. Stiles remained a small name and alive, while John Brown prepared to be a great name and dead.
—That summer, J. W. Shawnessy became an agriculturist of love, and worried about his crops.
—Ah, and J remember, too, said the Perfessor,
Summer—1859
HOW THAT WAS A SUMMER OF DROUGHT IN THE MIDDLE STATES.
The crops were dried and stunted. In the dark earth lay the rejected seed. It was a summer, too, of catastrophe and violence. In the prolonged heat men did strange deeds. The deep of the national character was troubled and cast up monsters. The newspaper columns were filled with rape cases. A woman was said to be running about a desolate part of the country naked. Members of a certain religious sect were reported to be waylaying and violating women with organized efficiency. A man fell into the vault of a privy and suffocated. Trains leaped trestles. The crops in the Middle States were stunted. In the dark earth lay the rejected seed.
On the morning after the Fourth of July, Johnny Shawnessy woke up slowly and reluctantly. He was troubled by a pagan memory. There had been a young man bold like a god. He had bestridden a whiteloined horse and had ridden beneath the sun. Winged and triumphant, he had taken no thought of the morrow. He had been naked, and he had no name.
Johnny kept telling himself that he had had one of his vivid dreams, and now he was waking up from it, and everything was all right. But he kept remembering new details. A sequence of sundrenched images hovered in his mind and refused to be dispelled.
He had a memory of swimming on still waters toward a wooded shore in the region where lake and river met. Of a sleeping in bright sunlight. Of an awakening on a bed of grass. Of a nude form reclined upon his own. Of mouths meeting in more and more perilous kisses. Of a young woman, garmentless, seen running toward an unguessed place. Of a pursuit and of an overtaking. And of a tree with a slender trunk and a shapely roof of foliage from which there sifted a rain of yellow pollen. And it had been as though the two beneath the tree, seizing the supple trunk, had shaken down (at first languorously and then more and more violently) forbidden fruit.
Fully awake, Johnny didn’t want to get up. He himself had a name known and respected. He didn’t want to have any responsibility for a nameless scamp who had acted as though time and causality didn’t exist.
Nevertheless, when the naked ones of that memory had put on their clothes, they had put their names back on too. They were called Johnny Shawnessy and Susanna Drake. They had ridden back from Paradise Lake into Freehaven and had begun to look at each other with thoughtful looks. They were strangers again.
A few weeks before, Johnny Shawnessy had been the most innocent young man in Raintree County. Now he was the most guilty. In the space of a few weeks he had done incredible things. He had told a girl that he loved her and had promptly gone swimming with her naked in the river. Two weeks later he had gone with another girl, an almost total stranger, to a place where he had never been before, and he and she had performed the act of love.
It was useless to point out that by a freak of fate, which was by no means entirely his fault, he had been drunk the second time on whiskey and hard cider. That was merely another crime.
Apparently he had a fatal talent for picking out girls who liked to take off their clothes by lonely waters.
The thing that happened to him at Paradise Lake on the Fourth of July hadn’t seemed evil at the time. Indeed, while he was in full career, he had felt like the Hero of the County, life’s young American, who had discovered beauty by secret waters. He would no more have plucked himself from that terrific happening than he would have plucked himself out of existence. The feeling of guilt came afterwards when he returned to the familiar part of the County and the effects of the cider wore off. Guilt had not been in the act itself. It was superimposed upon the immutable act, as the map of Raintree County was superimposed upon the immutable earth.
He felt that he had always participated in two worlds. One was the guiltless earth of the river of desire, the earth big with seed, the earth of fruit and flower. The other was the world of memory and sadness, guilt and duty, loyalty and ideas. The two worlds were not antithetical. They were flesh and form, thing and thought, river and map, desire and love. Now the second world had reclaimed him with a vengeance, and he was sincerely penitent.
But his sense of guilt was not religious. If a huge voice had thundered down at him from the summer sky and had said, John Wickliff Shawnessy, thou hast lain with a woman named Susanna Drake for thine own lewd pleasure. Why hast thou done this evil thing, my son? Johnny would have been impressed, of course, but he wouldn’t have had any strong sense of guilt. His answer would have been respectful, something like, I’m awfully sorry, Sir. I just drank too much cider and made a slip. I beg Your forgiveness, Sir.
This would be easy. God was impersonal. But Johnny couldn’t even imagine a conversation that he might hold with his mother on such a subject. The mere thought of it made him want to climb into a hole and die.
—A great man, Johnny, is a man who does good for other people.
As an innocent child he had understood what Ellen Shawnessy expected of him—to be a good man, to be pure, to combat human suffering and wickedness. During his whole memory of his mother, she had been an angel of purity and good hope, standing at the gates of life and death, secure in the age-old faith that she and T. D. had conferred upon their last child and emphasized by the name they had given him. In his mother’s Raintree County, there was no official recognition of the strong desire by which life cunningly furthered itself. There was propagation—but not pleasure. There was love—but not the act of love. Eros and his flametipped arrow had abdicated in favor of Jesus and the cross.
And yet Ellen Shawnessy’s most gifted child, John Wickliff, bearing the name of the great reformer and Bible translator like a trumpet-peal of righteousness, had done the Unpardonable Thing. For pleasure, he had stripped the garment of shame from the body of beauty, for pleasure and pastime of his body, had clasped the forbidden whiteness of a young woman in his arms. This he had done in the formrevealing brightness of a July afternoon. Under the circumstances, God, whom T. D. and Ellen were always locating in the sky directly over Raintree County, couldn’t have had any trouble seeing the trespass. Johnny might as well have done it on the court house lawn for all the world to see.
The guilt was peculiarly aggravated by the fact that he had committed this trespass with a young woman whom he scarcely knew, an alien from beyond the County. If he had fallen from the path of righteousness with someone like Nell Gaither, a marriage could be quickly gotten up and the fault condoned by official sanction. Johnny had often heard T. D. say,
�
��High time them youngsters got married.
The truth was that something about the climate of Raintree County or the resilience of its haystacks encouraged the nuptial embrace before the nuptials. And in such cases, the County was inclined to be smilingly tolerant.
—Guess they just couldn’t wait, was a common expression when a seven-months’ baby had nine months’ fingernails.
But there was nothing to condone what Johnny Shawnessy had done. The only rueful satisfaction that he could derive from his sin was that it had the quality of genius about it. An ordinary sinner couldn’t have conceived and carried out such a brilliantly successful piece of self-damnation.
For nearly two weeks, Johnny holed up at the Home Place. Then, he received two letters at about the same time. The first said:
Dear Johnny,
I take my pen in hand and seat myself to say that I am as well as a distressed heart will let me be. Johnny, why haven’t you come to see me again? Since a certain afternoon, I have thought about you a great deal. I’ll be at home for you next Saturday afternoon, if you care to renew an acquaintance that has already meant more to me, Johnny, than it would be modest in me to say. Johnny, I have been worried and unhappy at not seeing you again. Please come if you can.
Yours trustingly,
SUSANNA
The other letter said: Dear Johnny,
Dear Johnny,
I take my pen in hand and seat myself to write you something that a more discreet, but, alas! less wounded heart would not disclose. Johnny, I have paid dearly for my foolish pride since I wrote you a certain note last spring. If I have hurt you, please forgive me, and believe, Johnny, that to see you again would gladden the grieving heart of
Your disconsolate
NELL
All over the County the rain was falling, as he drove through Freehaven to call on Susanna Drake. The rain came down, big drops vertical in dead air, and ran in rivulets on the sunhardened earth. He thought of all the seeds that lay wet in their tombs, beginning to feel an impulse stirring in hard rinds. The rain came as a kind of relief. It was a washing if not a purification.
Susanna’s house on its high lawn gleamed palely under vast, rainy skies. Green branches of trees near-by dripped noisily against it. The gutters of the high roof spouted gray water. The house there on its lofty lawn was a shell of riddles, inscrutable against the veined and hovering skies. As he sat a moment bleakly in the raindrenched buggy looking up at it, a strong excitement possessed him. What waited up the stone steps, in the hollow rooms of the house beyond the five front windows to catch the soul of Johnny Shawnessy in a satin snare?
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