At the door knocking, he had an involuntary image of himself entering a room whose walls were scarved with scarlet; a naked woman whose olive body curved with sleek muscles pounced on him with catlike fury and thrust him upon a couch while her deeplipped mouth purred and stung his face with savage kisses and her black hair lashed his shoulders. He visualized himself as sturdily resisting this assault in the name of his late—and lamented—innocence.
When Susanna’s face appeared at the glass doorpane, it was the eyes that dominated the face, those soft childlike eyes with their violet veins, which could be, he knew, all misty with passion. The black hair was now pulled back and chastely bound to show the ears and emphasize the forehead. The lips had their perpetual pout, of course, but suggesting now the wistful child rather than the barbarous little voluptuary who had drunk his kisses with such inexhaustible appetite on the shore of Lake Paradise.
The door opened.
—Hello, Johnny.
The girl in the doorway was chastely attired in black with just a few scarlet ribbons at the neck and shoulders. She held out her hand with a gracious ladylike gesture, and he bowed stiffly into the house.
—Won’t you sit down, Johnny, and I’ll have the maid bring tea.
A silent little Negress brought tea, while Johnny sat in a deep chair. Demurely lovely, Susanna poured two cups.
—You like tea, don’t you, Johnny?
—I hardly ever have it, Johnny said.
—You’ll love it, she said.
The expression disturbed him. She had said the same thing on the shores of Lake Paradise, and he had wondered about it ever since, though at the time he hadn’t stopped to consider what it implied. Since then he had thought more calmly of it, wondering at the history of amorous pastime in which this elegant figure in the black dress must have participated. Perhaps he, Johnny Shawnessy of Raintree County, had merely contributed the latest chapter in a legend with the tantalizing title You’ll Love It.
He heard the same phrase many more times that afternoon, applied to a variety of things that were not his things, most of them things Southern, from New Orleans architecture to steamboat excursions on the Mississippi River. The phrase was clearly habitual with her; and indeed it did disclose a vivid, lush, romantic world to Johnny, a world he had always wanted to explore. Susanna dominated the conversation, and it soon appeared to Johnny that only thus was conversation between them possible. Her talk was an incessant self-exposure, candid, vivid, artless—yet somehow never giving a satisfactory explanation of anything. No girl in Raintree County, he was sure, had ever talked as Susanna Drake did that afternoon.
Sometimes he was charmed by her romantic views of life and love and, again, shocked by crudities of speech and anecdote, as when she got off on a whole repertoire of stories intended to show that the Negro was not a human being and that there was no use to talk of emancipating him, people who had any other view were just black abolitionists with Negro wives, and hussies like Harriet Beecher Stowe who didn’t know a thing about the good old South, you had only to come down there and you would just love it. Some of the most offensive stories concerning black people were told in the presence of the Negro girl who carried the tea service in and out. To Johnny this was an inexcusable breach of good taste, and he blushed for it, but it was clear to him that Susanna didn’t regard the Negro girl as a person.
She seemed to have a peculiar relish for sexual atrocities,
—The good Nigroes are just like children, she said. But if they once got equality ideas, we would all be raped in our beds. They’re just like beasts in the jungle. Johnny, I could tell you stories about Nigroes assaulting white women that would make your hair stand up. Why, a few years ago a girl in one of the finest families in New Orleans was out riding in a buggy, and she was attacked by a big runaway Nigro, he made her get out of the buggy, and he tore all her clothes off, and she had to submit to him to save her life. And finally he let her go, and the poor thing drove back into town naked.
Johnny winced and put his head down at this torrent of invective against the immorality of the Negro, creature of the jungle and the Great Swamp. All the time he was remembering how he and Susanna Drake had rediscovered the Great Swamp in the middle of Raintree County, steaming in the sunlight.
A more charming manifestation of Susanna’s absorption in herself was the album of pictures that she brought out toward the end of the afternoon.
—O, here’s the picture taken the day I met you, he said, opening it.
—No, she said, that’s another one.
It turned out that the album was full of pictures of Susanna in romantic attitudes like the one in which he had found her in the Freehaven studio. Usually her black hair was unloosened and her body was buried in a cloudy white robe.
Enclosed in the album separately was a daguerreotype of a house, a Southern mansion pillared and stately with a corniced roof. Standing on the porch were three people, a bearded man, a woman, and a little girl. Behind them, half in shadow, was a tall, imperially lovely woman.
—That’s my mother and father, Susanna said, and there’s me. And there’s Henrietta. She was a mulatto, but you couldn’t tell it to look at her, could you?
—No, Johnny said, barely able to distinguish the faces of the picture because of the fading light in the parlor.
—We lived right by the Mississippi River, Susanna said. That house burned.
She made her habitual gesture, touching her throat with her left hand.
—That’s how I got my scar, she said.
Her voice was low and thrilling and her childlike eyes looked down wistfully at Johnny as she bent over his shoulder.
He was remembering the scar then—how he had awakened on the shore of Lake Paradise and had seen the scar, the whole of it, six inches long, beginning at the base of her neck and making a curious, curving pattern through her olive flesh until it stopped just at the roots of her left breast, as though it shrank from disfiguring anything so exquisitely formed. It was not a deep scar, and there were times when it was hardly visible. There were times too, when the blood beat it crimson, and it glowed and throbbed on the olive smoothness of her body, which had no other blemish.
She had spoken of it then, too, saying simply,
—I hope you don’t mind my scar, Johnny.
She had pronounced the words exactly as a woman of good breeding might refer with quiet pride to a costly necklace.
Remembering what had followed her reference to the scar that other time, Johnny blushed.
—I’ve got to go now, Susanna, he said.
—I’ll show you to the door, she said, her voice pensive, her face turned away and lost in shadow.
And so he left the tall house south of the Square. Except for the mention of the scar, no other reference had been made to the wanton encounter on the shores of Lake Paradise. Nor had any word been said either to release him or to bind him more closely to this mysterious girl. He strongly suspected—indeed almost hoped—that he wasn’t the first to explore her tawny nudity. Johnny wished he could confide his trespass to his erstwhile mentor and get a frank opinion from the Perfessor, who shared with Johnny precise knowledge of a secret anatomical detail. Had that perceptive young man also discovered a pollendropping tree on the shores of Lake Paradise, and had he too made unexpected forays below the Mason and Dixon Line? But Johnny remembered that the Perfessor, who was nothing if not exact in matters of fact, had in describing the scar prolonged it beyond its actual range. Perhaps he was not so deeply seen in this subject as Johnny Shawnessy after all.
So Johnny went on home through the still falling rain. He was a prisoner now in his own beloved earth of Raintree County. All these corridors through sheets of rain led to and from the person of a darkhaired girl whose body had a hidden scarlet mark. Try as he might, he couldn’t fathom her secret. A talented little voluptuary—yes—but she had also been a little girl who once lived in a house beside a river. And in spite of her probable experience, he wa
s convinced that her passion for him had been genuine. It had been tender and undissuadable that afternoon at Lake Paradise; both he and she had been the victims of it and of his own triumphant manhood. She too had fallen—it had been a mutual seduction, and he couldn’t force from his mind the feeling that the woman who had taken the first young giving of his love had a powerful, enduring claim upon him.
Meanwhile, he took no action on Nell Gaither’s note. But the strangest part of his situation was that his passion for Nell had been intensified by all that had happened. What he had begun with her when they swam together in the Shawmucky had been meant to reach its consummation at the lake. It was a damnable piece of luck that somehow, in the moment of discovering the lake, his true beloved had changed her name and the color of her hair, and instead of an imprint on one of Raintree County’s most beautiful twin mounds, there had been a scar like a scarlet letter.
At times, he even indulged the guilty dream of repeating with Nell what he had done with Susanna. He thought of going to the lake and seeking out with Nell the same spot beneath the same tree. He was not at all sure that he could find his way to it, but he played with the fancy that the tree he had only vaguely seen (what with the cider and his amorous excitement) was the celebrated Raintree. At the time it had seemed to him dimly that he had thrust his way to the secret heart of life. And but for a slight error induced by Fate, it would have been so. But now such fancies only added to his sick, unhappy feeling that by one willful act he had cut himself off forever from all the good things of life in Raintree County.
During the next few days, he simply waited for something to happen. He lost all appetite for his usual pursuits. He stayed away from the County Seat. He sent nothing to the newspapers. He did, however, get hold of both the Clarion and the Enquirer every week. Each time he picked up a copy of the papers, his hands trembled, and his heart beat furiously. Perhaps in this paper he would find the article that told his crime to everyone. He read each paper avidly before any other member of the family got hold of it, devouring column after column and finishing with a feeling of exhaustion and relief, which promptly began to dissolve as he thought of the next issue of the paper, in which the fateful article might really appear and brand him for what he was.
The news in general was not important that summer. The country was apathetic on the great issue of the day. No one seemed to care very much what was to be done about the slaves. Editorials complained a little of the speeches of Alexander Stephens, Jefferson Davis, and other important Southerners, who made it manifest that the South was acquiring a unified point of view on the question of slavery and the Union. There was little doubt that the African slave trade would be renewed and that the South’s peculiar institution would continue to expand and require more and more political power and land for its furtherance. But in the heat and stillness of the summer of 1859, the issue was buried in the editorial pages, and nothing indicated that the Republican Party would find the leadership necessary to overthrow the immoral concessions of the Dred Scott Decision and the compromise legislation, or that the South would remain content with them.
In fact, the Republic was deceptively calm, and instead of political explosions as the election of 1860 approached, people concerned themselves with fashions in dress, the Daniel Sickles Murder Trial, rape cases, railroad accidents. The leading news event was the day-by-day account of how a Frenchman named Blondin, balancing himself with a great pole, walked on a tightrope over the chasm of Niagara Falls, defying death again and again in more and more ingenious ways to the shocked delight of thousands of Americans.
Here was danger that could be overcome by skill and determination. But Johnny Shawnessy was up against something that courage couldn’t control. For the first time in his life, he had become the fool of time and its blind processes. There was no person he could surpass, no work he could do, no barrier he could leap. He could only wait. This young agrarian had planted some seed, and after that, it was all a question of time and the earth.
About three weeks after the Fourth, the absence of news from the Upper Shawmucky aroused a comment. Johnny read the following note in the Clarion:
GREAT MYSTERY!!!
WHERE IS SETH?
Well, we don’t hear anything these days emanating from a certain sportive individual who used to contribute to the columns of the Enquirer. What has happened to Seth? All his friends and admirers are genuinely alarmed. Both of them admit that they haven’t seen or heard anything of Seth since the famous footrace last Fourth of July. Some say he kept right on running, fell into the Shawmucky River, and was swallowed by the mythical beast, which never forgave Seth for the misrepresentations made about it in the Enquirer a few years ago. If so, we hope Seth didn’t stick in the monster’s craw. He always did in ours.
DAN POPULUS
At about this time, Johnny made another visit to the tall house south of the Square.
When he knocked at the door, a plain, workworn woman with a cleaning rag in her hand opened.
—Hello, Johnny said. Is Miss Drake in?
—No, she’s gone, the woman said.
—When’ll she be in?
—She won’t be in. She’s gone back South, the woman said.
—You mean she’s left town?
—Yeh, she left all of a sudden last Tuesday.
—You—you live here now?
—I’m just to keep the place up for her, the woman said.
—You—you don’t know why she left?
—I don’t know anything about it, the woman said. But I was here to close up when she left. She and them nigger girls and all the trunks went out a here on three wagons.
—Did she say when she’d be back?
—She said it might be a year or two. I’m to come in every month and dust the place and check up on it. It’s a mighty queer house. You ever see it inside?
—No, not especially, Johnny said. Thanks a lot.
He walked back to the Square, where he hadn’t been since the Fourth of July. He wanted to see faces. He wanted to shake people by the hand. He wanted to be able to say, Look, it’s me, Johnny Shawnessy. He that was dead has risen.
He found Garwood Jones in front of the Saloon. He went up and violently shook Garwood’s hand.
—What the hell’s the matter? Garwood said.
—Nothing, Johnny said. I’m just glad to see you, that’s all.
—I don’t know why, Garwood said. I’ve been giving you one hell of a going over lately. Don’t you ever read the newspapers?
—O, that? Johnny said. They were sweet articles, all of them, Garwood. Really sweet—like you.
—What in the hell’s come over you? You must be saving up something big.
—I’m darn glad to see you again, Garwood. That’s all. I really am.
Johnny stood pumping Garwood’s hand and hitting him on the back.
—By God, I think he means it, Garwood said several times.
The next issue of the Free Enquirer carried the following intelligence from the Upper Shawmucky:
SETH IS BACK
Rejoice, ye virgins, o, make sport, ye maids.
Bid Error reinvest his dirty den.
Once more a genial shadow haunts the glades:
Lo! Seth is vocal on his hill again!
Greetings one and all! Your correspondent is glad to report that after a brief sojourn in foreign parts, once more the amiable Mr. Twigs adorns with the tenuous architecture of his frame the shades and shallows of the Upper Shawmucky.
We have been titillated by the several speculations that have come to our ears purporting to explain the disappearance of this kindly bumpkin, and we are frankly at a loss to say exactly what happened to him. Some say that while snoozing in a hedgerow one day, he was discovered by a nearsighted farmer, who mistaking Seth for a scarecrow, tied him to a post, where he dangled helplessly until blown down by the recent storms. Others insist that his well-known weakness for the opposite sex caused him to follow an attractive widow al
l the way out to California, where, when he at last plucked up nerve enough to make his proposal, the widow replied in the following vein, to wit: that if she were the clinging vine type, she would not know where to find a better beanpole, but that she was more than half persuaded it was not her person so much as her purse the amiable Seth was after, and that she would be willing, if necessary, to dispense all the contents of the second to prevent him from obtaining possession of the first; that she had heard much of the romantic prowess of the gamesome sparrow, but was not under the impression that any poet had composed odes to the amatorial proficiencies of the longshanked crane; and finally that it was better in the whole scheme of things that feckless sorrow should devastate one matronly bosom in California than that it should ravage twenty virginal ones in Raintree County. Acknowledging the cogency of this last argument, it is reported, Seth returned once more to his native haunts.
We cannot in all conscience pretend to be a friend to Mr. Rube Shucks, as though not overly finicky in our tastes we draw some lines, but the sentiment of pity which universally animates the human breast bids us warn him that Seth looks much refreshed, and woe to him who in his absence has taken liberties with the name of Twigs.
WILL WESTWARD
It now seemed to Johnny that he had passed safely through the most dangerous trial that life could offer. He had dreamed a dream of guilt and had awakened to find that it was only a dream. The days and weeks slipped past. By October, hearing no more of Susanna Drake, he became convinced that he had been needlessly alarmed from the beginning. He began even to lose his feeling of uneasiness in the presence of his mother. He now looked back with a certain detachment on the superb young man who in the space of two weeks in early summer had accomplished such notable feats. After a wobbly start, he took up again the unfinished work of becoming life’s American, the completely affirmative man, and plunged headlong into plans for composing an epic poem based on American History. A lingering anxiety kept him from making up right away with Nell Gaither, and he was a little nervous when he called for the family mail. But Time, which had been his enemy for a while, was becoming his friend again. And he was beginning to recall with more envy than guilt a pollendropping tree beside the lake, and a companion who had waited for him there as if to teach him
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