Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  The father was a tall, lanky, bearded man, gentle and distinguished in appearance. The mother appeared to be a brunette, her face oval, her body fattish, her eyes distrustful, her mouth twisted. The little girl was a lovely, eager child, her face all eyes and mouth, as she clutched her doll with one hand and held her father’s hand with the other.

  Here was a fragment from the lost days of a little girl—innocent, scarless days, bathed in a brown light of arrested time. A secret lurked here in pools of shadow, like the lovely mulatto woman standing on the porch.

  —Johnny!

  He sprang up just in time to catch Susanna’s half-naked body as she fled across the room in a white nightdress.

  —O, Johnny! she said, don’t leave me. I’ve been sick.

  She was sobbing. It was no ordinary sobbing fit: it lasted a good hour by the clock. She clung to his neck, and when he sat down, she sat on his lap and wept on his coat and face. It was a fit of passion as violent in its way—and as seemingly authentic—as the one at Lake Paradise. Perhaps it was intended to have the same climax, for Susanna kept trying to press her mouth against his between fits of sobbing. But the superb young god of July had given place to a young man with gloomy November scruples. Johnny was terrified to think that he had caused a woman to weep in this way, and he found himself muttering reassuring affirmatives. When at last she seemed a little quieted, he started to say,

  —But why didn’t you let me know sooner, Susanna? Now it’s——

  At this point, the sobbing broke out afresh and with it an incoherent tide of explanation. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him, she had tried to forget him, she had been very sick and unhappy, mysterious people—her own relatives and friends—had all turned against her in New Orleans, there had been shameful plots to get her property and her good name away from her, he had no idea what she had been through.

  It was another half-hour before she subsided again, lying quiet in his arms with her head on his shoulder, like a heartbroken child, soothed but occasionally catching her breath and ready to break out afresh. He decided that the best thing he could do was to get away, if he could, and talk with her when she was calmer.

  —I want a little time, he said, to think things out. I’ll come back and see you again, Susanna.

  The figure in his arms didn’t stir, but continued to cling to him. Brusquely decisive, he stood up and lifted her to her feet. She offered no resistance, passively allowing him to use her as he pleased. Her eyes were faraway, mournful, pensive.

  —I’ll come back and see you again, Susanna.

  She didn’t say anything. He moved indecisively toward the door as she stood where he had set her, a picture of forlorn resignation. He felt ashamed of himself.

  —Good-by, he said. And try not to worry. Things will work out all right.

  She didn’t say anything but threw herself down as if collapsing on the divan, and lay there, silent, with her face down, and hidden by the tumultuous black hair. In falling, the nightdress somehow was pulled up to show her bare thighs. Her feet were pointed to prolong the olive flowing length of her legs. Even in his distress, Johnny couldn’t help noticing how beautifully formed she was. It seemed a little curious that no unsightly bulge marred the slenderness of Susanna’s waist.

  —Good-by, he said.

  The figure on the couch merely drew a long, quavering breath. He went to the door, opened it, and started down the steps. He felt like running, but he took his time until he reached the street. There was no sound from the tall house. He turned his back on it and began to walk away. He turned a corner and drew a deep breath. He must have been holding his breath, for he was panting. He felt as though someone had been slapping his face.

  He stopped in town for his mail. There was a letter for him from New York.

  Dear John,

  I am personally writing to the proper governmental authority requesting that a bronze medal be struck to commemorate your extraordinary achievement. It shall be engraved with the image of Venus bestowing a garland on the kneeling hero, the circular inscription to read:

  Uno fulmine, terram perturbavit.

  Seriously, my boy, I’m sorry this happened to you, and especially with the female in question. Under the circumstances, I feel I should reply to your highly personal query, if it will set your mind at ease. Yes, I saw that mysterious scar under the following auspices: You will recall that I was acting as duenna to a party of young people at that peculiar little pond in the middle of the County. Everyone was partaking freely of a poisonous compound supplied by Garwood Jones, and after a while I found myself in the water with Miss Drake. The lady is a perfect little hellcat when liquored up—but why tell you! Though I am but an indifferent swimmer, she and I arrived on the far shore, where we amused ourselves by frolicking in the water. The lady swims like a fish and insisted upon ducking me several times and goddam near drowning me. The last time she pushed me under (squealing with lust) I took a good firm purchase on her bathing costume and ripped it open, whereupon I got a peek at Elysium. I guess I was doing the dress rehearsal for your performance.

  Don’t believe any other version you may hear of this incident.

  As for Miss Drake, I think she’s morally, emotionally, and politically problematical—to say the least. I have even darker suspicions. At any rate, boy, don’t imagine that you seduced anybody. The seduction, if any, was strictly bilateral. My own impression is that you were the only virgin in that brawl.

  Get out of it any way you can. Maybe a money settlement would do the trick, but I doubt it—she seems to have plenty of money.

  Why are you so perplexed as to her motives? From among the various candidates for the honor of legitimizing the bulge, she elected you—understandably.

  Maybe you could talk her into switching her attentions to someone else. By the way, do you think Garwood’s been in there?

  Yes, I’m in New York beating up news for the Dial. Would you care to have me run an item on your accomplishment? People are getting tired of balloonists and funambulists, and maybe a series on the Hoosier Hotshot (He only fars once, folks!) would titillate the jaded sensibilities of the polloi.

  Apropos, New York is a nice place to get lost in. Better join me there if things get too hot in Raintree County. I firmly believe that the age of prophets and martyrs is over. Better be live Judas than dead Jesus.

  Well, think I’ll run along and get Under the Raintree myself. Her name is Agnes, and she stands five ten in her bare feet.

  Fraternally yours,

  JERUSALEM WEBSTER STILES

  Johnny walked down to the Saloon. It was late, but Cash Carney was still standing in front talking with the boys. Johnny hadn’t seen him for two weeks. He gave him the sign, and Cash walked over. The two of them went down a sidestreet.

  —She’s back, Johnny said.

  —How’s she look?

  —You wouldn’t know it.

  He told Cash about his reunion with Susanna.

  —Now, look, John, Cash said, I’ve given this a lot of time and thought. I’ve personally milked Garwood for everything I could find out. I got some names of some folks down there to write to. I’ve wrote some letters and received some replies. The more I see of this thing, the more I don’t like it.

  —I hope you conducted all this in secret.

  Cash was lighting a cigar.

  —Naturally, John! Of course, Garwood is a smart—puff, puff—bastard, and I think he smelled a mouse.

  He exhaled a quantity of smoke.

  —First I tried to draw Garwood out to find out how far he went with the girl himself. He wouldn’t tell me a thing. Kept swatting me on the back and saying, Hell, I wouldn’t do a thing like that to my own niece, Ha, Ha. There are laws against that, son, Ha, Ha. But I dug up a lot of dirt about the girl. She’s only twenty-two years old, but she’s been a wild one for years. According to Garwood, she ran off with her cousin’s husband a year ago. They disappeared completely, and the rumor in New Orleans had it they’d run off
to Jamaica. He come back a month or two later, very contrite, and Susanna come up here for the scandal to blow over. That was when we first saw her last spring. It seems that when she went back there this summer, people forgave her out of curiosity. She went to a lot of balls and parties and was seen everywhere with a lot of different men and there were rumors of engagements and so on, but nothing come of it. Nobody seems to know down there why she come back up here.

  —What can I do?

  —Just tell her you have no intention of being the sucker in this situation. Tell her she can’t prove anything anyway, and the best thing she can do is to go back to her own people and try to catch someone back there.

  Johnny felt a lump of sickness forming in his stomach and rising in his throat.

  —I couldn’t do it, Cash.

  —I’ll do it for you, Cash said. I’ll go talk with her.

  —I’d rather you’d not, Johnny said. Wait till you hear from me.

  They talked some more, but to no purpose.

  When he drove back home, he didn’t know what he would do. In the far field of the Home Place under dripping skies, the rock lay, immutable and lonely. And the thought came over him that only the rock and the gray earth were lasting and that the tortured world of conscience, guilt, and consequence in which he lived was really nothing but a kind of mist that passed as seasons did over the immutable and mournful earth.

  Meanwhile, the rock lay there lonely at the verge of his ancestral earth; and he didn’t know it then, but in a sense it was waiting for him to discover it.

  Only a few days later, he was driving his mother home from Freehaven, where he had arranged to meet her after some work at the Free Enquirer office. As they drove out of town on the old road east, he noticed that she hadn’t said anything but was sitting with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes looking down the road. Ordinarily Ellen would have detailed all the adventures and encounters of the morning in a girlish, ungrammatical narrative. He gave her a quick slantwise glance. Her eyes were hurt, puzzled. She looked aging and pathetic. Her fussy old bonnet was tied on askew, her dark coarse hair had fallen in wisps and strings down her forehead and around her cheeks.

  He drove gloomily in silence, waiting. At last, she said,

  —Johnny, I want to talk with you about something.

  In that one moment, the question was settled forever. He knew then that he would marry Susanna Drake. Thus only could he still the great voice of conscience, which was the voice of Raintree County.

  —Yes, Mamma.

  —I got a letter from someone today trying to tell me something that I hope isn’t true. I got it right here.

  She handed him a short note written in an unfamiliar scrawl, huge, childish letters that looked forged. ‘Dear Mrs. Shawnessy,’ it began, ‘I think you should know that your son John . . .’ It was signed, ‘From a Well-meaning Friend.’ It was explicit, accurate, completely damning.

  —That isn’t true, is it, Johnny?

  A bitter emotion welled up in him. He wanted to be able to tell his mother that somehow he hadn’t been disloyal to her belief in him, that he was still at heart the virtuous and fortunate Johnny, that there was still possible for him that great, good life to which long ago he had pledged himself on the breast of the land. But as he was aware of her sitting there, waiting, a woman no longer young, her face seamed with the passing of the years, her body clothed in the shapeless mother’s garb of the County, when he thought of the shattered image in her heart, he realized that there could be no real explanation or communion between himself and her. He understood her Raintree County, but she could never understand his. She could never understand the young man’s omnivorous appetite for life. To her, the young man’s pagan world of beauty and desire, which no doubt God had intended for the perpetuation of life, would seem only vulgarity and lewdness.

  Johnny Shawnessy bled helplessly in the old tragedy of the son’s rebellion and couldn’t say a word. But his silence was itself an answer.

  —If it’s true, Johnny, please tell me so. I want to know.

  Now his emotion became so strong that he had to defend himself from it.

  —It’s none of your business, Mamma. Please stay out of it.

  The words were said the only way they could be, short and bitter.

  What she said after that and what he said were merely the truncated mouthings of the Oedipean agony. During the last halfmile of the road from Freehaven to the Home Place, mother and son drove in a shocked silence, which grew more and more terrible. When at last they reached the Home Place and he had driven the buggy up the drive, he wanted nothing more than to get out and run. In fact, he did get out and started walking swiftly across the land, striking off through the South Field as if he had a definite place to go. He felt as if he must get away from the Home Place and from his mother forever if he was to achieve manhood and independence. As he reached the curve of the earth, he heard the train passing on its way behind the woods toward the great bend of the river. It made its disconsolate wail of parting and farewell; the naked little engine and one passenger car were cleanly visible through the thinning foliage of the oak forest. It was evening. Leaves were falling in the woods as he approached the limit of the land.

  —Johnny!

  He turned. Ellen Shawnessy was coming down the long slow hill, an erect small person picking her way, halfrunning to catch up with him. He knew then that she was coming because she feared that in his grief and anger he might do himself some injury.

  He had reached the rock that lay solid, faintly tinged with red just short of the railfence. He stopped and bent his head against it and said,

  —Please go away, Mamma. I’m all right.

  —I just want you to know, Johnny, that anything I’ve done or said was because I love you. If I done anything wrong, tell me what it was. I know that whatever you do’ll be the right thing.

  —Please go away, Mamma.

  He hid his face against the rock. He was crying. He couldn’t control the violent sobs that shook him. He hadn’t cried since he was a child, but now he cried and didn’t see how he could get hold of himself again.

  After a while Ellen had gone back across the land, and it was night. The tears were all gone out of him then, the river of his being had dwindled to its source, the waters had retreated into distant and deep caverns. He stood a long time yet there at the limit of the land, leaning on the rock, and wondering how it was that he had come to be upon this land in the fading evening of the years beside a rock that knew no tears or time or laughter, love or passion or regret. And then he felt deeply stilled and strengthened, and he felt that he could never be hurt again by the world’s opinion. Then he turned and walked back across the field

  TOWARD THE YELLOW WINDOWS OF THE HOME PLACE

  BECAUSE HE KNEW THAT THERE

  WAS

  —NOWHERE ELSE TO GO, the Perfessor was saying. That’s why they came to America. This nation is the love-child of History. Dame Clio bore the others of a paternity known and acknowledged, but America was a lusty by-blow.

  —There’s a good deal to be said for the bastards of men or of nations, the Senator said. The bar sinister is a badge of vitality.

  —All life is casually begot, the Perfessor said, but the bastard birth is less casual than the other kind. A certain amount of resolution goes into the fathering of your bastard. Believe me, as Willie Shakespeare says, some woman has to screw her courage to the sticking place—and vice versa.

  The Perfessor leaned over and, using the tip of his malacca cane, began to draw lines in a patch of dusty earth between the store and the sidewalk.

  —Behold the diagram of Life! he said. At the base of the diagram, there’s an immense swamplike womb, and from this rises a giant tree, the umbilicus, through which saplike pours for aeons the stuff of life. Then dangling from this tree in its maturity would be a tiny seedpod, your post-natal individual, whose separation from the parent tree is, biologically speaking, a brief period. Actually we so-ca
lled mature individuals are only the pods of the tree, quaintly contrived to seduce one another so that the precious impulse that we carry, the immortal seed, may again and again be shaken back into the swamp of life.

  The Senator got up and shook hands with a large lady from Indianapolis. He bowed, waggled his head, fondled her hand.

  —There, said the Perfessor, the seedpod is shaking on its invisible tree. By a million winds of chance, the seed is sprinkled back into the womb of humanity, and the process goes on. Out of this swamplike womb grows the terrific tangle of the family trees and swinging briefly from some branches thereof are those little flowers of life, Jerusalem W. Stiles, John W. Shawnessy, and that big fulsome flower, Garwood B. Jones, the Senator from Indiana.

  —Pure Darwinism, Professor. Where is History in this view? What is the life of a nation? And who—or rather what—is God?

  —These questions I will leave to you, said the Perfessor.

  —You were talking about genealogy, boys, the Senator said, sitting down again. I’ve been looking back into the family past of the Raintree County Joneses in connection with my forthcoming little opus. I’m proud to say that there isn’t an earl or a duke in the family. Just a bunch of barefoot farmers and horsethieves. I recently got a letter from a fourflusher offering to hunt up a suitable coat of arms for me. I told the skunk to go ahead and see what he could find. What would you suggest for a heraldic device, Professor?

  The Perfessor thought for a while.

  —An ass ascendant and about to bray, he said.

  —I have one for you, Professor, Mr. Shawnessy said.

  —And what’s that?

  —A serpent pendent from a branch of bay.

  —And for you, John, the Perfessor said, how about: A Raintree rampant in a field of hay.

  Golden tree, never labelled by arborealists, I look far down from one of your topmost swinging branches to the shadowy trunk. Here is a good tree, tawny with shocks of shaken flowers, the Shawnessy Tree, spreading on the amorous air of summer the seedburst of its golden bloom. Here is a rare seed, brought overseas in old migrations. Beware, ye virgins! It was made for deep plantings. It will spring in your dark wombs with a fierce leaping, blindly hunting the channels of the future.