Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  —Surprise! Surprise!

  The house was full of people. Most of them were friends, but some were people Johnny had never seen. Someone was pounding the piano in the parlor while couples sat on the stair and sang or danced in the hall. Johnny could even hear sounds of merriment from upstairs. He walked into the parlor.

  —Well, I’ll be hornswoggled! Look who’s here! jocundly boomed a familiar voice.

  Garwood Jones was in the front room by the piano, a drink in his hand and one arm lovingly embracing Susanna, who giggled shyly.

  Johnny stood blinking, trying to keep from looking like a man who had just come home late at night to find more people than he expected in his bed.

  Susanna ran over to him and threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. She was in a dark winecolored gown he hadn’t seen before. Her eyes shone, and her cheeks had a hectic flush. Her mouth made little pouts and smiles.

  —It’s a party for you, honey, she said. Uncle Garwood helped me do it.

  —I’m sorry you ever came, chum, Garwood said. We were having fun till now.

  Someone swatted Johnny on the back, and someone shoved a glass into his hand.

  —I mixed the punch myself, John, Garwood said. An old Indian recipe. Pure corn and just the least lettle bit of pure lye.

  Johnny put his worries at the back of his mind and became the life of the party. He danced with all the girls and executed some new Southern steps with Susanna. He had never seen her so innocently lovely. She laughed and danced and drank and prattled at a rate that would have exhausted ten ordinary women. The climax of the party came when she threw her hands up in the air and began to shriek,

  —Hush! Hush! Everybody hush! I have an announcement to make.

  Everybody hushed. Susanna went over to Johnny and took his hand.

  —I want you all to know, she said, that I don’t keep any slaves in this house. That was a wicked article, and, Uncle Garwood, I’m ashamed of you!

  —Don’t mention it, honey, Garwood said, looking surprised but quickly rising to the occasion. I’d slander my own grandma if it’d beat the Republicans at the polls.

  —I have freed both of those girls, Susanna said, and they work for me on wages.

  Bessie and Soona, the two colored girls, standing in the door and obviously a party to this charade, nodded their heads and grinned widely.

  —Hurrah! someone said weakly.

  There was even a little applause. Horribly embarrassed, Johnny tried to get the party started again, but the life had died in it. Pretty soon, people were bowing out of the door. When they were all gone, Susanna held out her arms.

  —Now, she said, you see how much I love you, Johnny.

  —My dear child! he said, putting his arms around her. Susanna, I——

  She had not yet completed her elaborate gesture of conciliation, but slipping out of his arms ran up the steps.

  —Come and find me in our room, she said. I’ll be waiting for you.

  When he went up later to the front room on the second floor where the bed with the scarlet drapes was still enthroned in lonely splendor, he didn’t know what to expect. Opening the door, he looked apprehensively in. It was even better—or worse—than he had expected.

  In the light of a candle, a naked woman was on her knees beside the bed, with head, arms, and hair flung forward in an attitude of slavish surrender. The flickering candlelight made dusky shadows in the hollows of her back. She had somehow twisted a scarf around her wrists and pinioned them loosely to the bedpost. There was a leather whip lying on the floor beside her.

  —My God! Johnny said involuntarily.

  The figure on the floor sighed and said mournfully,

  —Whip me, honey. I deserve it.

  Johnny picked up the whip and tossed it into a corner of the room.

  —Get up, you crazy little thing, he said.

  —Go on and lash me, she said with savage intensity. You’re too good to me, Johnny, and I don’t deserve it. I wish you’d beat me good and hard.

  Johnny leaned over and pulled her to her feet. She was crying and kissing him at the same time.

  —I’ll do anything for you, honey, she said. I love you so.

  Johnny looked around.

  —There is one thing——

  He jerked the scarlet draperies aside and picking Susanna up, put her not very gently on the bed. He found himself talking between clenched teeth.

  —Let’s start by getting rid of these damned dolls!

  He picked them up one at a time from their precarious perches around the bed, and one at a time he threw them.

  —Take that! he said. And that! And that!

  Their little waxy heads and stuffed bodies smashed against the walls of the room. Each time he threw one, Susanna gave a shriek of laughter and clapped her hands.

  He started picking them up by the armful. They fell around the bed. He kicked them. He plucked the big fat one from the base of the bed and holding him by one leg threw him the length of the room. Finally, he grabbed the burnt doll.

  —You, too, he said, you hideous little devil.

  Susanna gave a particularly loud shriek of excitement as the doll Jeemie rebounded from the wall.

  —Now, Johnny said, at last we can have a little privacy in this bed.

  That was a wild, sweet night, but there never was another that good in the tall house south of the Square. In a way, it seemed to be a turning point. The following morning Susanna was very sick. She moped in bed for several days, and the dolls all had to be collected and put back in place, and Johnny, Bessie, and Soona waited on her hand and foot. But she refused to have a doctor.

  —Maybe you’re going to have a child, Susanna, Johnny said at last.

  —No! she said bitterly. I’d rather die.

  That night, he awoke vaguely alarmed. He sat up suddenly.

  A woman was standing before the single great window of the bedroom. Dressed in a long white vaporous robe, she turned her head from side to side, eyes shut, as if rejecting something. Then her lips parted, her eyes opened and stared in terror at the pale square of the window, she thrust her arms out several times with the palms forward, writhing her body fantastically backward in attitudes of loathing and rejection. She was breathing hoarsely like a person in the grip of strong passion—love or terror.

  Johnny got out of bed and started toward her.

  —Susanna!

  Instantly she put her hands clawlike to the sides of her face and screamed. He caught her wrists, intending to awaken her and lead her back to bed. She fought frantically. She spit and snarled beastlike. Her nails raked his face and chest. He hugged her, pinioned her arms to her sides. She went on twisting and screaming. He shook her violently, and at last she went limp. He carried her to the bed where she lay silent, refusing to say anything, turning her head away as if ashamed.

  —What was the matter? he said, lamely. Bad dreams?

  Instead of answering, she gave a long, shuddering sigh and began to cry. She cried helplessly and loudly like a child. He tried to quiet her, and at last she stopped.

  —Tell me what’s the matter, Susanna. Please.

  —O, she said, it’s—it’s that I’ve been having such awful dreams. I’ve been so afraid. I think—I think maybe it’s because I’m going to have a child, Johnny.

  —Well, why in the world didn’t you tell me? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. When do you think it happened?

  —In August just before we came back, I guess. I’ve known it for quite a while.

  —No use to be alarmed, honey. Having a baby’s the most natural thing in the world.

  It was something he had often heard T. D. say.

  —I suppose so, she said.

  They talked for a while and finally she said,

  —I remember now what I dreamed if you’d like to hear it.

  —Sure. Go ahead.

  —I thought I was back in our old home—you know, before it was burnt. Everything was just the way it used to be, ex
cept that the house was all covered with dust as if it had been closed up for a long time. And it was all silent like a tomb, nobody else in it but me. There was some kind of mystery about it, and I was trying to find out what it was. I went up the main stair to the second floor and walked over to the window and looked out. There was the garden just the way it used to be, but it was getting dark. Then I could see a steamboat on the river coming up to the landing. It was all lit up, and there were hundreds of people on board singing and waving their hands. There were men and women and children, and about half of them Nigroes. They were all happy and excited, and then the steamboat blew two blasts of the whistle and all the little Nigro and white children came running down the gangplank to the levee. I was walking across the garden then toward the river. It was dark, and there was a celebration of some kind, slaves singing and dancing by the river. I turned and went down a lane and through the trees till I reached the little cabin where Henrietta used to stay and where I played doll. I thought I’d left something there that I must be sure to get. I went in the door, and everything was dark. I had a lamp in my hand, and I went over and climbed the ladder to the loft and went over to the window and looked out. Big red fires were burning by the river. Then I thought I was in the bed there or somewhere else, and it was pitchdark, and suddenly I realized that it was a plot to kill me. Somebody was trying to get in at the window and I tried to move, but I couldn’t, and a big black thing covered my face and throat and was trying to strangle me. That was when I woke up.

  On following nights Susanna woke Johnny often to tell him dreams that she had been having. More often than not they were grotesquely distorted incidents of her childhood in the South, before the death of her parents. Little by little, he explored a Southland of her soul, from which a portion of herself had never been withdrawn. In the sleeptime, dark hands carried her back and back, and she was again a little girl in a landscape of dream-illumined rivers, rotting cabins, old plantation homes. Often in her dreams she saw the dug earth yield bodies of women dead in childbirth or children, mothlike, with crusted eyes, whose little pinched faces were faintly negroid.

  As autumn advanced, she awoke often from this tainted land and would cling to him like a scared child and talk solemnly for hours in the night telling him stories of her childhood, as if by these recitals she could discharge at last the whole of a sick burden and be rid of it forever.

  —Mamma was very queer, she told Johnny one night. When I was little, everyone said that Mamma wasn’t well. I know now that she was crazy. I hated her.

  —Was she that way when your father married her?

  —Soon after, I guess. Aunt Prissy said that Mamma made life un-bearable for Daddy. I think her madness must have had something to do with his leaving Louisiana and taking her to Havana. He was there several years, and I was born there.

  —Were you the only child?

  —Mamma had another baby before they left Louisiana. It was a little boy, born dead.

  —Do you remember anything about Havana?

  —I was only four when we came back to the plantation. But I have some memories of when we lived in Havana. That was a happy time. Henrietta had more of the care of me then.

  —Where did Henrietta come from?

  —According to Aunt Prissy, she belonged to a rich man in Havana, and Daddy bought her freedom. She was a famous beauty, the most beautiful woman I ever saw. She was very gentle and sweet, and I loved her much more than I did Mamma. When I was very little in Cuba, we had a house in the country, and Daddy would come and visit sometimes. Henrietta was like a great lady and had her own servants. Those were the happy days.

  —What made your father go back to Louisiana?

  —Daddy was the only son, and when his father died, he went back to take the plantation. That was his great mistake. Everything changed. Not that I wasn’t happy at first. When we first came back, Henrietta lived in a little cabin not far from the main house. She had a girl to wait on her. I used to stay at the cabin with Henrietta most of the time and play dolls there.

  —Didn’t your mother ever take care of you?

  —No, Susanna said. Mamma had a room of her own on the third floor and a special girl to attend to her. Every now and then, Daddy would take me up to see her. In fact, my earliest memories of Mamma are always the same way. She would be sitting in a chair looking at an album of pictures. She was a fat, darkhaired woman, not pretty any longer. When Daddy took me up, he would say, Here’s your mother, Susanna. She would like to see you again. Mamma would smile as if she knew a secret no one else knew and would go on turning the pages of the album, hunting for something all the time. She never touched me, never said anything, never showed any sign that she recognized me or cared anything about me. Once she laughed in a way that frightened me. Your mother isn’t well, Susanna, Daddy would always say when we left the room. That’s why she acts the way she does. Then the bad time came.

  —How was that?

  —It wasn’t very long after we came back that there was some kind of trouble. Aunt Prissy has told me more about it since. It seemed as if Mamma’s relatives made a protest of some kind and wanted to take Mamma away. Aunt Tabby—that was Mamma’s older sister—was at the bottom of it. Anyway, that was when Henrietta went away, and her cabin was shut up. I was terribly lonely. And for a while Mamma got better and came downstairs more. Daddy had a girl to look after me. But Mamma would sometimes watch me in her peculiar way and smile, and sometimes she would laugh at me. I believed that she had driven Henrietta away, and I began to hate her and fear her then.

  Susanna’s voice trembled. She turned restlessly in the bed, trembling.

  —That was when I would go down to Henrietta’s cabin, and I found a way of getting in through a loose board on the back door. And I would go upstairs to Henrietta’s bedroom, where the window looked out on the river, and get on the bed and play doll and pretend that Henrietta was there. Then one day, Daddy came to the house and said, I have a surprise for you, Susanna. He took me down to the cabin with him, and there was Henrietta. I was so happy I cried. Daddy just smiled in his sad sweet way. He was the most wonderful man, Johnny.

  —Then Henrietta stayed—for good?

  The phrase seemed unluckily chosen.

  Susanna’s voice was hushed and solemn.

  —Yes. Only, after awhile, she stayed up at the house and had the large front bedroom next to mine. That was when Mamma was so much worse, and two people had to watch her all the time.

  Susanna began stroking her throat as if to rub away the memory of the thing that had suddenly devoured this tangled skein of love and madness. For these conversations between Johnny Shawnessy and his wife always ebbed into silence against one now nevermentioned scarlet fact, a night of fire whose secret was impenetrably lost on the river of years.

  These verbal debauches came all at night. During the day, Susanna talked little. She became pale and almost ugly during this time, looking somehow younger, like a haggard child in the grip of an incurable disease. She was pathetically dependent upon him and the Negro girls. She could hardly bear to have him leave the house, and when he returned she was avid to hear of everything he had done and of everyone with whom he had spoken.

  —Did they inquire about me? she would ask.

  She was especially inquisitive about members of his family. When his parents called at the house in Freehaven, he felt constrained in their presence, knowing how entirely he had been taken out of the old life with them. He felt that they too were ill at ease in this house. Somehow he couldn’t talk with Ellen and T. D. about Susanna’s condition, and once when he suggested to her that T. D. might handle the delivery of the child, Susanna objected so violently that Johnny didn’t mention the subject again. Indeed, it was months before she consented to see a physician at all.

  During this time, the summer and fall of 1860, the year of the great campaign, Johnny Shawnessy felt that he had passed entirely from his years of sunlight and young aspiration into a somber maturity.
At Susanna’s insistence he had grown a mustache and beard, and in other ways she caused him to feel much older—by her utter dependence on him, her sickness, and her jealousy when she discovered some part of his present life denied to her. Her childishness became so complete that it dominated their relationship to each other and filled him with emotions that he couldn’t define. At this very time when he had made her a woman fruitful, she had become to him most like a passionate, irresponsible child. And he in turn became in his own mind like a father, grave, full of brooding anxiety and a persistent feeling of guilt. He felt that he was transgressing some ancient, most austere prohibition.

  The only good thing about Susanna’s illness was that she ceased to care about the political contest that was now shaking the land to its foundations.

  Election Day, 1860, was the most memorable in the history of Raintree County as well as the Republic. For the first time, North was openly pitted against South on the question of slavery extension. The Republican Party had become the party of the North, reflecting the widespread moral and economic opposition to slavery, which had grown steadily greater for fifty years and had now swollen to an irresistible flood. The Democratic Party, which had until that time tried to remain the party of compromise—of North, South, East, and West—was hopelessly split and enfeebled. In separate conventions, the Southern branch of it, abandoning all compromise, had nominated its own candidate, while the Northern-dominated branch chose Lincoln’s old senatorial opponent, Douglas. A fourth party, calling itself the Union Party, merely increased the confusion. In this chaos the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, presented a clearcut opportunity for voters to elect a President who stood firmly for the preservation of the Union at all costs and against the spread of slavery as a moral and political evil.

  On Election Day the Republic made the fateful decision that it had been evading for fifty years. In Raintree County, the people went down to the polls all day long in a tide unprecedented, overwhelming, irresistible, and voted for Abraham Lincoln in the belief that they were voting for the future of America as one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.