Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  Susanna began to stroke her neck.

  —So then, that was when I hated Mamma, and I wanted to hurt her. And I had been reading a novel in which a person wrote an unsigned letter to hurt another person, so I wrote a letter and I managed to slip into her room once when she wasn’t there, and I put it in Mamma’s picture album that she was always looking through. It was just a little note. It said, ‘Daddy loves Henrietta. Yours truly, A Well-meaning Friend.’ Wasn’t that silly?

  Neither one laughed, and Susanna went on, talking faster all the time as if she had to tell it all now and get rid of it.

  —So then I wished I hadn’t written it. But it was too late to get it back.

  —Of course it couldn’t have made any difference, Johnny said. Your mother knew about it anyway. Down South, it wasn’t an uncommon thing for——

  But Susanna hadn’t heard him. She drew another deep breath, and her voice was now so low he had trouble hearing it.

  —So then after that awful scene with Henrietta, Mamma was shut up more carefully, and she was very violent for a while, and then for a while she must have been much better, because Daddy took me up to see her again. And she became so much better that Daddy had a photographer come and take a picture of us all in front of the house—you know, the picture I have in the album. That was just a day before the fire, and three of the people in the picture never even got to see the picture. And Daddy was planning some big change, I think we were going to go away again back to Havana. There was a lot of packing and excitement. And then that night I was in bed and asleep and all excited about us all going to go away, and sometime in the night I woke up, and someone was in my room with a lamp, I couldn’t see who it was, and I leaned out of bed and said, Who’s there? I thought it might be Henrietta as she often went through my room at night and her room was next to mine with a little hall between. And whoever it was put the lamp out. I listened and heard a door shut, but no one said anything. There was a lot of noise outdoors that night, there had been a barbecue for the slaves because Daddy was going away again, and they were singing and making a lot of noise. And then all of a sudden I heard something like firecrackers, sort of low and muffled in the next room or maybe in the hall. I couldn’t say for sure, and at the time I hadn’t any way of knowing what it was. Then I must have gone to sleep. And the next thing I knew, I woke up coughing. It was terribly hot in the room, and I could hear a crackling sound, and my doll was on fire. I began to scream and tried to beat the fire out on the doll, and someone kept saying, Get her through the window! and a man came in through the window, it was one of our Nigroes, and wrapped me up in a blanket, and there was a lot of yelling and a timber fell down on us, and I felt a terrible burning pain across my neck and chest. Then somehow I was out in the yard and they said, She still has her doll, and I had this burn on me. And then I said, Where’s Daddy and Henrietta? and they just told me not to worry and took me away. Then they took me to stay with Aunt Prissy to get well from my burn, and she didn’t tell me about Daddy and Henrietta and Mamma until quite a while later. Then finally Aunt Prissy took me away, and that was how I first came up here, and Aunt Prissy had this house built—she and I were Daddy’s heirs—and we lived here.

  —Did you tell your Aunt what you heard the night of the fire?

  —Yes, I did, and she said not to say anything about it. It wasn’t anything, and no one could do anything about it. But I didn’t tell her about seeing Daddy and Henrietta. She worshipped Daddy, and I thought maybe she oughtn’t to know. And I didn’t tell her about the note I left in Mamma’s album. I thought maybe I had caused their death some way. I cried and cried, and no one knew what 1 was crying about, they thought it was just because of the fire, but it wasn’t just that.

  —You don’t think——Johnny started to say.

  —She killed them!

  The words were said through clenched teeth. Johnny could feel the bed tremble.

  —She killed them! Susanna said again. She planned it all with the cunning of a fiend. I hate her! I still hate her, and I hate myself for what I did!

  —But, you didn’t do anything, child, he said. You didn’t have anything to do with it. You were just the victim of the whole situation.

  Susanna was suddenly very still. He waited, trying to find something else consoling to say, something that would undo the confession that lay a sickening weight between them. He waited and listened almost afraid to breathe, afraid that there might be some further admission even more terrible—if such a thing could be—than what he had just heard. Here in the night beside him, momentarily lay the real being of his wife Susanna, a child that had come farwandering across the years out of the brown shadows of an old daguerreotype, reaching out her arms to him in the night, holding up her small pathetic face, asking him for help, for consolation, for pity, for reassurance.

  —You have been hurt by all those memories, dear, he said. You live back there too much. All that is past now.

  He felt how enormous was this brave lie as she lay there in the darkness stroking her throat where a tragic hour had left its signature of flame.

  The next day she avoided him and kept to her room. At night when he came to bed, he could tell that she had been drinking. In spite of his efforts to prevent her, she had begun to keep brandy in the room, to bolster her spirits, as she expressed it. While he was preparing to come to bed, she said,

  —I lied to you.

  —Yes?

  —About the Nigro girl and my father. I made it up. It never happened.

  She had a defiant, sullen smile on her face. Her eyes stared drunkenly.

  —What did you tell me for then?

  —O, I don’t know, she said. You asked me about it, and I just made up that story. My father wouldn’t have touched any Nigro girl.

  A few days after that, Soona came over to the Enquirer office to tell him that he had best come home at once. When he got home, he found Bessie in tears trying to prevent Susanna from coming downstairs. Susanna had on her hat and coat—it was a chilly April day—and she was carrying Little Jim, who was just a few days past his second birthday.

  —If I was home, Susanna shrieked at Bessie, I’d have you whipped.

  She saw Johnny in the door and appealed to him.

  —She’s been trying to keep me from leaving! she said furiously. Am I mistress in my own house, or do I have to let a nigger wench tell me what to do!

  Her eyes blazed, her face was flushed, she staggered and nearly fell with the child in her arms. Johnny ran up the stair and took the child. Little Jim looked back at his mother with scared eyes.

  —Daddy! he said. Mamma cwied.

  He clung with small strong arms around Johnny’s neck, like a child drowning.

  —Where were you going? Johnny said to Susanna.

  —My own business, she said defiantly.

  —Don’t you know you might have dropped him, Susanna!

  —It’s this house! she said, her voice breaking into hoarse sobs. It’s this awful house!

  —Why, what’s the matter with it? Johnny said.

  —No, no, you don’t understand! she said. He might die in here. Something terrible might happen to him!

  —Nothing will happen to him! Johnny said fiercely. What could happen to him! Are you crazy?

  The words had slipped out. They stood looking at each other. Susanna’s mouth opened, her eyes dilated, the blood left her face as if he had slapped her. She lay back against the banister. She began to laugh then; the laughter came bubbling up out of her chest, changed to a low, tearless sobbing, while Johnny stood holding the little boy and listening.

  And soon it was the third summer of the War, June of 1863. The Union Armies were reeling back slowly through days of confused headlines and columns of drivelling words. The name Chancellorsville began to emerge, first as a place where a battle might have been fought, then as a place where the Army of the Potomac under Fighting Joe Hooker was reported to have whipped Bob Lee at last after a magnificent effort, t
hen as a place where another inconclusive, bloody fracas had occurred, then as a temporary setback for Northern arms. At any rate the Army of the Potomac was backing up, and Lee was reported to be advancing in the Theatre of Operations, where battles were being fought again over the bones of men dead in battles two years old. At Vicksburg on the Mississippi, the Army of General U. S. Grant, in which Zeke Shawnessy was a soldier, was reported to be closing in at last for the kill, so that the Father of Waters might flow unvexed to the sea. But the capture of the Confederacy’s river fortress had been anticipated in preceding years and sometimes falsely reported as accomplished. In January Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, so that now the War was being fought not only to preserve the Union but also to free a race. Summer had come back again, the War was still on, and the end was not in view.

  During these years of battle, death, sickness and division in the Republic, Johnny Shawnessy had remained out of the fighting. But the War, this brute continuing event, was the somber atmosphere of his life during that time. The remote din of its battles, its names of little towns made reluctantly immortal by bloodshed, its controversies on the home front, its scandals and corruptions, its few great utterances buried in battle-glutted papers, its hundred thousand deaths of young men in battlefield, camp, and prison-pen, its books and poems, songs and sayings, its shibboleths, its ephemeral heroes, its brass bands and banners, its sorry pomps, its nameless, unreported heroisms—all this was the somber background of what Johnny Shawnessy was in those years.

  But what he most truly was had nothing to do directly with the War. During this time, long after the physical fact of parenthood, he became a father by touching the form of a little boy, by dressing him, holding him, carrying him, watching him run, telling him stories. The red days rolled on; battles came and went with summer. But he was touched by the contemplation of a new fact in Raintree County: the flowering of a little being who had come to him out of darkness and terror and had held out tiny hands. In a tall house close to the Square, he watched this being grow from a collection of blind impulses to an intelligent, gifted person, Little Jim Shawnessy, who, because of his unusual origin, was more precious than any other child, and therefore more to be feared for.

  Often in the evenings and mornings of those long years, Johnny would go to the crib and look down on the little boy lying in partial darkness, would see the eyes closed, the translucent lids, the lips faintly smiling, the breast moving ever so slightly with a steady respiration.

  It was as though the father wished to assure himself that the little visitor had not been taken back into the deep water from which he had risen.

  This child had come bearing a great gift, he was irreplaceable, only once could he have come to Raintree County, only one path had existed for him in the fearful complexity of all the labyrinthine paths of life, and that one path he had taken so that his life might be entwined with that of Johnny Shawnessy in the house in Freehaven during the Great War for the Preservation of the Republic.

  No caution was too great, no tenderness too deep, no loyalty too lasting, no patience too enduring, for the saving and education of this little being. All life, all time had gone into the forming and the fashioning of this mysterious little man, and now that he was here, it didn’t seem possible that there had been a time when he was not. For him, the good life of Raintree County, even as Johnny Shawnessy had often dreamed it for himself. For him, great days on the breast of the land. And one day, the War must end, the Republic would be one nation again, chastened and purified by its great passion. In that time perhaps Susanna would recover from her fears and walkings in the night, and Johnny would all at once complete the Great American Epic, and Little Jim Shawnessy would be the most splendid affirmation of all his father’s dreams.

  THAT DAY, WHEN AT LAST IT CAME,

  WOULD BE A

  —WONDERFUL DAY! the Perfessor said. I never see a day like this but I think, Good battle weather! So the War leaves us.

  He paused to relight his cigar.

  —Exactly twenty-nine years ago, he said, on the Fourth of July, 1863, the armies were at Gettysburg. The earth is so peaceful now. Hard to believe Americans were killing each other there in the fat Dutch farmland not so long ago. Gettysburg! My God! what a battle! Generations and republics crowded at the gates of time, while Lee’s ragged infantry charged up the slopes of Cemetery Hill. I saw it, you know. Of course, it wasn’t anything like the storybook accounts. No one knows what a battle was or is. Soldiers making a battle are just poor lost bastards trying to improvise out of smoke, fear, and confusion something that a bunch of brassheads called generals can agree upon as won or lost. The Battle of Gettysburg, that great Event in the History of the Republic, is the sheerest myth. It seems to us now the classic battle of all time, with its neatly contrived stage, its monuments for fallen dead, its two Round Tops, its Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Hill, its heroes, its storybook gallantries, its consequences. We think of the little town of Gettysburg as having existed for that battle. Yet no battle was ever more the farce of brute chance. The armies blundered into each other, blundered into their positions, and blundered for three days trying to discover where they were and what was really happening. Lee, the greatest military genius of the War, achieved the murder of ten thousand men by blindly and brutally pounding away at an impregnable position. Let anyone go to Gettysburg—I mean the place itself—to realize what a froth and frenzy human life is. Here was a little town lying in its peaceful valley where roads met in summer. Here were the hills and the local picnic spots and the little college and the cemetery ground. It might as well have been Freehaven and the country surrounding. Then came the young men, a hundred thousand tired boys marching. Somebody heard there were shoes at Gettysburg, shoes for blistered feet. Gettysburg was fought for those shoes, because both sides discovered that they needed sizeable armed corps along to get the shoes—namely the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia. I remember well enough how I rode into Gettysburg on the first day, just as the First Corps of the Union Army was engaging the Rebels beyond the town.

  —And I remember only too well where I was, Mr. Shawnessy said. I fought the Battle of Gettysburg too, though I was hundreds of miles away.

  —How is that? the Perfessor said.

  —By the implacable law of the continuity of being. I have a peculiar feeling that I will always go on fighting the Battle of Gettysburg in a remote part of myself. If I had enough will, perhaps I could reach down into that world I never knew and find the whole insanely complex happening out of which we built this Myth, this Memory of the Republic, the Battle of Gettysburg.

  Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles shut his eyes and hummed the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ He was remembering no doubt a certain young Perfessor with thicker, blacker hair who was riding along a road in the landscape of Gettysburg, a Fourth of July many years ago. What had become of that young Perfessor, and what had become of that landscape and that battle?

  Mr. Shawnessy smoked, remembering his own private Battle of Gettysburg, the one that never got into the history books.

  He searched the sky and the faces, the day clamoring and spacious. Once more it was July on the breast of the land. Trains hurried west, roads made the same old intersections, the bannered corn waved in the fields, the Shawmucky was filled with flowers and floating seed, the lake was rank with lilies, it was summer.

  But where were the tumultuous drums, the cannons, and the tired young faces that poured into the cauldron of Gettysburg? Where was this archetypal battle in which a faceless swarm advanced through mythical summer in a mythical republic, climbing forever from Seminary Ridge to Cemetery Hill? And where were the faces of two children to whom no bronze memorial was erected, but who were also lost in that great battle for the Preservation of the Republic and the Emancipation of a Race?

  In the deepest landscapes of his life, he hunted them. Surely they were still there somewhere, flying along their phantom trail. Perhaps he could st
ill find them in the rush and tumult of the trains, in the stations where the cars were changing, among the million lost faces and the decayed landscapes of eighteen-sixty-three. He hunted them, hearing on the horizons of his past the sad old tumults of his personal Gettysburg. It, too, had had its gallantries and its despairs, its random collisions, its varying tides, its shifting incidental terrains, and its dread climax of disaster for the

  July 2-4—1863

  LOST CHILDREN OF A LOST REPUBLIC—SO THEY SEEMED

  to him, the people whom he saw on the roads and in the fields of Raintree County as he returned to Freehaven on the train from Beardstown, where he had been on business for the Enquirer. Those days, like the whole week or so preceding, had been dark with disaster for the North. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, victorious in the Battle of Chancellorsville, was on the move. The headlines for days had reported

  THE INVASION OF THE NORTH

  Just where the main Rebel Army was, no one in the North could tell. It seemed strange that an army of one hundred thousand men could be lost sight of for days, and yet that was the impression created by the newspapers. In the North it was generally agreed that this daring advance marked the supreme effort of the Confederacy, flushed with victory, to win a decisive battle and the War. The reports, confused and tentative as they were, made one thing clear: Lee’s infantry were choking the roads of Pennsylvania and flowing northward with little yet to stop them.

  In Raintree County, Indiana, far from battles, these days were blue and lovely, and Johnny Shawnessy had the civilian’s feeling of paralysis more strongly than ever before. He continued the old routine of his life, nodding at familiar faces, climbing familiar steps, entering familiar doors, while his future and the Republic’s were being shaped for better or for worse in a distant valley of rivers, roads, and sleepy towns. There had to be men somewhere who would be willing to die with skill and resolution in a field of corn or behind a railfence lest the Republic be dissolved and something indefinable and holy lost forever to Raintree County.