The Senator was still laughing.
—That was one hell of a homecoming you had, he said. I wrote it up at some length in my book there. Hope you don’t mind. I guess I got the important facts in.
I doubt it, Mr. Shawnessy thought.
—Ah, gentlemen, the Senator said. What things we have seen and done in fifty years! What is America? Well, I’ll tell you, gentlemen——Thunder! there comes my train.
A rhythmical pulse was beating on the rails.
What is America? What is America? What is America?
America is a memory of a boy who was dead and then came home anyway, hunting for an old court house and a home place in the County. America is the memory of millions of young men who came home and never came home and never could come home. America is the land where no one who goes away for a year can come back home again. America is the land where the telegraph keys are clicking all the time and the trains are changing in the stations. America is the image of human change where the change is changed by experts.
Come back, come back to Raintree County. O, wanderer far from home, come back after the Patriotic Program, when the leaves of it are scattered on the grass, and seek again for beauty, love, and wisdom. America is a dream that I was dreaming, an innocent dream among the moneychangers. For I got lost in stations where the trains were changing. I got lost in cities of a gilded age. O, wanderer far from home, come back, come back and live a memory of your illusioned, strong young manhood, a memory of
1865—1876
HOW THE FIRST ELEVEN YEARS
FOLLOWING THE GREAT WAR WERE SAD AND LONELY YEARS
for the tired hero who came back to Raintree County one day in the spring of 1865 like Lazarus from the dead. When Johnny came marching home at the War’s end and when the reunions and discoveries of that extraordinary homecoming were over, he found that in a sense the report of his death had not been unduly exaggerated. Johnny Shawnessy, that innocent and happy youth who had somehow contrived to keep in touch with the elder Raintree County of before the War, was really dead (though it took his successor a little while to become aware of the fact), and the Raintree County to which he had fondly dreamed of returning was also dead. Out of the shocks and changes of the War and the equally great shocks and changes of the homecoming, there emerged a new hero of Raintree County and a new County. The old (that is to say, the young) Johnny was really gone, interred in the triteness of Garwood Jones’s poem. In his stead was John Shawnessy, a sober young man of twenty-six, who had now a new life to live, a new love to find, a new poem of himself and the Republic to create.
Also the old Republic was gone. Johnny Shawnessy had unwittingly put the torch to it along with Atlanta and Columbia. The new Republic was something he hadn’t foreseen.
He hadn’t foreseen the sooty monster that stood alone after the smoke of battle had cleared, the Vanquisher alike of vanquishers and vanquished. Before the War this monster had been an awkward babe. But during the War he had put on muscle. His name was Industrialism.
Johnny Shawnessy hadn’t foreseen that where there had been one factory before the War there would be a hundred factories following. He hadn’t foreseen that the railroads would grow with magic speed until the huge vine enmeshed the Republic in iron tendrils. He hadn’t foreseen that hundreds of thousands of Americans would leave the farms and go to the great cities. He hadn’t foreseen the great cities themselves (for who could have foreseen these huge, glistening mushrooms that appeared one morning on the surface of the Great Swamp!). He hadn’t foreseen how tides of aspiration.setting ever east to west would bring millions of immigrants to America and how the tidal glut of these innumerable faces would fill up whole cities and run deep into the prairie leaving pools of alien speech and alien ways around and far beyond the borders of Raintree County.
He didn’t foresee the Reconstruction of the South, the doomed experiment of giving the black man a vote by force of arms. He didn’t foresee the scalawags and carpetbaggers who exploited the prostrate South. He didn’t foresee the bayonet legislatures, the wrecked economy of the Cotton Kingdom. He didn’t foresee the inflamed race hatred that war left behind, the lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan. He didn’t foresee the impeachment of Andrew Johnson (who was a cousin of Johnny Shawnessy’s on his mother’s side), a shameful effort to wrest from an honest, if tactless, Executive the power vested in him by the Constitution, a cynical effort to destroy the balanced system of government. He didn’t foresee the sectional feeling kept alive for years after the War by orators North and South. He didn’t foresee the formation of a Solid South, a political bloc, reactionary and resentful, a separate culture in all but legal fact.
He didn’t foresee that the greatest Union General of the War, Ulysses S. Grant, would be elected President, expressing for millions the wish to see a nation peaceful and united, and he didn’t foresee that, once elected, this politically stupid man would become a helpless front for crooks in high place, who bled the Republic of wealth and honor alike.
He didn’t foresee the Tweed Ring in New York, the Gas Ring in Philadelphia, the Whiskey Ring in St. Louis. He didn’t foresee the daring speculations, the corrupt deals, the barefaced frauds. He didn’t foresee the famous Corner in Gold, the Crédit Mobilier, the Panic of 1873. He didn’t foresee Jay Gould, Jay Cooke, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan—the new men, titans of industry, amassers of corrupt fortunes, exploiters of millions, barons of a new feudalism.
He didn’t foresee the materialism of the age, the spirit of getting wealth, of amassing property, of conquering space, of mining and stripping and gutting and draining, and whoring and ravaging and rending the beautiful earth of America. He didn’t foresee the grotesque buildings, public and private, that festered on the land, the tenements of stunted souls.
He didn’t foresee any of these things. Johnny Shawnessy didn’t even foresee John Shawnessy.
For example, he didn’t anticipate the loneliness of John Shawnessy, his search for a new religion, and his brief appearance in the political arena.
When John Shawnessy was once more firmly back in the County, he resumed a life that outwardly resembled the good old life he had had before he met Susanna Drake in 1859. He lived at the Home Place with his parents and continued to teach school, work on the Free Enquirer, and write. But the resemblance between his new and his old way of life was outward only. Between him and the happy youth of 1859 lay the red divide of the Civil War and many memories.
These post-War years were the saddest and loneliest that he would ever have. Sometimes at night he would dream of his comrades beslutted by death in yellow fields and forests rotten with rain. Waking up alone in his bed at the Home Place, he would be engulfed in silence and a brooding sadness. Was this the Republic that he and his comrades had been tramping toward in the Great March? Was this the Union they had hammered out ringing on the forge of battle? Was this the Raintree County of which Johnny Shawnessy had intended to become the hero?
Pensive, he listened to the pulse of silence and the earth. The earth alone endured the same. The rock still lay at the limit of the land. The river ran in darkness down its pathway to the lake, tracing a word of prophecy and recollection. The lake lay, an ancient scar in the middle of the County. But this was the period of awakening into a new age, and a new light was upon the land. He thought then of the railroads, the newspapers, the speculators, the builders, miners, exploiters of the earth. He thought of new cities crammed with new people. Did they still wait the coming of a young Shakespeare, a hero from the West? Was there still a passionate lover waiting for him somewhere, the incarnation of all the beauty he had ever seen and coveted? Where was the streambegotten girl? Where in all the turning waste of nights and days was the anciently beloved of the youth with the sunlight in his hair?
Then John Shawnessy, that sober young man whose hair had begun to fade a little at the temples and whose forehead now never quite lost its faint lines even when he slept and whose long blue eyes had
traces of crowsfeet at the corners, would lie a long time in his lonely bed and wish that he had someone to love and to love him, a woman with great eyes and passionate lips, someone whose voice, touching his ear in the lone spaces of the night, would lull him from the bad dreams.
All things changed on the earth except the earth itself and certain memories of the earth.
He would think then of his wife Susanna. For he was still bound to her by ancient ties. Now and then he would receive and answer one of her poor mad letters. But he knew now that he would probably never see her again. She herself didn’t wish it, though she still clung pitifully to the memory of their love, a last anchor in the swirling torrent of her madness. There was no use raising the question of divorce. Even if he could have obtained a divorce, he wasn’t sure that his conscience would let him. It seemed best for the moment to let things go on as they were. Time would make decisions for him.
But in one of his most terrible dreams of that lonely period following the War, he found himself walking up the steps of the tall house south of the Square in Freehaven, coming back home after long absence, approaching with the old feeling of nameless dread, and as he neared the door he could see, peering at him through the wavering glass, his wife Susanna, her face and body marked with fire and bound with bandages.
As for his family, the girls were all married, the older boys had farms and families of their own, and his favorite among them, Zeke, had gone West after the War and had started a new life in California. T. D. went on dispensing botanical medicines to a few old patients and meeting more and more rarely, fewer and fewer people in the church at Danwebster. As for the town of Danwebster, it died after the War. Just why it died no one knew, but the life went out of it. Half the houses in town became empty, and the remaining residents began to apologize for living in the place. The walks grew up with weeds, porches sagged and fell, stores closed. By 1870, Danwebster was a collection of roofless sheds and shacks. T. D. would drive by, shaking his head and saying,
—I don’t understand. It was a right nice little town before the War.
When several families refused to bury their dead in the graveyard on the hill, it was clear that the town was done for. As for T. D., who had depended largely on the community of Danwebster for patients and parishioners, he too began to seem a pathetic anachronism in the post-War period. No one cared anything for reform after the Civil War. All the ardent crusades had been trampled under in the one great crusade of the generation. The younger people had little faith in the Botanical Medicines. T. D. himself went on taking a hopeful view of things, but without financial aid from his youngest son, he would have been hard pressed to buy food for himself and Ellen.
Ellen, however, seemed to change little with the years. And though the Office behind the house began to seem more and more like a tiny faded museum, the house itself, the fields, the rock at the limit of the land, the brown road running east and west, the contour of the earth remained unchanged, and the taproot of his being was still deep in this ancestral place.
Despite his lonely life during this time, John Shawnessy had complete faith in himself, and there welled up in him stronger than ever the assurance that he was the bearer of a sacred fire. He had been meant from the beginning by a messianic birth to be the Hero of the County. Only he could fulfill prophecy and lead his generation to a nobler way of life, a loftier religion than they had known before.
He had always meant to do this great thing while he was young. At the close of the War in 1865, he was twenty-six. At twenty-six Keats was dead. At thirty-three, Jesus was crucified. The time had come for John Shawnessy to make a godlike exertion, to produce a masterwork, a book that would usher in the Golden Age of the American Republic.
So he would write the epic of the American Republic and its people, the greatest poem ever written. He didn’t know at the outset just what form the story would take or what resources of language (rich and daring—equal to the theme) he would discover. But he knew that what he wrote would be the story——
Of a quest for the sacred tree of life. Of a happy valley and a face of stone—and of the coming of a hero. Of mounds beside the river. Of threaded bones of lovers in the earth. Of shards of battles long ago. Of names upon the land, the fragments of forgotten language. Of beauty risen from the river and seen through rushes at the river’s edge. Of the people from whom the hero sprang, the eternal innocent children of mankind, latest of the mythic races and of their mythical republic. Of their towns and cities and the weaving millions. Of their vast and vulgar laughters, festive days, their competitions, races, lusty games. Of strong men running to a distant string. Of their rights and their reforms, religions and revivals. Of their shrine to justice, the eourt house in the middle of the square. Of their plantings, buildings, minings, makings, ravagings, explorings. Of how they were always going with the sun, westward to purple mountains, new dawns and new horizons. Of the earth on which they lived—its blue horizons east and west, exultant springs, soft autumns, brilliant winters. And of all its summers when the days were long . . .
This was the epic vision that John Shawnessy had arrived at shortly after the War and hoped to express while he was still young.
For seven years, then, following the War, he taught school children and worked at the monumental edifice of his poem, slowly erecting it through endless visions and revisions. But it was a gigantic task that he had set himself. It was all to be done from the ground up—a new language to fashion, a new wisdom—perhaps a new religion—to be discovered. Seventy times seven years might not be enough for such an undertaking, and at the end of seven John Shawnessy was still far short of his goal. So in the year 1872, when he was thirty-three years old, he did a remarkable thing.
He left his life of teaching and meditation and ran for political office. This decision was perhaps an odd one for the still unlaureled Homer of the age, but it wasn’t entirely inconsistent with his aims. And the resulting scenes were, to be sure, all conducted in the purest John Shawnessy tradition.
For he had decided that the new religion toward which he was groping was not for the pulpit. The pulpit had already failed in America. Orthodox religion, an exotic on American shores, had run out of miracles long ago. The true religion of Americans, he decided—although no American would have admitted it—was politics. American politics had its rituals, sacred objects, saints, dogmas, devotions, feasts, fanaticisms, mummeries, and its Bible of sacred writings. Abraham Lincoln, the most sanctified figure of the century, had been a politician. Perhaps Lincoln was a John the Baptist to a still greater prophet who would lead Americans, a chosen people, to a new vision of heaven and earth. And the messianic task would be accomplished through the very institutions that made America unique among the peoples of history.
This religion of the new republic of John Shawnessy’s vision was not, of course, a logical formulation. It was something to phrase in parables. The Old Testament of it was in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other American scriptures. The New Testament of it had yet to be written—and lived.
Where orthodox Christianity had been the negation of human life, this new religion would be the affirmation of it. It affirmed that heaven and hell and hereafter are now, living and present. It affirmed that every second of life is a miracle greater than Lazarus trembling in the tomb. It affirmed that every human life is sacred because it is the whole of life and that in the continuity of being, no life is lost. It affirmed that the world of human ideals, morality, loyalties, and dedications was in a true sense the work of God, fashioning order out of blind becoming, but that this God was not separate from the universe of his creation or from its creatures. He existed in each human awareness. Only in this mancreated world was there truth and beauty, wisdom and goodness, and these things were both temporal and eternal simply because only in the mancreated world did time and eternity have any meaning whatsoever.
Thus was a man the artificer of
his fate, building out of nothing what had not been there before. Therefore was a man free to some extent both in his means and ends.
To believe in this creed required, of course, an act of faith, but no greater act of faith than the creation of a republic of Raintree Counties in the first place, the daily living with others in peace and happiness, the simple affirmation that words had meanings. All human life was founded on faith anyway, and to live more fully required more faith.
This creed was also political. In fact it envisaged a state made up of wisely affirmative individuals, each one having the supreme, amiable vanity that taught him the inviolability of his own soul and that of others. This distinctively American state would be a republic of endless rediscovery, in which souls were rescued from the underside of Raintree County and educated in self-reliance. By an act of total responsibility for themselves and others, men voted themselves citizens of this republic, which was greater than the boundaries of America.
How could such a condition be brought about? The long way was by education. The short way was by an emotional surge, a religious crusade. It was the short way that John Shawnessy was trying when he entered politics in 1872, convinced that the American Messiah, if he came at all, would have to come as a candidate for office and that religious miracles in the pressridden Nineteenth Century would have to be miracles of social betterment and education.
This scheme of John Shawnessy’s was either very daring or very innocent—probably both at once. In the America of the railroad and the sweatshop, he foresaw an Eden of social and economic equality. In the era of Jay Gould, President Grant, the Whiskey Ring, and Tammany Hall, he foretold a Periclean Epoch of honesty and forbearance. In the middle of the Gilded, he sought to build the ramparts of a Golden Age.
So it was that in 1872, John W. Shawnessy and Garwood B. Jones were rival candidates for the office of Representative to the Congress of the United States from the Congressional District in Indiana of which Raintree County was a part.
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