Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  DAN POPULUS

  It was plain from this that Johnny Shawnessy had been found out as the author of the Will Westward articles and therefore also as the beholder of a Raintree County girl naked in the Shawmucky River. In a subsequent article, Will Westward reported that the repentant Seth had confessed the whole thing a fraud, insisting that the vision he saw was caused by ‘guzzlin’ a pint of pure pizen that Rube Shucks wuz sellin’ in the County fer corn likker.’ But the hurt was done. Nell Gaither must have guessed that she was the now celebrated nymph of the Shawmucky and must know, as everyone else seemed to, that Johnny was the author of the article in question. For two weeks, Johnny didn’t go to church or any other place where he might see Nell.

  But this cowardice of his couldn’t last long. T. D. had planned a Temperance Rally for September, and the members of the Cold Water Army had enlisted to give a temperance drama. Johnny had agreed to write it, and Nell Gaither and Garwood Jones were both cast in leading parts.

  It was on a Sunday at the Danwebster Church that Johnny and Nell met again for the first time since the famous emergence from the river. Johnny was standing at the door of the church handing out some private printings of a new hymn by T. D. called ‘Wash me in the Jordan.’ Just before time for the service to begin, Nell and her father and stepmother arrived. Nell was in a new green dress. Johny took one look at her getting out of a surrey and then kept his eyes averted. He felt as though he would choke while she climbed the pathway up the steep bank and approached the door.

  —Hello, Johnny.

  —Hello, Nell. Have a program.

  —Thanks, Johnny.

  He didn’t look at her, but her voice, low and musical, pronounced the word ‘Johnny’ in her special way. Only now, the touch of her tongue on his name went through him in a tide of sweet anguish. As she went down the aisle, he studied the point where her hair, piled up in a mound, dwindled to a wispy peak on her neck.

  While the service was going on, Johnny sat on the front bench, holding a hymnbook. Under his oak on the Shawmucky he had lately memorized the most exciting passages from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. In his mind he had repeated unweariedly the assault of a sultry goddess on a shy boy, and all the time against all reason he had endowed the goddess with the fullflanked form, small piquant face, and golden hair of Nell Gaither. He, too, on the fierce tide of this new love had tried his hand at an erotic poem, in which a swain beheld a rustic maid bathing in a woodland water. But there was something in the puritan perspectives of Raintree County or his own fledgling inexperience that had prevented a free, fine handling of the subject in the spirit of his lusty precursor.

  T. D. had insisted that Johnny lead the singing of the original hymn. While the congregation was in full cry, Johnny stole a glance at Nell. Her mouth was making pleasing O’s, her eyes were oval pools of rivergreen, she seemed entirely chaste and inaccessible. An innocent young republic had labored to clothe her in her puritan costume, had given her moral serenity and comely speech, had instructed her in the means of hiding the victorious nudity that the river had bequeathed her. (The river flowing out of distant summers, the river coiling past the beautiful twin mounds, the river twisting in slow anguish by reeds and rushes, tarn and tangling swamp unto the lake where life began.)

  Wash me spotless in the Jordan,

  Cleanse my soul of earthly sin,

  For I’ve wandered from the pathway

  That my fathers put me in.

  Lead me back unto the river

  Where I strayed in happy youth

  And array my limbs forever

  In the radiant robe of truth.

  (The river, older than Helen and the Greeks, older than the Indian peoples who left the relics of savage warfare on its banks, older than man himself, and concealing in its course through Raintree County a fabulous, forgotten secret, of life that buzzed, sang, murmured, flapped great rushing wings, and shouted from the shallows.)

  O, wash me in the Jordan,

  And I’ll climb the happy shore

  Where the blessed band of angels

  Bathe in bliss forevermore.

  In rehearsals for the temperance play and elsewhere during the next few weeks, Johnny saw Nell often. In no way did she betray the secret that she and Johnny shared. After a while, he wondered if he had seen wrong.

  Meanwhile, he returned as often as he could to the banks of the Shawmucky. For his desire was of the river. Those days, through all his waking dreams it ran, rank with curious fleshes, to the lake. It had given him beauty and desire. Some day, he must find again forbidden whiteness in the river and become the joyous fisherman, the proud possessor of the river’s most curved and radiant flesh.

  He never went to sleep without hoping that he would dream of Nell. And in his sleeping as in his waking dreams, the river ran. He was rowing a rotten boat on the Shawmucky or wading through a fetid swamp. The river shimmered on its mudded floors. Sometimes, he would find a young woman in the reeds. He wanted to look directly into her green eyes, and persuade her to become again the goddess of the river. But in the climax of the dream, as he sought her skin under a green dress, he would find himself entangled in rushes, her slippery body writhed whitebellied and flaggyfooted, escaping in the yellow reeds, and then the spasmed jet of his desire would stream off his body in the night, finding no place for its delicious anguish except the river. He would awaken lying in his bed at the Home Place, drenched with the mystery of his own young seed. Summer night was on the breathing earth. She whom he loved lay somewhere in this night, her curved, pale body stretched in darkness close to the river like his own. They were the children of the rivered earth, meant for each other. And yet there lay between him and this fabled whiteness all the green mesh of Raintree County, a net of names and words, a costume of puritan restraints, and he must be

  BOLD LIKE A YOUNG GOD WHO WOULD BREAK

  HIS WAY PAST ALL

  THOSE

  BARRIERS BURNED AWAY

  The gilt words were stamped into a green cloth binding.

  —Yes, I’ve read it, Mr. Shawnessy said.

  He handed the book back to Eva, who became instantly reabsorbed in the story.

  Brief résumé of the Sentimental Epic of America:

  Between green cloth covers, on yellow faded pages, an upright young man from the country goes to the wicked city of Chicago to seek his fortune. There he falls in love with a rich girl, innately good but unredeemed by the Christian faith. Scenes of love, misunderstanding, danger, sickness, and death follow each other with dramatic vividness. In the climax of the book, the Great Chicago Fire bursts catastrophically upon the world of private lives and loves. The hero saves the heroine from a villainous rape amid spectacular scenes of fire and death and converts her to Jesus on the shore of the lake while around them the corrupt wealth and social inequalities of the City are leveled by the purging fire, and all barriers between the lovers are forever burned away. The congregation is requested to stand on the last verse.

  The river was far behind. The roofs of Freehaven were visible a straight half-mile down the road. The Court House Tower stood in a haze of distance directly from the line of the road, a square stem of red brick, capped with a dull green roof ascending to a blunt point. A clockface recessed in the roofslope was too distant to be read.

  He sifted the faded pages of himself.

  Beautiful and lost was the secret he had sought to find long ago in a green cloth binding. In the greatest of the sentimental novels, he too had lain beside the river of desire, had been the hero of a sentimental epic—a legend of barriers unburned away. For America was always an education in self-denial. And Raintree County was itself the barrier of form imposed upon a stuff of longing, life-jet of the river.

  In a way, all stories, no matter how badly written and printed, were legend—and eternal. Each book was sacred, a unique copy that had somewhere in its crowded pages the famous misprint, the cryptogram, or the lithograph of a beautiful woman whose nudity was signed with
the faint signature of her mortality. Wherever paper was covered with print, the papyrus rush shook down its seed again by the river of life, the music of Nilotic reeds was carried on the air of summer. The strange linkage of a sound and its visual symbol was invented by men who lived beside a river, saw a cursive shape written on the earth, heard the continuous sound of flowing water.

  And again he was making the memorial journey from the river to the Court House Square, from the random curve of water to the rectilinear stone. It was the pathway of the hero of a legend, of one who rose from the Great Swamp and rode a horse of godlike appetite to the summit of Platonic forms.

  Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy shook the reins over President’s back. He took a deep breath to still his big excitement as the surrey passed the red barn at the edge of town where travellers went abruptly from the open road into the shade of a wide, treebordered street.

  Instantly, it seemed, the sound of the firecrackers became multitudinous and intimate. A powdersmell drifted up the sleepy streets, incense of holiday. Flagbright, the broad street stretched between diminished tree trunks to the far enclosure of the Square.

  Make way, make way for the Hero of Raintree County! For he is coming to pluck the golden apples! Down with the ancient prohibitions! None shall restrain the intemperate young man with the sunlight in his hair! Make way, make way for . . .

  Mr. Shawnessy drove the surrey to a place on the east side of the Square and tied President up to the hitching rail. A firecracker burst in the alley near-by, scattering children. The clock in the Court House Tower showed six-forty.

  —I’ve got two or three places to go, Pet, he said. It shouldn’t take me over fifteen or twenty minutes. Keep the children around close.

  Atlas under arm, he crossed the street toward a tall, sourfaced brick building. Sandstone steps led up to a door over which a legend was carved into the sandstone arch:

  HISTORICAL MUSEUM

  ANTIQUITIES OF RAINTREE COUNTY

  ‘Footprints on the sands of time’

  H. W. Longfellow

  He hesitated at the foot of the steps and looked around the Square. The Court House was a recumbent beast couched on the curled paws of its balustraded stairs. The four walls of the Square were holed with a hundred immutable doors to a hundred immutable desires. The old pomps and prohibitions of Raintree County were enacted into the shapes of this enclosure.

  Yet all this had been pulled like a mask over the naked beauty of an ancient human want. This mask quivered on the secret thing that it concealed. And soon all the holiday hundreds would be pouring into the enclosure, wearing their ritual costumes. All would enjoy the sacrifice and the incense, the invocation of the sainted names. All would share in the feast and the communion.

  But only the consecrated hero could enter the inmost shrine where a young woman waited with a book of revelation.

  He mounted the steps to the museum door.

  A few mornings before, the body of an old man had lain on these steps, his face pressing the cold stone, his heart exploded, while in the lock stood his unturned key. An imperturbable god had curved cold lips and had forbidden the old man a last cold lust of killing. For Waldo Mays, Custodian of the Raintree County Historical Museum, had meant to kill the shape of beauty. Priestlike, in the name of the dourly orthodox god of Raintree County, he had meant to make a sacrifice most pleasing to his deity.

  Now there came one younger, with a golden key, a hero capable of getting golden apples.

  Mr. Shawnessy straightened his poet’s tie in the mirror of the glass doorpane. His reflection exactly filled the statuary niche over the Main Entrance of the Court House across the street.

  Entering a little hallway, he sniffed a faint stink of stuffed pelts. Antiquities of Raintree County filled up the four floors of the narrow building: relics of Indians and Mound Dwellers on the first floor; pioneer relics and implements of agriculture on the second; weapons and other mementoes of four American wars on the third; and an exhibit of natural history on the fourth. Metal stairs ascended in spiral from floor to floor. He stood, waiting and listening, in the place where the accumulated residue of life in Raintree County had been preserved. Relics of more than fifty years were crowded into rows of glass cases that walled the gloomy rooms. They had all achieved (these pistols, books, bundles of beribboned letters, daguerreotypes, pioneer cradles, primitive scythes, tallow lamps, candleholders, slates, spinning wheels, arrowheads, tomahawks, moccasins, stone knives, belts of wampum, firebows, cultivating sticks) the antiquarian repose.

  This was the land of shades. An elder American bard, the celebrated Longfellow, had met a young aspirant at the portals and ushered him into these fuscous circles.

  A sound of high heels started up and tapped smartly toward him. Peering into the brown dusk of the corridor, he saw a young woman approaching. Her hair was tawny yellow, her figure abundant, her face fair, lightly freckled, with wide blue eyes, a large but pretty mouth, and a look of radiant freshness and health.

  —Mr. Shawnessy! I’m so pleased to see you again!

  The impulsive gesture with which she took his hand was made with her whole body.

  —Well, well, he said, you’ve grown a good deal since I saw you last, Persephone.

  The remark made him more fully aware of the ample yet classic proportions of her figure, which he now saw was clothed in an attractive green dress, asserted by puffs of cloth flowers over the breasts and by a saucy bustle.

  —You hardly change at all, Mr. Shawnessy.

  —The light isn’t very good here, he said, smiling with lifted brows. Is it possible that it’s been twenty years!

  —Yes. In 1872 I left for the East and haven’t been back until Uncle Waldo took ill a few weeks ago.

  —I was sorry to hear of your uncle’s death, he recited. But it’s nice to know that the Museum is to be in such good hands. Do you mean to become our Lady Custodian?

  —I really don’t know. I haven’t any plans. I’ve been a widow, you know, for two years now.

  As he spoke to her of circumstances and changes, he kept wondering at the inexorable rhythms that had fulfilled themselves in her. She had been a lank stick of a girl when last he saw her; now she stood before him, a mature woman who had known vicissitudes of travel, love, marriage, death. But at this instant of reunion, she brought to him the adoring schoolgirl he had last seen, and he brought to her the youthful yet paternal teacher. And this reunion was for both of them a delightful anachronism among the other antiquities of Raintree County.

  It required an act of desperate boldness for him to say,

  —I know your time is precious, Persephone. What have you decided about the—the book? I’m to meet the Senator around ten o’clock in Waycross. The Senator is a man of curious tastes and has expressed a keen interest, as you know, in this volume because of its—its rarity.

  —Let’s get it out, she said, and have a look at it.

  Mr. Shawnessy’s heart paced nimbly after as she walked before him down the corridor, a weaving, fullflanked form, into the office of the defunct Waldo Mays.

  In the glass case beside the old man’s desk, the Atlas lay on a bed of red velvet, its gilded letters brightening in the dark oakpaneled room. The young woman seemed studiedly casual as she turned a key in the back of the case and lifted the book out.

  —Well, here it is, she said, opening the cover and laying the Atlas on top of the case.

  The title-page contained a picture. On the wooded bank of a river, underneath a widebranching tree, a bearded gentleman sighted with a surveyor’s level at a pole held by another gentleman some distance off. Seated near-by on a rock, an artist sketched the scene of a train crossing a river trestle in the background.

  Mr. Shawnessy was relieved to see no woman standing in her pelt, ankledeep in the river under the bridge. The picture was exactly like the one in his own copy. Then he felt a depression of spirit as if this one refutation of an idle rumor proved the whole story a fraud.

  Lift
ing the heavy load of the leaves between index finger and thumb of her left hand, the young woman let them sift down slowly as she said,

  —It’s a lovely book, isn’t it? I’d never seen a copy until I came back. I’ve been looking through it since I got your letter. It seems to be in good condition.

  He watched the earth of Raintree County blurring past in a shower of familiar images. The eyes of the woman were speculative and distant, he thought, as she closed the Atlas. He followed her gaze through the window, which framed a portion of the Court House Tower above the Main Entrance.

  Pedestaled in the deep niche thereof, blindfolded, leaning on a sheathed sword, the Statue of Justice stood, a granite woman sternly pectoral, holding bronze scales, her stony features spattered with pigeondung.

  Mr. Shawnessy blushed, bit his lip, fought an irrational desire to grin, then gasped as Mrs. Persephone Mays herself laughed in a clear, bubbling contralto.