Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  On the way back to the Home Place, T. D. kept talking about the significance of higher education.

  —Yessirree, John, he said, I wish I had had just half your advantages when I was your age. I always did want to know a little Latin and Greek. I tell you, with Latin and Greek, and your natural aptitudes and faculties, John, I take a very hopeful view of your future. I’m sure I express and echo the sentiments of your mother too, when I say that we’re very proud of you.

  YOU HAVE A BRIGHT ROAD AHEAD OF YOU, MY BOY,

  AND WE EXPECT YOU TO

  GO

  FAR around on three sides the ocean of July corn undulated toward the Danwebster Graveyard and broke, a gentle surf, against it, ebbing from the wire fence. Mr. Shawnessy opened the gate and stepped inside.

  The graveyard, abandoned like the town, was a hundred stones beside the river. In the middle of orderly cornlands, it was an island of disorder. He kicked up crowds of grasshoppers as he walked through uncut grass, gravemyrtle, wild carrot, white top, blackberries, poison ivy.

  He stopped and shaded his eyes, looking for familiar stones. In the place of death he felt overwhelmed by life. Life rushed up from the breasts of the dead in a dense tangle of stems that sprayed seeds and spat bugs. As he thought of other memorial journeys to the graveyard, the stones seemed to him doomed and huddled shapes around which green waters were steadily rising. He stood up to his knees in grass and weeds, holding in one hand a box of peaceful cut flowers and in the other a sickle, his eyes hurting with sunlight.

  They lie beside the river, lulled by the music of its waters. They lie beside the river.

  Where are the forms and faces of my pagan youth? Where is the hunger of the shockhead boy who saw a white flesh in secret waters? Where are youth and maiden?

  They lie beside the immemorial river.

  Where are the generations of those who loved beside the river? Where are the generations of grass and flowers that bloomed and seeded by the river?

  Bare feet of lovers, thudding on the roofs of mounds, press lightly on these crumbled hearts.

  There are many mounds beside the running river, become beautiful and secret by the lapse of years. There are entire eras of lost lovers who have left only mounds full of bright boneshards beside the river. All the people who ever lived here were lovers and the seed of lovers. Where are all those who ever beheld beauty in bright waters?

  They lie beside the river. They lie beside the river.

  He walked a little farther into the graveyard and bent over a stone that rose slenderly from the grass, completing itself in a tranquil arc. He began to tear at the dense grass with his sickle.

  O, beautiful, springing hair from the flesh of the dead! I will remember long gold hair around a face that was like no other. I will remember boats that moved in gala procession far down between widening shores. And oars that made languid wounds in the pale flesh of the river.

  What difference now does it make that love was a tall, imperious bloom beside the river? What difference if face touched face beside the river?

  There was no guilt or recollection of guilt. There was only love that is desire for beauty. We were like flowers that seduce each other without memory and without guilt.

  He stood up leaving the base of the stone softly revealed by the sickle. He had put very far from him, he knew, the anxieties of the coming day. Very far from him now was Waycross, on the periphery of the County, where before long he must participate in patriotic ceremonies. He stood in a place of classic stones. Halfshutting his eyes, he felt his body drenched in sunlight. He listened to the murmur of cornleaves swayed by the wind and the music of the river passing through its vocal reeds.

  This was the earth of riddles, this was the earth from which had sprung all myths, memories of passion. He shut his eyes entirely. Something white and graven with a legend was approaching him on a sundrenched water. There were words that he had meant to remember, a legend of his life in one of its memorable springtimes.

  Then he had a sharp, clear memory of the lecture room of the old Academy Building. He was sitting at his desk, pencil in hand, among the other students. It was the Final Examination in 1859. Across the board a tall, blacksuited man chalked slantingly

  A QUESTION IN RHETORIC

  Compose an essay suggested by the following incident:

  One day a poet walking on the shores of the Mediterranean picked up a broken oar washed in by the sea. These words were graven on the blade:

  Remembering the cryptic line, he heard again a sound of surf—young voices, laughter, beating on brick walls.

  I see the blue mass of the seamounds shifting in. O, little blade, naked and smooth, borne in from untumultuous seas, I hear the slanting music of your legend.

  My body is whitely reclined on leaguelong beaches. O, plastic Mediterranean forms!

  What is this white tower of beauty? I see it slenderly arisen from bright waters.

  O, goddess, you were borne to me by a white oar sandward washed in summer. Foamborn, with young unpendulous breasts, far from your ancient shores you came to me, forgetful of your old fruitions. We were together youngly before great wars.

  I the child of a young republic reached hands of a young desire to your body clad in the archaic garment of nudity. Did we not weary ourselves in a rhythm of rowing, daylong on the inland waters?

  Our arms were interlaced, our sobbing breaths beat on each other’s eyelids under the seedenlivening light of eternal day. O, bright annihilator of lines and minutes, o, ceaseless undulator of curves recurrent, 0, visual and unvestal goddess, Oft was I weary when I toiled with

  June 18—1859

  THE

  ROMANTIC, ILLSTARRED, WONDERFUL,

  WICKED CLASS PICNIC WAS IMPARTIALLY REPORTED

  only in the Free Enquirer, and even then not until several days after the excitement had died down. The article, a remarkable one, was published as coming from an unknown pen. It began:

  THE EPIC PICNIC

  Most of those who have written of the late picnic have told nothing but lies, monstrous fabrications on a thin scaffolding of truth. This observer had hoped that the whole thing would escape the pitiless light of the press, which could only serve to keep wounds open and passions inflamed. Since the lid is off, however, he feels incumbent upon him the melancholy duty of giving a full account of the entire episode which, as it happens, he is in a position to know better than anyone else. And as, except for its unhappy dénouement, the picnic will remain a fadelessly blithe memory in the hearts of most of those who were there, let us paint it for posterity with an impartial pen, gay where gaiety is apposite, grave where, alas! the events that transpired upon the banks of the Shawmucky require such a style. So that those who live after us may have the picture in all its light and shadow, long after hearts that are now embittered have ceased to beat, let us for a little withdraw the curtain and then lower it forever on the events of that memorable and melancholy day. Say, then, Muse, what was the beginning of . . .

  The picnic began at the Academy Building, where the students assembled and set out noisily in buggyloads. The Perfessor led the way, driving a black spring buggy belonging to the Reverend Ezra Gray, which his wife Lydia had procured for the afternoon. Johnny, Lydia, and Cassius Carney were squeezed into this buggy. Garwood Jones’s buggy followed with five people wedged in, including Nell Gaither. The third buggy brought the rest. There were thirteen altogether, counting the Perfessor.

  —Thirteen, the Perfessor had said at starting. Which is the marked man?

  Startled, Johnny Shawnessy had kept his eyes down. It had been a week since he and Nell Gaither had exchanged certain keepsakes. Two nights after, he had decided on a bold move and had walked down the road to Nell’s house. A buggy passed him on the way and turned in at the Gaither drive. When Johnny reached the house, Garwood Jones was giving Nell’s father a cigar on the front porch. Johnny walked back home without paying his respects.

  At the Academy, Nell had turned up in Garwoo
d’s buggy, wearing her green dress, her gold hair pulled back to show her ears under a wide white sunbonnet. Stepping down from the buggy, she had fluttered her hand at Johnny, and a smile touched the corners of her mouth, this mouth with the pointed red tongue, so fullflown and sensual and, alas! so often kissed—but never by Johnny Shawnessy.

  —Hello, Johnny, it said, lingering on the word. It’s hot, isn’t it?

  This remark seemed to Johnny somehow the most exciting and subtly meaningful thing he had ever heard.

  But Nell’s eyes gave no special sign. Johnny felt a cold and not wholly irrational fear. Girls were mawkish sentimentalists and would write almost anything in a keepsake book.

  On the way over to Danwebster, where picnic tables had been set out beside the mill, everyone laughed and sang. The Perfessor was full of quips and quotations. Johnny Shawnessy kept leaning out of the Reverend’s buggy and yelling things ar the Garwood Jones buggy. Each time he did so, Garwood solemnly thumbed his nose, and Nell stuck out her tongue in a very ladylike manner. Johnny deliberately fell out of the Reverend’s buggy once and raced the horse for a hundred yards to loud applause.

  When they reached the bank of the river, they put their picnic baskets on the tables and engaged in a new sport that the Perfessor had introduced into Raintree County.

  THE BASE BALL GAME

  (Epic Fragment from the Free Enquirer)

  Arriving on the banks of the legendary Shawmucky, the young men promptly divested themselves of their coats and laying out a ‘base ball diamond’ proceeded to urge the sportive ball hither and thither in the somewhat complicated evolutions of this new game only recently imported by Professor Stiles from the East into Raintree County. Cassius Carney demonstrated a baffling speed and precision in the exacting art of wafting the ethereal sphere across the spot denominated ‘home plate.’ Professor Stiles showed extraordinary agility in snatching the bounding pellet off the ground or stopping it in mid-air, whenas with one graceful sweep of his arm he would propel it to the appropriate spot on the ‘diamond.’ John Shawnessy, he of the limber legspring, shot around the ‘bases’ like a comet whenever he got a chance, which, be it remarked in passing, was not often, as he showed a marked inability to engender that contact between bat and ball which is necessary for a ‘hit.’ The game was marred by a few altercations, at the bottom of which one could invariably expect to find that rising young politician, Garwood Jones, whose ignorance of the rules and regulations of ‘base ball’ did not in the least diminish his readiness to argue about every moot point.

  The final score could not be exactly ascertained for a variety of reasons, especially as the rules were scandalously relaxed from time to time in favor of several young ladies who were invited to play in order to make up two ‘teams.’ It is believed that about thirty or forty legal ‘runs’ were scored by each side.

  One amusing mishap involved the person of the aforesaid Mr. Jones, who mistook for ‘second base’ a certain circular adornment that is oftentimes found in places where members of the bovine species ruminate.

  After the game of ‘base ball’ had terminated, several of the young gentlemen were pitted against each other in a test of fleetness of foot. In all these encounters, John Wickliff Shawnessy, that poetic young denizen of the Upper Shawmucky, dismounted from Pegasus long enough to demonstrate to the assembled company a velocity of pedal locomotion not seen in these parts for many a moon. This young man is being groomed by his supporters as a challenger to the honors now so long held by Orville Perkins of Freehaven, better known as ‘Flash,’ who has been undisputed champion of the County for five years. When asked by your correspondent whether or not he thought he could obtain the victory over the redoubtable Mr. Perkins in the Annual Fourth of July Race in Freehaven, our modest young hero said without a moment’s hesitation, ‘Shucks, it won’t hurt to try. Someone ought to beat that old guy before he trips on his beard.’

  Personally, we should like to see the veteran velocipede from Freehaven match his stuff against this brash beanpole from the banks of the Shawmucky. Five dollars will get you one of ours that youth will not be denied and that Mr. Perkins’ venerable years (he is now, we understand, a senile twenty-two), if not the fleetness of his challengers, will at last get the better of him.

  But now we approach that part of our recital from which the Muse shrinks in trembling anticipation. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon that . . .

  It had been Johnny Shawnessy’s idea that the picnic include a boating excursion down the Shawmucky River. A half dozen rowboats had been procured and rowed laboriously up the river from Danwebster the day before by Johnny and others to a spot where the river looped behind the Gaither Farm. Here the picnickers could break up into twosomes and row the loops of the river back to the picnic ground at Danwebster, arriving in time for supper and a bonfire before breaking up and going home.

  On the mile walk over to the river, the girls collected around Professor Stiles, who led the way, while the young men brought up the rear, falling farther and farther back. Near the river Garwood Jones pulled out a bottle of corn whiskey and passed it around. Everyone took a drink but Johnny. Garwood stopped, passed out cigars, and told a hearty joke, while Johnny lingered uneasily, watching the Perfessor and the girls climbing into boats at the water’s edge. Nell hadn’t yet entered a boat but stood as if waiting for someone. She shaded her eyes and, as it seemed to Johnny, looked directly at him. She slowly raised her hand and gently beckoned.

  While Garwood roared loudly at his own good joke, Johnny began to run. When he reached Nell, he took her hand, which he hadn’t held since they were children, and together they stepped into a boat.

  —Hey! Garwood yelled. What’s the big idea?

  He was standing on the bank now, feet wide apart, hands on hips, staring at Nell. Nell bit her lip in confusion and turned her head away. As for Johnny, he stood up, planted the oarblade in the bank squarely between Garwood’s legs and with one shove sent the boat skimming to the middle of the river.

  ROWING DOWN THE RIVER

  (Epic Fragment from the Free Enquirer)

  Their boats dispread upon the river were like swans on classic waters. With a languorous lifting and falling of oarblades, the gala procession floated on the widening stream. In romantic twosomes, they lingered on between green walls. Did they stop to think, in the midst of their gaiety and laughter, that they were passing burial places and battlegrounds of vanished peoples? Did they think that the winding river was the highway of extinct races, whose skimming light canoes did cleave the same waters in centuries long ago? Did these maidens in wide bonnets, these lads in straw skimmers and bowties, dream of aught but innocent love and beauty and desire as they drifted on languid oars down waters of youth and summertime! Ah! let us behold them this brief while, floating on the classic river of Raintree County, with all their gushing joys in their bloom. . . .

  Johnny dug the water with slow oars. On the breast of the slow-flooding river, he was floating with Nell Gaither, who sat in the stern of the boat, her feet together, her hands on the sides of the boat, her wide bonnet buckling with the breeze that freshened fitfully along the river. Languor and desire flowed from the fullbodied river. Looking past Nell, Johnny could see the broad road of water curving distantly in the haze of afternoon. The air was moist with the odor of the river and its flowers. Nell Gaither’s body in the green dress was curved like the river; her face in the bonnet was an incredible, lush flower swaying on a supple stem. Her eyes glowed with a curious light in the brightness of the river air. Turning now and then, Johnny saw the other boats spread out upon the water. In the farthest boat Professor Stiles, paired with Lydia Gray, rowed fiercely toward the bend.

  Garwood Jones and Cash Carney, forced by the shortage of women to row down the river together, hung around Johnny’s boat. Just opposite the place where Johnny had seen Nell in the river, his boat grounded on a mudbar. Everyone else had missed it by yards, but Johnny, who knew that part of the river by he
art, drove straight onto it. Garwood, slightly ahead, laughed grimly and stood up in his boat.

  —You’ll have to push off, John. Need any help?

  —I can manage, Garwood. Thanks.

  —Be glad to help, Garwood said grimly.

  —No, thanks. I can manage.

  Johnny, looking over his shoulder, watched the last boat coasting toward the bend. He and Nell were alone on a mudbar in the middle of the Shawmucky.

  Eyes thoughtful, Nell sat with her feet primly together. She reached up often to push a wisp of hair off her forehead, and sometimes she trailed her hand in the river.

  —This boat is here to stay, Johnny said, until we push it off. I drove it on hard.

  Nell laughed.

  —You sure did, Johnny, she said. I thought you knew the river.

  —I do.

  —O.

  —You in any hurry to get to Danwebster? Johnny said.

  —Not a bit. This is nicer right here.

  Johnny raised the oars and laid them up along the sides of the boat. Nell put her hand on the left oar, still dripping from the river.

  —I feel so funny, she said, and the sun’s so bright.

  She ran her fingers along the thin blade of the oar.

  —Remember the line from the Final Examination? she said. I don’t know why I thought of it.

  She took off her wide bonnet and shook her hair. Her eyes were nearly shut in the brilliant sunlight. Johnny watched her mouth as she recited in a low voice, rhythmical and pensive:

  —Oft was I weary when I toiled with thee. I wonder where the Perfessor got it?

  —Probably he made it up, Johnny said.

  —Oft was I weary when I toiled with thee, Nell said. I wonder what it means. It sounds so—so pagan.

  She kept running her hand along the smooth oarblade and trailing her other hand in the river.