Raintree County (151 page)

The Perfessor appeared somehow pleased and revived by this confession. He bestirred himself, sitting up as if for a last effort.

—You know, John, in your pleasant vanity, you remind me of another misguided idealist, young Jesus of Nazareth, who also believed in the Resurrection and the Light. And yet, the resurrection
of Jesus was a myth like those that have gathered in the wake of every great moral personality since the world began. If it weren't for the newspapers, Lincoln would have had a resurrection. I wish I could go back to the days after the murder of young Jesus and take a series of photographs and write it up for the newspapers as it really happened. Call it if you want to

THE REAL STORY OF THE RESURRECTION
by Reporter J. W. S
TILES
(Epic Fragment from the
Cosmic Enquirer
)

Imagine yourselves, friends, plucked up and put down in the middle of the crucifixion scene as it really happened. You see a very Semitic young Jew hanging naked on a cross and groaning audibly. He's sweaty and ugly as all men are in pain, and you perceive that he's flesh and bone like anyone else. Everyone around you has a drab, everyday look, and there aren't any thunderbolts from heaven. The aging shabby Jewish woman standing near-by with some other crones is, of course, Mary, the Mother of Jesus. She's shaking her head and moaning with grief. Young Jesus, the first of her nine children, always had been a source of great concern to her, ever since his dubiously virginal begetting had caused her such anxiety—until she caught the pliant Joseph for a husband. And ever since adolescence, young Jesus had raised a stench in the local community with his overactive mentality and his messianic obsession. Now here he is at last, being nailed up like a common criminal between a couple of thieves.

Now if you follow this great Passion a little farther, you see the women take the bedraggled and very dead remnant of young Jesus from the cross. Just now, it looks as though the whole thing is washed up. A little more historical perspective on the part of the local authorities, a little more judicious killing, and Jesus will go into the records as an old forgotten court case—you know, another one of those young Jews that are always coming out of the hills and pretending to be God.

Just now the disciples are lying and sweating and doublecrossing each other to escape the axe. Some of the miracle-healing jobs are going around, openly admitting that they still have the sores.

Meanwhile, the women, who are the only ones with sand enough to admit a connection with Jesus, carry the body off, and the greatest
corpus delicti
case in all history is under way. The big problem is, what to do with it? No doubt young Jesus himself predicted his resurrection—that would go well with his sublime vanity. The faithful fear reprisals
on the body and a possible visit from the civil authorities. So a pretense is made that Jesus has been buried in a certain tomb to throw the policemen off the scent. People come and worship around the tomb and perhaps open it after a few days. No Jesus! He has arisen! some say out of ignorance and others out of deception.

As time goes by and the law fails to take any reprisals, the body becomes more and more important. Meanwhile, the physical remnant is beginning to embarrass its custodians, and the question of disposal gets serious. People are really beginning to believe in the resurrection, and something must be done about it. Some of the sturdier apostles are beginning to get back their courage. They're not going to have a life-career as preachers go down the drain just because the body of Jesus is still around. Besides, people at this time are close enough to primitive mental states so that they can't conceive of real death anyway. What is important is that someone should see the shade and talk with it. Everyone believes in ghosts anyway, and very ordinary people have seen other very ordinary people after death and are willing to swear to it. Nor do people distinguish clearly between dreams and waking reality. Is it any wonder that one or more of the disciples—a thoroughly neurotic gang anyway—claim that they've seen the Master? They're all rival preachers and quarrelling with each other over the spoils. So each comes forward with his own private myth of resurrection, and finally they all get together on a collective falsification. I suppose literally hundreds of people see Jesus in the days following the crucifixion.

But what really happened to that poor outraged, murdered body, of course we'll never know. At least we may be sure that it obeyed the universal laws of decomposition by fire or decay.

The whole thing may be even simpler than that. It's entirely possible that the body remained in a marked tomb for years and was known to be there. We can't emphasize too much how little we know of the real Jesus and how late and untrustworthy our only records are.

A few hundred years after Jesus died, there was a quantity of recorded myth available, and out of this the Divine Scriptures were selected. Thus upon a basis of lies, bad reporting, and the memories of ghost-ridden barbarians, the greatest religion of all time was erected. In the face of this unpleasant historical truth, can you call yourself a Christian?

—In transition, Mr. Shawnessy said. I believe in the eternal existence of a great human being named Jesus, and I also believe that this man was God.

—In the Raintree County sense, said the Perfessor.

—In the Raintree County sense, Mr. Shawnessy said. And as for the question of his resurrection, I do not believe that the physical body of Jesus had a resurrection. This is a crude, primitive conception which retards rather than assists religious feeling. But to think that this Jesus was a man, a human being, and that he was born as all of us are born, and died as all of us must die, makes him a more divine being than if he were some nature-transcending god. I also believe in the Divine Words of Jesus Christ, which, along with some other Divine Words uttered since the beginning of time, affirm the sacred and eternal miracle of life.

—You know, John, the Perfessor said, with a little luck, you might have been a messiah yourself. But you were born into the age of newsprint and the locomotive. Do you really want to be a Great Man, my boy?

—Of course.

—Then I'll tell you how to do it. Die obscure. Fifty years later, when civilization has all but destroyed itself and has returned to moral barbarism, your epic will be found among the ruins in a state of tantalizing incompleteness. The critics will acclaim it an authentic masterpiece, having the freshness and golden splendor of America's lost youth. Lines from it will be on everyone's lips. But biographers hunting for traces of the author will run up against a series of locked doors. Instantly, people will come forward with hundreds of untrue stories about you that will be canonized and a few true ones that will be discredited. Forged letters will appear that will be much more flattering to you than any you might have written. Someone will come out with a book to prove that you were really a down-at-the-heels country schoolteacher of no ability and that the great work attributed to you was an unacknowledged piece by Walt Whitman. Several unidentified photographs of this era will be proved beyond contention to be you. Three incredibly old ladies will claim that they enjoyed intimacies with you in your heyday and will write memoirs to prove it. A monument will be erected to your memory on the banks of the Shawmucky. An illiterate old man will show visitors through the Shawnessy Home in Waycross and sell them hunks of wood from the local lumberyard as chips from the eponymous Raintree. Someone will contend that your father and mother were never legally married, and the way will be open for a doctrine of a virgin birth. And if you can manage to hide the
corpus delicti,
I might
even promise you a resurrection and a religion of which you will be the new messiah.

—Well, it's entirely possible that I'll stay here in Waycross the rest of my life and die in a roomful of unsorted manuscript.

—John, the Perfessor said, please don't speak of dying. My own death I contemplate with some degree of placidity and resignation. But somehow it makes me bleed to think of you dying. Of course, you have the advantage of the rest of us. You've already died once and come alive.
Sleep in thy hero grave, beloved boy!
No, my boy, never die, if you can help it. You're my last great hope. When all is said and done, I'm damnably afraid of this dream in which we live and of its sudden awakening. It has been a rather dependable dream in some ways. It has always been possible to get on a train in New York City and arrive after a day or so in the neat rectangle of Raintree County. But I'm afraid that all the time we were all lost and didn't know it, because it wasn't really possible to come back to Raintree County even in a dream.

The Perfessor's voice was cavernous. He seemed a rack of bones hunched in shadow, faintly shaken by the swing.

—Lost! he said. Lost in the nation of the railroads and the century of wars and revolutions. You can't go back to Raintree County and find it, because it won't be there. Not one—
not one single moment
of time past can ever be got back.
Not one little thing
can escape change and death. Lost, the early Republic of our agrarian dream. We fought for it in battle and destroyed the thing we fought for. Lost, the years of our youth. They were good days and many, and they are all gone. And think of all the girls, John, the lovely girls, the lushloined girls who have gone down into the gulf of years.

Mr. Shawnessy shuffled the loose leaves of Senator Garwood B. Jones's manuscript, stuffing up the righthand pocket of his coat.
Memories of the Republic in War and Peace.
Perhaps on page 46 there would be an engraving of one of the lost faces, a floater on the mystic river. Drowned in years.

O, river of remembrance, you carry her on your memorial tide down many summers through an ancient Raintree County. O, nymphic whiteness and the river green with life! O, young—forever young!—and prediluvian days.

It was getting very late. The day seemed to be running in jagged
rhythms, eccentric and aimless, but far beneath it, was a leading idea, a river of memory that had been moving all the time toward a shadowy gulf.

He shut his eyes. He was taking the long way, the river way to the homeland. He seemed to be bearing a map to a place that had been lost. He held a parchment, yellow, immensely old, smelling of goat's musk. Archaic symbols—hieroglyphs, dawnwords—cluttered the margins. He heard dawnsounds. Great waterbirds plunged squawking into flight from the rivermarge. Frogs shouted from the shallows. The papyrus rushes made a murmuring sound. He heard the hiss of oars breaking the green skin of the river. There was a place where his boat had mudded in a swamp that choked the river's flow. A yellow pollen lay inches deep on the heaving muck. Reptilian birds beat upward on vast batwings from banks of rushes big as telephone poles. Their horrid cries clanged on the stridulous murmur of the Great Swamp. He floundered in sucking bogs, half-drowned in light and life, and a forest of flowering trees nodded their plumed tops at him. The flowers were halfsized human heads, dipping on fleshy stalks. One was the face of a certain lost young woman. Blushing, with eyes averted, it whispered in husky accents,
One for whom you once expressed affection, Johnny. . . .
Faces, innumerable faces, swam on the thick air, and some were the withering faces of children on blasted stalks, and the flowerfaces filled the swamp with a low, terrible cry.

—Ah, God, the Perfessor was saying in a low, terrible voice, if there were just some way to keep from going down into that Great Dismal Swamp!

Beneath his shut eyes, with startling vividness, Mr. Shawnessy beheld the form of Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles sinking, pincenez glasses and all, into the muck of the Great Swamp. The Perfessor seemed to be taking it placidly enough and made no struggle as the mud climbed up his white linen suit. Down he went deeper and deeper, weakly waving the malacca cane, his mouth submerged and bubbling slime. Attempting to rescue him, Mr. Shawnessy felt himself also plucked into the heaving pool, and in a fit of anger at the Perfessor's resignation, he caught the linen collar in his right hand and angrily shook it. The Perfessor tried vainly to escape. He wriggled and ducked and squeaked, he shrivelled and wept and pleaded. Then in swift succession, he changed into a grinning skull.
a wood nymph, a revival preacher, the Pope of Rome, a bony goat, a Republican Fourth of July Orator, a Democratic Congressman from the Deep South, a Certain Eminent Statesman, an Exceedingly Rich Man, an Illustrious Commander, a gray rat, a mortuary effigy, a bottle of rotgut whiskey, a book with ELBIB gilded on the cover, a hissing serpent, a copy of the
News-Historian,
a classroom pointer, a glistening black insect, and at last a small darkhaired boy, sobbing and trying to pull an old oaken bucket out of a well.

Mr. Shawnessy looked sharply at the collapsed form of the Perfessor on the porchswing and shook him gently by the shoulder.

—Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here,

groaned the Perfessor.

—Wake up, Professor. It's about time for the fireworks.

There is a music on the ties of time. The clock in the Court House Tower is telling the time of day. Come back. Come back to Raintree County. Come down the branchlines of the past and take another turning.
Wake from thy hero grave, belovéd boy.

For resurrections! For homecomings! For heroes! A last inscription! For soldiers who died for the Republic! For warwounded, casualties, homeless ones! For amputees of legs, arms, eyes, and hopes! For those who were falsely reported missing in action! For those who were truly reported missing in action! For all the Americans who tried to find their way back to youth and hope!

For all the converts and disciples who hunted for the Master! For all the mothers who waited in the night and never gave up hoping! For all who were once living in Raintree County! For all the lost souls hunting for each other and reaching out hands and touching each other with words! A last inscription.