Raintree County (19 page)

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.

Lifting 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.

—O dear, she said. Pardon me, I—I was just remembering our pageant on the court house lawn in '68. You remember how my corn-costume came off just as I recited the line

So yearly doth the sturdy husbandman
Strip the dry husks from ranks of standing corn.

O dear, and just then the belt or whatever it was held it together came loose and left me standing there in my petticoat.

Mr. Shawnessy's answering laugh was too loud. He laid his own copy of the
Raintree County Historical Atlas
on the glass case.

—Shall we exchange worlds?

—Why, yes, she said, handing him the coveted, mysterious book.

He took it gingerly, as if he expected a strong vibration from it, a flood of that dangerous force which primitive man detected in sacred objects.

—The Senator can let me know if he wants it, she said. I
would
be a little reluctant to part with it. But I'll keep yours on display while I'm waiting.

He thought her eyes had a veiled glint as she walked past him down the corridor into the entrance hall. Baffled, he followed her, wondering what treasure he held under his arm. At the door, he took her hand and bowed.

—By the way, he said, three weeks from now I'm conducting a
tour of schoolchildren to scenes of historic interest in the County. May I bring them here on the twenty-fifth?

—Of course, she said. Come often—sometime when you can stay longer. I'd love to talk to someone about the County. I've been away so long, and people back here are so nice.

He was certain as he stepped out of the door that she would stand a moment watching him from behind the glass pane, her hair gorgeously alive against the dusky inward of the Museum.

Cheeks burning,
Atlas
clutched under arm, he picked his way carefully down the steps. A man had died on these steps not many days before, reaching a stiffened claw to destroy the thing that Mr. Shawnessy now carried out into the sunlight of the Fourth.

He had saved a thing golden and strange. He hugged the living myth of Raintree County under his arm.

He made a sudden plan to carry the
Atlas
into the Court House where perhaps he would have leisure to examine it, but he must show no unseemly haste. He crossed the street, walked through the gate onto the court house lawn, approached the Main Entrance, feeling himself watched by thousands of accusing eyes.

Just as he reached the steps, an aging man with white closecropped hair came out of the Court House. It was Niles Foster, founder and editor of the
Free Enquirer.

—Hello, John! I'm surprised to see you here.

—Hello, Niles. Had a little business to transact.

—With that big program in Waycross, I should think you'd be too busy. John, I'm counting on you to send me the story of the day there. Much as I hate to, I've got to stay here in Freehaven for the program. Say, if you have a minute, come on over to the Office with me, and I'll give you a copy of the Semicentennial Edition.

Mr. Shawnessy turned and walked with Niles to the south side of the Square.

—Be sure to remember me to Garwood, Niles was saying. Say, I see the Saloon's open early today. How about a glass of beer with me in honor of the Old Days? Or are you teetotaling?

Mr. Shawnessy eyed the swinging invitation of the batwing doors. A slow sense of joy and power came over him. He had plucked a forbidden fruit and had achieved the wisdom of a god. Bright rivers
of intoxication flowed through the Court House Square. He would enjoy strong temptations, be life's young victor.

—I don't know, Niles. Have to be back by nine. Wife and children waiting in the surrey and——

—I recall, Niles said, gently rambling, how your pa, old T. D., was dead set against drinking. I hadn't thought for years about the big Temperance Rally he put on in '56 and the fire and all that until I read your story of it in the ‘History of the County.' Say, that reminds me—they're putting on quite a show at the New Opera House tonight. Anyway, we old-timers call it new.

He thumbsigned at theatre bills pasted on the alleyside of the Saloon.

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