I PRESUME?
--Yes?
His voice was tentative as he looked
for the woman who had spoken from the dusk of the little post
office. The whole thing seemed vaguely implausible. A short while
ago, he had left his house to take part in the welcoming exercises
for the Senator, whose train was expected momentarily in the
Waycross Station. Walking west on the National Road, he had joined
the crowd that poured from three directions into the south arm
of the cross formed by the County and National roads. A swollen
tide of parasols and derby hats blurred and brightened around
the Station. Except on Sundays, he had never seen over ten people
at once along this street, and he had been afraid that he might
not be able to reach the platform where he was to greet the Senator.
Near the Station, the crowd had been so dense that he could hardly
move. Women in dowdy summer gowns jockeyed his nervous loins.
Citizens with gold fobs and heavy canes thrust, butted, cursed.
A band blared fitfully. Firecrackers crumped under skirts of
women, rumps of horses. From the struggling column of bodies,
bared teeth and bulgy eyes stuck suddenly.
Then he had found himself looking
into the glass doorpane of the Post Office, where his own face
had looked back at him, youthfully innocent for his fifty-three
years, brows lifted in discovery, long blue eyes narrowed in
the sunlight, dark hair smouldering with inherent redness. He
had just begun to smooth his big mustaches and adjust the poet's
tie at his throat when the crowd shoved him against the door.
It had opened abruptly, and stepping inside on a sudden impulse,
he had heard the woman's question.
Now he shut the door, drowning
the noise of the crowd to a confused murmur.
--I was expecting you, Johnny,
the woman said in the same husky voice. Where have you been?
--I was just on my way to greet
the Senator, he said. Is there--is there some mail for me?
He walked slowly toward the distribution
window, where in the darkness a face was looking out at him.
--Some letters carved on stone,
the voice said. The fragments of forgotten language. I take my
pen in hand ant seat myself--
The woman was lying on a stone
slab that extended dimly into the space where the window usually
was. She lay on her stomach, chin propped on hands. Her hair
was a dark gold, unloosened. Her eyes were a great cat's, feminine,
fountain-green, enigmatic. A dim smile curved her lips.
She was naked, her body palely
flowing back from him in an attitude of languor.
He was disturbed by this unexpected,
this triumphant nakedness. He was aroused to memory and desire
by the stately back and generously sculptured flanks.
--How do you like my costume, Johnny?
she asked, her voice tinged with mockery.
--Very becoming, he said.
Her husky laughter filled the room,
echoing down the vague recess into which she lay. He hadn't noticed
before that the slab was a stone couch, curling into huge paws
under her head. He was trying to understand what her reappearance
meant on this memorial day.
Watching him with wistful eyes,
she had begun to bind up her hair, fastening it behind her ears
with silver coins.
--What creature is it that in the
morning of its life--
She paused and opened her left
hand, color of the pallid stone on which she lay. The hand was
excitingly feminine, though perhaps too broad, too fleshy for
perfect beauty. She put her arm on his shoulder. Then with her
hand gently plucking and pulling at the base of his neck, like
one wishing to uproot a little tree without hurting it, she pressed
his head down to hers. Reminding himself that she was an old
friend of the family and perhaps even a relative, he was about
to kiss her.
Just then she turned her face aside
and handed him a rolled newspaper.
--Our Semicentennial Edition, dear,
she said, with a special column devoted to the history of the
County. The fragments from your own unfinished epic occupy a
prominent place on page one. You'll find a picture of the authentic
Raintree----
Opened, the paper was a parchment
warm to the touch, engraved with a map of Raintree County so
exquisitely made that the principal landmarks showed in relief
with living colors. In the middle of the County, Paradise Lake
was a pool of shimmering green. Its shore eastward where the
river entered dissolved into the steaming substance of the Great
Swamp. The roads crisscrossing on the flat earth were brown and
gravelly. Tiny shiny carriages moved on the National Road, which,
side by side with the Pennsylvania Railroad, cut across the County
close to the southern border. Westward on the railroad, a darkly
lovely little locomotive pulled a chain of coaches covered with
patriotic bunting. The intersection at Waycross was dense with
human faces. All over the County, the bladed corn swayed softly
in the fields. In the Square of Freehaven, a mile and a half
southeast of the lake, the Court House stood in a lawn of slender
trees. A flag fluttered from the brave brick tower, and the four
clock faces told the time of day. From the northeastern to the
southwestern corner of the County, the Shawmucky River lay in
loops of green, halved into upper and lower segments by the lake.
On the road east from Freehaven two bridges spanned the upper
river's great south loop, and in the halfcircle formed by the
road and the river, relics of the vanished town of Danwebster
lay in deep grass. Across the river was the graveyard, a mound
of pale stones. And somewhat beyond the bridge on the south side
of the road was the Old Home Place, a little collection of farmbuildings
on a gentle hill, the ancestral Shawnessy home in Raintree County,
where Mr. Shawnessy had been born fifty-three years before. So
precise was the map that he could see the great rock halfsunk
in the earth at the limit of the South Field.
He was certain that in the pattern
of its lines and letters this map contained the answer to the
old conundrum of his life in Raintree County. It was all warm
and glowing with the secret he had sought for half a century.
The words inscribed on the deep paper were dawnwords, each one
disclosing the origin and essence of the thing named. But as
he sought to read them, they dissolved into the substance of
the map.
With a feeling suspended between
erotic hunger and intellectual curiosity,
he looked for the young woman. She was no longer lying on the
stone couch. Her voice was passionate, musical, receding.
--Johnny! Tall one! Shakamak!
He could see her pale form turning
over and over in a slow spiral floating away on green waters.
From time to time, one hand rose beckoning while the other untwined
her hair. The loose gold cord of her hair was at last all he
saw of her, untwisting, prolonged in the water to a single shimmering
thread. Holding a branch of maize loaded with one ripe ear, he
stood on the threshold of the door, about to lunge into the delirious
crowd. The ceremonial day that he had spent a lifetime preparing,
a web of faces and festive rites, trembled before him. The girls
in their summer dresses were twirling their parasols and shouting
hymen. The official starter of the Fourth of July Race was raising
his pistol. A path was opening through the crowd to a platform
erected in a distant square. Beyond, beside a sky-reflecting
pool, he saw white pillars and a shrine. He heard a far voice
calling. The sound was shrill, appealing, with a note of sadness....
He awoke. The whistle of a train
at the crossing had at last pressed its way into his sleep. It
was early dawn. He lay in bed, among the glowing fragments of
the dream. The dream had been vivid with the promise of adventure,
consummation. He rewove its tantalizing web, contrasting it with
the simple reality into which he had awakened.
His wife, Esther, eighteen years
younger than he, lay beside him, her Indianblack hair screwed
into curlpapers, her regular features composed by sleep into
a look of stony, almost mournful serenity. In the next room slept
the three children, Wesley, Eva, and Will, thirteen, twelve,
and seven years old. The family slept in the two upstairs rooms
of the plain white wooden house. There were four main rooms down--parlor,
middle room, dining room, and kitchen, running in that order
from front to back. A pumproom adjoined the kitchen, and a small
spare bedroom was annexed to the dining room. A cellar with outside
entrance was under the kitchen. A porch extended along the front
and halfway down the east side of the house. The house was set
well forward in a trimly kept yard, fenced in with white pickets
in front and on the two sides. Almost against the house behind
was a small frame building of two parts, smokehouse and woodshed.
A path started at the backdoor and ran along a garden to the
outhouse. At the rear of the lawn was a small barn. A narrow
field planted in corn extended a hundred yards back to the railroad.
The town of Waycross, where Mr.
Shawnessy had lived for two years, had an equally austere pattern.
The business buildings were at the intersection of the roads--general
store, barber shop, bank, feedstore, blacksmith shop. Half a
hundred houses were scattered along the four arms of the cross.
On the south arm were a church, the Post Office, and the Railroad
Station. The Schoolhouse, where Mr. Shawnessy and his wife were
the only teachers, was on the west arm. On the north arm was
a huge tent where the Reverend Lloyd G. Jarvey had been conducting
his Summer Revival Series. Among the dwellings on the east arm
were the Shawnessy house, lying on the south side of the National
Road, and the mansion of Mrs. Evelina Brown somewhat beyond the
town proper.
In the naked pallor of dawn, Waycross
seemed to him devoid of visual complexity, as if to reduce the
problem of place to its basic ingredients. And Raintree County
also aspired to spatial symmetry, being a perfect square twelve
miles to the side. What could be more certain than the location
of Raintree County, whose western border was sixty miles from
Indianapolis and whose eastern border was fifty miles from the
neighboring state of Ohio? And yet, the dream had left him with
an uneasy feeling of being anchorless, adrift on an unknown substance.
The formal map of Raintree County had been laid down like a mask
on something formless, warm, recumbent, convolved with rivers,
undulous with flowering hills, blurred with motion, green with
life.
He mused upon this mingling of
man's linear dream with the curved earth, couched in mystery
like a sphinx.
Had the woman of his dream, whose
face had been teasingly familiar, known the answer to this riddle?
And what token could she have given him of himself, he who also
escaped name and definition in his long journey through time,
a traveller from dawn to darkness, and all at once a child, a
man, an old man?
He should have asked this gracious
lady about time past. He should have followed her beckoning hand
down the mystic river of the years back to the gates of time,
the beginning of himself. He should have traced a tangled thread
to the source of a life on the breast of the land.
It was dawn on Raintree County,
and in a little while he would have to yield himself to the ritual
day. Past midnight, he had lain awake thinking about the big
Fourth of July Program, in which, as principal of the local school
and an old friend of the Senator, he had a leading responsibility.
First he would drive to Freehaven, where he had some matters
to see to before the Senator arrived. Despite the necessarily
early hour of the trip, the whole family planned to go along
as usual. On the way back, he would stop at the Danwebster Graveyard
for his annual visit to the family lot. At nine-thirty the Senator's
special train was due in Waycross, and the substance of Mr. Shawnessy's
dream would be repeated--minus, no doubt, the interesting lady
in the Post Office. Then he would entertain the Senator until
the G.A.R. parade and banquet at twelve-thirty. The main program
was planned for two-thirty, and after that he would see the Senator
off at the Station. In the evening there was to be a lawn party
sponsored by the Literary Society at the home of Mrs. Evelina
Brown. It promised to be the most exciting day since his second
marriage fourteen years ago.
He could still hear the thunder
of the train on distant rails receding. Its passing echoed in
the eastern valleys of his sleep. The lone shriek of it at the
crossing had been like a calling of his name. The sound of it
ebbing down gray lanes of dawn into the west was the lonely music
of a century, awakening memories of himself and the Republic.
He would lie awhile and chase a phantom of himself that was always
passing on a road from east to west. He would hunt for the earliest
mask of an elusive person, a forgotten child named Johnny, the
father of a man.
What creature is it that in
the morning of its life . . .
It was dawn now on Raintree County,
and he would begin with things of the dawn. He would pursue awhile
his ancient pastime of looking for the mystic shape of a life
upon the land, the legend of a face of stone, a happy valley,
an extinct republic, a memory of
before the cabin. ....
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