(Do you want to lose the most precious thing in all the world? Can you keep the most tragic of all the secrets?)
After that, she never ceased to be a little girl who was hunting something in the night.
The days went by like a shadow o’er the heart. There were novels about sentimental ladies and courtly gentlemen, in which mysterious notes broke up loves, effected conciliations and happy endings. Was it strange that in a little girl’s jealous anger, the fatal note was penned?
(How could I know that it would kill the dearest thing in all the world? Didn’t I hunt for the letter after that and ever since in the album where I left it? Didn’t I hunt and hunt to get it back before she read it?)
Who set the fire that burned the house beside the river?
No one will ever know. No one will ever know who put the torch to the house and burned it to the ground. Was it a little girl who did it with a jealous word? Who was it murdered two bodies joined by fire taken from the ashes of the house beside the river? Whose was the footstep passing in the night? And could anyone tell after the fire which was the mother of Susanna? Did they ever put out the fire entirely and heal the scar and stop the smouldering pain over the left breast?
So there was one who grew up a shape of this earth; her name was musical and proud like names of cities razed. Her body was lovely like Helen and the Greeks, though scarred with a scarlet letter.
And the river flowed, the river flowed in music and strangeness, the father of all waters, dividing east and west and joining north and south, through shore and shallow, tarn and tangling swamp to the sea. And the senators stood up, put togas on their phrases, they bade the black flesh lie quiet in the chains, they bade the clamorous West to be still.
Could they make the words be still? Could they chain the strong words? Could they keep seed from growing and hunting for the light? Could they keep the black flesh in the Great Dismal Swamp?
(For there were strong men ever going West. 0, Susanna, do not cry for me! They were putting the rails across the plain. The covered wagons shrugged and staggered through the passes. The engines hit the grade at forty miles per hour. They were coming all the time. They were coming down to . . .)
The days went by like a shadow o’er the heart. And one day a hero, lost young bard of Raintree County, sprang from the sunlight of a court house square and entered a room where his image was traced forever with a finger of light.
The train brought Johnny Shawnessy into Three Mile Junction, stopped briefly, and started up for the short run into Freehaven. Several new passengers had got on, crowding the coach. He would soon be home.
Then he remembered the afternoon on the shore of Lake Paradise, when a young gymnosophist had performed for cheering thousands, had walked a tightrope over the broad Ohio, achieved gymnastic bliss, ridden a balloon across the Republic, made bold forays below the Mason and Dixon Line, beaten down desire with a branch of yellow flowers.
And he remembered faces around a telegraph window and a letter at the post office, jasmine-scented from the South. A gray face had been seen many times in the Court House Square, of an old man, biblically stern. (Blow ye the trumpet, blow, all over the Republic!) One evening of November, when leaves dripped on the dead grass, he had stood by a lonely rock at the limit of the land and had remembered duty.
—Jedgin’ from the light of them fires, they sure are raisin’ a ruckus in town, a man said, peering out of a window. Reckon maybe they’re celebratin’ this here great victory at Gettysburg.
There was a strong glare of light in the sky over Freehaven, but as the train turned now directly toward the town, Johnny could see nothing more. He sat waiting.
The fragments of an immense puzzle of a human life and the Republic continued to fall into place, moving more and more swiftly and strongly like a river proceeding southward collecting a thousand random waters into one inexorable tide. On such a flood of waters he and Susanna Drake had gone South for their honeymoon to sultry nights of love in an old American city by the Delta.
He looked again at the daguerreotype in his hand. A tall house beside a river with five windows on its face! He remembered then the house near the Square in Freehaven; walkings at night, strange evasions, a scarlet strand of madness growing.
(When we lay together in the night, my unforgotten darling, when we touched our bodies in the night and made that fatal crossing, when we lay dreaming in the darkness so long and long, my darling, we were coming down to Sumter. O, Susanna, do not cry for me. . . .)
He remembered then how the bloody rose of Sumter had dawned on the Republic. Meanwhile he had lived in the tall house far from battles and had seen a being that was only a beginning come into Raintree County, Little Jim Shawnessy, a blue-eyed child. This child had come from the swamp where no one knew what seeds had intercrossed, where black and white and red and yellow sought each other blindly in the timeless underside of Raintree County.
He remembered then the face of his mad little wife fading from the doorpane back into the detested fabric of the house.
Who was Susanna Drake? A stream of reflections in mirrors? A sequence of shadows on lightsensitive plates? A river of dreams of rivers? Had she ever awakened from a dream that had begun one night before a fire? Perhaps she had gone on, always moving in that dream, walking in terror at night, hunting through the chambers of a tall house with a lamp in her hand, hunting for a secret darker than any other, whose source was hidden in the night of the Great Dismal Swamp. Did she hunt for a secret so dark that it could only be purged in fire?
He shut his eyes. Instantly, he saw the face of a little boy, an earnest small face in darkness, with violet eyes. A child’s arms clutched at him wildly. A child voice cried, Daddy!
Johnny Shawnessy’s body was bathed in cold sweat. His heart pounded. He was choking in the smoky heat of the car.
A man standing in the crowded coach leaned over and peered from the window.
—Must be some big excitement in town! Look at all them people on the road there!
Many people in wagons and buggies were going into town along the road that ran parallel with the tracks. Two or three wagons on their way out of town turned around and started back. The faces on the road were faintly scarlet.
Johnny stuffed the letter and the daguerreotype into his coat-pocket. He got up and walked to the car door. Though the train had just entered the outskirts of Freehaven, he opened the door and stepped down to the last step, which skimmed the weeds along the track. He leaned out, watching. Other passengers lined up behind him. Above the noise of the train he could hear people shouting, bells ringing.
They were in town now. Streets, houses, buildings shuttled past. People stood before their houses all looking in one direction. Down all the ways of Raintree County in this commemorative night, hooves thundered, wheels turned, feet flew, all moving toward a center.
When the tracks veered northeast to the station, Johnny saw a column of flame and smoke roaring straight up.
—Jerusalem! a man said. That there’s a fire! Must be the Court House.
—No, it ain’t the Court House, a man said. Can’t tell what it is.
Before the train stopped, Johnny jumped down and crossed the tracks. Running, he reached the Square, to find it full of people crossing it on their way to the fire. He ran on toward the alley at the south side of the Square. He looked between the buildings. There he saw plainly the last fragment of the puzzle.
The house blazed with light. Fire burned into the lonely face of it, fire shot in sharp tongues from the windows of it, fire flowed up it almost without touching it and rose fountainlike a hundred feet into the air.
In every open space where the heat wasn’t too great, in streets, alleys, yards, on porches and roofs, hundreds and hundreds of faces enclosed the fire in dense banks watching.
After that, it made no difference that Johnny Shawnessy ran through the crowd and shoved his way out into the space before the house. It made no difference that he tried to throw h
imself into the fire to find the child that no one had been able to rescue. It made no difference that strong hands had to hold him back. All that made no difference now. In a way he had foreseen this thing, but all that he had done to circumvent it had been part of the great circle of time and fate that brought it about.
Or so it seemed to him as he walked back and forth before the burning house all night, waiting, as if the fire were a surly tenant who would have to be expelled before he could reenter his own premises. He heard people tell how the fire had gained headway before it was discovered, what with the excitement, the bonfires, and the fireworks on the Square. He heard them tell how a brave man had managed to get into the downstairs part of the house and had found Susanna lying unconscious in smoke near one of the windows, a broken lamp in her hand, her hair and face burned. He heard of fruitless efforts to ascertain whether anyone else was in the house. He heard all this and knew that it was all an old legend of pity and terror that had to be played out in expiation of a crime. Not his crime, necessarily—and yet in part his crime.
He received condolences about the lost child. He heard the speculations as to what might have caused the fire. He could have told them now what had caused the fire, but they wouldn’t have understood.
He could have told them that fire could only be consumed by fire. He could have told them that this fire had come because men return to the swamp and lust after darkness and the night, because the form of a woman is meant to be seductive, because the earth is our first beloved. He could have told them that this fire had come and destroyed an innocent being because of guilty lust and careless seed. He could have told them that this fire had come because of Sumter and the Rights of Man and the Compromises and Danwebster and Gettysburg and the everrunning river, Father of Waters, which had that day begun to flow once more unvexed to the sea. He could have told them all that, but it wouldn’t have done any good.
And as he waited into the dawn, Johnny Shawnessy decided that he too would go forth now and become a soldier of the Republic. It was a choice made not from heroism but from revulsion. He was sick at heart, and he had to leave Raintree County, perhaps in order to rediscover it and rebuild it again. He had to leave it and his memories of its alien visitor, a dark love, a tragic begetting.
And during that night when ten thousand dead young men lay unburied on the picnic slopes, cornfields, and familiar grounds of a little town in Pennsylvania, the house in which Johnny Shawnessy had lived for over three years burned utterly to the ground. Fire ate its way through the mournful face of the house. It cracked and shattered the windowglasses. The roof came crashing down, spattering chimney bricks all over the street. And in the gray of the morning, when a rain came up and beat steadily on Freehaven, there was nothing left of the house but a hole on the skyline
AND A LONG FLIGHT OF STONE STEPS
THAT LED UP
TO
—NOTHING is more certain in my opinion, the Perfessor said.
—But no one will ever know for sure, Mr. Shawnessy said. Everyone who knew is dead.
—How many knew?
—Three. And one was mad. And all were killed by fire.
—Did Susanna really know, do you think?
—I think she only suspected it—or rather feared it.
—Of course, there’s one thing dead against the whole supposition, John. Would her father—or any other Southerner of good family—do a thing like that?
—Only for the strongest conceivable reason.
—What reason could be that strong?
—Great love, perhaps. Not so much for the little girl—as for her mother. A transcendent passion that broke all racial bounds and made him wish to legitimize as his child the offspring of his beloved.
—If so, he did it in the teeth of a widespread suspicion. Judging from what you say, it must have been widely rumored through New Orleans society that Susanna was a Negress. Obviously that’s why her father whipped Uncle Buzbee—as you call him—to a pulp. That’s why the family feeling was so violent both before and after the fire. That’s why Susanna never married any of the young blades who fell in love with her.
—Obviously it was only a suspicion, Mr. Shawnessy said. But a suspicion was enough—enough to ruin her life and ultimately to drive her crazy.
—Of course, the madness suggests that she was the child of her mad mother after all, the Perfessor said.
—She was the child of a greater madness, Mr. Shawnessy said. The two men smoked quietly.
—Life, said the Perfessor, is a volume of blind force, dispersed and trying to return into a condition of stability. In the intersections of this force with itself, human lives and whole nations are caught like gnats. That’s what we mean by fate. Susanna was the child of fate. By the way, whatever became of her family? The last I heard, she had run away and was declared legally dead just before your present marriage. Was that the end of it?
—Not quite, Mr. Shawnessy said. In 1880, I received a letter. . . .
He was losing his way in a web of waters, tracing a skein of tangled force across a map. Letters, newspaper clippings, dreams, photographs, faces—they were all drowned. . . .
In the river, the eternal river, the mystic river of her fate, Ophelialike, facedown, and floating with the stream. Where would she go at last except to darkness and the river?. . .
My dear Mr. Shawnessy,
The enclosed newspaper clippings will apprise you fully of a melancholy event that I am sure you will wish to take full cognizance of. For my part, as the legal adviser of Susanna Drake Shawnessy’s heirs, I had never been entirely satisfied in my own mind that she was dead. Therefore, two weeks ago, when I read in the newspaper of an unidentified woman found floating . . .
In the river, where all desire is quenched.
Where then is the soul to whom was given a proud, sibilant name? Her anguish was necessary that there might one day be fairer republics. Shall she be lost, this erring child from the eternal summer of the South?
I had a dream the other night, when everything was still. I thought I saw . . .
A WOMAN’S BODY FOUND IN RIVER
(Epic Fragment from the Meridian Sun)
July 8. Excursionists on the steamboat Delta Belle were startled in the midst of gaiety and song the other night when someone saw a body floating in the river. When fished up, it proved to be that of a woman unclothed and judged to have been in the river three or four days. Identification is rendered difficult by exposure to the water, but death is believed to have occurred by drowning. The woman is darkhaired and of medium stature. Her face and shoulders appear to have been scarred by fire. Persons having clues to the identity of the deceased may view the remains at . . .
My Old Kentucky Home, or Old Virginny, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or just anywhere and everywhere south of the Mason and Dixon Line!
O, tragic legend of the mingled seed! O, beautiful Electra, avenger of your murdered father, followed by furies to the last. O, stained and tragic girl!
So we rebuilt the doomed, incestuous house on the new earth of America, a house divided, a house of seven gables and seven deadly sins. Returning from the epic fight, we found the black stain still on the lintels. We burned the house, rebuilt it, and we are doomed to burn it and rebuild it many times.
When shall the black Helen be freed at last? When shall the river of the Republic flow to the sea unvexed by sorrowful floaters?
—But didn’t that invalidate your present marriage? the Perfessor asked.
—I had the ceremony repeated after positive proof of death was established.
The Perfessor had followed with peculiar relish the dark turnings of this Old Southern Melodrama.
—And to think, John, he said, that all this happened to you because you climbed a stair one day to have your picture taken!
—But I can’t say that it was for the worse, Mr. Shawnessy said. See the girl out there in the white dress watching the other children—my daughter—Eva? For her to be, there had to be t
hat other little girl and her burnt doll. Of course, the whole universe is implacably interconnected. It was all necessary to produce me, and I am all necessary to produce it.
He found a cigar in his coat.
—I take this cigar, Professor, and I now choose whether to light it or put it back. The delicate balance of the human universe depends on my decision. When I alter my surroundings, even slightly, I alter the timing of the human sperm throughout the world. All the generations of mankind down to the most distant future hang on the lighting of this cigar. Innumerable republics expire with every breath while I make my choice.
He struck a match on his shoe and lit the cigar. He took some time to draw it to a flame.
—All very well, the Perfessor said, except that there was always only one choice for you—the one you made. And so on down the line. There aren’t trillions of possibilities, as you imply, but only in every case the one thing that happened. Down to the most distant future, everything has to all intents and purposes already happened in the only way it could—through the operation of causality. In other words, your choice in lighting that cigar wasn’t really a free choice. The proof is that you made it and that you can’t take it back.
—You admit, don’t you, that in a choice between alternatives my belief that I’m making a free choice may be one of the causal ingredients of the choice.
—Well, yes.
—In that case, the idea of freedom has become a factor in the causal sequence, and without upsetting the doctrine of causality, it introduces freedom into human life. Man becomes a free agent by believing that he’s a free agent.
—But this idea of freedom is itself caused.
—Good! Mr. Shawnessy said. Thus freedom too is inevitable.
—I fell through a trapdoor, the Perfessor said.
—Human beings, Mr. Shawnessy said, don’t know how powerful they are. Every person determines the future by his least act. The Law of Causality means that the life of any man is the sum of everything past and the germ of everything to come. A man’s not only the child of wombs but of Events. Every single thing that happened in the world before my time was midwife to my birth. When I pick up an old newspaper of seventy-five years ago I feel a sacred excitement—I know I touch one of the lost copies of the immense newspaper of Myself. The great human problem is to find the source of Oneself. This is the Riddle of the Sphinx. And to find Oneself, I believe, is to find the Republic.