Come back to Raintree County and find your home again. And you will find again the sphinxlike silence of the earth. Knock hard, young hero, on the gates of death.
Listen to the wail of the train at the crossing. This is the myth of America and of those who cross America on trains. This is the myth of those who come back home.
Who would not suffer grief? Grief is the most beautiful garland given to love. (And who would not suffer love?)
But listen to the wail of the train at the crossing. O, sound of sorrow and farewell, as we go down the years of life into the gulf together! Lost years. Last years. Stations upon the plain. One-minute stops of life and smoky rooms where I got down with crowds. O, gates of iron gushing human faces!
Delay the trains! Keep them from crossing rivers! Delay the iron horse of time!
My gilded years come back to me, my postwar years. The Republic was roaring West; factories mushroomed from the nightsoil of cities. But there was a message for me to come back home. I had known already how the legend would end. All the great legends of the earth are certain like the earth.
For the saddest legend of my life was only some pencil marks on paper, a pulse of atoms in a wire. It was the one undissuadable legend. It had been coming all the time down all the wires and all the ways of the world since the world began, and it found a lost young man in the City and made him once more a passenger on trains, for it was
July-August—1877
A MESSAGE FOR HIM TO COME BACK HOME TO RAINTREE COUNTY
was in his pocket as he travelled by train along the trunklines of the Republic. When his train came into Pittsburgh, he remembered dully that the Great Strike was still on. Only a week ago, he had seen the Strike become a bloody war in the yards at Pittsburgh. He remembered an army leaderless and lost in darkness. In the Workers’ neighborhood a boy named Johnny Fabrizio had lain dead.
Since that day in Pittsburgh, he had taken the warm flesh of the City into his arms and had possessed it by rejection. Since that time, he had received a telegram. He knew now that time couldn’t be measured by Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, but only by the revolutions of the soul.
The telegram that he kept in his pocket and sometimes took out for rereading had already acquired a crumpled antiquity.
JOHN WICKLIFF SHAWNESSY:
COME HOME. . . .
A few words had crossed the statelines and rivers of the Republic and had found him in the City.
As the train passed slowly through Pittsburgh with unexplained delays, he saw the wreckage of the yards, a drab aftermath of battle—ashes, watersoaked rags, lumps of iron, overturned cars, gutted buildings, spewed bricks. Troops were in force, and when night fell and the train hadn’t yet left the station, torches sputtered in the yards, and the air was charged with excitement, as if at any time the fighting might flare up again.
As he was leaving Pittsburgh at last, train bells were tolling. He heard them in the yards of city after city on his way back home. They went on tolling and tolling the bloody dirge of the Great Strike. With troops and court injunctions and arrests without right of trial, the Strike was being broken. Cash Carney had been absolutely right. But the trouble was a long time dying in the land. Usually, John Shawnessy would have expected to come home in a day and a night, but he was many days getting home now because of the Strike.
Those days, the Strikers gathered along the trainways, standing sometimes in mute hundreds. Often at night, the train would be stopped by Strikers, John Shawnessy would be awakened from a fitful sleep, a lantern would be thrust into his face, voices would say,
—Is this the feller?
—No, that ain’t the one. Must have been the next car down.
—Who are you, Mister?
—John Shawnessy.
—Where you from?
—New York.
—Where you goin’?
—Indiana.
—What’s your business?
He showed them the telegram, and they passed on.
Several times, men raised lanterns to the windows.
—Are there any soldiers on this train?
—No.
—Damn good thing!
Through these summer nights and days of anger and pent violence, he passed, obeying an old command. For certain words had come and found him in the City. They had been reaching out for him with feminine and pleading hands, and they had called him home.
During these days, he hated the bigness of America. These miles of iron roadways, these planless cities, these stations, depots, roundhouses, warehouses, grain elevators, factories were the gray huge swollen river of American time. Like a gulf of bitter waters he had to drink it down before he could come home.
But there was a dark satisfaction, too, in these many delays because they kept the legend of the words he had got from becoming final. Perhaps a man might, by crowded thought, by accumulation of images, linger for a hundred lifetimes between two unrelated points on the vast earth of America.
The convulsions of the Strike had reached Indiana before him. More days were lost as he was diverted to Chicago, and from there down to Indianapolis, where the Strike had reached a climax of violence. During a stop-over there, he got out briefly in the Union Station and saw the backwash of bloody riots in which troops under the command of General Benjamin Harrison had been called in by a court injunction to put down the disturbance.
Strangely, all during this time, he had a morbid preoccupation with the lives and destinies of other people whom he saw, passengers on trains. He seemed to understand as never before the isolation and uniqueness of other human beings. Each one, he knew, was going a private voyage across time, approaching or departing from the terminals of birth, marriage, death, from the cities of joy and sorrow; and each, whether he knew it or not, carried in his pocket a crumpled telegram telling him to come back home.
Then on a brilliant August afternoon, he was speeding out of Indianapolis on the way to Raintree County. Familiar names went by, tolling the minutes off. Those days, the trains ran unpredictably, even on the local lines, and he hadn’t been able to get a telegram through. Consequently, when he got down at the station in Freehaven, he looked in vain for a familiar face. The town was hot and sleepy, and hardly anyone was on the Square.
John Shawnessy set out to walk home. He was unshaven, grimy, sweaty. His suitcase was heavy. His city suit was baggy and hot. The streets blurred and swam in his eyes. Looking back, he saw the flag limply hanging on the tower of the New Court House. The clock said three o’clock.
He was dizzy and panting as he went on through the outskirts of the town. The weeds along the road seemed insultingly lush, tall, fragrant. Thousands of voracious grasshoppers seethed at the edges of the road, frightened by his feet. The Shawmucky was choked with reeds, flowers, small trees, mudbars. As soon as he crossed the bridge, he left the road and picked his way through the lost yards and fallen fences of Danwebster, following a lane that led down to the mill on the river. He crossed the structure of wood and rock that still spanned the river there. He climbed the railroad, went down the embankment, ascended the hill to the iron gates of the graveyard, entered.
The Danwebster Graveyard hadn’t been mowed for several weeks. As he walked through the deep grass, hundreds of insects rose and fell like seeds from the hand of a sower.
He went down on his knees before a fresh mound in the southeastern corner of the yard. The tall stone, surmounted by a cross, had the legend
MOTHER
Ellen Shawnessy
1801-1877
There were bouquets of withered flowers on the grave. The sun beat hard on the crusted earth.
He lay on the earth, and the earth gave no sign, except to remain beautiful with summer. The river made a little sound in the shallows. A train passed, crying.
He thought of a face darkly tranquil in the earth below him.
Then he remembered the living face of his mother, Ellen Shawnessy. And with this memory there came to him like a tide of mus
ical waters the legend of his days in Raintree County. The face of his mother leaned down to him from a prehistoric past. This young, vivid face with the affectionate smile moved, and the mouth said the single piercing word that had touched him into being. Johnny! With that word came the memory of his father, T. D. Shawnessy, benignly nodding down to him from a great height. The old days came back, the days of his childhood on the breast of the land, a life steeped in myths and golden quests. Like invulnerable angels, the forms of his father and mother moved on the young earth of Raintree County. From the grass and flowers that brushed his face a sweet, wild fragrance rose of all the withered summers distilled into the little house behind the house. He remembered the primeval Home Place in the County, the log cabin, the road before it—a pioneer trace, the great oak forest, a twilight of stately trunks. Johnny! The word was talismanic. It called into being the newer Home Place of Before the War and the days of his burgeoning manhood. He remembered golden afternoons on the upland meadows, harvest of wheat and corn. He remembered the Old Court House, the shrine of clockless days when there had been no death. He remembered a hundred Saturdays, Memorial Days, Fourths of July, footraces, picnics, ice-cream socials, church suppers. The form of a young professor stood at the blackboard in a brick building and chalked a slanting script across it. The river ran through the whole bright legend, green waters of prophecy, rising from an unknown source and flowing to a lake. Johnny! With a pang of sadness, he heard the name said like a caress by the mouth of one who was lost and gone forever on the great river of the years.
Now he knew what grief was. It was a memory of time past, of time in its poignant and irrevocable pastness. It was man’s memory of being a child after it was impossible any longer to be a child.
It was late afternoon when John Shawnessy left the Danwebster Graveyard and going back to the road walked toward the Old Home Place, looking for its lonely form on the sky.
T. D. met him at the door. He looked pathetically old and broken, blinking back tears, wandering around disconsolately while others talked. Now and then the old man would stop and put his chin up and clasping his hands behind his back, would begin to rock on his heels with a faint revival of the old look of buoyant optimism. But a vague bewilderment erased the smile, and he would turn and go away by himself. During the next few days, he spent hours sitting in his Office fumbling with the Botanical Medicines. T. D. was obviously not long for this world himself.
Ellen Shawnessy’s death had been unexpected. A call had come from a neighbor’s house two miles away, near Moreland. A woman was about to have a baby. T. D. was away at the time, but Ellen had put down her work, bridled a horse, and ridden away bareback. Arriving, she had got off the horse and started toward the house. She had come up the walk, smiling, flushed with the ride, had raised her hand to greet one of the members of the household. Just then, she had stopped, turned pale, and fallen senseless on the path. A few hours later, without regaining consciousness and shortly after telegrams had been dispatched to John Shawnessy and other members of the family not at home, she had been pronounced dead.
In the days following, while John Shawnessy remained at the Home Place, wondering if he could find his way back to a satisfactory Raintree County, Carl Foster, a good friend and fellow teacher, told him of a teaching position vacant at the school in Moreland. He suggested that John Shawnessy apply for the place and also attend the County Teachers’ Institute, which was being held at Paradise Lake in the latter part of August.
With almost cynical resignation (as cynically resigned as he was ever likely to be), John Shawnessy accepted the suggestion.
In the strength of his young manhood, he had gone to Lake Paradise with a girl named Susanna Drake, after a victorious run through the Court House Square. That was nearly twenty years ago. He had plunged for an afternoon into the very quick of life and had done what it pleased him to do, like a young god. That was before he had erected on the horizons of his soul the shape of a mansion doomed to fall in fire. That was before the War and its wreck of human souls. That was before Atlanta fell and Columbia burned and Lincoln’s body had crossed the Nation on a flag-draped train. That was before his lonely post-War years and his messianic dreams. That was before he had gone in Centennial Summer to the City, where he dreamed an enchanting dream of love and fame, and hunted through the world Behind the Scenes, trying to find a lovely woman in a costume closet, but found instead the multiple image of a sphinx recumbent. That was before his recall to Raintree County:
JOHN WICKLIFF SHAWNESSY:
COME HOME. MAMMA IS DYING.
Come home. Come home. That was the thing he hadn’t been able to do and perhaps would never be able to do again. For where was the home of life’s eternal wanderer, the young American?
Now, he was thirty-eight years old, had lived more than half his allotted years. What trophies did he have of his days to carry before him like victorious banners? He had a huge, half-written, rejected manuscript, some letters addressed to a young soldier named Corporal Johnny Shawnessy (dead in battle), some notes scrawled by a pathetic child whose soul had been scarred by fire, a guide-book to the Centennial Exposition, an album of class day posies, some photographs of children’s faces in front of country schools, and a crumpled telegram.
Come home. Come home. He had come home and had completed the necessary legend. But now he saw that he hadn’t built new ramparts against the day when the old ones came crumbling down. He had his memories of Raintree County and his mother, and these he incessantly turned in his mind in the days following her death, as if now, when it was too late, he would try to recapture and understand fully the person who had gone away.
Come home. Come home. Well, he would go back to Lake Paradise in the center of Raintree County and see it as it was now, with its new hotel. its revival tabernacle, and its cottages for summer tourists. He would remind himself that nothing remains the same, not even the most ancient scar on the earth of Raintree County. He might even wander some day over to the wild side of the lake, where the Shawmucky emptied into it and see if he could find a boy with sun-illumined hair running among the trees (the fastest runner in Raintree County!).
He would, however, not disturb himself to hunt for that old tree, that mothy personal legend with which he had quaintly amused himself from childhood. He wouldn’t hunt for it, precisely because he was afraid that he would find it.
After all, it was there somewhere, with two rocks under it. He knew. He alone knew that it was there in the almost impenetrable swamp where the great reeds thrust to sunlight and the bugs went buzzing by like bullets. It was there, where an itinerant preacher had thrust a little seedling into the earth. It was there all right—and exactly what of it?
Or had he been drunker on applewine than he thought and dreamed the tree and the two rocks?
He knew then that he would never go back to the City. He knew then that he had ceased to be the child of his mother and had become at last, reluctantly, a man, who would have to make new alliances with Time and Fate and find, if possible, new loves to replace the old.
So, in the latter days of August, 1877, John Shawnessy climbed into T. D.’s old buggy and drove off toward the lake with a pile of books behind the seat, among them a pamphlet that Carl Foster had given him. It was really an advertisement for the new Biltmore Hotel, containing a gem of commercial poetry. He had read it with sardonic amusement. COME TO PARADISE LAKE, it said:
O, come ye now, and bring your children,
BRING YOUR WIFE AND SWEETHEART TRUE,
TO THE EARTH’S
MOST
—LOVELY GARDEN you have here, Evelina, Professor Stiles remarked to Mrs. Brown.
Esther liked Professor Stiles, but she didn’t really understand him. He and Mr. Shawnessy had just left the porchswing, where they had been talking ever since the picnic supper, and were standing with the ladies near the fountain in the front part of the lawn, watching a game of drop-the-handkerchief. The children gave such a wild shout of laught
er that Esther didn’t catch Mrs. Brown’s reply, but it was probably something genteel and witty.
Esther hadn’t forgot Pa’s warning, given after the Revival Service. Now that the day was so nearly finished and it seemed unlikely that anything could happen, she was more frightened than at any time before. What was waiting there in the hushed night to surprise these revelers in the garden? Was it something that had been waiting in secret for its hour during fourteen years?
Every Fourth of July was an occasion for mixed recollections of joy and sorrow; she always felt pulled apart emotionally before the anniversary day was over. It was both a birthday and a deathday in her life. Always there was a victory to be won over herself. People who had known her joy would have to suffer for it—this she had always known. For greatest bliss, one had to suffer greatest chastisement.
She had known, too, what this chastisement would be, had often found herself thinking about it when darkness would fall on the little towns where the summer evenings died slow, gorgeous deaths.
—I wonder what’s happened to the revivalists, Professor Stiles said. What in the world do they do over there? Burn a house down every time they hold a meeting?
Mrs. Brown and Mr. Shawnessy laughed. Esther was surprised, not realizing that the remark was intended to be humorous. Perhaps they had been burning something down. She had had for some time a feeling that there was an unusual disturbance in the town. People were perhaps gathering in the darkness, just beyond the palely colored light from the Japanese lanterns.
—Maybe they’re coming to run me out of the County again, Professor Stiles said, sniffing. That’s a familiar odor. You don’t see anyone out there carrying a long, knotty piece of somebody’s fence, do you—and a bagful of feathers?
Mr. Shawnessy laughed, but his eyes were puzzled.
About three hundreds yards away in the Main Street of Waycross, bunches of flame began to move, flicker, flare, approach, recede. They were torches. They drew together into a thick cluster. They began to move forward, held aloft in a shapeless mass, yet riding in a fixed relation to each other. They came forward voicelessly, glaring through the spears of the fence. The children stopped playing and listened. There was a noise now of heavy feet trampling on the road coming out of town.