Raintree County

  Raintree County

  Raintree County

  … which had no boundaries in time and space, where lurked musical and strange names and mythical and lost peoples, and which was itself only a name musical and strange.

  ROSS LOCKRIDGE, Jr.

  Cover design: Joan Sommers Design

  Cover illustration: © Clemente Botelho

  This unabridged edition is reprinted by arrangement with the author’s estate

  © 1947, 1948 by Ross F. Lockridge, Jr.

  Foreword © 2007 by Herman Wouk All rights reserved

  This edition published in 2007 by

  Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55652-710-4

  ISBN-10: 1-55652-710-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  For My Mother

  ELSIE SHOCKLEY LOCKRIDGE

  This book of lives, loves, and antiquities.

  I wish to acknowledge the assistance of my wife, VERNICE BAKER LOCKRIDGE, whose devotion to this book over our joint seven-year period of unintermitted labor labor upon it was equal to my own. Without her, Raintree County would never have come into being.

  ROSS LOCKRIDGE, JR.

  Raintree County Sixty Years Later: A Remembrance

  IN 1947 I PUBLISHED Aurora Dawn, a slender spoof of radio advertising in a pseudo-Fielding style. That year a big film company offered a munificent prize for a first novel, so I forlornly (yet secretly hopefully, of course) submitted my maiden effort. The winner of the prize was Raintree County, by Ross Lockridge Jr. When I read that novel, I pitied my own folly in trying to compete.

  To this day I remember much of the book, while so many later novels have faded off: Nell Gaither, the blond lost love of the melancholy hero John Wickliff Shawnessy, and his magical initials JWS, the comic-philosophic “Perfessor,” the erotic clock in the town-hall tower, all in a thronged, hugely readable Civil War epic. The author took a bit of savaging for making so much money, but the critical reception that I recall was nationwide, tumultuous, and generally admiring, with a little condescending abuse from the usual sidelines. The novel was a resounding bestseller. Hard upon publication, the author committed suicide.

  The story behind the novel was disclosed by his son Larry in an excellent memoir, Shade of the Raintree, which has powerful echoes of the book, with added bass notes of grim truth.

  Once long ago when I reread Raintree County, I had a momentary impulse to write a literary critique, something I never do, to be called “He Came, and Ye Knew Him Not.” By him I meant the author of “the great American novel.” For I realized in that reading that Ross Lockridge had pursued and—insofar as he could—captured the phantom prize he was really after, with movie money the farthest thing from his aspiring spirit. I knew nothing, of course, about the way his youthful literary work was distorted and mangled by the publishers and the film people, on its wretched road to publication. The naive, beset young author, utterly out of his depth, was unable to defend his art against the people whose money he had taken. Only when I read his son’s threnody did the full tragic picture come clear to me.

  The place of Raintree County in American literature I have no inclination or authority to discuss. To me as a fellow novelist, surely at the very least it should stand in the penumbra of Hawthorne near “The Great Stone Face”—a tribute, a grand variation on the theme of that deathless allegory, and a poignant artifact of the literary spirit in the twentieth-century American Midwest, by a greatly gifted contemporary who was killed with his whole life before him.

  HERMAN WOUK

  February 2007

  Hard roads and wide will run through Raintree County.

  You will hunt it on the map, and it won’t be there.

  For Raintree County is not the country of the perishable fact. It is the country of the enduring fiction. The clock in the Court House Tower on page five of the Raintree County Atlas is always fixed at nine o’clock, and it is summer and the days are long.

  FOR THE READER

  Raintree County is the story of a single day in which are imbedded a series of flashbacks. The chronologies printed here may assist the reader in understanding the structure of the novel. At the back of the book may be found a chronology of historical events with bearing on the story.

  Chronology

  of

  A GREAT DAY

  for

  RAINTREE COUNTY

  July 4, 1892

  Morning

  Dawn

  — MR. JOHN WICKLIFF SHAWNESSY awakens in the town of Waycross. (page 3)

  6:00

  — The Shawnessy family leaves Waycross by surrey.

  6:45

  — In the Court House Square of Freehaven, Mr. Shawnessy enters a Museum of Raintree County Antiquities.

  7:45

  — Across the site of the vanished town of Danwebster, Mr. Shawnessy carries a sickle and a box of cut flowers.

  8:30

  — Approaching the town of Moreland, EVA Alice Shawnessy reads the last page of Barriers Burned Away. (page 235)

  8:45

  — Re-entering THE GREAT ROAD OF THE REPUBLIC in Waycross, Mr. Shawnessy is engulfed in wheels and faces. (page 253)

  9:30

  — Senator Garwood B. Jones arrives by special train in Waycross Station.

  10:00

  — Three men tip their chairs back against the General Store for a talk.

  10:05

  — Esther Root Shawnessy enters the Revival Tent to hear THE OLDEST STORY IN THE WORLD, the Reverend Lloyd G. Jarvey officiating. (page 358)

  10:30

  — Mr. Shawnessy hands Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles a copy of the News-Historian, containing the legend of a HOUSE DIVIDED. (page 421)

  11:15

  — A photographer, a preacher, a lady in a Victorian mansion, a chorus of men only, and A WHITE BULL prepare respectively to take pictures, glorify God, distribute pamphlets, see an Exhibition for Men Only, and affirm life. (page 553)

  Afternoon

  12:30

  — In the intersection of Waycross, General Jacob J. Jackson presents Mr. Shawnessy with a copy of a manuscript entitled FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, and the G.A.R. parade forms to march on the schoolhouse for a banquet. (page 595)

  2:30

  — The Grand Patriotic Program begins in the schoolhouse yard.

  4:30

  — Eva Alice Shawnessy muses in WAYCROSS STATION, where Statesmen, Soldiers, Financiers, and Poets arrive and depart by train. (page 753)

  4:35

  — As Senator Garwood B. Jones prepares to entrain for the City, Mr. Shawnessy recalls a SPHINX RECUMBENT in his gilded years. (page 765)

  5:05

  — Financier Cassius P. Carney descends from the Eastbound Express in Waycross Station.

  6:00

  — BETWEEN TWO WORLDS in contest for her soul, Esther Root Shawnessy passes the intersection in Waycross as a train bears Financier Cassius P. Carney from Waycross Station, (page 869)

  Evening

  7:30

  — On the porchswing at Mrs. Evelina Brown’s mansion, an informal meeting of the Waycross Literary Society opens a discussion on THE GOLDEN BOUGH. (page 885)

  9:30

  — Esther Root Shawnessy watches a cluster of torches approach the garden east of Waycross.

  9:35

  — From the tower of Mrs. Brown’s mansion, Eva Alice Shawnessy beholds a celestial conflict.

  10:50

  — The last Fourth of July rocket explodes over Waycross.

  Midnight

  — Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles departs by train from Waycross Station.<
br />
  CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER OF FLASHBACKS

  (Page numbers show actual order in text.)

  Election Day, 1844 HOW ON THE MORNING OF ELECTION DAY

  July 20, 1848 EVERYTHING WAS STILL ON THE WIDE FIELDS

  1848-1852 A FABULOUS AND FORGOTTEN SECRET WAS WRITTEN

  July 4, 1854 A BIG CROWD OF PEOPLE

  Summer, 1856 FLOWING FROM DISTANT TO DISTANT SUMMER, THE RIVER

  September 6, 1856 ‘FATHER, COME OUT OF THAT OLD SALOON’

  1857-1859 HOW A QUAINT VISITOR ARRIVED

  May 16, 1859 THE PLATEGLASS WINDOW OF THE SALOON

  June 1, 1859 LEGENDS IN A CLASS-DAY ALBUM

  June 18, 1859 THE ROMANTIC, ILLSTARRED, WONDERFUL, WICKED CLASS PICNIC

  June 18, 1859 TWO CREATURES PLAYING WHITELY IN A RIVERPOOL

  July 4, 1859 THE RACE TO DETERMINE THE FASTEST RUNNER IN RAINTREE COUNTY

  July 4, 1859 BARE EXCEPT FOR A CHAPLET OF OAKLEAVES

  Summer, 1859 HOW THAT WAS A SUMMER OF DROUGHT

  October 19, 1859 A LETTER AT THE POST OFFICE WAS ALWAYS A BIG EVENT

  November, 1859 HOW THE ROCK HAD LAIN THERE ALWAYS

  November 22, 1859 THE SCENT OF WITHERED SUMMERS HOVERED

  December 1-2, 1859 DAWN AND ITS DAY OF LONG FAREWELL

  December 2, 1859 DOWN THE RIVER FOR YOU, MY BOY

  1859-1860 FAR, FAR AWAY TO AN EVERBLOOMING SUMMER

  1860-1861 THE HOUSE, SUSANNA’S TALL HOUSE

  April 12-14, 1861 IN THE DAWN, IN THE RED DAWN

  1861-1863 ‘ALL’S QUIET ALONG THE POTOMAC’

  July 2-4, 1863 LOST CHILDREN OF A LOST REPUBLIC

  July 4-—1863 AN OLD SOUTHERN MELODRAMA

  1857-1863 HOW IN HER OLDEST AWARENESS OF BEING ALIVE

  July 13, 1863 JOHNNY SHAWNESSY’S DEPARTURE FOR THE WAR

  Summer, 1863 WHAT FACES HE SAW IN THE CAMPS

  September 19-21, 1863—CHICKAMAUGA, THE STAFF OFFICER SAID

  November 22, 1863 WAR HAD COME TO THIS HOLLOW BETWEEN HILLS

  November 25, 1863—HURRAAAAHHHH! THE CRY SMOTE HIM

  November 14-16, 1864 PROGRESS THROUGH DOOMED ATLANTA

  November 26, 1864 FIFTY THOUSAND STRONG ON THE EARTH OF GEORGIA

  February 17, 1865 HANDS POINTING AND GESTURING, FLASH PERKINS

  April 14, 1865 WEARING A BATTLE WOUND, SCARCE HEALED

  May 24, 1865 FROM THE LAST ENCAMPMENT IN A HUNDRED FIELDS

  May 31, 1865 WHEN JOHNNY CAME MARCHING HOME AGAIN

  May 1, 1866 THE SOFT SPRING WEATHER OF RAINTREE COUNTY

  June 1, 1876 THE NEW COURT HOUSE WAS BY FAR THE MOST

  1865-1876 HOW THE FIRST ELEVEN YEARS FOLLOWING THE GREAT WAR

  July 4, 1876 ON THE MORNING THAT AMERICA WAS A HUNDRED YEARS OLD

  July, 1876 PLEASANT TO THE EYES DURING THE CENTENNIAL SUMMER

  1876-1877 HOW HE CAME TO THE CITY OF NEW YORK

  July 21-22, 1877 HOW THE GREAT STRIKE CAME UPON THE LAND

  July 25, 1877 BEFORE THE FOOTLIGHTS AND BEHIND THE SCENES

  July-August, 1877 A MESSAGE FOR HIM TO COME BACK HOME

  August, 1877 ‘COMETO PARADISE LAKE’

  1877-1878 A CONTEST FOR HER SOUL

  July 4, 1878 WAITING FOR PA TO COME HOME

  Pre-Historic A STRANGE LIGHT WAS OVER EVERYTHING

  1880-1890 HOW ONCE UPON A TIME A LITTLE GIRL

  1890-1892 THE ROAD, THE GREAT BROAD ROAD, THE NATIONAL ROAD

  Raintree County

  A Great Day

  FOR RAINTREE COUNTY

  (Epic Fragment from the Free Enquirer, July 4, 1892)

  YES, SIR, here’s the Glorious Fourth again. And here’s our special Semicentennial Edition of the Free Enquirer, fifty pages crowded with memories of fifty years since we published the first copy of this newspaper in 1842. And, friends, what a half-century it has been! While the Enquirer has been growing from a little four-page weekly to a daily paper of twice the size, the population of these United States has quadrupled and the territory governed under the Institutions of Freedom has been extended from sea to shining sea. In those fifty years the Great West has been conquered, and the Frontier has been closed. The Union has been preserved in the bloodiest war of all time. The Black Man has been emancipated. Giant new industries have been created. The Golden Spike has been driven at Promontory Point, binding ocean to ocean in bands of steel. Free Education has been brought to the masses. Cities have blossomed from the desert. Inventions of all kinds, from telephones to electric lights, have put us in a world that Jules Verne himself couldn’t have foreseen in 1842.

  Folks, it has been an Era of Progress unexampled in the annals of mankind, and all of it has been made possible by the great doctrines on which this Republic was founded on July 4, 1776.

  During those fifty years, we haven’t exactly stood still here in Raintree County. Freehaven has grown from a little country town to a bustling city of ten thousand. The Old Court House of 1842 could be put into the court room of the present imposing edifice, one of the finest in the State of Indiana. And we challenge any section of comparable size in this Republic to show a more distinguished progeny of great men than our own little county has produced.

  If anybody doubts the above statement, let him take a look at what is going on in the little town of Waycross down in good old Short-water Township. The eyes of the whole nation are fixed on that little rural community today. The celebration there to honor the homecoming of Senator Garwood B. Jones is a striking testimonial to the vitality of our democratic institutions. While we have often opposed Senator Jones on political grounds, we would be the last to diminish the lustre of his name or the distinction he has brought upon the county of his birth. We had hoped that the Senator would see fit to make his homecoming address here in the County Seat, but no one can doubt the political wisdom of Garwood’s decision to speak in his birthplace, a town of two hundred inhabitants, as the opening move in his campaign for reelection. It’s a dramatic gesture, and the Senior Senator from Indiana needs all his vote-winning sagacity, not only to defeat the rising tide of Populism this year, but to further his wellknown ambition to achieve the Presidency in 1896.

  Nor is the Senator the only nationally known figure in Waycross today. His friend and ours, another Raintree County boy, Mr. Cassius P. Carney, the famous multimillionaire, is expected to be there. And our own great war hero, General Jacob J. Jackson, is going to lead a march of G.A.R. veterans to point up the pension issue. There are rumors of other celebrities coming on the Senator’s special train, and all in all it looks like the little town of Waycross will have dern near as many famous people in it today as Washington, D. C. If the celebrated Stanley set out to explore this dark continent tomorrow for the Greatest Living American, he could do worse than get off a train in Waycross to ask his famous question. . . .

  Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy

  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 fa
ce 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 and 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.