Raintree County (111 page)

Then she felt as though she were living in some wise enchantment, and when she came down from the dreamland of her books, it was merely from one circle of her dream into another still more glorious and legendary. Then she felt like the Alice from whom she got her middle name, the fabulous little girl who had walked hand in hand with a gentle elder spirit, lapped in legends old, and herself dreaming of legends. Eva read the last paragraph of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
over and over. It anticipated (in a dream within the dream, as it were) how the little storybook Alice

. . . would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman: and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little
children, and make
their
eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

It was one of Eva's favorite daydreams to imagine herself grown and returning to Waycross in afteryears, a famous woman who had succeeded in glorifying her father's life and imprinting it forever on the memory of mankind. Rarely, too, in her nightdreams she had nostalgic sensations as of return after long years to the scenes and places of her childhood. In these dreams, remarkable like her father's for their vivid realism, she would be riding in some odd sort of vehicle on the broad road from west to east, a woman returning to the little town where she had been a girl fifty years before. She would be trying to reconstruct the old tranquil life just as it was in those faded, lost years at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

Yes, she had come back to the old, the archetypal Waycross. She was walking down the unpaved sidewalk beside the tidy fences. Each house was like a homely, once-familiar face. Behind the gray-eyed windows were rooms she had never entered but had always vaguely wondered about. And it gave her a queer start to think that they were all furnished down to the last exquisite detail with the furnishings of a lost era and that they were peopled with faces that were long since gone from the indifferent years. How still and deep the lawns looked and the spaces between the houses!

And now she was approaching the little house behind the white fence. She paused with her hand on the gate. They were all there, yes, they would surely be there in the changeless world between the Road and the Railroad. Her mother would be working in the kitchen where smell of sealing wax lingered forever. The lost Eva and the forever lost Wesley would be in the middle room reading, each one absorbed in a sentimental dream, which was itself peopled only with dreamers. And somewhere she would find little Will, another lost face of her childhood. And if she went behind the house, she would see the sunlight falling through the appletrees, the outhouse papered with clippings, the barn, the narrow backfield stretching to the railroad. And perhaps, even as she watched, one
of the trains of those departed years would go roaring by, carrying to westward a hundred mysterious faces.

But no, she wouldn't go in for a while yet. Probably school was in session, since there were no children in the streets. She would turn, then, and approach the schoolhouse—not one of the newer schoolhouses built since her departure from the County but the old frame school where the famous celebrations were held back in those tattered, stained, and lovely years of the early nineties. Yes, it was the old school, and the children would all be there in the holy communion of the schoolroom, half a hundred precise child faces, enclosed in the ambercolored light of those many and many photographs taken before the schools of Raintree County, with her father standing unobtrusively in a corner of the picture, his tall, gentle form half-dissolved in sunlight.

Then there would rush over her the recollection of a thousand lost days in schoolrooms and schoolhouse yards. And all the children whom her father had taught trooped through her memory, proceeding all (by a second birth) from the archetypal schoolroom into the archetypal Raintree County and thence beyond its borders and down the roads of all the years into the sunlight of a new century.

But now she must be courageous and hold hard to the perishable moment if she wished to see her father (whose death in some earlier dream she seemed to remember). And in fact, she was opening the door and stepping into the hall between the two rooms of the schoolhouse. In one room her mother taught the elementary classes, and in the other her father taught the advanced pupils. Golden light of the late spring was in the room, it was one of those days when her heart cried out with music, and she seemed able to accomplish anything. There was her brother Wesley at his accustomed desk, and there close by him was the lost Eva, and there—there at the blackboard at the front of the room, turning now with the light of afternoon on his old dark suit, there to be sure was her father touching the blackboard with a piece of chalk.

—Eva, he would say, will you please go on with the problem from there?

Such strange, timeleaping dreams, speculations, and endeavors colored the early years at Waycross and slowly formed the Waycross Eva, that grave, great-eyed girl-woman, that reluctant daughter-mother, that little transitional being who was passing through the
valley of decision between a self and a self. This passing, like nearly all things human, was made imperceptibly and would go on being made for years, and in a sense too, of course, would never be entirely made, since the earlier Evas and the transitional Evas would all linger on in the deeper layers of Eva's being.

Yet there was a moment of self-discovery during these early years in Waycross when Eva herself became clearly aware for the first time that she had crossed a dark valley and was emerging on the farther side. The discovery came in early June of the year 1892 along with one of the great emotional crises of her life. It came suddenly and unexpectedly as a result of a simple thing.

Little by little she had been forced to give up her claims to physical equality with her brother Wesley. Only in wrestling had she still been able to maintain her old proud feeling of equality. One evening after supper in early June, after a day of small disappointments and frustrations, Eva herself had suggested a match. She hadn't wrestled Wesley for several weeks, and although she had had to exert every particle of strength to get a fall in their last match, she still believed in her ability to hold her own with him. It was after supper, and they were all out on the back lawn. The children had been running about barefooted. The air was warm and still, and day was ebbing on the level fields. Her father, who had been walking at the rim of the backlot where the young corn was already a hand high, came back to the middle of the yard.

—All right, he said. Square off.

Wesley stood before her, lithe and wary, hands on hips, waiting for the signal. His mouth and eyes had the usual set look of stoical confidence. At the signal, they laid hold of each other. Eva gritted her teeth and tugged and pushed and pulled and twisted, trying to use her superior weight to advantage, trying all her tricks one after another. She and Wesley had never wrestled longer for a fall than for that one. After nearly five minutes of struggling, Eva felt her strength going from her, while Wesley remained as lithe and powerful as a wild thing. Just then, when she hardly expected it, he gave her a quick twist, and down she went slapbang on her back.

Her mother laughed.

—Well, pshaw! she said.
Didn't
you go down, Eva!

—I just slipped, Eva said, jumping up angry and panting.

Wesley, as usual, didn't say anything, but waited, hands on hips,
confident-like. All set to make a heroic exertion, Eva laid hold of him and gave a great push. He cut his leg in front of her, dodged, and she threw herself.

—Well, pshaw, her mother said, smiling one of her rare smiles,
aren't
you getting strong, Wesley!

—There now, that's enough, her father said. Wesley seems to be feeling his oats tonight.

—No, please, Eva said. Three best out of five.

This time, the struggle was longer. Eva lashed herself to a superhuman effort. She groaned, strained, squealed, and thrashed around, but Wesley stuck his tongue between his teeth and this time, without any trick throw, gradually bent her back and back until there was no help for it, and down she went crashbang.

—Pshaw, her mother said.
Don't
they wrestle hard!

She licked her smooth lips and stood watching the contest with more than her usual interest.

—Yes, Eva's father said, when those two lay hold, it's do or die. Of course, Wesley being the older and a——

—Let's try again, Wesley, Eva said, springing up, her voice quavering.

They struggled again—a long, silent, grim struggle. This time, he threw her on her face.

—Well, that's enough now, children, her father said. Let's have a game of——

But she was up and trying again. She thought her heart would burst if she didn't throw Wesley at least once. They were wrestling again, and then again, and again. Each time, he threw her more easily. She lost count of the times.

—Eva, Eva! her father said. You're too tired to win now. Wait until you're rested.

—No, just
once
more, she pleaded, her voice breaking. I want to throw him just once.

Wesley had become an impersonal force that had to be subdued or else there was no longer any hope or joy in life. Tears streamed down her face as she took hold of him for the last time. She began to sob openly.

—Eva, I'm ashamed of you! her mother said.

In the middle of that last struggle, Eva found herself wishing that Wesley would
let
her throw him. And in that instant she knew
that she was hopelessly beaten. She knew that she would never be able to throw him again and that she was wrestling him for the last time.

As she went down, all her anguish and sorrow came forth from her in a great wail that sounded ridiculous even to herself. She didn't move from where she was thrown, half-lying on her face, her cheeks wet with sweat and tears.

—Pshaw, Eva, her mother said. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. A great big girl like you! Go on in, and wash your face.

—Poor child, her father said. Let her be, Esther. She was so proud of her wrestling ability. After all, Eva, you couldn't expect to beat Wesley forever. He's a year older than you, child, and he's bound to get stronger. It's nature for men to be physically stronger than women. I think it's extraordinary you've held your own with him so long.

Eva started to say something, but her voice soared off in a series of O sounds, and she didn't seem to be able to take the one deep breath that would stop them.

So she lay there, with everyone watching her, she lay there in the soft grass of the back lawn, her outraged, overgrown girl's body sprawled on the earth. She just wanted to lie there, and she never wanted to have to wrestle anyone again.

As she cried, she was thinking of all the days and ways of her eager, sexless childhood when she and Wesley had wrestled, and sometimes it was one, sometimes the other who beat. It was all, all over now, the innocent, swift days of the two children playing together, Eva and Wesley, the laughter, the jealousies, the frustrations, the triumphs. And now she realized that during that time they had been as one, she and Wesley, in the close passion of competitors, which is fierce like love and hate. All that time they had been one and wedded to each other by jealousy and emulation. And now they were forever and irrevocably two, boy and girl, brother and sister, man and woman.

Strangely then into her heart there crept a feeling of tenderness and strong love for her brother that had perhaps been there all the time, and in this last great defeat there was no longer any bitterness but a sorrowful, complete acceptance. And as she lay on the green breast of the earth, even the tears and the sorrow went slowly out of her, leaving her stilled and pensive. The family went away, and she
stayed there in the grass a long time, lying on her stomach, her tearstained face propped in her hands. She watched the night come on, filling up the backlot and the cornfield with darkness and flowing around the houses of the town. A train went by during this time; the steady thunder faded down the track to westward. Carts and wagons passed on the National Road. The insect voices of the night began to shrill louder and louder. And the cool dew came on the grass.

And still she lay, looking out across the growing cornfield and wondering what great tide it was, gentle, inexorable, and strong, flowing up from all the years of all her life that had at last reached and flooded to the full here in this town to which latterly they had come beside the Great Road, and where perhaps her father and mother would live out their days, had found her as it had been fated to find her from the beginning, and had created at last out of all the earlier Evas (perhaps better and braver and more tender than them all) this new and latest Eva.

Then she looked east and west and thought of the Great Road, the broad straight Road, the National Road, rising upon the plain forever, and flowing in a band of brightness east and west, and of the vast plain beneath the night and of all the lost days of her father's life that were somehow hovering in this night, and of the terrible and beautiful rhythms of the earth, and of its wandering flowers, and of its ancient tides, moondrawn and flowing out of darkness, and of the great tide of death that must some day come and find her father in this quiet ground between the two roads. And so the darkness came, lapping her with mystery as she lay a long time

ON THE GREEN EARTH OF
R
AINTREE
C
OUNTY
IN THE ATTITUDE OF
A