Raintree County (115 page)

GARWOOD B. JONES
THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE

But in a few minutes John Shawnessy realized that it was all pure virtuosity. Garwood was the same old Garwood. His political creed was transparent as ever. He promised the farmers better treatment from the railroads. He promised the railroads more money from the
farmers. He promised the businessmen and creditor classes a currency that wouldn't fold up and go into any old pocketbook but would find its way clinking into strongboxes with reinforced corners. He promised the debtor and farming classes a currency so plentiful everybody could pay off his debts and buy fat acres. He promised the radical reconstructionists that he wanted to see a firm hand maintained in the South so that the fruits of the War would not be lost. He promised the Southern sympathizers that the Negro would be kept in his place and that the Union would somehow be the old Union of before the War.

Garwood's political creed was even simpler than all that. It was simply and solely to get himself elected to office.

Garwood B. Jones was a born politician. He knew how to make the votes flow. In the hands of Garwood B. Jones, the ballot ceased to be the expression of a free people. It was the charmed tribute of the dumb to the eloquent.

When Garwood at last sat down, he left the Square churned up with fury. Faces leaped through the air and confronted other faces. Men cursed. Middle-aged women fanned themselves and panted as if they had just had physical contact with a Casanova. Cowbells clanked. And above it all, Garwood's band, which was much bigger than the Independent Candidate's and had a great deal more brass and blow in it, played the militant air of Garwood's campaign song.

At this inauspicious moment, the moderator introduced the Independent Candidate.

John Shawnessy knew, when he got up before the crowd in the Court House Square, that this was one of the mythical hours of his life. He was at last confronting the people. He knew most of them, and most of them knew him or thought they knew him. Could he indeed open a door for these people that would admit them to a better day? Or was he, even as Garwood had implied, a cloudgathering impostor?

—Friends and fellow citizens, he began.

—Go home, Johnny, a man in the front row said, and git your maw to wipe your nose.

The crowd laughed.

—Shut up, you! a Shawnessy supporter said.

—You shet me up! the man said.

—Friends and fellow citizens——

A man in the front row plucked slowly a huge belch from beer-swollen guts. Garwood's supporters guffawed savagely.

John Shawnessy stopped, confused.

But at this moment, Garwood Jones made a magnificent gesture. He stood up and said with impressive dignity,

—I repudiate the support of any man who denies to this candidate the right to be heard.

This spontaneous action touched the crowd, and members of all parties cheered Garwood to the echo. With a gracious bow to the Independent Candidate, Garwood sat down. Next morning his behavior was very favorably noticed in the newspapers and elsewhere, except for a few cynics who said Garwood had planted his meanest hatchet men and hecklers in the crowd and had planned the whole thing, including the noble gesture.

More confused by Garwood's generosity than by the heckling of the crowd, John Shawnessy launched into his speech.

Neither speech was quoted in the papers next day. The words which John Shawnessy had carefully prepared were cast like little seeds on the silence and enigma of hundreds of attentive faces young and old. He never knew where the words fell, and where, if anywhere, they took root. He spoke in a calm, serious voice, and there was no applause for anything that he said, except at the end. The Independent Candidate preserved no copy of the address after he made it, deciding that as a political speech it was a failure.

It may have been a great utterance, to set beside the Gettysburg Address and the Sermon on the Mount. Or, again, it may have been a rather stilted and, in the light of the times, pointless performance. Its immediate effect could be easily calculated in the voting statistics of the following day. As for its ultimate effect, perhaps some seed of all its words lodged in the memory of an admiring child and was carried devious ways to a more receptive day. John Shawnessy never knew about that.

But in later years, a good many people who had been very young in 1872, some only children, remembered the speech. And as time passed, an impression grew that it had been a marvellous speech, full of wisdom and high sentence. People often said that they wished they had a copy of it.

—That was a humdinger of a speech, they said, the best I ever heard, now that I think back.

But they couldn't quote a single sentence from it. The lost speech was like the secret of the County's mysterious naming; and it took its place among the riddles and legends of Raintree County, as 'That Speech John Shawnessy Made in the Court House Square in Seventy-Two.'

As for the Election itself, the next day after the great debate Garwood's machine got busy and went to town. Garwood himself admitted that his campaign fund bought five thousand cigars and one hundred barrels of beer for distribution on Election Day. The biggest town in the Congressional District, Middletown, which was beginning to boast an industrial middle class, went solidly Republican. Garwood's machine voted blocks of five all day long—paid votes marked under the vigilant inspection of Garwood's heelers and dutifully held aloft in squads of five until they reached the box. Apparently, the voting American of 1872 preferred a cigar stuck in his face to a halo crammed down on his cranium. He went to the polls puffing on Garwood's cigar and pleasantly exhilarated by Garwood's beer and voted overwhelmingly for Garwood—two or three times when possible.

There was some small consolation for the Independent Candidate. Although he was soundly defeated in the total vote, by some miracle he carried Raintree County proper by one ballot, which he afterwards laughingly remarked must have been his own.

But the verdict of the polls was decisive, and John Shawnessy never returned to the political arena. He had been rejected by his people and called a false prophet. He had come down into the Court House Square from the wilderness where he had searched his soul somewhat longer than the scriptural forty days. But as Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles remarked to him in a letter written during that time, Jesus Christ himself couldn't have achieved the notoriety of a crucifixion in post-War America. So pocketing his disappointment and pondering his latest epic gesture, John Shawnessy went back to teaching the school children in Shawmucky Township the rudiments of what is known as education.

Enlivened by this single public appearance, his post-War years fled by, and the Republic went on building great fortunes for a few
men, swelling up with immigrant millions, pouring westward, multiplying railroads, mining, rending, ravaging the earth, fighting Indians, planting the plains, loving, raising children, dying. And John Shawnessy went on writing, musing, speculating, and preparing, as confidently as ever, for the day when he would complete his task and become the epic poet of his people.

During this time, his face was one of the lost faces of the Republic. It underwent imperceptible changes, aging a little, becoming perhaps a little more gentle, having perhaps a little less of the young arrogance of earlier days. And there were unnumbered faces of school children during those fading years (lost faces like his own and changing) that beheld his face and had some memory of it. And perhaps in those silent years there may have been planted in the obscure womb of time a future flower, a wondrous affirmation of life, some love more passionate and true than he had dreamed. He couldn't say as to that, but went on with his teaching, wondering the while whether he taught anything that was really meaningful and whether he would ever leave his mark on Raintree County in a significant way, or whether he would be taken back into its indifferent earth, like all the other little flowers, even as these withering years were taken one by one back into the watery grave of time while the Republic roared to the end of its first century as an independent nation.

And as the year 1876 approached, the Centennial Year in which the Fledgling of the Nations would complete the first one hundred years of its existence, John Shawnessy, stirred by deep currents of unrest and aspiration and having now completed a sizeable quantity of manuscript, decided that the time had come to do what he had always intended to do, before his youth was gone. So it was that at last he hearkened to the urgings of Professor Stiles, who had become a famous topical poet, newspaper columnist, and special reporter on Life in New York City. In July of the Centennial Summer, he took a few personal belongings, the manuscript of his unfinished poem, and some money that he had painfully saved, and entraining at Beardstown on the Pennsylvania line,

BADE FAREWELL TO HIS MOTHER AND FATHER
AND A SMALL GATHERING
OF

—
F
RIENDS AND FELLOW CITIZENS
, the Senator said, I bid you all an affectionate farewell.

Standing on the rear platform, flanked by his secretaries and press-agents, the Senator leaned down out of his statesman's mask to clasp Mr. Shawnessy's hand. For a second, his eyes looked kindness and concern.

—Well, sprout, finish that great book, he said, and if you ever get to the Nation's Capital, look me up.

Mr. Shawnessy, moved by an unexpected rush of feeling, clung a moment to the Senator's plump hand.

—Good-by, Garwood, I——

Just then, the train trembled along its length. Instantly the Senator straightened up, leaned back into his greatbellied costume, his face became fixed in the same smile that he had worn in the morning, his storeteeth clenched the unlit cigar, he raised his arms, he began to bow massively. The train started.

Dipping, diminishing, receding, Senator Garwood B. Jones, framed in the hindend of a passenger train, gradually lost precision. It was a little melancholy and oppressive to think of the grinning mask of a certain eminent statesman in his frock coat and black Lincoln tie getting tinier and tinier in the immense plain of the year 1892.

The last curious members of the crowd loitered in the Station, sniffing the lingering aroma of greatness, and then left. The Perfessor and Mr. Shawnessy went back to the bench and sat down.

—Something I've never understood, the Perfessor said, is how trains keep from running into each other oftener than they do. If Cash Carney's train is on time—and you say it is—it should be running into Garwood's train any time now.

—It's all done with wires, Mr. Shawnessy said. And dispatchers.

Inside the Station, the single live cell of the telegraph key fluttered endlessly on.

—Wonder what they're transmitting there? the Perfessor said.

Mr. Shawnessy, who had learned the code during the War, listened, laughed, and read aloud,

—‘A
RE YOU FOR THAT WINDBAG
?' ‘H
ELL, NO.
A
RE YOU
?' ‘H
ELL, NO
.' The tower men are talking to each other, he explained. ‘N
EVER FORGAVE HIM FOR CHEATING US IN
'77.' ‘H
OW'S WIFE
?' ‘O.K.' ‘N
EW KID
?' ‘D
OING
O.K.' ‘N
AME YET
?' ‘W
AIT
. S
ENATOR'S TRAIN PASSING
.'

—The Republic has a voice, the Perfessor said.

There was a silence on the keys. Then:

—‘S
ENATOR WAVED AT SMALL CROWD
. K
ID'S NAME
G
ROVER
C
LEVELAND
.' ‘H
OW'S
B
ILL
?' ‘G
ONE TO
C
HICAGO
. W
ORK ON
F
AIRGROUNDS
.'

—By the way, the Perfessor said, I plan to go up and see the Fairgrounds at Chicago. The work's pretty well along, I hear.

—How long since you've seen Cash?

—Year or two.

—The telegram says Laura may come too. Is she still pretty?

—There's a sort of ripe splendor about her now. It's still a gorgeous looking edifice. Too bad she hasn't acted since her marriage. Well, poor Cash finally made the grade. Her beauty was rolled for an old man's gold.

The Perfessor looked keenly at Mr. Shawnessy.

—All right, come clean, he said. Did you or didn't you? After all, it was so long ago.

Mr. Shawnessy smiled in embarrassment.

—I've forgotten all that, he said, lying. As you say, it was all so long ago.

—I don't know why I ask such dumb questions, the Perfessor said. Must excite you to think that she may be on this train.

—It's strange, Mr. Shawnessy said. You never know who's going to get down from a train. During my sojourn in the big City, I used to go down to the biggest terminal in town and just stand in the station watching people get on and off, as if I were waiting for someone.

—Did the party ever come?

—No, not exactly, Mr. Shawnessy said. The truth is, I've never lost that feeling of excitement about incoming trains. And I have the same feeling when I get off a train. It's as though I were young again and about to step into the middle of a wonderful adventure,
as if the crowds of the City would pick me up and bear me off on a floodtide of fulfillment.

—John, the Perfessor said, you're an incurable idealist. As for me, I've gotten out of too many trains in my time. I always look for the nearest toilet.

—Speaking of the Fair, Mr. Shawnessy said, remember the Centennial Fourth in Philadelphia?

—What a day! the Perfessor said. Remember my monolithic blonde?

—Sure. What ever happened to her?

—Don't ask me, the Perfessor said. Her price went up right after that. The Great American Blonde, I think we called her. Sixteen years ago, by the way. Exactly. To the day. Well, we had some life left in us then, boy. Ah, I can see the sunshine now on her corncolored hair and the little railway that took us around the Fairgrounds. That surely was one of the hottest days in the history of the Republic. And those godawful buildings chockful of third-rate canvas and big glittering machines. The Centennial Exposition! Tell me the truth, John, did that ever happen? By the way, her name was Phoebe.