Raintree County

  —She’s in here. John found her on the fer side of the lake.

  —Right in the middle of the swamp, Papa said, just ready to fall into a pool two or three feet over her head. How she got that far without drowning I’ll never know.

  —How’d you happen to go there, John? a man said.

  —Just a hunch.

  —Look at her eat!

  —Poor child! she’s starved.

  She had never been up after dark before. It was just as black as when she woke up sometimes at night. When they carried her out of the hotel and down to the tent, it was sort of cool, and there were lots of people around all smiling and coming up to see her. Her mother took the little dirty dress off and bathed her. Papa picked up the dress and shook it and the little yellow flowers fell out of the pockets.

  —Where did you get these? he said.

  —Unduh a twee, she said.

  —We’ll have to give Eva the grand prize in Natural History, he said.

  He stood with a strange look on his face sifting the tiny flowers from one hand to the other.

  She had meant to tell more about the flowers and all the things she had seen because these were things that no one had ever seen before, and she wanted desperately to tell Papa about them, but she didn’t have the words, and she got all sleepy, and they put her to bed.

  The moment she shut her eyes, she was back under the trees in the middle of the swamp, where the earth rocked her softly and the warm sunlight touched her cheek, and the soft yellow flowers fell on her hair and eyelids, they said that they made honey out of flowers, and she was hungry and a little sad, waiting for them to find her, and their voices were far-off and

  HAD BEEN A LONG TIME CALLING

  AND CALLING HER TO

  COME

  —BACK where I started from, the Perfessor was saying. Well, thirty-three years ago, the Lord God Jehovah drove me out of Raintree County, and now I’ve driven him out.

  He and Mr. Shawnessy walked up on the verandah and sat down again in the swing.

  —And to think, the Perfessor said, that the old ranter himself had been riding the circuit only this morning. Well, it’s been a busy day for us all.

  The Perfessor looked at Mrs. Brown, who was still standing near the gate. He sighed.

  —If I had your chances and my morals, John, what a time I’d have! Couldn’t I love that, though! Ah, that is sweet! Look at her out there! Ah, John, life is so good to us, and we are so bad to it! It gives us beauty and the earth and days and nights. Then we build our walls and weapons and defy each other to come in.

  The Perfessor was very hoarse. He and Mr. Shawnessy lit cigars.

  —You certainly are putting on a good show today, John. As for me, I’ve nearly talked myself out. What time is it?

  —Nine-fifty, Mr. Shawnessy said, consulting his watch.

  —What time does my train come through?

  —Twelve o’clock.

  —You’re sure it’ll stop?

  —Yes, we’ll wave it down with a lantern. But, frankly, I don’t like to let you go into this dark night, Professor. What will become of you?

  —O, it’s very simple, the Perfessor said. I shall die.

  —In my opinion, no one will hold harder to life than you. You’ll take pills to the end and expire with the beginning of a witty word on your lips, as if you intended to finish it in the hereafter.

  —But if we could only resign ourselves to death, complete death, the Perfessor said, how much happier we’d be! I seem to see things more clearly tonight, John. And I’ll give you my History of Mankind in a few hundred words, which are more than it deserves.

  The Perfessor took a long, hard pull on his last bottle.

  —THE HISTORY OF MANKIND

  by Professor JERUSALEM WEBSTER STILES

  Sometime in the mist of the hugely indifferent ages, the ancestor of Man climbed down out of the elm and walked on his hind legs. The female of the species was beginning to lose the hair around her vestigial tail because the male of the species liked it better that way and chased the ones with the bare behinds. This is called Natural Selection. From this beginning Man became the Bald Mammal—though I must say he carried it a little too far. The tail itself was beginning to curl up and wither, and some of the foremost sports of the day expressed a strong preference for the ladies who didn’t have this curious twig.

  Dawn Man was a dumb little character with a jut jaw and a flat head, bearing a remarkably close resemblance to a cousin of mine in Spokane. Back in his Asian homeland, where for centuries he enjoyed immunity from serious competition, he managed to evolve sub-species of different colors.

  While he was still in his original home, Dawn Man began to enjoy a loud blat that he discovered in his throat. He brayed loudest in the mating season and from that time forth made poems. He was a pugnacious runt from the beginning and fought ferociously with other males for the possession of his little bearded doxies.

  With the discovery of fire, our little bastard progenitor won a secure foothold on terra firma and a resounding victory over the other mammals, who were afraid of his torch. Sometime after that, he discovered words, and by words he began to build up his brain, being no doubt somewhat less attractive after he made the top of his head bulge. He spent several thousand years adding to his cortex and his vocabulary, and meanwhile the races of mankind began to spread out, and whole cycles of languages flowered and decayed. Language gave Man a means of transmitting his knowledge from generation to generation. Thus culture came about, being the intellectual inheritance of mankind as distinct from the physical. Morality grew from the fact that Man was a social beast. All Man’s moral sanctions were really social. And the only reason Man ever held back his hand in the whole range of his history was the fear of retaliation.

  This little Dawn Man, our poor relation, our skeleton in the biological closet, had wonderful hands. His little deft hands, developed by swinging on limbs and picking fleas, were as good as Modern Man’s, and with hands and words he developed his brain. For the human brain itself, with all its wonderful processes of language, memory, aesthetic feeling, and association, was only a highly specialized instrument of survival. Some of the variations of the species seem to run away with themselves and develop beyond the point of utility, and Man’s brain, with its myth-making power, wasn’t an unmixed gift. Primitive Man was a creature so enmeshed in taboos and totems that he was much less free than the beast he hunted for food. Biologically, Man never came very far from the little bald mammal with the deft hands and vestigial tail who came down from the Miocene oaks all ready to elect Garwood B. Jones President of the United States.

  Modern Man began with the discovery of the alphabet. Modern Times were characterized by the following grand illusions—warfare on a large scale, art, religion, and science, most of which had to be written off as a dead loss to the development of life. For example, the invention of gods and finally of God didn’t help the Bald Mammal to any noticeable extent. Religion was a purely intramural pastime of the existing tribes. Taken as a whole, God was merely Man’s pathetic hope that a creature like himself devised the world.

  As for who devised the world, Man never found out. Science, the religion of the intelligent man, never told him who devised the world. But the world wasn’t well explained by imagining a Person who made it. After all, what was the Person of God? The most searching theologians were obliged to deprive It of all real attributes and make of It a Great Someone who was Nobody and Nothing. The most advanced men said, Nature is: this Isness is what I believe in because I can see it, measure it, and make predictions about it.

  In the department of miscellanies, I wish to take special note of the Christian Religion, the Republic, and the United States of America. The Christian Religion was the cultural product of a little tribe with delusions of grandeur. By a fascinating historical process, the infection spread. But Christianity reached its peak in the Middle Ages, and erosion set in. The Church encouraged the Bald Mammal to believe in
his importance, and he could believe in it only if he seemed important enough to be punished for his crimes. Actually, the Universe never cared enough about Man even to punish him. It just accepted him and let him live and die as he could. As for the Republic, it was merely the primitive horde squared—and acted like it. America was one of the more picturesque migrations of the Bald Mammal. One sub-species exterminated another by superior weapons and numbers. As an instrument of biological survival, the American Culture proved a wondrous supple weapon. The Doctrine of Moral and Political Equality invited expansion by attracting other people to its banners. The Economics of Unlimited Material Expansion and Free Enterprise kept the race on its toes and squelched the unfit. And of course the Americans stole a magnificent hunk of earth from lo! the poor Indian.

  —And how did it all end?

  —We gibbon apes, who superseded Mankind as the master race on the planet, look back today with a certain nostalgia on that quaint dead-end of the Simian Family, whose specialized nervous system led to self-annihilation. Unlike most species, whose decline and fall are gradual, Mankind’s collapse would appear to have been sudden and spectacular. Though more weakly armed than the insect in the reproductive battle, Man’s overthrow would appear not to have been induced by procreative weakness. The most ancient historians of our own race, to whom there remained some literary relics of the pregibbon ages, refer over and over to the amorous fury with which the human males wooed their pertbreasted and plumpbottomed females (to use the epithet of that quaint old historiographer Jehoshaphat Wooster Stuttius, whose veracity in this particular there is no reason to doubt). Probably it was Man’s own somewhat remarkable gifts that proved his undoing. He was his own—and life’s—greatest enemy. By his extraordinary mechanical ingenuity, he discovered ways of destroying the delicate adjustment of the species to one another. And in the year 2032, he blew himself right off the face of the earth. Requiescat in pace.

  The Perfessor made a small, neat smoke ring, which rose slowly and somewhat mournfully into the night.

  —And this is The History of Mankind?

  —This is it, the Perfessor said. What can you say against it?

  —Against it, I’ll set another history, which is included by it but which includes its includer.

  —And this is?

  —The Legend of Raintree County, Mr. Shawnessy said. A little fable with multiple meanings, and a moral for a vestigial tail.

  —All right, the Perfessor said, let’s hear it.

  —THE LEGEND OF RAINTREE COUNTY

  by JOHN WICKLIFF SHAWNESSY

  Once upon a time a child looked abroad on the darkness of a Great Swamp. And a voice spoke and said a Word.

  And behold! the child lived in a place called Raintree County, which had been forever, even as the child had been forever. This was the magic of the Word, for the Word was of God, and the Word was God.

  But the child had forgotten the curving path by which he had come into Raintree County, and he had forgotten the location of the shrine where the Word was spoken, and he had forgotten the Tree, which was the living embodiment of the Word. And as he grew in strength and years, he had a quest to find the Tree and the sacred place, which was the source of himself.

  Now, wherever he sought he found the earth penetrated by names and peopled by other souls, wanderers like himself in quest of beauty and eternal life. Each one was a private universe. And the feeling with which the child sought to understand and share the universe of other souls was love. When the child had grown in years and strength and had become a young man, his love was a strong desire to pluck forbidden fruit and know a sweet pleasure which only could be found with a mysterious creature like himself but subtly different, who embodied in her white beauty the ancient secret of the earth touched into breathing form.

  Meanwhile, he and these other souls struggled darkly through a series of Events, the imperfect writhings of their human dream. Out of them they built a fiction called the Past and embodied it in a myth called History.

  And seasons and years passed, and he continued in his quest, which was no other than to win eternal life from darkness and a dream of darkness.

  And slowly he discovered that in the imperfect world of his personal dream, he had been making the legend of a hero. This hero was Humanity, and the place in which the hero strove for beauty and the good was the Republic. Both Hero and Republic were immense fictions. They could never have existed without their poet, but neither could he have existed without them.

  For he had localized the great myth of the Republic in Raintree County. He and all who had ever lived had labored to create this vast, amiable legend, the Republic, and this most gentle and passionate of heroes, Humanity. Unknown to himself, the child had already consummated the quest, the quest being itself an eternal consummation.

  And in so doing, he became in truth, what he had always known himself to be, the father and preserver of Raintree County, which without him never could have been at all. And thus, by becoming most himself, he became a greater than himself—in fact a god, who singly by his own desire and faith created and kept alive a universe.

  —And thereby hangs what tail?

  —And so he learned that Raintree County being but a dream must be upheld by dreamers. So he learned that human life’s a myth, but that only myths can be eternal. So he learned the gigantic labor by which the earth is rescued again and again from chaos and old night, by which the land is strewn with names, by which the river of human language is traced from summer to distant summer, by which beauty is plucked forever from the river and clothed in a veil of flesh, by which souls are brought from the Great Swamp into the sunlight of Raintree County and educated to its enduring truths.

  —And this is The Legend of Raintree County?

  —This is it. What can you say against it?

  The Perfessor had sunk far down in the swing, shoulders hunched, head sunken between them, face in shadow. After a while, his voice rasped up as from a cave.

  —To my History of Mankind, he said, I wish to append a footnote:

  Homo pluviarboriensis, or Raintree County Man, who evidently consisted of a dried testicle, a copy of the Indianapolis News-Historian, a cake of Pears’ Soap, a Colt revolver, a McGuffey Reader, and a railroad spike, was dug out of a tertiary stratum in which were also imbedded bovum domesticum and his spouse bova domestica, la cucaracha, and John D. Rockefeller.

  The Perfessor considered this so funny that he shook, choked, and coughed for half a minute.

  —Seriously, John, he said, there’s much truth in what you say. Your Legend of Raintree County is a beautiful and brave fable. For my part, I love ideas, and I love people—some people. I think that in our human world are all beauty, goodness, love, and godlike disputation. Only, I also think that all this is only a mist—a dream, if you will—from which we awaken into nothingness. All this is only a by-product of blind process. In the enormous web of chance, which a little while ago you described so eloquently, I believe that there was no provision for myself or any other, but that we merely happened to arrive. I go forth beneath the skies of your Republic, and everywhere I see impermanence—beautiful, fleeting forms, among whom, alas! most beautiful and most fleeting, I perceive a certain reflection in a mirror—Myself! A man knowing himself is merely a property of living matter, the by-product of certain agitations in his nerve-system.

  —I name, Mr. Shawnessy said, the Sacred Name of the Great God Nerve-System. His Law is Cause, and his abode is Space, and his Divine Substance is composed of Matter. Through his all-pervasive body Electric Impulse passes and creates the World. This is the Truth, the one Truth, and the only Truth. And when the Great God Nerve-System dies, then shall we all be dead and overthrown. And we who believe in the Great God Nerve-System accept on faith—for in our infinite humility we do not understand—the Sacred Mysteries of Name, Cause, Space, Matter, Electric Impulse, Truth, and Death. For all that we are and all that we hope to be we owe to the Great God Nerve-System.

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nbsp; The Perfessor elevated his hands in a priestlike gesture.

  —You are taking advantage of a sick man, he said. What do you believe in, my boy?

  —In miracles.

  —Such as?

  —In the eternal miracle of the living Self which is greater than itself. From this premise all begins: that science and all the world are unavoidably human. Everything exists by the authority of that sturdy republican, the Self. The world in which we live lives in us. To look outward at the farthest star is to look inward into oneself. We are merely exploring our immense cupboard.

  —Get me another bottle off the shelf, the Perfessor said.

  He tossed an empty bottle into the bushes.

  —But, John, your Self and its precious Ideas don’t explain anything.

  —For example?

  —They don’t explain your Self and its precious Ideas. By what authority is the Self here and who or what implants its Ideas? To be brutal with you, boy, what is the cause of all this?

  He made a gesture with his hand indicative of the night, the fountain, Mrs. Evelina Brown, Esther Root Shawnessy, and the children, who were busy fixing rocket sticks in the ground.

  —There are laws beyond the Law of Cause.

  —Such as?

  —The Law of Being.

  —Which is?

  —I am that I am.

  The Perfessor crossed himself and shuddered dramatically.

  —Then to be is to be God?

  —In a way, yes. Beyond all Cause, is the Uncaused Thing, the Causer that isn’t Caused. Beyond every mystery is another mystery—by Cause itself, which creates more and more causes by its own law.

  —But what is the ground of it all?

  —The ground of it all, the Uncaused Causer, is a Self, which must always assume a prior cause, creating mystery out of its own law of order. The deepest intuition is that we are alive in mystery. Know thy Self, Professor, and the greatness of thyself.

  —And is this Self God?

  —Each Self participates in God.