OUR HEROINE INTRODUCED
(Epic Fragment from the Eva Series)
It was a summer’s day, and it was summer too in the heart of a certain small person, who at this commencement of our tale, we find sauntering idly by herself along a country road. And who is this girl whose hair is like finespun gold, whose eyes are the color of the cloudless skies? Some of our little readers have already guessed her name. She is, of course, none other than Eva, that delightful child, heroine of so many happy and instructive tales. At the time of our present story she is about twelve years old, her form foretelling already the graceful proportions of the woman, while retaining the delicate lightness of the child. And where is Eva going? That, my inquisitive little dears, will be discovered to you all in good time. . . .
—Have you finished your book, Eva?
—Yes, Mamma.
Austere and vaguely accusing, the question had shattered the golden dream, and instantly Eva remembered the nightmare she had dreamed just before waking up in the morning. Then as now it had been the earth of Raintree County over which she travelled, but she had been alone, walking, forlornly hunting for her home on roads diminishing in mournful silence to the far horizons. Yes, these were surely the small brown roads of Raintree County, and the houses that she saw at a great distance were surely the plain board houses of Raintree County. But she had somehow become lost in her own familiar earth. She couldn’t even remember what home the family was living in from among the many homes she had had in Raintree County. And what season was it—summer, winter, autumn, spring? Or was it some seasonless and timeless landscape, one in which it was impossible to return to the right home at the right time? If only she could find a familiar landmark—the plain board buildings of the Old Home Place, or perhaps the brick tower of the Greenville house, or the steeple of the Moreland School, or the lonely structure of Waycross Station—she would have her bearings and be instantly at home. Somehow she had got lost from an earlier dream in which small golden flowers had sifted on her eyes and she had floated on a lake at evening, and it was summer and the days were long. Or was that all the legend of another girl, a fabulous, forgotten little girl, the little dreamer of a summer dream?
Then while she wandered in that dawncolored landscape, she remembered about the crazy woman. Right now, the crazy woman might be hiding behind a hedge watching. Looking over her shoulder, Eva saw a tall woman with black hair and bright black eyes coming swiftly across the field behind her.
—Papa! Papa!
Her screaming was a tortured small moaning in her throat. Her legs were glued with earth. The crazy woman came up behind her and raised the knife in her rigid arm; her indianstraight hair was shaken with fury. . . .
—Eva! Time to get up.
It had been her mother’s voice, thrusting into the dream and bringing her back into real life.
Her father shook the reins over President’s back.
—How time passes! he said. It seems only yesterday, children, that we walked along this road on the way to school.
—It seems a long time ago to me, Papa, Eva said.
It was clear to her that her father didn’t measure time as she did. Already she divided the twelve years of her life into distinct periods, according to where she had lived. It made her uneasy to think that perhaps her father regarded the entire fourteen years since his marriage to Esther Root as a single period, in which Eva was a minor—if somewhat noisy and persistent—accident.
She looked at the green earth swimming by her as the surrey passed like a lazy boat rocking on a lazy river. She was passing down one of the oldest pathways of her childhood, a way to school. She was remembering summers of long, slow trips in the surrey from town to little town. In all these memories, her father was a presence mystical, pervasive. The years of his life—those lost years before there was any Eva, years of his boyhood, his youth, and his young manhood—spoke to her with indistinct, soft voices. The legend of her father waited for her to rediscover it between the green covers of a sentimental novel inscribed with a golden legend. In that story, she too would have a part. Unseen, she must have been there all the time, travelling the little long brown roads of Raintree County, tracing on the earth a vast initial, hunting for her home. A hundred bright eternal doors opened for her. Her ways and times were neither before nor after his, but woven with his own in the same gold myth of summer and the earth. Welcome, beloved child, heroine of an endless series! Yes, she would linger in a golden world, remembering
1880—1890
HOW ONCE UPON A TIME A LITTLE GIRL LIVED BESIDE A ROAD
that went somewhere and somewhere and how she had a father and a mother and a brother and had always been a little girl in a house beside a road.
Her great desire was to travel on the road that went somewhere and somewhere. Often the family would go together in the surrey and start along the road, and it would be a long day in the summer, and they would go a long way and visit another house beside a road. And sometimes it was night and she slept as the surrey passed along the road, and always she was back at last in the house beside the road.
Behind the big house was a little house where she and her brother Wesley played. The little house was piled with old things, and it had a strange spicy smell that came from glass-stoppered bottles with black words on them. This little house was taken down when she was still very small. It was called the Office, and it belonged once to T. D., who was dead long ago. She and her brother played Explorer too, and sometimes they went to the end of the South Field and watched the train go by. A few big oaks partly hid the hurrying train on its high embankment. Close to the railfence was a scarred boulder, higher than a man, lying like a big egg halfsunk in the earth.
—This is the oldest thing on the Home Place, Eva, her father told her once. Older than you and I.
—Or T. D.?
—Yes, much older.
—Or the road?
—Yes, even than the road.
She tried to think of the time when there hadn’t been a road. But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t even remember being a baby.
There was a picture of the baby Eva. The baby Eva was a fat, bald, bugeyed thing that looked something like a toad in a dress. It was too bad, because this baby had been given beautiful names. She had been called Eva from a little girl in a book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and one time her father told her that the word ‘Eva’ meant Life, and that it was the noblest name a little girl could have. Her other name, Alice, had come from another book called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It had been written by a grown-up man for a little girl who really lived and whose name was Alice.
Child of the pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
It had taken great courage for her father to call the baby Eva by these noble, beautiful names. Eva would have to become a famous and beautiful woman to justify these names.
But when she got bigger, she was still squatty and plump with large staring blue eyes and peculiar brown hair. When people called, they never said, Isn’t she pretty! but instead, Well, I’ll bet this one isn’t sick much! Then Eva would almost cry for rage and shame, and especially for pity of her father, who had given her the names.
People called her father Mr. Shawnessy—or, rarely, John. But one time a woman Eva didn’t know called him Johnny. Eva was shocked. Her mother had never called him anything but Mr. Shawnessy in front of other people and had never in her life used his first name in any form. Perhaps that was because she had gone to school to him when she was a little girl, years before they were married.
Eva’s father had the school in Moreland, to which he walked every day of the schoolyear. At home he was almost always reading or writing. Eva would think back and back, and it seemed to her that the oldest memories she had were of her father sitting in the yard of the Old Home Place, feet propped on a rock, reading a book or writing in a tablet. She would look over his arm and study the curved, softflowing marks. Her father never got tired of
making them. He said that they were poems.
It bothered Eva that she knew so little. The big trouble was that she didn’t know where she came from. Once her father said,
—You came from those two photographs on the wall, Eva. They belong to the Pre-Eva Age.
The two photographs on the parlor wall were a picture of the Shawnessy family and a picture of the Root family, grouped in the respective front yards of the Old Home Place and the Old Root Farm. These pictures had been taken at about the same time, two weeks before a famous Fourth of July in 1878, when Eva’s father and mother had run away to get married. In the middle of the Shawnessy group was T. D., Eva’s grandfather, a tall brittle old man looking vaguely happy about something, as he sat with his three daughters and four sons. He had died a year before there was any Eva, and they had put him into the ground in a hill by the river. In the Root picture Eva’s other grandfather, Gideon Root, sat blackbearded, bigheaded, immense in the middle of his children. On his right, with her hand in his, stood Eva’s mother, Esther Root, in half-profile, her eyes like her father’s, dark and sad.
For a long time Eva never saw her Grandfather Root except in the picture. Then one day he rode hugely out of the picture—or rather Eva rode into it.
The family had been visiting in an unfamiliar part of the County. As the surrey topped a gentle rise, Eva’s mother pointed to a lonely farmhouse on the left, set close to the road.
—That’s where I was brought up, children, she said. That’s the Old Farm.
Then a fearful thing happened.
A buggy came into view as if it had sprung from the ground. It rolled swiftly along a lane from the barn behind the house to the main road. It was a black shiny buggy pulled by a big black horse. It turned onto the main road and came toward the surrey. There was a low thunder of hooves and a squeaking sound. The buggy came closer and closer, and Eva could see a big face under the hood, and a black beard with jags of gray, and a thickfleshed nose ending in a sensitive tip, and eyes black and big that looked right into her eyes.
A few yards away, the man in the buggy jerked the reins and shouted,
—Whoa!
His voice was so loud and terrible that buggy and surrey stopped side by side. Eva’s father could have reached out and touched the man in the buggy.
The big man sat, knees close together. He held the reins in one hand, and in the other the crop of a coiled whip of woven leather. He looked at Eva’s mother as if she were the only one in the surrey.
—Esther, he said, the old home’s waitin’ for you. Come on back.
Eva’s mother looked at the man. Her eyes were dark and sad like his own.
—Pa, she said, I’ll come back as soon as I can bring Mr. Shawnessy and the children.
There was a dead hush. The man and the woman looked at each other. The man’s eyes burned with dark hunger, and the woman’s were brooding and sad. The buggy and surrey and their occupants side by side on the narrow road were as still as a photograph. And the lonely little farmhouse was still. And the long acres around it were still.
Then the man’s face changed. From deadwhite, it turned red, bloating with blood. The man looked at Eva’s father and then at herself and her brothers in the back seat and again at her father. The man’s bluntfingered hand bulged on the crop of the black whip, the knuckles of his balled fist turned blue, his mouth opened, he panted, half rose in the buggy, and swung the whip. It went crashing out along the flanks of the black horse. The black horse lunged as if it had been shot, President reared in the stays, and in the same instant, buggy and surrey shot forward and down the road in opposite directions.
After that one meeting with her Grandfather Root, Eva never again felt quite the same sense of peace and security when riding on the County roads. As for why her grandfather hated her father, no one would tell her the reason. It was one of the secrets of the Old Days.
The Old Days were full of maddening secrets. Once while Eva was digging things out of a box in the attic, she found two photographs—one of a woman holding a little boy and another of the same woman holding a doli. The woman was very pretty, but she looked sick or frightened. Eva took the pictures to her father and asked him about them.
—That was my first wife, he said, startled. A long time ago—before I married your mother, Eva.
—Where is she now, Papa?
—She’s dead.
—Whose little boy is that?
—That was my little boy, he said. Here, Eva, we’d better put those pictures away. It makes me sad to look at them. You don’t want to make Papa sad, do you?
Another secret thing from the Old Days was the biggest book in the family bookcase, the Byron book, which Eva once got down, finding these words on the flyleaf in a pretty hand:
For Johnny,
In memory of happy days together at Pedee Academy,
NELL
Between the pages of the book were wisps of flowers plucked in some summer of her father’s youth, weightless little corpses that left faint stains and fragrance on the fine black print.
—Who was Nell, Papa? Eva had asked her father.
—Someone I knew in my youth, Eva, he said, closing the book and putting it back into the top row of the bookcase.
In the Old Days, everything was either Before the War, During the War, or After the War. The War had been fought to free the slaves and save the country. President Lincoln was a kind good man with a sad face and a black beard. He had had a small boy named Tad and had been shot in a theatre. Their own father had come home sick at the end of the War with a scar on his left shoulder.
Before the War her father had been a great runner and had run a famous race against someone named Flash Perkins in the Court House Square. Sometimes the surrey would go by an old brick building in Freehaven, and her father would say that it was the old Pedee Academy, where he went to school when he was a boy Before the War. As for the Old Days After the War, they were more mysterious even than the others. One day Eva and Wesley found in the attic a little red book with black words printed on the outside:
VISITOR’S GUIDE
TO THE
CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION
AND
PHILADELPHIA
1876
Their father said that it was a guidebook he had bought in Philadelphia, where they had a kind of fair like the County Fair, only much bigger.
All through the Old Days her father had taught school in Raintree County. Eva was always meeting people who had gone to school to him, and some of them looked older than he. But then he never changed much, and it was hard to believe that he was eighteen years older than her mother.
Her mother was sallow and slender and had a red smooth mouth and jetblack hair. Her face in repose was sad and almost stern. In her mother’s presence, Eva always felt vaguely guilty of something. When Eva was naughty—which was not seldom—it was her mother who punished her, switching her legs with a rattail plaintain while Eva yelled without shame, being unable to take punishment like Wesley.
—Wesley’s an Indian like his mother, their father would say. They never show their real feelings.
That was a good one of her father’s about Wesley being an Indian. There was something about Indian blood in her mother’s family, but Wesley had blond hair and skyblue eyes. He was a boy, and boys had it better than girls. Their mother always favored him, and everyone looked upon him as the bright light and shining star of the family because he had such a wonderful memory.
Her other brother, Will, was born at the Old Home Place when Eva was five. One morning, not long after his birth, their mother was down on her knees going along the edge of the carpet pulling up tacks, and all the time the tears ran down her cheeks and fell on the floor, but she didn’t make a sound. It was in the late summer, and all their things were loaded into two big wagons, and they all got into the surrey and rode away down the road that went somewhere and somewhere.
The road brought them by evening to a little town called Greenville, and
they took an angling street to the outskirts, and in the declining light, across the pastures and the fences, standing in isolation beside a pond, its redbrick sides glowing with a living warmth, its upper windows reddened by the sun, a house stood waiting.
—Why, it’s like a tower! Eva said.
A lonely form, unlike any other in all Raintree County, the house in Greenville where Eva lived for two years was a kind of sixsided brick tower, the whole mass pierced with narrow windows and crowned with a mansard roof rising to an observation platform. A small greenhouse attached to the back of the house and extending to the pond was full of glistening plants. A queer doctor, whom Eva never saw and whose name she couldn’t remember, had made the house, the greenhouse, and the pond.
Her father had the school at Greenville, and except for the new house, his life was as before, with reading, writing, and teaching. But for Eva the life at Greenville was a changed life. The dominant image of this new life was the pond mucky and green, full of spooling and spawning forms of fish and frogs and snakes scaringly beautiful. Deeply puzzled by the miracle of life and the mystery of the sexes, Eva was a moody, jealous little girl during the years at Greenville. It was here that she committed the greatest crime of her life, the murder of the boy doll.
This was a lovely doll that was given to her little brother Will on his second birthday. Eva coveted the doll, and when Will wouldn’t let her hold it and their mother scolded her for taking it away, Eva wished the destruction of the doll. In the afternoon, taking her old rag doll she dipped it into the pond to baptize it, and as she had hoped, Will dipped his doll. As the beautiful new doll slipped out of his hands into the pond, Eva felt a terrible pang of joy and remorse mingled. She took a stick and snagged the doll and brought it to the surface muddy and ruined. Crying, the children laid the soaked dolls at their mother’s feet. As Eva had expected, no one was punished since the harm had come to the doll through a religious motive.