Love in a Dry Season

by Shelby Foote

  She had two interests. One was the Memphis paper, the one that came down on the evening train, with lurid headlines and pictures of bank robbers and gentlemen riders and beauty contest winners in one-piece sleeveless bathing suits. She read it column by column from left to right and page by page from front to back, picking up the continuations as she came to them, moving inch by inch down the newsprint, through congressional debates and legal notices and want-ads, with the grim unflagging headlong perseverance of a mole burrowing in loose earth. Theory and problems did not interest her (editorials, for instance, passed from her memory as soon as she had read them) but she acquired a host of facts—she knew all the journalistic celebrities by their first names, including the various husbands of Peggy Joyce and the wives of Tommy Manville. The newspaper brought the outside world to her, and she preferred that world to be as different as possible from the one she knew.

  Her other interest was sewing. She spent her daylight hours stitching flower designs on quilted satin. Folded into envelopes, they were handkerchief cases; left unfolded, they were samplers. Each Christmas she wrapped the year’s production in holly paper, individually, and sent them to women she had known as girls a decade back, most of whom were mothers now though she always addressed the packages with their maiden names, looking up their addresses in an old phone book she had saved. A receiver would unwrap the gift and spend five minutes in speculative contemplation—it was too fine for a tea cosy and too thick for framing—and then give up and pack it away in a cedar chest. Ten and fifteen years later, when her daughter would lift it from the stale confusion of yellowed lace and dance cards, asking what it could be, the mother would pause for a moment, the tip of one forefinger at the corner of her mouth, and then: “Why, I dont rightly know, darling,” she would say. “It’s something poor Florry Barcroft sent me, years ago.”

  These two occupations filled her ordinary days. But the first Sunday of every month was an extraordinary day, with two events neatly separated by two oclock dinner. Soon after noon the rector came, Mr Clinkscales, with his rosy cheeks and pleasant manner, bearing under his arm a calfskin case containing the utensils and the bread and wine for Communion. He walked with a limp, the result of breaking his ankle long ago—he was making a genuflection and when he straightened up, stepping backward, he fell off the dais; the break had knit improperly and now he walked with a rolling gait like a seafaring man. He improvised an altar in front of the Morris chair, and there he administered Communion. Florence took the wafer greedily. While it dissolved on the back of her tongue, digested almost before it was even swallowed, the words of the ritual seemed to float in the air about her head: Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving. She stretched her neck eagerly for the cup, and while the wine fumes set her brain reeling, the words had a particular beauty: Drink this in remembrance that Christ’s blood was shed for thee, and be thankful. Thus transported, she remembered the half-naked man nailed to the wall of the church beside the altar, and she fed on him in her heart and drank his blood. When Amanda came into the room after seeing Mr Clinkscales to the door, she always found her sister sitting with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes would be filled with tears of happiness.

  Later that afternoon the doctor arrived—Dr Clinton, who, though already well past middle-age, was rather dandified, affecting stand-up collars and pepper-and-salt jackets with bellows pockets and the belt sewed on. He spent half an hour with Florence, talking symptoms in a guarded manner and making a perfunctory examination. Then he went to the rear of the house, to the small downstairs room that was called the office, for a consultation with Major Barcroft. Whether this was for professional attention or to report on the condition of the invalid daughter or perhaps merely social, the sisters did not know. However, they ruled out the last possibility—their father was never ‘social’—and soon they ruled out the first as well; for when the doctor left the room he put his instrument case on a hall table just outside the parlor door.

  It was Florence who discovered about the instrument case. On a November Sunday, a chill drizzly day three years after the barber’s first visit—Sam Marino came back four times a year, in March and June, September and December; he was always punctual, arriving the first Monday in each of those months, and Florence no longer feared him; he was one of her ‘visitors’ now, along with the rector and the doctor—Amanda came into the room in time to see her sister make a sudden furtive motion, hiding something beneath the newspaper in her lap. Then she looked closer and saw a glint of metal and a length of rubber tubing. “Now, Florence,” she said quietly. “Youd better put that back before he leaves. He’ll need it, you know.”

  Florence was flushed with excitement. “I was going to put it back. I always do.” There were two bright spots on her cheeks, like rouge. She paused. Then she said, with the forthright manner of one who has considered and made a decision: “I found out something. Do you want to hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Listen.” She gave Amanda the stethoscope. “Listen to yours first,” she said. “Then mine.” She bent forward with an air of conspiracy, hands clasped under her chin, and said eagerly, “Oh Amanda, it’s the strangest thing! Just listen.” She showed her younger sister how to wear the instrument with the ear hooks pointed forward and even how to place the listening cone. “No, no,” she said authoritatively. “It’s not way over on the left. They just tell you that. It’s in the middle, almost. Listen.” She reached out and shifted the cone. Then Amanda heard it: her own heart, like a tomtom, going Bump. Kibump. Kibump. Kibump with a steady, viscous, pumping sound, the rhythm of her blood. Watching, Florence smiled. “Now listen to mine,” she said, pressing the cone to her own breast. Amanda leaned forward, hearing her sister’s heart: Kibump. Ki-kikibump. Bump. Kikibump: a terrifying sound. The tomtom had gone all wrong, as if a madman were beating a mad rhythm.

  “See there?” Florence said proudly. Her cheeks were flushed. “Isnt it just the strangest thing?”

  So now Amanda knew; whenever she looked at her sister she knew. Something alien and dread had entered their lives. It was as if a third person were present now whenever they were together: Florence was never alone. From this day, in the dim hot airless room, close and fetid as a winter den in which a wolf had recently littered, while Florence sat by the window pulling bright thread through hoops of quilted satin, her back hunched as she leaned toward the light, her short hair spiked forward in two abrupt, vicious curves against her jaws, Amanda felt the presence of death poised like an actor in the wings of a theater, disinterestedly awaiting his cue to repeat a performance he has played too many times.

  For Florence there was no relief, no other life, no other atmosphere; but Amanda had outside duties. Three times a day she left the house. First in the morning, soon after the major had gone, she went to do the marketing, carrying a basket over her arm. Then in the afternoon, at five oclock when slanting sunlight threw long shadows on the pavement, she would walk to Cotton Row to meet her father. And finally, after supper, she went for her seven oclock constitutional, a half-hour stroll which the major prescribed (for her, not himself: he never went) to ‘settle’ the evening meal.

  The five oclock outing was the one that put her most in the public eye, for she and her father would walk together homeward through the quiet downtown streets while others were still waiting for five-thirty, quitting-time. At fifty Major Barcroft had the septuagenary dignity, the stiff, sway-backed carriage, the grizzled hair and slightly tufted eyebrows he was to take to the grave. Townspeople would watch them—the middle-aged old man who maintained an air of inward contemplation, as if he somehow had managed to swallow a cannonball, and the young daughter who was as drab, as deferential as a hired companion not too sure of holding her job, aged, too, beyond her years, whose air, though not contemplative, was as removed as her father’s—and there would be a ripple of comment following their passage, like the bubble and foam o
f a wake:

  “There they go, the high-and-mighty Barcrofts.”

  “Thats quality, man.”

  “Quality. You can have it.”

  This was spoken not so much in pity as in judgment, and not so much in judgment as in triumph. They could forgive him his reverses, the sorrows that crowded his life, but they could not forgive him his reported million dollars and his highborn insularity. They, or others like them, had watched him all his life, and when trouble came they resented that he did not call for help. They would have preferred it so; they would have enjoyed watching him run shrieking into the street with his hands in the air: ‘Help me! Help me! My affliction is more than I can bear.’ In that case they might even have gone to help and comfort him. But as it was, their eyes were hostile as they watched him pass.

  “Punch him with something sharp,” they said; “what would run out? Ice water.”

  Amanda and the major did not so much as glance to the right or left. They went past like figures in a tableau moving slowly along the pale sidewalk dappled with low-angled, watery sunlight and the shadows of leaves. Young men among the watchers would nudge each other:

  “There’s your chance.”

  “My chance at what?”

  “At a million dollars, man. What else?”

  “Hm. No thanks. It’s not enough, considering what goes with it.”

  But there was someone who thought it was enough, who weighed it carefully, point against point, made his decision quickly, and believed himself fortunate that no one had done so before him. There was a suitor on the way.

  2. Jeff and Amy

  Briartree, the Tarfeller plantation down on Lake Jordan—what was left of it, anyhow—went to Amy Carruthers when her aunt, Miss Bertha Tarfeller, died intestate. “Miss Birdy should have known better than to die like that,” people said. She had been principal of the Ithaca school for almost a generation; Miss Birdy they called her, and though it had mostly been forgotten by now, she had had one love affair in her life. In 1890, when she was eighteen, she was left lonely in the house after her older sister married a young lawyer visiting a classmate on the lake and moved to North Carolina: whereupon Bertha took up with a professional gambler. No one knew how they became acquainted, though she was the one suspected of having made the overture; such horseback rendezvous appealed to her romantic nature—which later took a milder form; she was poetess laureate of Jordan County in her later years. An anonymous letter informed her mother, who told her husband, Bertha’s father, that he would have to do something about it. “There is a thing you must do,” she said, a tall broad-shouldered woman with fierce eyes. “A gambler and a loose man has defiled your daughter.”

  Cass Tarfeller had never done anything about anything. Vapid and congenial, he lived on land inherited from his father, who had been a man of convictions and decisions, one of the original settlers of the region. But this time, goaded by his wife, Tarfeller did something—the one action in his life that was out-of-character. He wrote a challenge to the gambler, Downs Macready: I will shoot you on site if I see you Tuesday when I come down town & I mean it. But Tuesday when he went to Ithaca, wearing his father’s horse pistol, Macready shot him with a Henry .44 repeater, twice in the belly and once through the chest. Tarfeller crumpled and lay in the hot white August dust, stained but not even bloody, as if even the dignity of bleeding were denied him in his belated assumption of a heritage for which he had never been fit. Macready in turn was shot by a man named Bart, a planter friend of Tarfeller’s, who himself was wounded but recovered.

  So then the widow and her daughter lived alone at Briartree, the mother brooding, reliving the scene in the lower hall immediately after the shooting, when a messenger came from Ithaca and told them her husband was dead, along with the gambler, and Bertha turned on her with a face like a tragedy mask, accusing her: “You killed him, and Downs as well; you killed them both! I’ll hate you forever!”

  “I didnt kill them,” Mrs Tarfeller said, shrinking back; she raised one hand in protest, palm outward in front of her face as if to protect herself from a blow. Within a dozen years she had brooded her way into an asylum, where during the years until she died she would approach a total stranger on the grounds; “I didnt kill them,” she would say, holding out her hands, and the stranger would be frightened; for though by then she was harmless, she still had the broad shoulders and fierce eyes.

  At the time of her commitment the older daughter and her lawyer husband came down from Carolina for a division of the estate. He was honest enough as lawyers go; it was Bertha herself who insisted on taking the house and eighty surrounding acres as her share. The Carolina couple took the rest, the fifteen hundred acres of cotton land, which they sold to the first bidder at a price outrageously low. The low price did not matter, however, for the lawyer lost the money in the market crash of 1907. He would have lost a larger amount with the same facility. That was his luck all his life.

  Bertha was left lonelier than ever in the big house, without even her mother to hate. She moved to Ithaca, took a room in a boarding house, and began teaching school. That was 1902. She rented the house and the eighty acres, using the income to send what she called ‘deserving’ pupils to college (most of whom disappointed her completely, being spoiled by this one taste of easy money) except a bit she held back to finance the publishing of her biannual books of poetry, selections culled from the poems which now began appearing one a week in the Bristol Clarion. Since there was no spare money for repairs, the house deteriorated. At last it was almost a ruin, occupied by the kind of people who rent eighty acres for a year or so, not caring what manner of residence is included, and then move on. When you opened the gate, rusty plowpoints strung on haywire for a counterweight would shriek and jangle, and as you passed down the double row of mule-gnawed cedars toward the house, three or four flop-eared hounds would come belling from under the gallery and razorbacks foraging in what had been the rosebeds would turn and look at you and someone in a barrel-stave hammock swung between two of the cedars would ask what you wanted, not bothering to sit upright to ask it. Inside, conditions were worse; dust was everywhere and the tenants had been using the woodwork for kindling. Early in the Twenties the ladies of the Bristol Garden Club voted to buy the house and restore it as a showplace. They sent a delegation to the Ithaca school and Miss Birdy came to the door, her hair untidy and chalkdust on her dress. “Oh I couldnt do that,” she said when they had made their offer. “My people are all buried there, you know.” Six years later, when she died, they were disappointed that she had not left it to the garden club in her will, though in fact she left no will at all. They shook their heads. “She should have known better than to die like that, being a teacher and all.”

  That was 1927, the year of the great flood, and Amy Carruthers, daughter of the Carolina sister, was the only surviving member of the family; her parents had died of Spanish influenza during the war, within a week of each other. The following April, soon after the anniversary of the day the levee broke, she came to Mississippi with her husband (he was also her cousin; Carruthers was her maiden as well as her married name) to look over the property, see what she had inherited. They obviously had money, or anyhow one of them did, for they came in a car considerably longer than any Bristol had ever seen—pearl-gray, with almond lights, fenders like wings on the upbeat, and a baggage rack at the rear: a town car with a glass partition between the back and front seats, the chauffeur sitting out in the weather, sweating in his winter livery, for it had still been almost chilly when they left Carolina two days ago. This was the year when Southern voters, mostly Baptist, were confounded by having to choose between a Republican and a Democrat who not only was believed to be under the thumb of Rome but who also announced for Repeal, and they felt betrayed.

  Its rear protruding almost to the center line of Marshall Avenue so that people out for their Sunday rides had to detour around it, the long gray car stopped first at the Kandy Kitchen, and the Negro carhop who went out t
o the curb to take their order—two glasses of ice “shaved dry, it has to be dry,” two lemons, and the sugar bowl—came back with his eyes stretched perfectly round. “They got them a bar in the back of that thing,” he said. Several people left their cherry phosphates and Green Rivers on the marble counter, walked by the car, glancing more or less casually into the back, and it was true: the woman was mixing Tom Collinses with a long-handled silver spoon. The chauffeur watched them but neither the woman nor the man appeared to notice their curiosity. They went back into the Kandy Kitchen and resumed their places at the counter, sipping their soft drinks and shaking their heads. Early afternoon of an April Sunday, and here were people drinking on the sabbath streets—at a time, mind you, when Bristol husbands were still forbidding their wives to smoke in public.

  The woman was in her middle twenties and she wore a sort of tennis dress that shouted Money almost as loudly as the car did, sleeveless and V neck, of a semi-transparent material, chiffon or crêpe-de-Chine or maybe georgette, which allowed the pink of her nipples to show through. She not only wore no brassiere, she obviously wore no undergarment of any description. There was nothing of modesty about her. Not that she was flaunting herself; that was what was so outlandish about it (for this was the late Twenties; plenty of women were dressing almost as scantily); she appeared not even to know the watchers were there. Her hair was brown with streaks of sunburnt yellow, bobbed just a little longer than ponjola, and her skin was tanned to the smooth, soft tint of café au lait. She moved slowly, after the manner of the inherently lazy, not so much as if she had no energy, but as if she were conserving it for something she really cared about—bed, most men would say, for there was a strong suggestion of such about her, like an aura. Her mouth was lipsticked savagely, no prim cupid’s bow, and there was a faint saddle of freckles across the bridge of her nose.