Love in a Dry Season

by Shelby Foote

  She finished mixing the drinks, stirring them until they were frosted over, then touched the back of the man’s hand with the cold wet bottom of one of the glasses. He hesitated, then turned his hand palm-up and took the drink. He did not look at her or even turn his head in her direction. “Mud,” she said, watching him, and he lifted the glass with something less than a flourish; “Mud,” he said. The chauffeur continued to sweat beneath the wheel.

  The man appeared to be younger than the woman, perhaps by a couple of years. He too was tanned, though not as dark, and he had a hale, athletic look, wearing a white, open-neck shirt and lightweight gray flannel trousers, buckskin shoes with red rubber soles, and a wrist watch that had no crystal. His hair was crew cut, like a furry skullcap golden in the sunlight. He had that same economy of motion the woman had, but in his case it did not seem to be based on indolence or conservation; it seemed rather to proceed from the caution of a hostage among enemies. The features of his face were small, occupying a scant one-third of the front of his head, as if a hand had squeezed them forward without doing them any individual damage. His mouth was small, its corners barely extending beyond the wings of his nose, though the lower lip was full and rather pendulous; from time to time he gripped it with his upper teeth, which were small and sharp and very white. His eyes were light gray, peculiarly fixed.

  When they had finished their drinks and the carhop returned, the woman asked him the way to Lake Jordan. He told her, turning his eyes this way and that, in every direction except toward the front of her dress. She tipped him fifty cents. “Yas maam!” he said and his teeth were as white as his eyeballs. The car backed almost to the opposite curb, swung left, a long gray curve (actually the metal seemed to bend) and then was gone. “Who could they be, asking the way to Lake Jordan?” the watchers said to each other, ranked along the marble counter of the Kandy Kitchen.

  They were Amy and Jeff Carruthers and they rode south out of Bristol, gravel chattering under the upswept fenders. After a while the man said suddenly, “Whats it like?” Amy glanced out at the fields.

  “Cotton. Everywhere nothing but cotton.”

  “Young?”

  “Just little green lines. People plowing. Niggers.”

  “Ah,” he said, and did not speak again. His reserve was like a wall to hide behind.

  It was thirty miles. After a while: “There’s water,” Amy said; the lake was sparkling in the sunlight. The car turned left, moving down the eastern shore behind a screen of cypresses just beginning to bud with tender green along the paleness of their boughs. Jeff said nothing.

  They asked again at a service station and the attendant, a young man almost startlingly handsome, told them how to find the Tarfeller place. Another two miles, he said, and described the gate. He had trouble with his eyes, the same as the Negro carhop had had, except that he did not deny himself, and his confusion showed in his voice. Jeff turned his head at the sound; Amy watched him. “Drive on, Edward,” she said. Then she said to her husband: “You neednt have bothered; he was ugly as sin. There!” she cried, leaning forward. “By that gate.” The car pulled up, tires growling in the gravel, and the dust cloud they had been trailing caught up with and blanketed them. Then it settled and Amy sat looking at the house. “My God,” she said. “It’s haunted. It’s bound to be. And to think thats where they got me.” Jeff said nothing. The chauffeur sat sweating dark halfmoons at his armpits.

  She meant that she had been conceived here, an only child born after twelve years of marriage. Searching through her mother’s diaries, she had discovered—or at any rate, folding down her fingers, had computed—that she had been conceived at Briartree when her parents came down for a division of the property at the time when her grandmother lost her mind. Returning to the place appealed to her as a sort of pilgrimage to hallowed ground, the blind seed swimming home. Maybe I’ll die here, she thought, for though she did not really believe in death—her own—she was superstitious and even sentimental to a degree.

  “Want to get out with me?”

  “All right,” Jeff said.

  She got out first, then he with his hand on her wrist. “Careful through here,” she said. When she pushed the gate ajar, the plowpoints slid along the wire and clattered. They passed through, then walked up the lane with its double row of cedars toward the house, Jeff still with his hand on Amy’s wrist and a bit in front, so that an uninformed observer would have said that he was the one who was doing the leading, the guiding. “Oh Jeff, Jeff,” she said after a time. “You wouldnt believe how lost, how lonely it is.”

  Last year’s tenants had left when the flood came, and when the flood went down had not returned. No one was living in the house; nothing had been done to clear away the ravages of high water. Vines and weeds were everywhere. A six-inch deposit of silt covered the floors of the lower story, baked almost as hard as concrete though it had a fine powdery surface that shifted and stirred with the slightest breath of air. Fractional chocolate bands on the walls of the house, paling in ratio to their distance from the ground, marked the receding stages of the flood. There was no sound, no motion. An old hound, sway-backed, gaunt, half blind—part Walker and part Redbone and part stray—came from under the gallery, stood for a moment looking at them, blinking its milky eyes in the filtered sunlight, then turned and crawled back out of sight. Amy did not mention this (dogs were a taboo subject just now) but she gave a running description of the place: “Columns. One of them’s down. A carriage house—all run down too. Oh Lord, Jeff, what a sight. We’re miles from nowhere. Miles. A person might as well be buried as here. What an inheritance: it’s just my luck.”

  She said these things in a natural, offhand manner, but she watched Jeff’s face as she said them—particularly when she said, “Miles from nowhere. A person might as well be buried”—and she appeared satisfied with his reaction. Then she went on.

  “You can see how beautiful it used to be and of course it could be restored. But who would live here, miles from nowhere?” She paused and watched him, afraid that she was overdoing it.

  “You,” he said, breaking the silence, and at first she was afraid that he had outsmarted her, had seen through the pretense. But he said it in a somewhat threatening tone—which reassured her.

  “Ha!” she cried, imitating a laugh.

  They continued their tour of inspection, Amy doing the talking, Jeff the listening. “All right,” he said at last. He stood stock-still, holding onto her wrist. “You can cut the sales talk. I’ll do it.”

  “Do what?”

  He turned his face, as if he were looking at her. “Who you think youre fooling?” he said harshly. Then he cursed her, the words coming fast like slaps, all the while holding her tightly by the wrist. Sunlight glittered golden in the furry skullcap as he nodded in time with the words. Then he stopped; he stopped quite suddenly. “Lets get back to the car,” he said, waiting for her to move.

  They rode north on the gravel, which made a steady tinkling against the rims. “Did you really think you were really fooling me?” He smiled as he said it. Amy was smiling too by now, but she managed to keep all evidence of it out of her reply:

  “All right, we’ll have it your way. Dont we always?”

  They rode through Bristol again, then up to Memphis, where they made arrangements with an architect and a landscape gardener for the restoration of Briartree.

  The money was tobacco money, not from the growing end but the manufacturing; they were from Winston-Salem, and there was plenty of it. Even Jeff who was a younger son (as Amy’s father had been, in the days before the increased popularity of cigarettes boosted the fortune) could look forward to something over a million in his own name after three brothers by his father’s first wife had got theirs. It had come in time to give him all the advantages: expensive Virginia prep schools—two of them, for he had been expelled from one when a snooping proctor found in his locker a collection of pornographic comic books such as daycoach butchers used to sell—enough spen
ding money to attract the companions he really cared about, and later a succession of high-seated runabouts and out-of-season weekends at the beach. His mother was his father’s second wife. She had been governess to the first three sons and a carnal relationship had existed between her and her employer for years. The first wife was an invalid; she never got up from her last childbed, and when she finally died the governess blackmailed old Carruthers into marriage, though in fact it was not so much that her threats frightened him—nothing ever really frightened him—as it was that she caught him off guard, while he was grieving: for he had loved the first wife very much, in spite of his infidelities with the governess. (“At least I dont go chasing outside the house,” he had said to himself with satisfaction, where another might have said, with equal satisfaction, ‘At least I dont betray her here in the house.’) The governess had little time to enjoy her success, however, for she died in her second pregnancy, during their second year of marriage. The old man’s third wife was a Broadway showgirl; he met her while he was up there doing the town, celebrating the death of the governess. A dewy-eyed Norwegian from the Minnesota prairies, who cultivated an air of innocence, she taped her breasts to make them jut and later resorted to paraffin injections. She raised Jeff, having no child of her own. He called her mama—accent on the second syllable; it was all the French she had.

  Though Amy was almost three years older than Jeff (she was born in February 1903, he in November 1905) she was the daughter of Jeff’s father’s younger brother, who had gone into law and found a wife on a Christmas visit down to Mississippi. She was an only child. Then her mother and father died, both practically at once during the influenza epidemic two months before the Armistice, and Amy came to live with her uncle, Jeff’s father, what time she was not at one or another of the girls’ schools she attended through girlhood and youth: which meant, in effect, that she spent summers at the country place near Myrtle Beach. She resembled her mother—and indirectly, though she had never seen her, her Aunt Bertha—thin and intense, with a pouting mouth and a wealth of hair. Like Jeff, she had been expelled from school: twice in fact, though never for any such reason as he had been. It was merely that she was insubordinate on the slightest provocation, and sometimes with no provocation at all; every teacher was an enemy per se. Her mother died, then one week later her father, and all through that last week he asked the same question, as if now at last, on his deathbed, some sense of responsibility had caught up with him: “My God, what will happen to Amy?” He took his brother’s hand, looking up from the hospital bed; they had never really been friends. “Look out for her, Josh, will you? Will you, Josh?” He kept asking that, even after the brother said he would, and then he died.

  Amy came to Myrtle Beach the following summer. She was sixteen; Jeff was thirteen, and at night he would hide in the shrubbery, watching her and her beaus in the side porch swing. It was better than the comic books, and sometimes strangely like them, though a good deal more grim and without the exaggerations. He would crouch there, watching, and at length the lover would disengage himself, would come down the steps, sometimes to within touching distance of Jeff in the shrubbery, and with one heel dig a shallow trench in the sand to bury the contraceptive, which glistened rather sickeningly in the moonlight before it was covered. That continued, and Jeff was always there to watch. Then one night her date telephoned to say he couldnt come—he had to drive his mother down to Charleston; someone was sick or something. It sounded suspiciously pat to Amy. She was angry enough for any enormity.

  So Jeff took his place in the swing. He had studied well, watching the others; his movements were bold and selfassertive up to a point. Then at the critical moment he panicked; he was terrified; he even began to weep; “Hold me! Hold me!” he cried. Then it was over and he was amazed: Was that all there was to it? Then gradually he became conscious of a sort of animal chuckling near his ear. She was laughing at him: had been laughing all along, he realized. And he was horribly ashamed.

  He never got over it. But afterwards, through the remaining years of school and college, when he looked back on that summer it was not the brief period spent in his cousin’s arms that he remembered with most pleasure. After all, her manner had been more that of a riding instructor than a lover, let alone a maiden in submission. What he remembered mainly, what he dwelt on, were those drawn-out moments when he crouched in the shrubbery and watched her with the others. It seemed to him that at such times he could enjoy his pleasure with a greater clarity, his mind being less clouded by emotion.

  There were other summers at Myrtle Beach, but he was never admitted to such intimacy again; there were not even any more performances in the swing. For she had reformed—as far as he could tell. Still, they were together every summer, sharing the same house, and this had its consequences. He would stand in the hall outside the bathroom door, listening to the splash of water, the flop of a soapy washcloth. The keyhole was blocked by the key on the other side, though Amy never turned it. Two summers later he mustered the courage to enter. Her breasts and belly were dazzling white in contrast to her arms and legs and shoulders. “You squirt,” she said, standing beside the tub and holding the towel limp at her side, not bothering to raise it. He stood looking and suddenly she moved; she moved quite fast. She struck him with one of her foster mother’s reducing devices, a plaited rolling-pin, and he fell back. “Squirt!” he heard her shout through the slammed door. However, despite the violence, it seemed to Jeff that she sounded more amused than outraged, and even then she did not turn the key.

  That was what bothered him most: the fact that she seemed to encourage his advances, and even granted him certain liberties, up to the point at which she turned on him with violence or laughter. He did not know which was worse, the chuckling or the blows; there was something terribly unmanly about being on the receiving end of either. But he looked forward to a time when he could repay her, could laugh at her or strike her as he saw fit. Thus marriage was already in his mind.

  Next year he entered the state university at Chapel Hill. It seemed a shame to waste all that expensive and exclusive prep school training on such a democratic institution, but he really had no choice. All the Carruthers men had gone there, beginning with the grandfather who was the founder of the fortune. He worked his way through, this patriarch who later had his portrait hung over the mantel in the baronial living room, wearing a morning coat and a stand-up collar, and had a coat of arms designed and cut in stone above the driveway entrance; he worked his way through, waiting on tables in the dining hall and making beds in the dormitory at twenty cents a bed a week. Given the time and place, North Carolina in the early Eighties, he had little trouble deciding on a career. He went into tobacco, the marketing of it. In later days, when he was on the rise, a classmate would hear his name and say with a smirk, “Josh Carruthers? I remember him. He used to make up my bed every day in Old East.” Afterwards, when he had power and this remark got back to him, together with the names of the men who made it, he ruined some of them financially, though generally they never suspected why.

  Jeff, however, waited on no tables and made no beds, not even his own. He went a good fraternity and became a football hero—this last in spite of the fact that he had never been ‘athletic,’ had not enjoyed the beach games that were a part of summer vacations, had not gone out for any sport in either of the prep schools, and in fact had avoided exertion in all its forms. Football was a manifestation of the fury and frustration that grew out of the annual three months spent near Myrtle Beach in the same house with Amy, crouching outside the bathroom door, hearing the splashing water, the flopping washcloth, or standing on the porch in the gathering dusk and watching her ride off with a series of young men in topless roadsters, or lying in bed, tense and wide-eyed, waiting until the small hours when the roadster’s tires would whisper in the driveway sand and stop beneath the porte-cochere, directly under his window, where he would hear them talking in low voices or, worse, silent; then they would kiss again
and say good night and she would come upstairs with her shoes in her hand and enter the adjoining room, from which he would hear the rustle of her clothes coming off and the sighing complaint of the bedsprings as she lay down, relaxed for sleep. It added up to more than he could bear. Every September he brought the memory of all this to Chapel Hill and tried to work it off on the football field, to take it out on the opposing team, both in the weekday scrimmages and in the Saturday games. What he lacked in weight (it was not until his senior year that he reached a hundred and fifty pounds) he made up for in fury and a nonregard for injuries. He was clever enough at finding gaps, but when there was none to plunge through, he hit the line as if bent on self-destruction, breaking the chain of flesh. Then he would be into the clear, the spectators a mass of tossing arms and pennants in the grandstand roaring his name. For a moment there would be an illusion of freedom, an elation at having found release. But then, the touchdown made, the furor in the grandstand having subsided except for the sharp occasional cries like the yapping of dogs on a scent, he would find himself in line for another kickoff and it was all to do over again, the chain of flesh relinked.

  His father was delighted (but not surprised; he saw his son’s football prowess as a demonstration of qualities inherited from his mother, the second wife, the governess)—delighted so much that he gave him a Bearcat roadster to go with the coon-skin coat Jeff bought himself. He was Somebody on the campus; other students would stop on the paths, strolling classward, and look at him; he was pointed out, and he did his fraternity no end of good. He even suspected a change in Amy. She had made one among the cheering mass of grandstand faces, had heard them roar his name (it was also hers) and maybe even had swelled the chorus herself, though he rather doubted this last. When she came down for weekends with other men, Jeff sometimes thought he saw her watching him with different eyes—not tender, but anyhow different—and he thought perhaps his time had come; he could declare himself. But then it would be summer again, the long hot days, and he would lie in the close, familiar darkness, monklike on his narrow bed, hearing her under the porte-cochere with other men, her bare feet on the stairs, the rustle of her clothes as they came off … and his nerve would fail. Wearing his new dignity, his aura of football and the cheering throng, he more than ever feared a scene that would end in submission to ridicule or violence.