by Shelby Foote
He regretted now that he had not done it that way from the start. And that night, when Amanda came down the steps and met him in the shadow of the oaks, he told her it was their only hope. They walked and the moon was high and pure, like beaten gold, the air still balmy; people were saying there would be no winter this year. “Come out as usual tomorrow night,” he told her, pressing her arm and leaning so that his lips were touching her hair. “You neednt bring anything with you; come as you are. We’ll be married by the justice of peace and catch the ten oclock train for New Orleans. Say you will.” She was doubtful, but she wanted to: Drew could see that. He pressed her arm and breathed into her hair. When they returned to the house she held him close, more tenderly even than she had done the night before, and told him she would go with him.
“I’d go with you anywhere, Harley,” she said.
TWO
4. Citizen Bachelor
That night the weather broke. Soon after midnight the wind rose; there were sudden gusts of rain, intermittent and abrupt, like scant handfuls of gravel tossed against the windowpanes. Toward daybreak it stepped up the cadence; all Monday morning it came down with the steady drumming of true autumnal rain, driven in scudding sheets before the wind, stripping the leaves from trees and plastering them on streets and sidewalks and lawns, sodden, viscid, robbed of their gay colors. “Lord God,” Drew cried. “Is this the sunny South?” Just after three oclock that afternoon it slacked; within another hour it stopped; the sun emerged, cold and pale and distant, riding a murky haze, bathing the transformed landscape with a sinister yellow glow like the flicker of lightning. The limbs of trees, leafless and black with wet, were gaunt against the sky when Amanda went to meet her father at five.
Drew had told her that she must do nothing to make the major suspicious. But as they walked home together through the leaf-plastered streets, under that eerie refulgence, her father seemed to have divined her plans. This was in his manner, not his words: they were halfway home before he spoke. “Amanda,” he said. He paused. “I want you to realize the consequences before you do something youll be sorry for.” He did not look at her, and she too kept her eyes to the front. “You know that when I say a thing I mean it—I mean it to the hilt. So tell your young man this, Amanda. Tell him that the day you marry without my consent I’ll cut you off without a dime. Without so much as one thin dime, Amanda. I’ll cut you off, disown you, and what is more I’ll never regret it. I’ll never so much as think your name again.” Up to now he had spoken slowly, pausing between phrases. But now the words came fast, like fencing thrusts. “Tell your young man that, Amanda, and see what he says.”
Major Barcroft turned his head, looking at her for the first time since they had left the office. She knew that his gaze was fixed on her; she saw the movement out of the side of her eye. However, she kept her face to the front, and after a few more steps on the wet pavement he resumed. No one standing five feet away could have heard what he said.
“But there is something more to it than this, and I wonder that it hasnt occurred to you; I wonder that you havent thought of it.” He shook his head. “It isnt like you, Amanda. It isnt like you at all.” He leaned toward her and spoke rapidly, still in the quiet tone no bystander could overhear. “I hear her in the small hours of the night, and I hear you when you go to her; I know what Florence dreams. Will you leave your sister here alone, to wake up screaming and not find you there? Will you leave Florence here for me to comfort? For me to be the one who is there, holding her hand when she comes out of that dream?”
Amanda looked and saw her father’s face turned toward her, the drawn expression about his mouth, the cobweb strand of golden chain that drooped in a glistening parabola to the button at his lapel, the grizzled, tufted eyebrows, the glazed shirt front with its one pearl stud the color of skimmed milk. Then everything was blurred, for her eyes were filled with tears. They were in front of the house by now, and she ran up the steps and through the hall and up the staircase to her room. She closed the door behind her and turned the key. Then, whirling, she leaned against the panel, arms extended in a pose of crucifixion, her mouth and cheek against the varnished surface, panting. God is awful mean to people, she thought, sobbing against the smell and taste of varnish; God is awful mean to me.
Presently, though, she dried her eyes on her sleeve and crossed the room. She sat sideways on the bed, looking down at her hands in her lap. She sat thus for perhaps ten minutes; she did not move. Then she rose deliberately and went to her writing table, where she took a sheet of paper from the drawer, uncorked the ink, took up the pen, and wrote rapidly. The squeak of the pen was loud in the quiet room. When she had filled a little more than half the page—seven lines, not including the salutation or signature—she laid the pen aside and sat looking down at the paper while the ink dried. Rising, she folded the sheet, sealed it in an envelope, and started for the door. Then, without pausing, she turned in the doorway and returned to the table, where she addressed the envelope. Her hands were shaking; the writing was hardly legible. “Oh me,” she said, looking down at it. She decided it would do, however, and carried it downstairs without waiting for the ink to dry.
From the veranda she beckoned to a Negro boy who was passing on the sidewalk. He crossed the shallow lawn and accepted the letter which she held out to him. “Take this to the Bristol Hotel,” she told him. “Go straight there.” She paused, looking down at the writing on the envelope, then said quietly, “It’s for Mr Harley Drew.”
“Yassum,” he said. “At the Bristol Hotel. Yassum.”
He did not go, however; he stood there in his scuffed and soggy shoes, his knee-length jeans, his sky-blue denim shirt, looking up at her, showing a good deal of white at the bottoms of his eyeballs. Amanda waited, but still he did not move. So at last she took a change purse from the pocket of her dress, undid the clasp, and selected a piece of money. “Here. This is for you,” she said. He took it but for another little while he continued to stand there, watching the dull, not-quite-silver glint of the coin against his pinkish palm.
“Yassum,” he said sadly. It was a nickel.
Drew was entering the lobby through the doors that gave on Marshall Avenue—he had just come from the depot, where he had bought tickets and made a drawing-room reservation on the night train for New Orleans—when the desk clerk hailed him. “Mr Drew! Mr Drew, here’s a boy with a letter.”
The young Negro stood in front of the desk, holding the envelope with both hands hugged to his chest. “You Mr Holly Drew?” he asked, suspicious.
“I am,” Drew said gravely.
“Then here,” the boy said, even more gravely, and extended the letter, still gripping it with both hands, alert against any sudden attempt to snatch it.
Drew took it, ripped it open. There was a monogram at the upper left of the sheet, a flowery B, and beneath the body of the text the signature Always Your Amanda had been written larger than the rest. The stationery was heavy, expensive, and slightly yellowed. It belonged to her mother, Drew thought. He glanced up, still without having read the letter, and seeing the boy still there, took a coin from his pocket and flipped it: a quarter. The boy’s dark hand interrupted the spinning arc, and as he passed through the clashing plate glass doors, both rows of teeth showed white against his face.
Drew leaned against one of the columns beside the desk, looking at the note. It required some deciphering, for the tees were mostly uncrossed and the eyes undotted; the ens and yous, the ayes and ohs were indistinguishable. He scanned it first from the bottom up, reading only those portions that caught his eye. Tonight seven thirty. He will not change. Never regret it. Imposible. Do not buy the tickets. Startled by this last, he crossed the lobby and sat in one of the leather armchairs where old loafers sat through every morning and early afternoon, spitting into the brass spittoons and talking cotton while they watched the legs of women on the sidewalk. He spread the letter and read it carefully, from beginning to end.
Dear Harley—
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I will see you the way we said but do not buy the tickets. What we planned is imposible. Not because Pappa says he will cut me off and said to tell you so, without a dime. I know he would and never regret it, because he said so and when Pappa says a thing he will not change it even if he wants to. It is for another reason, I can not write. I will tell you tonight seven thirty.
Always Your Amanda.
He reread it without pause: Always Your Amanda, Dear Harley: not because there was any doubt about its meaning, but because he wanted to delay having to think about it, to delay the realization of defeat. Sitting there with the letter once more folded on his knee, he could have recited it from memory—crowded syntax, misspellings, and all; the hurried, open-looped calligraphy was microfilmed on his brain. The elopement was off. Amanda had said there was another reason, but Drew did not require another reason. Nine one-syllable words of the message had given him all the reason he needed: He will cut me off. He will not change. That was enough.
For another hour he sat in the lobby, the letter placed in his inside coat pocket along with the useless railroad tickets, deciding whether to meet her or not. His first inclination was to go away now, to end it without a final scene of parting; he disliked sentimentality, even when there was something to be gained by it. But pride would not let him leave like that. The fact that it was Amanda who was ending it gave him a chance to be remembered with compassion, and he preferred to have her think of him so. Besides—and this had the most weight in his calculations—there might be some way to keep the opportunity at hand. That was when it occurred to him, quite suddenly, that Major Barcroft could not live forever.
As soon as he thought of this he wondered that it had not occurred to him sooner. He said to himself, Youve been too intense about this thing. But he was wrong. His trouble was he had taken it too easy. Everything had run as smooth as silk, up to the interview with the major. Then he had panicked; he had snatched at straws; he had taken the first advice that was offered him, even from what he called ‘the crazy sister,’ and merely because that had failed he had despaired. Just settle down, he told himself, like an athlete when the score begins to favor his opponent; Youve been too intense about this thing.
Though it was not really true, it was true in a sense. So much depended on the outcome, and he had thought intensely of the outcome. Drew slumped in the chair, his hands in his pockets, his knees raised almost level with his head. Night had fallen. Beyond the plate glass window, street lamps burned in ordered rows down both curbs of the avenue, the posts like iron trees growing out of concrete, each with a pool of gold about its trunk, and bearing incandescent globes for fruit. He had come far, so far that looking back was like peering down from a height after a climb: all the way from the steelmill years in Youngstown, his father crying “Hi! Hi!” stamping red-heeled boots and squeezing a concertina; the shoe store where he had crouched at the feet of women customers and politely turned his head when they spread their knees; the Army during the war, the nights of screaming metal and concussion, the days of blood, and then the period of occupation when he had formed his tastes and his desires; the three-year ‘look round,’ including the skimped meals, the luxurious envy; the long days of work at the head office of the cotton trust, studying books and statistics; the season in Texas, glad-handing—and now this. Was it all for nothing? He was asking. Did it all add up to failure when the first real opportunity came his way? He cursed the major. Then suddenly he stopped. It was not much different from the Army, really. There it had been the bullets, and the bullets had stopped; the firing had died to a mutter, then had swelled to crescendo, and had ceased. As for the major—why, the major would die as well. It was merely a question of waiting, now as then, and waiting had been his specialty for years. Meanwhile who could say what might crop up?
On his way out he stopped at the desk and wrote a telegram, addressing it to the head office in St Louis: FLU CURED STOP WILL BE LEAVING TOMORROW FOR VICKSBURG. When he passed through the swinging doors, the clock on the wall marked seven-thirty.
This time it was Amanda who was waiting. She stepped out of the shadows and took his arm, and as they walked down Lamar Street the overhead branches, stark and black against the moon, groaned and clacked in the wind. The dead scurrying leaves of goblin-time, dry now after the rain of the night before, made tiny scraping sounds, like whispers, against the sidewalk. For a while she was quiet, leaning lightly on Drew’s arm, but when they had walked a short distance she began to tell him what she had promised in the letter. She said she could not leave Florence. “I dont know how I ever thought I could. Or yes I do: I know. I thought at first we’d be here, you and I—thats what it was. Then later, when I knew we couldnt, I wanted to be with you so much that nothing else made any difference. Thats why. But I know now I was wrong. Florence needs me more than anyone needs anything. We have to wait.”
“Wait?” Drew thought he understood, but he wanted to be sure. He wanted to make her say it. “Wait for what?”
“Her heart,” Amanda said; she hesitated; “her heart is bad. I know; Ive heard it.”
Drew looked at her. “How bad?”
“I dont know. Bad. She’s going to die.”
That was what he had been waiting for, what he had been edging her toward. And now he said what was in his mind: “Or he is.”
“Who is?”
“Your …”
“Papa?” she said, incredulous. It was clear that no such thought had ever occurred to her. She thought her father impervious, immortal. “Papa’s not going to die.”
Drew was silent then, walking with both hands deep in his pockets and thinking of death—thinking of the two of them waiting for it: she waiting for her sister’s death, he waiting for her father’s: a sort of monstrous horserace, in reverse. We’re a fine pair, he thought, and he smiled as he thought it. If Florence died first he simply would not come when Amanda called. But if it turned out that the major was the first to die, he would be there before they got him under ground. It was a race, a gamble—yet not really a gamble, either, for Drew had nothing to lose, no matter who won; but he had a great deal to gain if it worked out his way.
Then he felt a tug at his arm. They were into the second block by now, midway between street lights, and the shadows were deepest here. He stopped and turned and, looking down, saw her face lifted toward him, pale in the moonlight, lips bloodless and drawn, eyes glistening faintly in their sockets. “Oh Harley,” she said; it was almost a whimper. He kissed her, nuzzling, murmuring wordlessly, and stroked her backside with one hand. This startled her at first; she hid her face against the tweed at his shoulder. “Ah Harley,” she said, and he continued to stroke her, as if gentling a high-strung pony. Soon they turned and came back, and he kissed her again in parting at the steps.
“I’ll wait as long as I must,” he said. “There will never be anyone else for me, Amanda.”
He meant it; he meant it then. And when he got back to the hotel he stopped at the desk. The nightclerk was on.
“I left a wire. Has it been sent?”
“A moment, Mr Drew.” The clerk turned to the switchboard and began to thumb through some papers; as night man he was also switchboard operator. Drew knew that the search was a pretense, for the nightclerk read the day’s accumulation of messages, including even postcards, as soon as he came on duty. “Here we are,” the clerk said. He turned, holding the yellow sheet: FLU CURED STOP. “Itll go out first thing in the morning.”
“Give me.” Drew took it. “Good night.”
“Yes sir,” the nightclerk said, watching from under the neat fringe of his eyebrows.
Upstairs in his room Drew tore the message across and across, then across and across, again and again, as small as he could tear, and dropped the pieces into the basket beside the desk. Fluttering like yellow snow, some of them fell on the carpet. He took up the phone.
“Yes sir?”
“415. Send the bellboy.”
“Right away.”
“Thats her,” the bellboy said.
Drew closed the door. Ice in the pitcher clanked the length of the hall, diminishing. The elevator whined, rattled open, rattled shut; it whined. Then there was silence. It seemed long, for anticipation heightened his perception. The elevator whined again and stopped and rattled open. Footsteps approached. They came abreast, and then went past; a key chattered in a lock at the end of the hall. There was silence again. Drew sat a while longer, not moving. Then suddenly he rose and went to the desk, where he knelt on the carpet and began to gather the scraps of yellow paper, placing them one at a time into the cupped palm of one hand. He dropped them into the wastebasket, then rose, dusted his knees, and returned to his seat on the bed. He lit a cigarette and smoked it fast, sharpening the ash like a pencil point from time to time on the rim of a saucer that sat on the bedside table.
He began to think of Amanda. Why think of that? he said to himself, and went on thinking of her. Should I have taken it further? he thought; Should I have—then grew conscious of the scratching at the door. He had been so absorbed in thinking of Amanda, he had not heard the elevator or the footsteps in the hall. He rose and swung the door ajar. “About time,” he said. She was dressed the same as four nights ago.
