Love in a Dry Season

by Shelby Foote

  “Fine,” Drew said. For the first time he smiled. He knew that Rufus knew he had nothing to fear from him, yet it was pleasant to find friendliness in the midst of constraint, wherever. Besides, he was not worrying; he knew it would come out all right. He had been through this before, when he entered the head office in St Louis.

  That night he waited outside the Barcroft house from a little after seven till almost eight, long enough to smoke four cigarettes, with even some interval between them; but Amanda did not come. She’s grieving, he thought. She hasnt got over hearing that ten oclock train last night and thinking I was on it. He ground out the fourth cigarette, and turning up his coat collar—for it was really cold now, down around forty; December had come with a vengeance—walked back to the hotel. Maybe she just comes out in mild weather, he thought: “Like the primroses,” he said aloud.

  But the next night he was there again, and he had no more than lighted the first cigarette when the door opened and someone came out. The moon had not risen. Drew cupped the cigarette and stayed behind the tree, thinking it might be Major Barcroft. Then whoever it was came down the steps and he could see, not well but almost; he was almost sure. So he stepped out—he took a chance. “Amanda?” he said.

  She turned and it was not surprise; she did not gasp or cry his name; she did none of the things he had expected, but merely stood and watched him take her arm. It was as if she had lost all capacity for surprise, being involved already in events so far outside her experience or hope: as if, after the initial shock of finding herself loved—or, at any rate, loving—all other surprises were bound to be anticlimax. Drew took her arm and they walked, and it was as if they had not missed a meeting the night before; it was even as if their meeting two nights ago had not been one of parting; the lonesome wail of the whistle two hours later might have been something heard in a dream, a sort of languid nightmare whose horror consisted of just that languidness, and now was false.

  “I couldnt go,” he said. “I couldnt leave you.”

  They walked, and at first his voice was only a murmur as he told her how he had missed her, how he had tried to steel himself to catch the train, and then how he had lain in bed and heard the whistle. Such a lonesome sound, he said, and he had lain there, alone and lonesome, hearing it.

  “I heard it too,” she said.

  “And thought I was on it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I meant to be; I really did. But I couldnt.”

  He was settled in Bristol for good, he said, to be near her. And then his voice stopped being a murmur: he spoke carefully, giving instructions. “We must not see each other often. I stayed here to be near you; I didnt stay to make life miserable for you. I know how he feels about me, Amanda, and in a way I dont blame him—on such short acquaintance. If you were my daughter I guess I’d feel the same.” They walked and he appeared to think. He said, “We’ll be together in the end, whatever. We know that, dont we? Dont we?” He squeezed her arm.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And as long as we know it, nothing else can matter. Not really, I mean. Can it?” He squeezed her arm.

  “No,” she said.

  “The thing is, I’ll always be here if you need me. All you need do is call and I’ll be with you, Amanda. Otherwise it’s better not to give him grounds for anger. The main thing is, we know we’ll be together in the end.” He kept saying that, returning to it like the refrain in a ballad, like Theme A of some rondo he was humming in her ears.

  They parted at the foot of the steps, but tonight he did not return to the hotel. He had moved that morning, into the Pentecost house out on Marshall Extended. Tilden had recommended him; Mrs Pentecost, whom Tilden called Aunt, was a second cousin, niece of the grandfather founder’s. The house was in the best residential section; Drew had two rooms and bath on the ground floor, with a private entrance under the porte-cochere. Mrs Pentecost was highborn—what was called highborn; she was old Judge Hellman’s only child. But she had married beneath her station, as she frequently reminded her husband after marriage began to pale, and he had turned to whiskey in his early middle-age. He was dead now. His death had managed to be at once scandalous and tragic, for he died one night ten years ago in a cell at the city jail. The police had put him there for his own good, intending to take him home later, as they had done so many times before, always being careful to get him into the house before dawn so the neighbors would not see. They had thought the apoplexy was drunkenness—he had had DTs before, right there in the same cell—so that by the time they saw it was serious he was dead. Public sentiment was with the widow in the suit that followed. Though they knew that they would have to pay the judgment in taxes (and though they knew too, in varying degrees, depending on their various perceptions, that it was she and not the police who had killed her husband) almost none of them begrudged her the fifteen thousand dollars the jury awarded. And yet to look at her youd never know it, never imagine the nights she had waited for the husband she herself had driven to drink because of her inveterate pretension and because marriage had not measured up to the dreams her people had taught her in her youth: ‘Poor Edward’ she called him now, demure and put-upon and so soft-spoken you had to lean close to distinguish what she said. Drew heard her story soon after moving in, yet he was not surprised. By then he had heard many such stories; Bristol was full of such people. Maybe every town was, he thought, but in Bristol everyone knew about everyone else—as if God, an enormous Eye in the sky, were telling secrets.

  He had said at the outset that he had fallen in love with “this sleepy little Southern town”; he had said so twice before he so much as knew its population, first to Tilden and then, since it seemed to make such an impression, to Leo Anson in the letter to St Louis. It was not true, either when he said it or when he wrote it. The truth was he had hardly noticed. Besides, the statement needed some translating: for when he said ‘Bristol’ he meant Amanda, and when he said ‘love’ he meant something else as well. Yet now he did—notice, at any rate. He was plumped into the middle of it; all he needed to do was look around.

  Soon he knew Bristol’s history, from back in the days when it had been a nameless river landing where steamboats took on cotton and firewood without staying long enough to affect the pressure in their boilers. In time, however, though it still was scorned by the floating palaces, the landing became a stopping-off place for flatboat men; they had slept and worked off their excesses by then (Memphis was a hundred and fifty miles up-river) and by the time they reached Bristol they were primed for another bender—“carrying a load of steam,” they said, that would not wait for Vicksburg, another hundred miles downriver. So the landing became a settlement, though its ‘stores’ were mostly grog shops. Then it grew and was a town. The war in the Sixties provided a sort of pause, a breathing space. Gradually during the era that followed and rapidly during the postReconstruction building boom, which was in full swing in the Eighties, after the fever deaths of ’78, the town thickened within its boundaries. But the Barcroft house was the last big private residence to be built within the old limits, for then the town began expanding eastward, beyond the silver sweep of the railroad tracks, where old Mrs Sturgis, ‘the Mother of Bristol,’ was subdividing her father’s plantation. Soon townspeople were pointing out more or less far-flung areas for visitors and telling them, “This used to be country, out here. That was a brier patch where we hunted rabbits; I used to sit under that big elm and wait for doves to come in of an evening. See how Bristol has grown.” Then one morning they woke to find the Chamber of Commerce calling it a city: ‘The Queen City of the Delta.’ Two years after Drew got there, the census showed a population of more than fifteen thousand.

  Two weeks after entering the bank he joined the Kiwanis Club. This was at Tilden’s suggestion—for business reasons. “Later we’ll move you up,” he said. “Youll come into the Rotary with me.” So every Tuesday at high noon Drew made one among the Kiwanians, singing group songs and serving on committees. T
hey took him in; they gave him a sense of belonging. Sometimes he almost liked it. Then he would pause; he would look at the others down the length of the table, with their ready-made suits, their not-quite-country haircuts, bending forward over the melting remnants of ice cream as they listened to some speaker who told them of business trends, and Drew would remember the New York years and the years among the rich. At such moments time seemed to stand still; all down the table they would be frozen in motion. And he would ask himself, Is this me? Is this really me? What have I to do with these people?—knowing well enough what he had come to and what compromises he had made. But that was bad for him: it made him unhappy, made him even regret. So he tried to think only of the future, when he might well be proud of all he had endured, just as he already had begun to be proud, in retrospect, of the skimped lunches and long walks of the New York phase. Yet sometimes he could not help himself; the past would rise up into the present, and all down the long table his fellow Kiwanians in their store-bought suits and Mississippi haircuts would be frozen in motion. He would find himself thinking, Is this me? Is this really me?

  By the time he left the teller’s cage to move back to the general bookkeeping department—where he familiarized himself with what Tilden had called ‘the big picture’ (and found that it was not so big after all. The mystery of banking lay in incidentals that could be grasped within a month; the essentials were as simple as a child’s game. If a measure of awe still attended each transaction, that was merely because of the fact that money changed hands)—he was also a member of the Elks, a big three-story stucco building on Marshall Avenue, four blocks from the levee. Like Dante’s Hereafter it was in three parts, one part to a story. The top floor was a ballroom; the second contained reading and billiard rooms; the bottom floor was honeycombed with card rooms—Paradiso, Purgatorio, and Inferno. In this last, men sat at white-clothed tables under cones of diamond-blue light. Hugging cards to their chests and hunching their shoulders, their faces expressionless, they resembled corpses propped in their chairs. Cigars and cigarettes raised steely plumes, forgotten, and the only sounds were the whispering slither of cards being dealt, the clicking of chips when they ante’d or bet, and the dispassionate, monosyllabic language of poker: “Raise. Call. See you. Pass. I’m out.”

  Here in this sterile, clicking hades, Drew learned something else about the people he had moved among. Just as his contempt was reaching its highest, based on seeing them in the congenial, somehow false, Kiwanis atmosphere, he discovered that they were the best poker players in the world. They took him quick, who had cleaned out a whole boatload of officers intent on getting nest-eggs at a time when poker was the one interest, the one occupation, even, of the westbound AEF. So he gave it up; he moved on to the hearts game always in progress in one of the corner cells of the honeycomb. He found a new respect for his new associates. From now on, even at the Tuesday noontime gatherings, he was not so quick to look at them askance.

  Then it was October, nearing the anniversary of his arrival. The days were getting shorter. And suddenly the bottom fell out of the market. Everyone knew it was serious, everyone said so; but no one really believed it. They saw it merely as a culmination of the long Republican rule, and they told themselves they had expected it. Now that the big-time money men had learned a lesson, the market would stiffen and climb again on a firmer basis. So they said, incurably optimistic. Yet there was a scrap of doggerel they were repeating, grinning while they recited:

  Hoover blew the whistle.

  Mellon rang the bell.

  Wall Street gave the signal

  And the country went to hell.

  In the middle of all this, Tilden advised Drew that it was time for him to join the country club. “It’s your next move,” he said. He spoke in a conspirator’s undertone, adopting the manner he reserved for these discussions with Drew about his progress at the bank. Sometimes he actually spoke behind his hand, like a boy engaged in a game of Cops and Robbers.

  “I cant afford to,” Drew said.

  “You cant afford not to,” Tilden told him. They were in the restaurant; they came here once a week for what Tilden called a Progress conference. Soon now Drew would be leaving the bookkeeping department. He had done well there, as well as in the teller’s cage; even Mr Cilley had grown fond of him. Now that he was about to move up again, Tilden told him, he would have to assume various—a—social obligations that went with having a desk out front and talking with customers on a more or less equal basis. Membership in the country club would be a good beginning.

  Drew’s objection that he could not afford it was based on an exaggerated respect for the clubs he had visited over the country during the three-year ‘look round’; anything so desirable was sure to be expensive, so much so that he had never been able to bring himself to the point of asking the cost. When Tilden explained the requirements for membership—possession of a two-hundred-dollar share of stock (which he would sign over to Drew, and which Drew would sign back over to him as soon as he was a member) and agreement to pay monthly dues of five dollars and fifty cents—Drew at first was amazed and then delighted. Then a reaction set in: he was somewhat disappointed too, as a result of finding that one of his great desires was cheap after all.

  While Tilden talked, continuing to explain, Drew noticed a new hand-lettered sign behind the counter.

  COFFEE 5¢

  NO WARM UPS

  If the bankers and brokers, the money men North and South, believed this market collapse was something ‘temporary’—“A readjustment. Now watch it go up again”—the restaurant owner at any rate thought otherwise; he was retrenching, digging in for a siege. A year from now it would be: Coffee 5¢. Free warm ups. Tell your friends. Tilden had paused and was looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to reply. Drew started. “I’ll be glad to join,” he said.

  “I’ll arrange it this week then,” Tilden told him.

  As a member of the club he took up golf. Soon he became quite good at it, being seeded number three on the Bristol team within a year of the day he played his first nine holes. There was nothing really unusual about this, not from his point of view. He simply would never have taken it up in the first place if he had not intended being serious. He approached golf with the same intentness he brought to everything, including the courtship of Amanda Barcroft. No diversion remained merely a diversion in his hands, and thus he never really had one. Which was all right too; he never would have been happy otherwise, knowing he could not afford it—not because of the cost in money, but because of the cost in time. He had come a long way, still with far to go, and Time’s chariot always rumbled at his back.

  He also attended the Saturday night dances, the get-togethers held nominally in the ballroom though actually they spread wider, onto nearby greens and tees and into the back seats of automobiles parked hub to hub along the gravel driveway, where husbands huddled with other husbands’ wives, relaxing from a six-day stretch at the office. Up East the jazz age was over. Down here it had started late and it lasted longer, into the early Thirties. Middle-aged men, with rumpled shirt-fronts and hair broken over their foreheads and eyes, still borrowed the orchestra leader’s baton, and women in last year’s knee-length dresses still did the shimmy.

  Drew moved among them, affable, urbane, drinking his share of the bootleg corn which he soon learned not to gag on. They knew of his courtship and surmised what it was based on; they knew that the major had routed him and they suspected why he had taken up residence here. It gave him a certain romantic air which the women found attractive. They wanted to comfort him. But he did not stroll with them on the links or sit with them in cars; he kept strictly to the ballroom, careful to dance at least twice each night with the wives of the bank’s best clients. That was where he first saw the rich young blind man, Jeff Carruthers. That was where he first saw Amy, the blind man’s wife.

  5. Another Courtship

  However, it was almost six years before he knew them by more than name. Thi
s was not so much because they were ‘exclusive’ (though they were—as much, at least, as anyone in the Delta ever could be) as it was that they were gone: first to Carolina for Jeff’s father’s funeral in the spring of 1930, soon after Drew joined the country club, and then to Europe. Josh Carruthers died at the breakfast table; he was sitting bolt upright, his jowls oozing over the sharp edge of his collar; “Pass the sugar,” he was saying, angry at having to ask for it, when suddenly, like a jointed doll whose spinal string has snapped, he slumped forward, upsetting his coffee, cup and all, into his wife’s lap. It was as if he had thrown it and at first she thought he had, for he had been subject to such fits of temper since his prostatectomy three years before; her presence was an affront, an unanswerable challenge. But just as she was about to run, she saw his hand jerk toward the pocket where he kept the little nitroglycerin capsules and he was dead before she reached the telephone.

  Jeff and Amy got there in time for Amy to take one look at him before the casket lid was closed. She remembered her uncle as being above the average size, seeing him in her mind as he had seemed to her in childhood, replacing her father. But now he looked cramped and small in the satin-lined box, as if in death he had gathered into himself; the aura was gone and the cockatoo crest had wilted and thinned, not white but a dirty yellow. The undertaker, patting rouge on the strangely pointed cheekbones and arranging the mouth in a frown—he felt that a frown was more dignified than a smile: he always buried his moneyed clients frowning—had transformed what was left into a caricature of what had moved and breathed and worn the aura.

  “Whats he like?” Jeff said beside her, one hand on the rim of the box, crowding close as if for a better look.