Love in a Dry Season

by Shelby Foote

  Waiting, Drew became more and more restless, standing with his hands thrust deep in his overcoat pockets and shifting his weight from foot to foot. His breath, which came faster as his impatience grew, made little rapidly vanishing clouds of steam. It seemed to him he had never been so cold, not even up in Canada on the goose hunt that had ended the golden look-round. She might at least have some consideration, he thought with resentment. Just then a tall, narrow rectangle of light flicked on and off; the door had been partly opened and then closed, and he could hear her crossing the veranda. Despite the cold he removed his hat (a lightweight felt too summery for the season, but the other was down at Briartree) and stood holding it in both hands, like a basin. “Evening, Amanda,” he said. There was no moon, nor even stars; the night was black. She paused and then came on.

  “Good evening, Harley.”

  6. A Renouncement

  They walked and it was as always; he was attentive, cupping her elbow in his palm when they stepped down or up the curbs, and handsome—he really got more handsome all the time. If tonight he seemed a bit distracted, why that was all right; she understood that men had business worries from time to time. She had taken to reading the agony column in Florence’s paper and there the advice was always the same. Be understanding but not prying; a husband or suitor had a right to occasional moods after a hard day at the office; that was when you showed your mettle as a sweetheart or a wife, and dont think this would go unappreciated when the fair weather days returned. Then too Drew must be thinking that with another girl (—and he of course could have his choice) he would be sitting in a nice warm parlor or at least at the picture show, not out in the weather like this. The truth was, theirs was so exclusively an out-of-doors courtship, she never saw him without his hat either on his head or in his hands. It was up to her to make up for all this with ‘understanding.’ She understood that. But it was strange.

  “Youve been well, Amanda?”

  “Oh yes.” The pause that followed seemed longer than it was. “And you?”

  “Oh yes.”

  They walked and his air of distraction was heavy upon him. Not knowing what to say, she said nothing. At last, however, midway down the second block, he appeared to shrug it off, to pluck up heart, and began to tell of his experiences during the past month at the bank. It was a strange world, mostly humorous by his account. People said and did such funny things in their anxiety for money, and others were so incompetent, so much beyond their depth in the world of finance—like the lady who signed all the checks in case she lost them: he had told her that story twice, saying both times that it happened ‘yesterday.’ But that was all right; she understood; his life was so dull otherwise, he had to double his jokes. She had her home and family, her sister to feel close to, but he had no one, nothing but his work and these few secret meetings, always with the danger of being discovered.

  During all their years of waiting, these walks were what sustained her, and though they had become more and more widely spaced because of the dictates of prudence—first once a week, then every other week, and finally once a month—Drew was no less attentive, no less affectionate, and he always said he was waiting. That was enough. It was not only enough: it seemed to Amanda that he was the one who had the harder time, carrying the anguish of his love through the outside world, among strangers with prying eyes. She had learned that particular form of torment during the first year of their secret engagement. Wherever she went there were the turning heads, the following glances, and the hand-cupped whispers. They had begun to gossip before Drew was in town a week: “Amanda Barcroft’s got herself a beau. She slips out to meet him. Yes. They walk together every night, by the dark of the moon.” Sometimes she heard them call her poor Amanda and she knew they made conjectures and said they were sorry for her, for most of their talk was based on their dislike for Major Barcroft, his ruthlessly honest business methods and what they called his high-and-mighty ways. However, she heard very little of it. Her marketing trips and her weekly attendance at church were the only times she was actually thrown with the watchers: during the five oclock walks from Cotton Row she and her father were apart from them, she in her identical gray dresses with the pale swatches of lace at her wrists and throat. There was hardly any change in her beyond a certain fixity of expression which the watchers were hard put to identify as either hope or despair. She kept her head up, her eyes to the front, her shoulders drawn well back, and watching her they were reminded that she was her father’s daughter. It was as if she were defying them, flaunting what they called her scandal in their faces. Her own face at these times was blank, like an empty page inviting them to read into it whatever they chose, and they were quick to do so; there were almost as many versions of the affair as there were tellers. When it became known around town that the courtship had been thwarted, there was a good deal of talk about that too. But presently they grew weary of it—it was too vague, too long-drawn-out; it palled, much as a popular song will pall with too much playing. She became merely an attraction for strangers being shown the secret, somewhat seamy side of Bristol: “Look yonder. Thats Amanda Barcroft. A young man tried to marry her, but her papa interfered: old Major Barcroft. Now theyre waiting. Maybe youve met him—Harley Drew. He works in a bank.”

  She had had all that to face, to live with. Also there was her father. But Major Barcroft showed no change at all, neither to the searching eyes of the townsmen nor to Amanda herself. He certainly never spoke of Harley Drew, though it was known that soon after the newcomer went to work at the Planters Bank the major withdrew his account and did no more business there—doubtless on the theory that anyone who would attempt to steal a man’s daughter from under his nose would not be likely to hesitate before stealing his money too. Amanda knew nothing of this transaction, but sometimes at the dinner table she would glance up from her plate to find her father looking at her with a coldly speculative expression, and she knew that he was wondering, though he was too proud to question her or mention the suitor’s name.

  Tonight in parting Drew kissed her at the steps, and that made twice. Usually there were three: once halfway out, once halfway back, and once goodnight at the steps: but tonight he had been so preoccupied with whatever worry was on his mind, he had neglected the first. He made up for it, however. For when he kissed her that second time he whispered with his jaw pressed to her cheekbone and his mouth beside her ear, “These are the hardest years: I know. But never mind. Our time is coming, and we’ll make up for them. Just you wait; youll see.” With that he turned and left her and Amanda crossed the veranda completely happy, to await the passing of another of those months which, accumulating thus, had amounted to years: ‘the hardest years’ he called them, though in truth to her they were anything but hard, for she had Drew—if only once a month—and she had the future, and she could imagine what life would be without either.

  She had Florence, too—her Albatross, her Old Man of the Sea: though of course she never thought of her as either. Even though she knew that Florence’s death was the one event that would make the future Drew painted become the present, she never allowed herself to hope for it, not even in her secret heart. Tonight, returning from her walk with Drew, she shut the outer door and turned at once to the door on the right, entering the room where Florence waited, eager and anticipant as she always was on these first-Thursdays, hands clasped under her chin.

  “How is he?” she cried before her sister had time to close the door. Amanda turned with one forefinger on her lips, the other pointed toward the back of the house where Major Barcroft was reading in his study. Florence put her hands over her mouth and drew up her shoulders. “I forgot; I really did. How is he?”

  “He’s fine,” Amanda said. “It was just like always.”

  “Oh Amanda, I’m so happy for you. He does love you, dont he.” This was not a question; it was a congratulatory whisper, and Amanda smiled and nodded, removing her coat. Florence looked forward to these first-Thursday nights as much as Ama
nda did, for having seen Drew that one time in the hall, she felt that she was engaged in a love affair too, if only by proxy.

  Her feet, in shapeless green felt carpet slippers, were propped on the pull-out, and her legs—in contrast to the rest of her body, which had thickened on inactivity—had grown so thin that the lisle stockings hung on them in wrinkled folds. Except for these Thursday evenings, she had retired into herself more than ever. She kept to her sewing and her newspaper, her monthly solace of medicine and religion; the last time she had looked out of her door was when she asked the young man to take Amanda away. Her greatest excitement of the past nine years had been the career of Dillinger, which she followed in her tabloid. He was for her a bright particular star, from the first photo of him handcuffed between two deputies and grinning at the camera, just before he made his wooden-pistol break. Florence had shared all his exploits, cheering him on. But alas, that too had reached an end (on a midsummer day in a theater lobby, betrayed by a woman in red and shot down by what amounted to practically a whole brigade of G-men; “Oh the cowards!” she cried when she read it) and all that was left was a picture of him stretched out dead on a slab in the morgue with a police tag wired to his toe. She had clipped the picture and now she kept it folded in her Bible along with the others, Bonnie Parker, Machine Gun Kelly, and Pretty Boy Floyd—the Billy the Kids and Johnny Ringos of our time.

  Her greatest adventure was still in front of her, though. Perhaps she knew it; for from time to time, and more frequently of late, Amanda would see her pause in her work with a sudden, startled expression. Her hand would rise to her breast, lingering there with a slight pressure; she would remain motionless, her head bent in profound and breathless auscultation. Then it would pass and she would return to her needlework or her tabloid. And when Amanda would question her, “What is it, Florence?” she would not explain; she would shake her head:

  “Oh Amanda—it’s the strangest thing.”

  That was the way the years passed in the big gray house on Lamar Street, the three of them circumscribed within a narrowing circle of pride and fear and guarded hope, breathing the close atmosphere of death—a family group, father and daughters, set in an oval frame, reflected in the huge fuliginous pupil of the enormous Bristol eye—until a night in late September, eight months after the one when Drew was kept waiting out in the cold in a summery hat. Florence sat in her chair. Under the yellow, down-funneled glare of her reading lamp the newspaper headlines stood out harsh and bold, shouting the imminence of war along with the reassurances of the diplomats. “I declare,” she said, petulant because Munich had disturbed her accustomed reading: “I declare this old Hitler meeting is crowding all the news out of the paper.”

  On the back page, however, she found an interesting item. When she had read it she cried happily, “Oh Amanda, Amanda, here’s the most dreadful thing! It happened in Los Angeles; everything seems to happen in Los Angeles. An old man killed a little boy in a rooming house. Then he tried to smuggle the body out in a rolled-up carpet. Imagine. He was walking along the street with it over his shoulder—like this—when somebody bumped him and the carpet slipped off and the little boy’s body came rolling out, right there in the busy part of town.” She paused, glancing down at the paper in her lap. “He’s pleading insanity, it says.”

  Amanda left her at ten oclock and went upstairs to bed. There were no screams in the night, no cries for protection from the terrible dream-shapes; next morning when she came down she found her sister sitting bolt upright in the Morris chair, her hands folded on the newspaper in her lap and her feet on the cushioned pull-out. In the early morning light the carpet slippers were a bronzy green, like that which gilds the heads of flies in summer. At first Amanda moved cautiously to keep from waking her, but as she backed through the doorway she saw that one of Florence’s eyes was open in the steady glare of a sunbeam lanced through a chink in the window blinds. And as she stood there, one hand on the door knob, looking at her sister’s face—the jaundiced skin and the deep sooty sockets of the eyes, the arched nose with its dark nostrils lined as if with fur—she thought almost immediately of Harley Drew, wondering whether she should notify him now, by telephone, or wait until after the funeral.

  That afternoon the undertaker brought Florence back in a gray steel casket lined with satin—like Malcolm’s, only larger—and set her in the parlor where her brother had lain when she and her sister were girls, which she had called her bedroom though it had no bed, and which still smelled of her fumigations though the newspaper calking had been removed from the doors and windows and the room itself had been swept and dusted and aired since early morning when Mr Barnes came and took her away. He had crossed her hands on her breast and combed her hair so that the spiked ends lay against her throat, giving her a softer, more girlish look, far under her actual years. Wearing Amanda’s Sunday dress, with touches of rouge at her cheekbones and a hesitant smile that he had stitched in skilfully, she denied by her appearance the lies Bristol had told about her raving behind bars in an attic room.

  They were there to witness the denial. They came by avid twos and threes, elbowing each other a bit as they craned about the coffin. “She looks so natural,” they said. “My. Youd think she was sleeping, wouldnt you? Wouldnt you?” They were all women. Bearing plates of warm food—a custom held over from the days when no cooking was done in a house where a corpse was on display—they would stand in the high dim hall, examining the furnishings and the cutglass chandelier with the feverish eyes of archeologists breaking into an Egyptian tomb, until Amanda came and received the food and invited them in to view the body. There was a steady procession of them, first a trickle, then a stream, beginning a little after five oclock and continuing into the night. Since the women arriving always outnumbered those departing (some did not leave at all), by dark there was quite a group of them in the parlor. They spoke in low tones out of respect for the dead, their heads leaned toward each other, at once compassionate and prying, officious and perverse, while their husbands returned to supperless homes. Here human cruelty was displayed at its worst, youd say, until you considered the reverse of the medal and saw the possibility of a worse cruelty still: an absence of concern, that is, or even curiosity.

  Amanda was kept busy, moving between the front hall where she met the callers and relieved them of their plates—like tickets of admission—and the kitchen where she set the plates in increasing numbers on tables, on the stove, and finally on the drainboard of the sink. In the parlor the visitors were waiting for Major Barcroft to make an appearance, but he disappointed them; he kept to his study. It was a long time—after eight, and the women were still arriving—before Amanda could step out on the veranda and look for Drew beside the oaks. He was not there; she would have seen him if he had been, for moonlight flooded everything. She went back into the house, telling herself that he had waited and then had left in the belief that she would stay indoors tonight.

  He was not there the next night either, though she could not have missed him; she came home from the funeral and sat with the major until a quarter to seven, when she took her station beside the oaks. At eight, when he still had not arrived, she came back in and sat again with her father. He was watching her with the coldly speculative expression so intensified that she could almost hear him thinking the words: ‘What will she do? What will she do now, without Florence to hold her?’ However, this did not give her much concern; she thought mainly of Florence, out there under her raw mound, and of Harley Drew—wondering over and over again why he had failed to come for her now that she was free.

  “Good night, papa,” she said at last. The major looked up from his book.

  “Amanda,” he said. The pince-nez flashed once, like a heliograph, and he returned to his reading.

  Then, as she was undressing for bed—after a last peep through the window at the oaks standing their lonely vigil in front of the house—she believed she knew why Drew had not come, and it was so simple, so obvious, that she coul
d not understand why it had not occurred to her before; it was just another instance of his delicacy, his consideration for her. He was giving her a grieving time. She fell asleep at last, believing that.

  But the third night, when he still did not appear, it was too much; it was more than she could bear. She lay in bed, moonlight shrouding the room with cloth-of-gold, and though she was weary to the verge of nervous exhaustion, she could not sleep. Each time she was about to drop off she was brought wide awake by the sound of his voice calling her from in front of the house: ‘Amanda! Amanda!’ Twice she got out of bed and went to see, but there was nothing, only the oaks shining in the moonlight. She wanted him now. So next morning she wrote a letter telling him so, and mailed it that afternoon on the way to meet her father on Cotton Row.

  Dear Harley—

  I know why you have not come and I suppose you are right, you know best. But I don’t care what people say, I don’t need a greiving time. Come now, I am waiting—seven tonight [deleted] tomorrow night, Tuesday in front of the house. I will go with you anywhere, either here in town or any where.

  Amanda

  It was on his desk next morning at ten after nine when he entered the bank; Rufus always picked up the mail on his way to work and sorted and distributed it as soon as he had swept and dusted. Drew stood beside the desk with his hat still in his hands, looking down at the stack of mail centered neatly on the blotter. Though Amanda’s letter was not on top, he recognized it almost immediately. This was partly because of the old square envelope, duplicate of the one handed him nine years ago in the hotel lobby, canceling the elopement; he even anticipated the heavy, expensive feel of the paper, the way the flap would spring unglued at a touch. Mainly, however, he recognized it because he had been expecting it for four days now—ever since the Friday when he opened the afternoon paper, reading above the fold of Chamberlain’s report on the Munich conference (“Peace with honor … in our time”) and then glanced down at a small one-column headline buried at the lower right: MISS BARCROFT/DIES IN SLEEP. Florence Barcroft, daughter of Major Malcolm Barcroft, 214 South Lamar Street, died in her sleep of a heart failure some time last night. Miss Barcroft, who was forty-one and a life long resident of Bristol, had been confined … But he did not go on with whatever facts the reporter had been able to gather. She was dead: that one fact was enough. He put the paper down and turned his head, bemused. Major Barcroft had won the monstrous horserace.