Love in a Dry Season

by Shelby Foote

  This despair was immediate, unrelieved; this was what came before her mind, receiving the message ‘I cant bear this,’ went to work inventing reasons, extenuations. She told herself it was only a quarrel, provoked by something she said; perhaps he hadnt been able to face the prospect of her cooking. (That was guilt: she had said that Nora had complimented her on her progress, and though it was true it was only relatively true, for she was a very bad cook and always would be.) So she thought of writing another letter: It’s true, Harley, I cant cook. Come back; we’ll hire a cook, we’ll save the money some other way. Come back. She did not write it, however. Next morning, rising from a daze that only resembled sleep between fits and starts, she realized that tomorrow would be Thursday, the first in October, and she grasped at that. The present difficulty was only a quarrel, a lovers’ quarrel; he would be waiting for her at seven oclock, as he had been waiting so many first-Thursdays before. Not that she really believed it: she knew well enough that Drew was gone for good. This was her mind at work. Having received the message ‘I cant bear this,’ it was trying to blunt the sharp immediacy of despair.

  That day passed, and then the next; it was Thursday, seven oclock. But she did not wait in front of the house. She stood at her bedroom window, holding the curtain aside, and watched and waited. The moon through the oaks, brighter through the dying one, was barely on the wane, flooding lawn and sidewalk with a light almost as rich, as brilliant as two nights ago. She did not try to put all doubt from her mind. Rather, she nurtured it; “He wont come,” she said aloud from time to time—so that at eight oclock, when she let the curtain swing back over the window, her disappointment was tempered by foreknowledge. That was also why she had waited up here instead of down there: the disappointment was easier up here. Thus Amanda was learning to live with despair.

  Then the November first-Thursday came, nearing the anniversary of their meeting. She did not stay the full hour at the window, but rose from time to time, drew the curtain aside, and peered down into the darkness as into a well, not allowing herself to believe for a moment that she would see him. Fall became winter; Christmas went past and New Year’s, the earth frozen iron-hard. Amanda was learning. Then spring came on, with summer fast on its heels; the year burned toward a climax, cotton beginning to split its bolls, pickers moving in ragged skirmish lines across the fields, dragging nine-foot sacks like windless flags, and the gins whined soprano round the clock. It was September: war had come to Europe. Newsboys cried Hitler, cried Poland, and it all meant less than nothing to Amanda, widowed before she had even been a bride.

  Early that week she was on her way to market and she stopped at a curb, waiting for the traffic light to change. Just as it did, a long low car pulled up. Mostly varnished wood and bright blue fenders, considerably wider than tall, it eased to a purring stop and Amanda saw that the driver was Harley Drew. He did not see her; he was busy talking to a coral-lipped young woman with smooth brown hair. “What I dont like is all this waiting. Damn it, Amy—” The young woman appeared not to hear him; she was gazing straight ahead. Then she turned languidly, her eyes moving past Amanda without pause. “Damn it, Amy—” He had on a brand new pearly hat. The traffic signal changed; they moved on, the engine purring like a dynamo, and Amanda had to wait again for the light. But when it went green she did not move; she stood there another moment, her face drained of everything, even despair. Then suddenly she turned and hurried home, holding the empty basket with both hands and restraining her tears until she reached her room.

  But this was only a temporary relapse. Within an hour she was back downstairs and she set out again with her market basket. Now that Thursday was no different from any other day of a month’s first week, her life was built more than ever around her father’s schedule. His day began with eight oclock breakfast, after which he was gone until half past twelve, when he came home for lunch and a nap before returning to the office. He never varied his regimen; people along the way could set their watches by the times he passed their doors. At five oclock, as always, Amanda would meet him on Cotton Row and walk home with him through the gathering dusk of winter or the fierce high sunlight of late spring and summer. The big gray house, its cupolas soaring grim and pristine among filling stations and neighborhood grocery stores, was more remote than ever—a reminder, like the major, of an era that was gone. Workers’ houses were just beyond it and a new cottonseed oil mill took up half of the second block; it made a constant crunching sound through the long autumnal nights, like a beast grinding its teeth in pain, and filled the air with a smell of frying ham. Radios and phonographs belonging to the workers’ wives shattered the quiet of other seasons with dance music, the blues, dramas consisting mostly of shots and screams, the bland commercial voices of young men selling soap and breakfast foods, and the shrill, desperate laughter of sponsored comedians. Against this background Amanda followed her daily rounds, leading a sort of posthumous existence in a world reduced to a population of two.

  She was no longer on the public tongue save in rare instances when strangers, seeing her pass, would ask about her: “Who was that? Whats the matter with her?” for her face was not only vacant now; it was dazed, distrait, like that of a person just recovering from an unexpected blow. The new versions were more prosaic than the old, without the eager surmises, the improbable conjectures. “Who? That? Thats Amanda Barcroft, old Major Barcroft’s daughter; she got jilted. Remind me to tell you about her some time.” It was as if a shadow were moving across the family portrait reflected in the enormous Bristol eye. Already one of the figures had been obliterated, and the shadow continued to move, reaching now for the shoulder of the central figure. Major Barcroft’s heart, which had murmured through the years after denying him a final chance at glory, gave warning that it was about to make its final claim.

  In late September—the anniversary of Florence’s death (and consequently within a week of the anniversary of Amanda’s last meeting with Drew)—father and daughter were walking home through the lingering heat, the sun just clear of the levee and the moon already up in the daylight sky. Major Barcroft walked fast, wanting to be in his study, where he kept a large-scale map of western Europe on the wall beside his desk, marking the positions of the armies with drafting pins. Warsaw, with its swarm of black- and red-headed pins, had fallen that afternoon, and he was anxious to get back and make the changes.

  Halfway home Amanda was surprised to see him stop suddenly and lean against a tree beside the walk. He was frowning, his face contorted; she had never seen him look like this before. She turned, one hand extended: “What is it, papa?” but he motioned her away with an angry gesture.

  “Let me lone,” he said, speaking through clenched teeth, hardly moving his lips. He stood there, pale and breathless. Indigestion, Amanda thought. That was what it seemed to be, for presently he pushed himself clear of the tree and resumed his walk, wanting to get to the house where he could sit down, look at his map in peace, and wait for the flicker of pain to go away.

  He did not make it to the house. As they entered the last block, within fifty yards of the front steps, he knew he was not going to make it and he halted for the second time, looking for something to lean against, to clutch. There was not a tree at hand, so with panic in his eyes he tottered across the strip of grass to a telephone pole at the curb. He was paler now, for pain was like an iron hoop drawn tight around his chest. Nostrils dilated with the effort of holding himself erect, he gripped the metal rungs of the pole; big drops of perspiration stood on his face and neck and the backs of his hands, where the liver spots were black against the paleness. Amanda moved to help him but an inexorable pressure buckled his knees. He slid down the pole, breaking his pince-nez and barking his face against the scars left by linemen’s spikes, and lay in the dusty gutter, his breathing labored, his eyes bulged with terror.

  Amanda knelt at the curb, bending above him, crying “Papa. Papa. Papa” over and over; “What is it, papa?” until a Greek fruitstand proprietor, w
ho had watched the scene with an air of unbelief like that assumed by sophisticates at the theater when they wish to show that they disapprove of the play or the performance, came out wiping his hands on his apron, lifted the major in his arms, and followed Amanda down the block and up the steps, then into the house and through the hall to the study, where he laid him on the horsehide couch. The major had not lost consciousness. His clothes grimed with dust from the gutter, he lay with that awful terror in his eyes, looking up at his daughter, and the uproar of his breathing filled the room. Amanda could not take her eyes from the straining face, the left cheek and temple of which had been raked raw against the spike scars on the pole. She stayed on her knees beside the couch, holding his hand and watching his face until the doctor came.

  They thought he would die that night, and the major apparently thought so too; they could see it in his eyes. But he was alive next morning, lying on the button-studded couch and breathing with the harsh, stertorous groans that had continued through the night. Amanda and the fruitstand proprietor had removed his coat and tie before Dr Clinton arrived, but he still wore the soiled trousers and shirt, for the doctor would not risk exposing him to the exertion that would be involved even in cutting them off. An oxygen cylinder stood at the head of the couch; it resembled an artillery projectile designed for use in super-deadly futuristic warfare and it made a treble hissing, sweet and clear, mounting toward some unattainable climax. A thin red tube drooped from it, the end inserted in one of the major’s nostrils and held in place by a strip of adhesive across his upper lip like a stage mustache put on in a hurry and awry. From time to time, looking up at his daughter, he would blink his eyes and twitch one corner of his mouth. It was some kind of signal; it had some meaning she could not understand. She hardly recognized him anyhow, lying in the dusty, rumpled clothes. Without the pince-nez his eyes looked out-of-focus, blurred and vague—not like Major Barcroft’s eyes at all—and the two little red marks left by the nippers, one on each side of his nose, were beginning to fade. Amanda was standing beside the couch, holding his hand, and suddenly he spoke. His voice was hoarse and low but surprisingly clear. “Lean down,” he said.

  She knelt and his face was even more unfamiliar at close range. The nurse had salved his lips to prevent the oxygen from chapping them, and somehow this seemed terribly pathetic, this thought of a dying man, a man in mortal combat with a thrombus, being protected from the slight discomfort and disfiguration of chap. “Papa?” she said. Their eyes were less than a foot apart; she had not been this close to him since childhood.

  “Amanda—I … have a thing to ask you. I havent—havent spoken of that person, that unhappiness. I wouldnt speak of it now, except …” He paused, watching her, the corners of his mouth drawn down, and she saw that this was costing him a terrific exertion, entirely apart from his physical condition.

  “I understand, papa,” she said quietly.

  “I want you to tell me that you … realize—that you realize I was right. I know I did right but now I want to know that you know I did right. Do you, Amanda? Do you know it?”

  Amanda kept her head down, feeling his eyes upon her. She did not nod or shake her head; she knelt there, motionless. Major Barcroft glared at her for half a minute, as if he were timing her silence with a clock. Then, when he was quite certain that she was not going to answer him, he turned his head away. She remained beside the couch for a while, still holding his hand. Finally, however, she rose and went into the hall.

  It was the first time she had left the room since her father had been brought into it yesterday. Soon she returned; she stayed near him constantly. She would have spent all her time hovering over the couch but it angered him to see her always there, so she slept the second night in Florence’s patented chair, which had never been removed from the front parlor. By the third day the thrombus had begun to canalize; he was past immediate danger. “You cant tell about these things,” the doctor said. He frowned, after the manner of medical men when developments, whether good or bad, surprise them. “Sometimes that one clot is all; the attack clears up the condition. He may live to see a hundred.”

  By the end of the following week Major Barcroft was sitting up, reading the war news and directing Amanda where to place the pins in the map on the opposite wall. He was furious when she could not locate the French and Belgian border hamlets whose names he mispronounced. In mid-October, three weeks after the attack, he was back at his office and they resumed their old familiar schedule. He was as well as ever, apparently, but there was a certain deliberateness about his movements, like those of a man obliged to carry a time bomb set to detonate at an hour unknown to him.

  Sometimes Amanda looked at him, remembering his face the way it had been when he asked her to admit he had done right about Harley Drew; she had bowed her head and refused to answer (which in itself was an answer) and now they were like strangers in the house. Formerly he had spoken to her but seldom: now he never spoke to her at all, beyond signifying incidental desires with grunts and gestures. Instead of saying ‘Pass the sugar,’ for instance, he would point to it and grunt. He kept more and more to his study, following the war news in the paper and shifting the pins on the map. Walking together, home from Cotton Row, they were as uncommunicative as soldiers on parade.

  This continued. Then one morning toward the end of December they were at breakfast and the major folded and rolled his napkin and put it in its ring. He rose and went to the door; it was as always. But there he paused, standing with his back to her, and made a clucking sound to clear his throat. “Amanda,” he said. He turned in the doorway and looked at her, after all these months of studied indifference. She had time to wonder what was coming. “Have you and Nora made plans for Christmas dinner?” He said it as if reciting something committed to memory, and she knew that he must have been phrasing it all through breakfast.

  “Dinner?” Startled, she said it to gain time; but he just stood there, watching her. “Not yet, papa. But it will be the same as always. Turkey and dressing and … everything. Like always.”

  He turned to go, then turned back; he made the little clucking sound again. “Very good. But when you plan it, plan for three. We’ll have a guest.” This time he went. She heard him pause in the hall for his hat and stick (he carried a stick now, remembering the heart attack when he stood looking desperately left and right for something to clutch, to hold to); then she heard the front door close behind him.

  Henry Stubblefield was the guest, and that was how she met him. Or rather that was how she learned his name, for she had been seeing him every week-day afternoon for two months now. When she walked to her father’s office at five oclock he would be there, and after the first few afternoons he began to nod to her and mumble “How do” and she would nod back, but that was all. He had been working in the office since October, learning the cotton business, and people up and down the Row were saying that he was Major Barcroft’s protégé. Anyhow, the major and his daughter were sitting in the parlor late Christmas morning, Amanda excusing herself from time to time to see how the turkey was coming; it was almost noon and there was a knock at the door. She looked at her father but he just sat there, giving no sign that he had heard. The knocking came again. So she got up and went to the door and it was the cotton clerk. “How do,” he said.

  Amanda stood aside for him to enter, then closed the door and turned and he was waiting; he stood with his hat in both hands, holding it gingerly in fear of roughing the nap. She came past him, leading the way to the parlor. Major Barcroft had already risen to greet them: they might have been returning from a stroll or even a trip. That was her first real inkling of what was to come, for he was smiling. “Amanda, help Mr Stubblefield with his hat. No: wait.” He put out one arm, the hand making a gesture that was strangely like a blessing, thumb and fingertips joined. “Henry, this is my daughter; this is Amanda. And, Amanda, this is Henry Stubblefield.” He was cavalier, Old South—she had never seen him like this before: galant. The smile
looked forced, however, as is always the case with people who smile but seldom. This embarrassed her; it was like having to sit and listen to lying, wearing a look of belief and corroboration. It also seemed to embarrass the young man.

  “How do,” he said.

  She took his hat and was on the way to the hall with it before the name meant anything to her. Then she remembered. Henry Stubblefield: he had lost his wife ten years ago in a freak accident, one of those occurrences we are apt to pronounce ‘outrageous’ in fiction and ‘absorbing’ in real life. It was one of the few local events that Florence, for instance, had shown an interest in. He was twenty-five then, six months married, and one fine day of early spring he put the lawn mower on the back seat of his car, a Chevrolet convertible with the top down. He was taking the mower to be sharpened, and just as he was about to drive off, his wife came running out of the house, wearing a light print wash dress. “Yoohoo! wait,” she cried, “I’ll go with you,” and she ran around and got in. She was a pretty thing by all report, just turned nineteen. So they pulled off, and that was when it happened; she was waving to someone on a porch across the way and they were approaching the corner when a car came blurting out of the cross street; he had to jam on brakes, and then it happened. The handle of the mower sprang forward, then down: crack! and broke her skull; she lived two hours, and the only comfort the doctor could give was an opinion that she never knew what hit her—small comfort indeed. Yet the general belief was that the young husband’s mourning was exaggerated, perhaps abnormal—even when it began to be told around town that the wife died three months pregnant (which incidentally was not true, though perhaps it made a better story that way)—for he went into seclusion; they only saw him once a day, when he took his midafternoon walk to the cemetery with a newspaper cornucopia of flowers. He lived with his mother; his father had died twelve years ago, leaving them a half interest in a downtown office building. There was a flurry of talk when someone reported seeing him drop the lawn mower into the river one dark night (—‘the death weapon’ they called it, and added behind their hands: “Maybe this was that ‘perfect crime’ youre always hearing about”) but it soon died down; probably not even those who told it believed it. Still, as they watched him going to and coming from the cemetery, carrying the cornucopia of flowers on the way there, empty-handed coming back, they shook their heads: “Thats a strange one, that.” Ten years after the death of his wife his mother died too (—of cancer of the liver; he had that to watch, to live through: three months of it) and then he was alone. Major Barcroft, who owned the other half of the office building, was appointed executor, and when the estate was settled it amounted to enough for him to live on but no more. The major said, “Henry: how would you like to learn the cotton business?” “Business?” “Yes. You can come in with me. Do you want to?” “Well—all right. Yes sir.” Thus he ended ten years of seclusion, and that was how it came about that Amanda had been seeing him at her father’s office for the past two months.