Love in a Dry Season

by Shelby Foote

  Henry did not say anything and the pen resumed its squeaking. But at five oclock he tried again. “Dont you think—”

  “Look,” the other said sharply, as if he had been waiting for him to speak. He turned from locking his desk. “I told you once, I’ll tell you again. Major Barcroft’s old enough to look out for himself. Even if he wasnt, if he was in some kind of dotage or something, it wouldnt be up to you to straighten him out. What you think he’s got a daughter for? Quit fretting. It’s this war; it’s got him all excited. He’s probly busy right this minute shifting pins on that map. I see by the paper the Nazzies crossed the Mews.” This sounded reasonable to Henry—he had not thought of it before. The bookkeeper took his hat from the rack. “Come on. Lets lock up.”

  They parted on the sidewalk in front of the office. Henry, though he had been somewhat reassured by what the other had said in explanation of the major’s absence, felt his doubts return. After all, people did get murdered in their beds. Deciding to see for himself, he set off for Lamar Street and the Barcroft house. He had not been there in almost a month, not since the brief proposal and refusal, and as he drew closer, remembering what the bookkeeper had said about getting his nose shoved out of joint, he reached up unconsciously and stroked it. And serve me right, he thought. Then he was there.

  The blinds were drawn, the windows all shut in spite of the summer weather; there was no sign of life. He turned in at the walk, the cupolas and tall eaves soaring above him. His footsteps had a hollow echo crossing the veranda, and when he had knocked at the door there was a grim, heavy silence as before. He stroked his nose. As he was about to knock again, leaning forward and listening, fist cocked, he had an eerie feeling that there was someone just on the other side, poised in the same attitude as himself, leaning forward and listening. Standing there in the heat of early summer he felt the hair stir on the back of his neck and a sudden start of cold sweat at his armpits. He rapped lightly; then, without waiting for a reply, he turned and walked swiftly across the veranda and down the steps, not having known a fear like this since the bad dreams of his childhood—a taste of brass at the base of his tongue and a pain in his chest as if an invisible hand had clutched his heart.

  That was Monday. Next morning when he came to the office a Negro woman was waiting on the sidewalk. It seemed to him that he knew her or at least had seen her before. “Mr Stubberfield,” she said. He stopped and looked at her. She was thin, of medium height, the color of milk chocolate, her hair hidden by a clean and neatly folded headrag. “I cooks for Major Barcroft,” she said, and then he recognized her, remembering all those painful Sundays; Nora was her name, the mother of a jazz cornetist who had come home from the North to recover from tuberculosis (—so they thought. But two weeks later he shot a barrelhouse gambler over a woman, and six weeks later was tried for it and sentenced, and five months later died in the electric chair: Bristol’s one artist, her one famous man, as they discovered when the musicologists came looking for information. But that was in the future now, both the fate and the fame); “Did cook, leastways,” she said. She paused. “Captain, they’s something you ought to know.”

  “All right,” he said. He said it calmly, so that afterwards, looking back, he could point to this calmness and tell himself that he had known what was coming. Then she told him.

  “Yessdy when I come to work Miss Manda was waiting for me at the door. She told me take myself a holiday. It warnt natchel; them folks aint never give no time-off to nobody. Onliest holiday I ever had, disbarring the flood, was three hours back in Twenty Nine when my sister’s husband passed. So I been going by there, since. Not up to the house: just walking past and looking. Captain, they’s something wrong in there. I could tell by the look on her face. They’s something awful wrong.”

  It came back to him now, the sense of horror that had swept over him the day before, when he stood on the veranda and felt a presence on the other side of the door. Safe at home, he soon recovered from his panic; he believed he had been foolish and he avoided thinking of it, much as a person will put aside thoughts of a previous incarnation or a sense of having lived a particular scene before. But later, as he lay in bed, it returned, and now as he stood in front of the cotton office listening to Nora, it was as strong as ever. “All right,” he said, still with the calmness he was later to call prescience. He turned. Leaning through the doorway he said to the bookkeeper, who was hunched above a ledger: “I’ll be back,” and set off down the street.

  This time he did not hesitate. He went up the steps, crossed the veranda, and knocked at the door without pausing. And just as before, the feeling came over him—except that now it was more general, more diffused; the presence was not opposite him, behind the door, but it was somewhere in the house. He knocked again. After waiting and hearing no sound, he turned to leave. At the head of the steps, as he turned again, he caught out of the tail of his eye what he thought was a flicker of motion. It was quick—too quick, like an optical illusion—but he believed he had seen the corner of a lace curtain at one of the front windows drop back into place. He stood facing the house again, looking at the curtain. It hung motionless.

  He did not return to the office; he went directly to the police station, walking fast on his short legs, his long trunk leaned forward as if into a strong wind. The chief of police and the desk sergeant sat looking at him solemnly while he told about it. “There’s somebody in there,” he said. “Somebody was watching me.”

  “Did you see them?”

  “N-no. But I felt it.”

  “I dont feel it,” the chief said. He was red-faced and thick-necked, in shiny blue serge. “I cant go busting into people’s houses because youve got a feeling. Maybe they took a trip or something.”

  “A trip?” Henry said. “Major Barcroft?” Since this made no impression, he told about the cook. “She knows. She’s been working there for over twenty years and she knows something’s wrong.” But the chief still looked doubtful.

  Then the telephone rang and the sergeant answered it. “You,” he said. He gave it to the chief.

  “Hobart here,” the chief said. This was his official voice and he narrowed his eyes as he spoke. During the pause that followed, however, his eyes went back to normal. Then they stretched to O’s. “Gret God,” he said, and Henry could hear the voice at the other end of the line. It was squeaky and indecipherable, like Punch infuriated. The chief’s eyes bulged. “Gret God!” he cried. Then: “All right, Mr Barnes,” he said, recovering his official voice, “I’ll be right over.”

  He put on his cap and hurried to the door. But there he paused, turning back to Henry. “I guess you better come with me,” he told him. “It looks like you really had something after all.”

  “What?” Henry said. “What is it?”

  “Come on.” They were outside by now. The chief got into a squad car. “Get in back,” he said, and Henry did.

  “What is it?”

  “We’ll see,” Chief Hobart said, and he gave the driver the South Lamar address. Henry watched the back of his neck, the bulge of muscle going to fat and the bone-white line at the rim of yesterday’s haircut. “Faster,” the chief said, pressing the button of the siren till it screamed. It died to a moan, then screamed again. By that time they had lurched to a stop in front of the Barcroft house.

  Harry Barnes was waiting on the porch (—as usual; he was always quick to reach the scene when tragedy struck. That was why they called him Light-Hearse Harry); he had just returned from the neighboring house, where he had gone to use the telephone. Behind him the door was open—the door at which Henry had knocked less than an hour ago, without getting any more answer than he had the day before. Chief Hobart got out of the car, moving fast with Henry close behind him; they went up the steps in tandem. “All right,” he said. “Where are they?”

  “He’s in back,” the undertaker said. “She’s up front, in the parlor, the same as when I got here. But you cant talk to her—she’s in shock or something. And you
sure cant talk to him and thats a fact.”

  “Then who called you?”

  “Miss Sadie Eggleston. She was passing here about twenty minutes back and she heard somebody call her name. It sounded kind of choked, she said. She looked and it was Amanda Barcroft, right up here on the porch, looking like she was walking in her sleep. Thats what Miss Sadie said. Amanda says, ‘Be so good as to call Mr Barnes. Tell him my father died,’ and went back into the house.”

  “All right,” the chief said. “Lets go see.”

  As they crossed the veranda to enter the house, Henry looked over his shoulder and saw a cluster of four or five women on the sidewalk, watching and talking with their heads tipped close together, their hands in front of their mouths. Miss Sadie must have been spreading the word, he thought—and turned back just in time to keep from walking into the chief and Mr Barnes, who had stopped in the hall before an open doorway on the right; “… in shock,” the undertaker was saying. Henry joined them, looking past their shoulders into the parlor. The room was so dusky behind its curtains that at first, having just come in out of brilliant mid-morning sunlight, he could discern nothing. But presently, his pupils dilating, details emerged as on a photographic print in its chemical bath, and he saw Amanda sitting in her sister’s Morris chair. The tabs of lace at her wrists and throat were soft points of light in the gloom; her hands were in her lap, her head slightly bowed above them. Though her face was drawn and pale, there were no tears in her eyes; “… since Sunday night,” the undertaker was saying.

  So now he knew what had been behind that locked door when he knocked on it, first yesterday and again an hour ago—he knew the source of the feeling of dread that had swept over him. The presence had been Death itself. I felt it! he told himself with something of triumph, or at any rate vindication, after the denials by the bookkeeper and the police chief. He stood looking at Amanda but she did not see him; she did not see anything. Then he knew that he must have been standing there quite a while, for he heard a voice say “Gret God” as if from a far distance, and when he looked around, neither Chief Hobart nor Mr Barnes was in sight. “What makes him black like that?” he heard the chief say from beyond the end of the hall.

  “Suffocation,” Mr Barnes said. “Thats what a heart attack really is: suffocation. Ive had them even blacker. Besides, two days in weather like this …”

  But he was at the study door by then; he could see for himself the body on the button-studded horsehide couch, with its blue-black, swollen face and staring eyes. Then he began to smell him and realized that he had been smelling him all along, the over-sweet smell of corruption. He turned without having really paused; he hurried back down the hall as fast as his short legs would carry him, out of the door and onto the veranda, where sunlight struck him like a slap across the eyes. For a moment he was blinded. He stood with one hand against a pillar, waiting for his pupils to shrink. At last they did and he saw that the group of four or five women had grown to more than a dozen. They stood as before, their heads tipped close together and their hands in front of their mouths.

  By noon all Bristol hummed with it, men clustering on street corners and housewives leaning over backyard fences. They told how the policeman had to hold her when Mr Barnes’ assistant came with his long wicker basket. Most of them said she had gone out of her mind with grief and had been sitting there with her dead father because she had not known what else to do. Others, including those who had called her Poor Amanda and were familiar with what they called her scandal, said she had been holding onto all she had left in the world. There was a third group, made up of people who believed they saw still deeper into the matter; they said she had been sitting there gloating over him.

  8. Shots in the Dark

  For all its intensity, however, the talk of what had happened on Lamar Street would have been even more fervid if it had not had to share the limelight with another outrage of which the news, concerning Harley Drew and Amy and Jeff Carruthers, reached Bristol that same morning, two or three hours earlier, from Briartree down on Lake Jordan. There was less conjecture here but that was because people believed there was less room, or at any rate occasion, for conjecture. The event, though far less common than in the old days—when, as they said, men were men—was not uncommon; indeed it was fairly cut-and-dried, though not without the tinge of humor that usually accompanies such bloodshed. “Why, yes, of course,” they told each other, speaking with the irrefutable positiveness which seems at times to be in direct ratio to the extent of error. For they were wrong. They were utterly and ironically wrong.

  In the year following that first tourist court assignation, Amy’s charm had continued to grow for Drew. He was not only fascinated by her person, he was fascinated by the things that surrounded her person—her clothes, her hair-style, even her cosmetics. He would wake in the night, switch on the bed lamp, and watch her sleeping beside him in the rented room, twenty to fifty miles from Bristol, depending on what point of the compass they had struck out this time. Admiring the texture of her skin, he compared her to those other women, hotel girls like that first Alma ten years back, who had kept the peasant ankles and heavy thighs their forebears brought over from the old world: whereas with Amy, though the blood was basically peasant too, it had thinned to a sort of ichor, actually blue where the veins were near the surface. Cut her, she’d bleed blue, Drew told himself. Or he would cross to the dresser where her overnight bag sat with the lid still raised, a patented model with compartments for everything; he would take out the urn-shaped jars and fluted bottles, unscrew the caps or ease out the glass stoppers, and smell them, the perfumed grease and distillations from the sperm whale, thinking: Ahhh. Then he would lift out the hand-stitched underwear, the pants and slips and petticoats with intricate unreadable monograms, unfolding and refolding them, feeling the whisper of silk against his palms, and to him they felt of money. At last he would return to the bed and sit looking down at her. Even her sunburn represented money, its smooth tan consistency reminding him of the leisure that enabled her to acquire it. He liked the way she smelled, duplicating what was in the various jars and bottles, and the fact that this fragrance could be bought (at as high as fifty dollars an ounce) made it no less enjoyable, no less heady—indeed, that was the pleasure; Fifty dollars a whiff! he thought, and his breath would quicken as he thought it. The fact was, he respected her enormously. It amounted to love, or very nearly love (a relative emotion anyhow, varying from person to person: Romeo and Mercutio, for instance) or as near love, at any rate, as Drew was ever to come.

  So it went. He had what he had prayed for, and the tick marks on the calendar, scoring their meetings, were for him what a mounting column of figures would be for a miser. Yet this success—like most successes, no matter how much longed for—bred only further desires, more distant goals. The Memphis and New Orleans visits had not been spent at the Peabody or the St Charles or the Roosevelt; they had not dined at Galatoire’s or Antoine’s. They had had to keep to the back streets, the remoter purlieus, dodging recognition. Apparently this was all right with Amy, who had had her share of highlife in her time. But it was not all right with Drew; the memory of that three-year ‘look round’ was beginning to dim. If originally his desire had been to get her alone, now he wanted her at his side in public. He wanted to wear her like a badge, a panache, her and her expensive clothes, her careless, moneyed manner. “Look what he’s got; look at that,” he wanted to hear them murmur as he entered hotel lobbies and restaurants with Amy on his arm—hotels and restaurants barred to them now because of the dictates of prudence. Not that he was opposed to prudence: he, in fact, was the one who insisted on it. What Drew was opposed to was the necessity for prudence.

  He had decided on his goal: his final goal, he told himself, incurably optimistic, still not having learned (and never to learn) that his desires were merely steps on an endless staircase leading nowhere. Divorce was no answer; the money was Jeff’s. The answer lay in another direction, one that he was wai
ting for the courage—or anyhow the opportunity—to propose to Amy. He saw himself master of Briartree and all that went with it, including Amy as chatelaine. As for the present master, who would be surprised at anything that befell a blind man? Who would be surprised to hear that the houseboy, coming to work one morning, had found his employer crumpled at the foot of a flight of stairs, dead of a broken neck since late the night before?

  Once this thought was in his mind, he would have been hard put to say when it had first occurred to him; it seemed so inescapably the only solution, he came to believe that he must have intended it from the start—as indeed perhaps he had, unconsciously. Yet even now, with it so firmly decided on as the answer to his problems, the only means of fulfilling his desires, he delayed proposing it to Amy: not because he had any fear of moral indignation on her part (he knew her far too well by now to expect any such reaction) but because he was afraid to add a questionable element to their union. He was enjoying himself, and one of his points of superiority over other men—call it that—was that he knew better than to tamper with happiness, a reflex most men find it impossible to abstain from. Whether or not she would agree was another matter, for at times she seemed inordinately fond of Jeff, not from love, of course, or even friendship, but rather from amusement. It was strange.

  However, two events brought him to the point of a decision. For one thing, he was offered a job with a Memphis bank, a really exceptional position, and though he did not exactly decline it—he never exactly declined any offer, as has been said—he did not accept it. To his considerable surprise he found that he was not even tempted to accept it. He could not have left Amy if he had wanted to. Thus he discovered that he had lost his freedom, which had been the one thing he thought of himself as prizing highest. The Barcroft business, as he now termed his long engagement to Amanda, had been a different matter: he had felt all along that he could break it off whenever he chose, which in fact was what he had done. But now he thought of himself as a man tied down, and that was bitter.