Love in a Dry Season

by Shelby Foote

  A year and six months was a very long time, longer than she had been involved with anyone—longer, even, than she had been involved with Jeff—in this particular sense. What kept it going was the clandestine excitement, the conspiratorial air, and the various subterfuges Drew employed. She had been right about the conspiratorial air from the first, and now it turned out that he had been right to adopt it. For that was what held her, that and his skill at subterfuge; he took no chances even with a blind man. Watching his grave demeanor at the Briartree dinner table while he discussed finances or the world political situation with Jeff and turned to her from time to time with the deference any guest owes any hostess: “Isnt that so, Mrs Carruthers?” (or, later: “Isnt that so, Amy?” since he decided that too much formality was itself suspicious) was better than watching a movie. He should have been an actor, she decided. Sometimes she would laugh till tears of mirth stood in her eyes; she had to cover her face with a napkin and pretend to be choking. “Take some water,” Drew would say, solicitous; he never so much as smiled at such a time. The most he permitted himself was a twinkle deep in the pupil of each eye, and that would set her to laughing all the harder, until finally she would have to leave the table. All this, together with the series of names on hotel and tourist court registers, from David Copperfield to Amos Tooth—& Wife—appealed enormously to her simple and somewhat cruel sense of humor.

  Some nights when they were stopping only twenty or thirty miles away, Drew would leave her soon after dark and return about three hours later. He would wake her and sit beside her on the bed and tell how he had sat talking with Jeff at Briartree, throwing him off the scent; for otherwise he might have begun to wonder at never seeing Drew when Amy was away, and from there it would be an easy step to assuming that they were together. “ ‘Where’s Amy?’ I asked him, and he said—you know how he talks: ‘Oh she’s off to Memphis, shopping. She’s buying an awful lot of clothes here lately, seems to me.’ ” Drew imitated Jeff’s voice to perfection, querulous and trembly in the upper registers; he even managed to look a good deal like him when he was quoting, puffing out his cheeks a bit, drawing in the corners of his mouth, and letting his eyes come unfocused. Amy had to laugh. He should indeed have been an actor, she decided.

  Even so, there was a limit to how long she could be amused in such a fashion. The jokes were not so funny the third or fourth time around; she wanted a new pair of hands moving nervously over her person, a new voice panting different words in her ear. She had begun to think of a break. This excursion to the Delta—the blind seed swimming home—had long since served whatever vague purpose she had had in mind. (What was his name? Perkins. Was that his name?) She was bored, almost to the point of doing something about it. Then in the quiet September twilight Drew proposed the murder and her interest was revived. “You want me to hold his legs?” she said. She had underestimated him, and even though she laughed there was admiration behind the laughter. Besides, she soon stopped laughing.

  She had known from the start what he was really after, beyond the flesh, and it seemed to her now that she should have expected this. From the night of their first intimacy Drew had listened with great interest when she told of her experiences in the world of highlife, especially during the five-year European celebration of the inheritance. He listened, absorbed, while she told of Jeff shooting at the patter of the widow’s little Spaniard’s pumps; then he roared with laughter, slapping his thigh. But this was unusual. Mostly he listened with quiet pleasure and anticipation, like a child being introduced to history through tales of kings and heroes, for he looked forward to doing such things himself—with Jeff’s money and Jeff’s wife. So she might have expected the proposal, she realized soon after he had made it, and she stopped laughing. For here was an excitement she had never known before; here were opportunities for amusement beyond anything she had imagined.

  Not that she had any intention of going through with it. Jeff suited her too well in too many ways, and she had few delusions as to Drew in the role of husband. What was more, she knew the boredom would return, and later the break. But she saw possibilities for an amusing interim and she worked it for all it was worth, believing that she was in command of the situation. This was the beginning of a more intimate relationship among the three of them—a sort of rehearsal, as Drew believed, for what was to come. Soon after the first of the year, he and Amy no longer went afield for their pleasures; they took them right there in the house, approximately under the blind man’s nose. Drew was not entirely without caution, remembering the potshots at the Spaniard, but he came to believe that he would more or less welcome such a scene. For a small risk, even though no plea would be needed before the world—let alone the coroner’s jury, whose verdict, if one were called for, would be Accidental Death—it would give him a chance to plead self-defense to his conscience.

  This moved swiftly. Amy could sense an approaching climax. Apparently Drew could sense it too, for now their love encounters had the frantic jerkiness of such scenes in the oldtime motion pictures (in the course of which the audience, crouched beneath the lancing beam, kept expecting Valentino or John Gilbert, stigmatized in flickering black and white, to look up from his work and cry with hot impatience—it was part of the illusion—‘Get those cameras out of here!’); yet nothing happened. Then one April night they tried something new. Drew had dinner at Briartree and afterwards the three of them were sitting in the living room. The electric clock hummed on the mantelpiece. For a long time nobody said anything. The servants had left. Then Drew said, “Well”—rising; it was barely after nine—“thanks for the meal. I’d better be heading back.”

  “Early yet,” Jeff told him.

  “Hard day tomorrow,” Drew said; “Good night,” and Amy went to see him out, something she had never done in the old days. “Night,” he said, opening the door.

  “Good night,” she said, and she reached across in front of him and slammed it. They stood together in the hall, facing the closed door. He did not understand until she pointed to the stairs. Then, obediently, he tiptoed up and waited on the landing while she went into the living room; “Good night,” he heard her say to Jeff. She joined him on the stairs and they went quietly to her room. After a while they heard Jeff playing the phonograph. He played it until midnight; then they heard him come upstairs and go down the hall to his room. Drew left just before dawn, arriving at Mrs Pentecost’s with plenty of time for a bath and a shave before breakfast.

  ‘Hard day tomorrow,’ he had said, not meaning it; but it was. He was red-eyed, numb with the need for sleep. Youre not as young as you used to be, he thought. However, he reminded himself that the time was near when he would be delivered. He was upstairs now, familiar with the floor plan; this was all a sort of rehearsal, a dry run, and he continued to labor at it. Twice again in the next two weeks he said good night and stayed, coming to work red-eyed the following day. The fourth time was the second Monday in May and the papers were full of the German break-through; von Rundstedt had crossed the Meuse. After dinner Drew and Jeff and Amy sat in the living room. It was all as before. The clock hummed; the servants had left; nobody said anything. Then Drew rose. “Well. Thanks again. I guess I’d better be going.”

  “So early?” Jeff said.

  “Rough day tomorrow,” Drew told him, knowing it was true. Except for this knowledge it was all as before. He and Amy rose. But now Jeff rose too, and the three of them crossed to the entrance hall, where Drew took his hat from the refectory table. Amy went to the front door with him but Jeff stopped in the doorway of the study; he would play some records before bedtime. Drew opened the door. “Night,” he said. Jeff raised one hand, waving as if from a distance though he was only fifteen feet away.

  “Good night,” Amy said, wondering what Drew would do. She had only an instant to wonder, for he slammed the door and they both turned together, watching Jeff. It seemed to Amy that he must hear their heartbeats. He continued to stand in the study doorway and his eyes were fixed
on Drew; there was an illusion that his eyesight had returned. Then, as if to reinforce the illusion, he said in a sudden but level voice, still as if looking at Drew:

  “Who do you think youre fooling?”

  Drew was so taken aback he almost answered. But Amy stepped in front of him, walking toward her husband. “Why should I try to fool you? I havent fooled you yet.”

  “That I know of, you mean.”

  “Maybe thats what I do mean. Yes. Good night.”

  Jeff shrugged and went into the study and Amy stopped at the foot of the stairs. There she turned and beckoned to Drew, who tiptoed past the study door, feet silent on the carpet. As he went by he saw the blind man seated in his armchair, his face toward the hall. Again there was that illusion of recovered sight: Drew flinched. He and Amy went upstairs together.

  When they were in the bedroom he said nervously, “You think he saw me?”

  “Saw you?”

  “Knew I was there.”

  “Oh, he makes all kinds of guesses and stabs in the dark. Here: unhook me.”

  Apparently she was right, for presently they heard the phonograph. It was Jelly Roll Morton’s Two Nineteen. At first he talked. “The first blues I no doubt ever heard,” he said. He talked some more, hands moving over the keys. Then he began to sing, and it was as if you could see him throw his head back, the drawn ascetic face of a high-yellow monk, the skin fitting close to the skull.

  Two Nineteen done cared my baby away.

  Two Seventeen bring her back some day.

  But Drew was right: Jeff had ‘seen’ him—meaning he knew he was there. For some time now, since not long after New Year’s, he had been increasingly aware of what was going on between them. What was more, he knew exactly where, for he had heard them go upstairs together the week before—Drew had come on from Guard drill, wearing his uniform, and Jeff had heard the creak of his boots and the tiny chink of his spur and saber chains. This was early May; he had not gone to the door with them, and as he sat in the living room he heard the door slam, followed by the sound of what he thought at first was Amy coming down the hall alone. Then he remembered that she was wearing no bracelet, and thus he identified the faint jingling which no one but a blind man would have heard. “I’m going up,” she said from the hall; the chinking stopped.

  “Good night,” he said; it began again, combined now with the creak of boots moving up the stairs.

  His first reaction was incredulity, then rage, then incredulity again: he simply could not believe his luck. For more than three months now, with increasing fervor as the conviction grew, he had been plotting, hoping for some move on their part which would place them at his disposal. Now it was here. Yet he did nothing that night, remembering how the incidents involving the Austrian ski instructor and Mama’s Spaniard had ended in ridicule; this time he would move according to plan. Besides, this was a new kind of jealousy—double-barreled, so to speak, directed not only at the man but at Amy too, and therefore requiring double caution. She was the alienor and Drew the loved one. Thus on one hand; on the other, she was the property and Drew the thief. On both counts action was required.

  Yet he did nothing that night. He went into the study and planned his campaign. Later he went up to his room, put on pajamas, and lay in bed completing the details. Then he got up and rehearsed it, moving quietly down the hall to the door of Amy’s room; he could hear them speaking in whispers. He stayed there for perhaps ten minutes, his ear against the panel. At last he came back to his room. He lay smiling in the moonlight. Finally he fell asleep, still smiling, and woke with sunlight warm on his face; he had not heard Drew leave. But that was all right—Drew’s leaving had no part in the campaign.

  So ten days later, the second Monday in May, he was ready: so ready in fact, so much in the advantage, that he could afford to be sporting about it, like a hunter letting a duck rise off the water. He followed them into the hall and stood in the doorway of the study. “Who do you think youre fooling?” he said when the front door slammed, speaking directly to Drew, eyes fixed on the place where he knew he was standing. He heard him gasp and he felt the thrill that is the reward of sportsmanship, the hunter’s consideration for the hunted. This was the greatest intimacy yet; it was like an embrace, flesh touching flesh; for a moment he experienced something akin to buck fever. Then Amy came forward and spoiled it. Jeff replied angrily, going into the study, where presently he heard Drew tiptoe past, his footsteps like so many powderpuffs dropped from a height.

  He listened while they climbed the stairs, and that completed Phase One; he had planned it in three phases. Now began Phase Two, which would end when he reached the door of Amy’s bedroom. He put the Jelly Roll Morton record on the phonograph, and when that was through he played another—any man to any woman in any dingy hotel room, the man abed, the woman with her hand on the knob of the door:

  Dont leave me here.

  Dont leave me here.

  But if you just must go

  Leave a dime for beer.

  It was one of his favorites, yet he scarcely heard it. When it was through he wiped it with the complexion brush and put it back. Then he selected a Bessie Smith, and this time he listened in spite of himself.

  I woke up this morning

  with an awful aching head,

  I woke up this morning

  with an awful aching head;

  My new man had left me

  just a room and a empty bed.

  Her warm, proud voice soared on though Bessie herself had been dead over two years now. She died after an automobile accident fifty miles from Briartree; they got her to a hospital in time but the authorities couldnt let her in—her color wasnt right and she bled to death.

  He listened, head bent, wearing crepe-soled shoes and white wool socks, gray flannel slacks and a polo shirt unbuttoned at the throat. This was a different Jeff from the one who arrived twelve years ago from Carolina or the one who returned from Europe less than five years back. His tan had faded; he had gone to fat. The pectoral muscles, formerly the hard square plates of an athlete, had sagged to almost womanish proportions; the ripple of ribs had disappeared beneath a fatty casing that thickened his torso from armpits to fundament. More than anything he resembled a eunuch, or rather the classic conception of a eunuch—as if the knife-sharp sliver of windshield glass had performed a physical as well as a psychological castration. Yet under that ruined exterior there still lurked, like a ghost in a ruined house, the halfback who had heard his name roared from the grandstand, who had welcomed the shocks, the possible fractures and bruises and concussions, for love (or hatred) of one among the mass of tossing pennants as at the tournaments of old, and who had won her—though not through the football prowess after all—so that now, nearly twenty years later, she waited upstairs, inviting him to another encounter, the chain of flesh relinked. And now, as before, he welcomed the shocks, the fractures and concussions. He took out the pistol.

  It was where he had kept it ever since Switzerland, in the nest of wires under the used-needles tray, along with a box containing thirty-eight of the original fifty cartridges. Six were in the pistol; the other six had been fired in the Cannes hotel. He had not fired it since, though every few months he would strip and clean and oil it. Once he had put the muzzle in his mouth to see what suicide was like, but there was such a compulsion to pull the trigger that he took it out in a hurry, badly frightened, and from then on his gorge would rise when he remembered the taste of oily metal. He thought of none of this now, however; he merely sat with the pistol in his lap, waiting for the record to end.

  Lord, he’s got that sweet something

  and I told my gal-friend Lou;

  He’s got that sweet something

  and I told my gal-friend Lou.

  From the way she’s raving

  she must have gone and tried it too.

  That was the end of the first side of the record. Jeff was expecting it, waiting with his hand above the tone arm, so that when the final not
e was wailed he lifted the needle clear of the groove, flipped the record over, and let the tone arm down. For three revolutions it gave a mechanical hissing. Then the music began again: Empty Bed, Part Two.

  When my bed get empty

  makes me feel awful mean and blue,

  When my bed get empty

  makes me feel awful mean and blue;

  My springs are getting rusty

  sleeping single like I do.

  Bessie said ‘blue’ with the French u language students try so hard for. When she said it the first time Jeff was already at the foot of the stairs; when it came around again he was at the top, walking quietly on crepe soles down the hall, pistol in hand. He moved with the confidence of the blind at home, not having to pause for bearings, not even having to count his steps, but able at any given moment to reach out and touch whatever tables and chairs and doorknobs happened to be within reach, as if the objects exerted some sort of aura, an emanation, or had at least a reflectiveness, twitching the invisible cat-whiskers of the blind. He paused at Amy’s bedroom door: Phase Three.

  For all his careful planning, however, his rigid adherence to schedule, he was early. Leaning with his ear against the panel he heard the preliminary whispers still in progress, punctuated by the squeak of kisses. Downstairs Bessie sang the blues, indifferent to all misery but her own, and between the lines a trombone throbbed and moaned.

  He give me a lesson

  that I never had before.

  He give me a lesson

  that I never had before;