Love in a Dry Season

by Shelby Foote

  When he got through teaching me

  from my elbows down was sore.

  Charley Green was the trombone, he remembered. Then he froze, standing with his ear against the panel. Beyond the door the whispering had stopped; he heard the first tentative creaking of the springs. But still he waited, the pistol in his right hand and his left hand on the knob. Downstairs the song was into its final verse, in the course of which the tentative creak from the room beyond changed to a regular groaning, muffled, rhythmic, and profound; he turned the knob.

  When you get good loving

  never go and spread the news;

  Gals will double cross you

  and leave you with them

  Empty Bed Blues.

  On the last note, just before the mechanical hissing began, Jeff opened the door, went in, and closed it quietly with a backward movement of his arm. The innerspring groaning was louder now, guiding him to the bed. Though he did not know it, a bedside lamp was burning; as he came nearer his shadow on the wall behind him loomed hunch-shouldered and gigantic. He moved quickly, silently. Halting alongside the bed he placed his left hand in the small of Drew’s back, palm down, rested the base of his other fist upon it, gripping the pistol, and walked the left hand up Drew’s backbone like a tarantula. This was all according to plan; the backbone guided the pistol to the brain; this time he would not miss. Drew, if he felt the hand at all, must have thought it was Amy’s. However, it is unlikely that he felt it, for he was approaching that brief ecstasy which is characterized—as is no other sensation, except perhaps extreme pain (and maybe nausea)—by a profound indifference to the world around him; whatever feelings of warmth and tenderness may lap the shores of these tiny timeless islands in the time-stream, no man is ever more alone than in this moment of closest possible contact. Amy, though, feeling something brush her knee, opened her eyes and saw Jeff with the pistol. She gave a yelp and a start of surprise. But here again Drew, if he noticed at all, must have taken her cry of alarm and her sudden writhing as evidence of a gratification similar to his own. Yet it was no matter—he had so little time anyhow; for then Jeff pulled the trigger.

  He fired twice. At the first shot Drew merely jerked spasmodically, but at the second he gave a leap that raised him clear of the mattress. He fell back, tumbling sideways, and rolled to the floor at Jeff’s feet. Meanwhile Amy, freed of his weight, scrambled out of bed in the other direction. Then she made her first mistake: she ran for the far corner instead of the door. Her bare feet made thudding sounds on the carpet and Jeff turned, coming toward her around the end of the bed. Neither of them spoke. Amy, crouched in the corner as if ashamed of her nakedness, watched him coming nearer; she had terror in her face. Jeff advanced with his arms outspread, like a man catching a turkey in a barnlot. The closer he came the less room there was left to go around him; the sooner she tried to reach the door, the better her chances were. She decided to make a rush for it, and that was when she made her second mistake; she went to the right, away from the hand that held the pistol. As it was, she almost made it; she was almost past when his free hand grazed her hair and suddenly clutched. He caught her. “Jeff!” she cried, but he dragged her inexorably across his hip, his left hand still grasping her hair—they posed thus for an instant, motionless, like dancers performing a deadly Apache—and slashed at her twice with the pistol, once at her right cheekbone and once across the bridge of her nose; then, chipping her teeth, he shoved the muzzle in her mouth. Downstairs the phonograph hissed and hissed. There were four shots left.

  9. Miss Amanda

  They gave Major Barcroft a military funeral. Colonel Tilden, flanked by what was left of his staff, stood at the salute while a bugler faltered through Taps and six National Guardsmen from the local battery, in lace-up boots and khaki breeches, o.d. shirts and dishpan helmets, fired three ragged pistol volleys across the grave. The cemetery was crowded, spectators pressing close about the funeral canopy and trailing back in thinning queues toward the gate through which the hearse had turned with its flag-draped burden. There were veterans among them, some of whom—the grizzled few with walking canes, trembly mouths, and eyes gone blear, come to honor this old soldier who had made so long a march toward death before them—had been members of his company in the Second Mississippi more than forty years ago, but mostly they were Legionnaires wearing snug blue bobtail tunics and jaunty caps with yellow piping cocked above one eye. Some had passed through the fire which their overseas caps and ribbons and fourrageres implied, had lived with bullets humming above them like the plucked strings of a gigantic musical instrument; others, like the man they had come to bury, had never seen battle.

  Craning and insistent, they milled about, elbowing each other and stepping on graves, disappointed at having been denied the main attraction, the feature which had drawn them in the first place. For Amanda was not here—she was in the isolation ward of the hospital, where Dr Clinton had had her confined the day before. She was dazed; she took no interest in what went on around her, spoke to no one, and did not seem to realize what had happened or even where she was. She lay on the iron cot, staring straight ahead, and her eyes were dry and vacant. A group of women, including those who had been first to reach the scene on Lamar Street yesterday, stood in the corridor with fresh-cut flowers in their fists like tickets of admission. There would be a steady buzzing, as of bees, until the door came open from time to time, the nurse or doctor passing in or out, and for a moment it would hush; they saw her lying there, her face in bleak profile. Then the door would close and the whispering resume: “Did you see her? Did you see her face?”

  Three stories above, in a corner room with a private bath and a telephone and a No Visitors sign upon the door, Harley Drew was convalescing from his wounds. Downstairs the women talked about that too, about what had happened at Briartree night before last: how Jeff, with Amy across his hip, the muzzle of the pistol in her mouth, one bullet left in the chamber and three more in the magazine, had suddenly lost his nerve or changed his mind or anyhow had dropped her, had relented, and had gone around Drew’s body to the bedside phone and put in a call for a doctor in Ithaca, five miles to the south. He sat on the bed and held his head in his hands, beginning to weep. Then he took up the phone again and called a Bristol clinic. “Tell him I said quick!” he shouted into the mouthpiece, as if long-distance required a louder voice. “Tell him I said bring a nurse and all his instruments. She’s banged up pretty bad I think.” Amy lay battered and barely conscious, one cheek laid open and the bridge of her nose crushed almost flat, her lip split and bits of teeth like sand and gravel in her mouth. She wanted to crawl to the dresser and look in the mirror but she was afraid of what she knew she would see.

  The Ithaca doctor was there within fifteen minutes. His name was Kidderman, an elderly country doctor who worked as much with mules as he did with men. He did what he could for Amy, disinfecting the cuts and dabbing at the bloodstains while waiting for the other doctor and his nurse to arrive. This was at Amy’s insistence: she took one look at him, the greasy tie, the frayed collar, the gray crescents under his fingernails, and decided that the Bristol clinician would do a neater job. Meanwhile Dr Kidderman, who was not at all offended—who, rather, was relieved at not having to attempt such a delicate performance—went over to the body lying naked beside the bed in a welter of congealing blood and seed; he bent down for a perfunctory examination before covering it with a blanket, and suddenly he cried in a startled voice: “What do you mean, dead? This man’s not dead.”

  He spoke in anger and reproach, as much at himself as at anyone. Then he went to work, moving deftly with an unexpected skill. This was more in Dr Kidderman’s line, who for better than forty years had spent the last half of almost every Saturday night and the first half of every Sunday morning patching up the variously shot and cut survivors of the razor and pistol arguments that exploded in and overflowed the Negro dancehalls and barrelhouses down around Ithaca. When he had swabbed away the coagulated blood
matting the hair around the wounds he found that both bullets had grooved the skull. It was as if Drew had been rapped smartly twice across the back of the head with a red-hot poker. The deeper groove was from the second shot; that was the one that gave him the concussion. If this had been one of the doctor’s barrelhouse patients he would have stitched in a couple of dozen sutures, wrapped his head in several yards of gauze, and sent him home on a stretcher. As it was, he put in a call for an ambulance, which arrived soon after the clinician and his nurse had started to work on Amy, and Drew was taken, still unconscious, to the hospital in Bristol.

  He did not regain consciousness until that afternoon. Shortly before five oclock his eyelids fluttered, lifted, lowered, then lifted again; he looked at the nurse beside his bed and the gray plaster walls of the hospital room. For a moment he said nothing. He seemed quite calm. Then he said, “What hit me?”

  It was certainly the natural, indeed the expected thing to say. The laughter that followed whenever this was repeated around town was out of all proportion to the words themselves; ‘Where am I?’ would have served as well, would have provoked as much hilarity and as many digs in the ribs—considering where he was when he was shot. Drew was in the position of some favorite comedian whose appearance on the stage is greeted with uncontrollable laughter before he speaks or even grimaces, whose very picture on a billboard calls for smiles. The humor lay in the expectation of humor; they listened with their mouths all shaped for guffaws. Some, however, shook their heads with mock-serious regret: “All I got to say is he certainly missed a chance for a lovely death. I hope when my time comes I go like that.”

  Besides, it provided a sort of counterpoint to the outrage on Lamar Street. Try as they might they could find no humor in that occurrence, only horror. So they swung from topic to topic with the agility of trapeze artists. When they grew weary of brooding they could laugh, and when they grew weary of laughing they could brood: Bristol had not been so fortunate since 1911 when Hector Sturgis, son of old Mrs Sturgis, hung himself in his mother’s attic after his wife was found asphyxiated in a hotel room with a drummer. Gossip had a field day—a field week. By the end of that time, however, distortion had made its inroads; the smallest fact in either event was taken as a theme for variations, until finally by the end of the week the original themes had disappeared, as happens in certain stretches of Brahms. People no longer believed anything they heard or told. In each case they had killed it, talked it to death.

  Now all that remained to look forward to was the reading of Major Barcroft’s will, the announcement of the extent of his estate. There was considerable difference of opinion about this, mainly because of his banking out of town since 1928 when Harley Drew went to work at the Planters Bank. Estimates ran from half a million—the amount he started out with when his young wife’s father died—to three or even four millions, depending on whether you believed the rumors of loss (such as the one concerning the purchase of Reichsmarks after the war) or the rumors of stupendous coups and ‘straddles’ engineered by long-distance telephone across the board in Memphis. The latter were more widely believed, however, for the major had been a quiet one, never discussing his business transactions with anyone, and it was a general observation that men might be quiet about their successes, content to radiate a glow of satisfaction, but no man yet had managed to be quiet about his losses, if only for the sake of cursing aloud or unconvincing himself of his shortcomings. Exaggeration did its work here too: by the end of the week they were telling themselves that they had had a financial wizard among them. Meantime, waiting for the reading of the will, they told and retold the manner of his death and shuddered and re-shuddered at his daughter’s strange reaction.

  Some of it percolated up to the third-floor hospital room where Drew lay face-down on the iron cot while the two longitudinal wounds at the back of his head began to heal; primary intention was under way and there was a constant itching worse than pain—or so he thought now that the pain had abated. When he heard of Major Barcroft’s death, the morning of the funeral, his first reaction was grief (grief for himself) and regret that this death had not come a year and seven months sooner, any time before that final interview in early October of year-before-last when he flung ‘I wont marry you!’ back over his shoulder as he hurried past Amanda, down the steps and down Lamar Street, out of her life. She was downstairs now, his nurse informed him; the hall was full of women clutching flowers and crowding each other aside for a better view each time the door came open. Thus he was kept posted on her condition. Next morning she ate breakfast; that afternoon she asked what there was for supper—she seemed to be coming out of it; in fact the doctor had said she might be going home in a couple of days. The nurse told him also of the speculation as to the size of Major Barcroft’s estate, and Drew lay face-down feeling regret along with the itching at the shaven back of his head.

  But wait. Wait, he thought. All is not lost, he told himself like Milton’s fallen angel. Amy was lost—no doubt about that: but Amanda? no: he could make it up. If he knew women (And I know women, he thought) her love was stronger after the separation, for since when did mistreatment do anything to love but strengthen it where women were concerned? She was waiting for him now, downstairs—had been waiting ever since the night of the renouncement—and now that her father was out of the way she probably was wondering, even in her dazed condition, why Drew had not come running. Doubtless, though, she would hear about the shooting. That gave him pause. However, having paused, he moved on. Being shot in a lady’s bedroom by an irate husband was no serious drawback. He would work the old Cynara excuse: ‘Between her breast and mine fell your shadow’—something like that; ‘Between the something something and the wine’—he would look it up and quote it properly if it didnt turn out too randy. Thus he remembered his old resolve to be romantically bold but never brash, as in the very beginning he had said “I intend to see you,” remembering to add: “with your permission.” As far as the involvement with Amy went, he could say he was trying to drown his remorse with a gesture of despair, a sort of spiritual suicide, a flirting with death. Which was what it damned well was, he thought, feeling a tingling in his wounds.

  He was back in stride now and he figuratively rubbed his palms and chuckled from relief at having ended the three-day hiatus when he lay planless on the narrow cot without an aim in life, with only the pain and itching at the back of his head to occupy his mind, to turn it from consideration of his double failure and the bootless dozen precious years invested here in Bristol. He moved on, thinking rapidly, back in the old familiar groove, rehearsing the speech of reconciliation. ‘I couldnt pull you into poverty, I told you. But I see now I was wrong. Wrong, Amanda. Youre all there ever was or ever will be, and anything is better than being apart.’ He thought he might even kneel as he spoke; just as he said ‘Youre all there ever was’ he’d sink to his knees and hold his arms out. It couldnt be too maudlin, he decided, considering how much there was at stake. For the next two days he worked at it, expanding, revising, polishing. At what he judged appropriate points he jotted in stage directions, such as: Kneel; Hold out hands; Squeeze a tear if possible; Here a sob. This was to be his masterpiece, and his spirits rose in ratio to the estimates of Major Barcroft’s fortune.

  Amanda went home Saturday but Drew was kept in bed, chafing at the delay; he imagined young men hurrying by the hundreds to Lamar Street to avail themselves of all she had to offer. He staged quite a scene that night, demanding to be released tomorrow morning. The doctor was firm, however: Drew was past all danger as long as he was quiet, but any sort of blow on the back of the head might prove serious indeed, even fatal. “You think I care?” Drew cried. But he did care; he cared considerably. This sobered him. He got through Sunday, chafing. Then Monday when his second-shift nurse came on duty she was frowning.

  “Whats the matter?”

  “Oh that mean old man!”

  “What mean old man?”

  “That Major Barcroft. You k
now what he did?”

  “What?” Drew said, and felt a sinking at his heart.

  Then she told him. The whole town had been waiting for the reading of the will, but there turned out to be no will. Wills could be broken. And besides, there was no need for one—for when, with Amanda’s permission, they opened the safe in the major’s study (this was on the Monday morning after the Saturday she came home; they were searching for the will) they found in a drawer, the key to which he had carried in his bottom left vest pocket, four thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills and a deed to a quarter interest in a downtown office building. The forty crisp new greenbacks and the deed had a rubber band around them and a slip of paper tucked under it on top. Across this he had written in a neat, soldierly script with a hard-lead pencil: For Amanda. This is All. It was dated 11-11-39, six weeks after the first heart attack.

  They could not believe it. For the past week all the arguments had been as to whether there would be three or four millions, and by this time some were expecting five or six; they had been prepared to be surprised at how large a sum it was but they were unprepared for a surprise in this direction. Two of the men ran next door and put in a call for the major’s bank in Memphis. They were calling for Major Malcolm Barcroft’s daughter, his heir: what was the amount of the account? A hum came over the wire, the same hum Harley Drew had once identified with chuckling, except that perhaps this time it was—a ghostly chuckling—for then the banker’s voice, urbane and silky, came down the line. Major Barcroft no longer had an account; he had cleared it out seven months ago, at the time of the donation. For a moment they did not get the word, and then they did: Donation? What donation?

  Well, it was supposed to be a secret—he had given in the manner of a gentleman, without fanfare; but now that he was dead … And then they heard the worst. Something less than a year ago he had begun to liquidate his holdings, converting everything to cash. In the end it amounted to a little over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all that was left of the inherited half million; the rumor about the Reichsmarks was true, and there had been other investments as unwise. A check for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars was sent to endow a library of military history and tactics at the Tennessee school where he had been cadet captain fifty years ago; he had never been back, the major said in the letter inclosing the check, but he had always remembered his school years as the happiest of his life. This left four thousand, which he directed the bank to send him by registered mail, forty crisp new hundred-dollar bills. That closed out the account, and that was what his daughter got, four thousand dollars in cash and a quarter interest in the office building—the same one Henry Stubblefield owned part of; it would yield her a bit under two hundred dollars a month. For Amanda, he had written. This is All.