Love in a Dry Season

by Shelby Foote

  She read the war news only on Sundays now, and then only as a sort of memorial to her father. In early summer, a little over a month after the anniversary of the major’s death, the Russians were attacked; they joined the fighting and were overrun; German armor clanked across the steppes; thatch-roofed huts burned fiercely. Amanda hardly looked up from her book. Summer wore itself out, declined into fall; the nights were cooler now, and another anniversary of her meeting with Harley Drew went past. She read on. Then one morning in early December, a Sunday, she got up, put on her robe, and went downstairs for the paper. It was on the veranda, at the head of the steps with a bottle of milk beside it. She took them up and went back into the house, reading the headlines: RED ARMY LAUNCHES COUNTER-OFFENSIVE; JAP ENVOYS SEE HULL. As she came down the hall, hearing the coffee percolating in the kitchen, the thick inky-smelling center section of the paper slid out and fell to the floor, the Society section, and when she bent to pick it up she saw the photograph.

  A three-column cut of a wedding party, it obviously had been taken immediately after the ceremony, bride and groom flanked by the bride’s attendants whose painted mouths and eyes and nails stood out black against the newsprint. The bride, a large matronly woman with an unmistakable aura of wealth—diamonds on her hands, pearls at her throat—was looking not at the camera but at the groom; she watched him, fiercely possessive. The groom, who smiled directly into the lens, was Harley Drew.

  That afternoon—our time—the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, and now the women had cause to appreciate Amanda even more. The energy that had gone into making the brass lectern angel one of the prides of the Episcopal church was directed into other channels too; there were bandage-folding sessions and gatherings where they mended clothes for refugees and packed dusty books and magazines for shipment to the soldiers overseas. At first all the women were enthusiastic, but gradually this particular fervor waned, especially when the new air base was established north of Bristol, after which most of the women Amanda’s age (and older too: in fact the most active ones in this respect were crowding fifty) preferred to advance the war effort by entertaining the cadets, many of whom had nervous stomachs as well as rosy cheeks and wavy hair; ‘fly boys’ they called themselves, and afterwards, after Ploesti, Schweinfurt, and the Hump—after the roses had paled (or yellowed from atabrine) and the wavy hair had straightened (from lack of attention, or maybe just from fright)—they were to look back on these few weeks in Bristol as a sort of misty, all-providing second childhood in which no metal screamed at them nor flak bloomed blackly to the left and right, and their greatest worry was some crank instructor. Though Amanda did not attend the teas or supper dances staged to help the fliers past the rigors of war, she was always willing to make one among the bandage folders. Thus she was a godsend (they used that word, godsend) to the women responsible in turn for recruiting workers.

  They convened in the armory, vacant more than a year now since the Guard had mobilized. Drawn up to long tables made from sawhorses overlaid with planks, they performed intricate folding motions with their hands and thickened the air with chatter and cigarette smoke. This was Amanda’s first real contact with gossip as a participant, or at any rate a listener, rather than as a subject. She enjoyed it, the bright chattering voices, the odd stories about the secret triangular lives of people you saw every day on the street—that was what it mainly concerned: whose wife had been seen with whose husband the week before—and in time she even learned to add an occasional bit to the sibilant hum of the place. So that at last, toward the end of this first year of the war, those members of the Altar Guild who formerly had said to their husbands, ‘At least you can see she wants to be. You know?’ would come home from the bandage foldings and say without explanation or extenuation, without any marvel at all: “Amanda Barcroft was telling me today …”

  And yet her life was not really so very different. All this was merely extra, an entering wedge not even recognized as such. She went on with her reading, her trips to market, and her duties at the church. Nora—who, with three empty bedrooms in the house, still slept on the hard, drum-tight canvas cot in the kitchen; each time she moved it squeaked like a box full of frightened mice—continued to be her only real companion; they lived alone and there were never any visitors, white or black. Then something developed that changed everything. In late November (another anniversary) a contractor’s representative called on her and offered what she considered a large sum for the house and lot on Lamar Street. Her first reaction was to say what Bertha Tarfeller said in a similar situation some years back: ‘Oh I couldnt do that.’ But then she thought, Well: why not? and told him, “I shall have to speak to my attorney, Sir.” She talked that way now—bookish. Next morning she went to the office of the man who had handled her father’s legal affairs in the old days, Judge Nowell. He was dead now but his son was there, a rising politician, a leading light in the state legislature despite the handicap of a Harvard education.

  “Why, certainly, Miss Amanda,” he said, speaking across the polished top of his father’s walnut desk. He called her Miss but that was nothing; he was five years younger, and even people her own age had begun to call her that. She wore her Sunday dress and sat with her hands in her lap. “It will do you good to get away,” he told her. “We havent felt right anyhow—the town I mean—about you living there alone with tramps and millhands roaming past at all hours of the night. Certainly sell it.”

  So that evening when the contractor’s representative called again she said that she would sell. This was Monday; Nowell made the arrangements. Amanda moved out on Thursday, having made a selection of what furnishings she wanted, and the rest was sold at auction the next day by a man who drove down from Memphis with a little wooden hammer in his pocket. It lasted all day; half the women in Bristol were there, and even some of the men. Though this time they had not had to wait for a funeral to gain admission to the house, there was still that air of feverish haste, as of vandals engaged in the rifling of a tomb, and most of them continued to speak with their hands in front of their mouths. First they made tours of inspection, visiting all the rooms, including some they had never seen before. In the major’s study they found the map still on the wall, its pins showing the positions of the armies in early May of 1940 just before the ‘phony’ war erupted. They even climbed the dusty stairs to the attic where they once had told each other Florence was kept behind bars. The auction, which got under way at ten oclock and continued on past sundown, was held on the veranda to accommodate the crowd that overflowed the lawn and sidewalk in both directions down Lamar Street. The bidding was intense, for the auctioneer—a big, jolly-looking man with a ducktail haircut and a double-breasted vest—knew how to pit them one against another; quarrels were begun that day that lasted through the decade. They bought everything he offered, the heavy, overstuffed ball-and-claw furniture, the china and silver, the carpets and drapes, even the cut-glass chandeliers. It all went under the hammer.

  Over the weekend the house stood empty, gutted; someone even came at night and rooted out the shrubs and iris bulbs. Children threw rocks at the windows for the pleasure of hearing the crash and tinkle of glass, and wrote with chalk on the steps and doors the old four-letter Anglo-Saxon expletives. Sunday was cold and rainy. Early next morning the wreckers came with machines, like a tableau of some mechanistic future in which these, the only survivors after the Bomb, turn on the world with destruction. Pulling and prizing at the walls with ropes and crowbars, they razed the house in just four days. When the sound of the airhammers stopped and the dust had cleared, there was only the vacant lot strewed with rubble and marked in places by the paler scars of flower beds; the house had disappeared like the fulfillment of a prophecy out of Isaiah.

  For three days it stayed like that, like photographs of London during the blitz. Sunday was cold and rainy, as before—it was December now. Monday morning, even earlier than the wreckers had arrived, the contractor broke ground for the foundation of a new building. With
in six weeks it was completed, a modern structure with sharp, uncluttered lines and a cavernous mouth at one end to swallow automobiles as they rolled up the concrete ramp. The broad low façade of garish brick had a sign with foot-high letters slashed across it: MAXEY’S GARAGE, ONE STOP SERVICE. All that remained of what had been there in the major’s time was one of the four original oaks; the garage man built a circular seat around it and on fine days off-shift workers would sit there watching cars go by. The Barcroft oak, it was called, one of Bristol’s landmarks, even after most people no longer remembered how it got its name.

  There was so much else to talk about, especially now with the war moving toward a climax. And not only the war: the old topics still flourished too, sometimes with the same characters, as long as they supplied food for conversation. Amy and Jeff Carruthers for instance. Ever since they moved away Bristol had been hearing various things from various sunny corners of the nation—Florida (something about a thrown drink in a Miami nightclub; but they never got the straight of that, neither who had thrown it nor even whom it was thrown at) and Southern California (this in a movie magazine: ‘What young male lead is head-over-heels about what tobacco heiress?’ and several pages further on, a photograph with the caption: Elsa Maxwell with Jeff and Amy Carruthers, the charming Carolinians (he is blind). That’s Gary Cooper in the background. Paulette Goddard is dancing with her Buzz) and Santa Fe. Santa Fe was where the fullest report came from—too full in fact, full of exaggeration and contradiction, for by then the legend had begun to acquire a somewhat mythic character. They had bought a house out there, a two-story adobe affair with Mission furniture, Indian rugs, and idols squatting in niches. You could park a car in the living-room fireplace and there were a dozen bedrooms, most of them continuously occupied according to the report; people dropped in from everywhere, the international set, kept on this side of the water by the war. Then followed the same involvement—Amy must have gotten bored again. This time it was a real cowboy, a wrangler off a ranch, not one of the imitation Arkansas varieties, and this time there was shooting too (but no bloodshed; the cowboy lost no blood as Drew had done; all he lost was one heel from a pair of forty-dollar boots, shot clean away) and Jeff and Amy sold the house and moved on: to South America, the report said hazily. In fact there was a good deal that was hazy—one version even said Amy did the shooting. When people in Bristol heard this last they began to understand that they might have been mistaken as to the direction in which Jeff’s jealousy had been pointed down at Briartree. It opened new fields for speculation.

  But not for Amanda, who listened and put it out of her mind. She preferred the stories she found between the covers of books; for her the Carruthers couple were just two people who shot Harley Drew, and that was that. Taking a few pieces of furniture—her bed and two silk-shaded lamps, the Morris chair and a rosewood chifforobe—she engaged a room on the top floor of the new hotel, a towering eight-story building twice as tall as any other in Bristol, where she had the steel-and-plastic sticks of furniture removed and replaced them with the things she brought from Lamar Street. Now that she had no household cares or marketing trips to distract her, reading took up more of her time than ever. She had no responsibilities, no ties: not even Nora, whom she had presented with a check for one hundred dollars as severance pay. This was probably the most expansive free gesture any Barcroft ever made, not excluding the major’s bequest to the Tennessee school; for that had not been exactly open-handed—he was more or less maneuvered into that.

  She liked it there, the breath-taking elevator rides, the attentive desk clerk with his waxed mustache, the bustling transients, the long dim carpeted corridors with so many doors and all kinds of secret exciting things going on behind them, like the night a man and his wife in the adjoining room called each other such vile names and finally, when dawn came through, began to throw things at each other; Amanda hugged her pillow and listened and regretted it when someone down the hall complained and the night clerk brought a policeman and made them quit. There were other incidents, less violent but no less interesting, like the businessmen in the dining room, leaning their heads together and whispering, or the high school couples coming home from the malt shop, holding hands—they also leaned their heads together and whispered. Soon she began to sit for a while in the lobby before going out or after coming in. She liked it there. Sometimes she had little exchanges, almost conversations, with transients who asked for advice about restaurants and picture shows and what there was to ‘do,’ even the traveling men (‘drummers’ in the old days, ‘salesmen’ and ‘representatives’ now, though in either case Amanda knew a girl was ruined if she went out with them) who thanked her and, strangely enough, were always civil. Many of them reminded her of Harley, smelling like him of bay rum and tobacco and paying a great deal of attention to the grooming of their fingernails and hair. Thus gradually Amanda was drawn away from her reading and into the orbit of the day-to-day life of Bristol; she too became a watcher.

  Best of all she liked the closing hour of every day, when she sat in the Morris chair at her high window and saw the town spread out beneath, with people moving along its checkerboard pattern on the way from work. She sat there while the light failed, watching them; she identified their small, foreshortened figures one by one, gave each its name, recalled its history, and traced its path along the sidewalk to its home. It was as if, brooding there like a gargoyle, her image had been imprinted on the public retina so long that now, at last, she had been absorbed by it, had now herself become a part of the enormous eye, and was looking out as all those others had done.

  She also took an interest in her food. Seated in the glass-and-marble, somewhat reverberant dining room, she would study the menu carefully and with much deliberation while the waitress stood by, pad and pencil poised; it was always thus, but the waitresses had become so accustomed to it that they did not even get impatient any more. She always ordered the full table d’hôte, and as a result she had begun to put on weight—she was not willowy now; she was almost plump, and when her gray, lace-appointed dresses no longer fitted her, she replaced them with new, tailored ones in softer grays and browns. They became her. “My, Miss Amanda,” the women said at Altar Guild and at the bandage foldings. “Youre really looking well these days.” And though at first she was flustered by the compliments, later she would preen herself a bit while thanking them and settle her pince-nez more firmly. The glasses were a recent addition, a result of eyestrain; they were rimless, like her father’s, and like him she wore them with a fine gold chain that drooped in a cobwebby glistening parabola to a button at her bosom. Taken in conjunction with the gray that had begun to streak her hair, they caused people to remark how much she had come to resemble Major Barcroft.

  Half an hour before time for the evening meal she would come down in the elevator and claim a seat in the lobby near the dining-room doors in order to be among the first to enter when dinner was announced. In this way, sitting there with time on her hands, she reacquired her sister’s newspaper habit; she felt that she could afford it now that her income had been boosted by the sale of the house on Lamar Street. Every evening, between six-thirty and seven, she sat there with the Memphis paper spread comfortably in her lap. From time to time other hotel residents would arrive and speak to her, wishing her good evening. She would nod decorously, the pince-nez glinting, and return to her paper. In the Society section she read frequent notes that told of the comings and goings of Harley Drew.

  He had married well. His wife, the widow of a cosmetics manufacturer and twelve years older than Drew, had brought him not only wealth but also high social position, and now—though his wife, they said, kept a grip on the purse strings and held him strictly in line—he bloomed exactly as he had said he would do when money came his way. The social notes referred to him as ‘sportsman, socialite and cotton broker,’ and there were photographs of him at all the best affairs. In the last summer of the war, for instance, Amanda saw a three-column cut that show
ed him surrounded by debutantes, leading the grand march at the annual cotillion. He wore the uniform of a colonel in the Tennessee Home Guard.