by Shelby Foote
They made the trip in April and she moved according to plan. “How lost, how lonely,” she said. And Jeff was taken in, even though he saw through it; she had calculated well. They returned in July to supervise the final stages of restoration, and now they were living there, the house in all its new glory surpassing the old. She was the mistress, the chatelaine—‘Old Miss’: successor to those other women, dead a generation now, who ran this house (and others like it, up and down the lake) with efficiency at hand like a muleskinner’s whip, who wore clothes that gave inch for inch as much covering as armor and yet were able, laced and stayed as they were, not only to be willowy and tender but also to bear large numbers of children and raise them according to a formula whereby life was simple because indecision did not cloud it. Amy was mistress and Jeff was master—‘Mars Jeff’ he would have been called, back in the days of the men he superseded, men who settled the land at the time of Dancing Rabbit and worked it and built the houses scattered along the cypress-screened shores of Lake Jordan, living their lives with a singleness of purpose, save for the temporary distractions of poker and hunting and whiskey, like priests whose cult was cotton. The house was neither the oldest nor the largest, but it was the one in best condition now. It was the grandest. Carruthers money, personified by the architect, the landscape gardener, the Carolina servants, had made it the showplace of the lake.
Soon they joined the Bristol Country Club, where they made one among the couples at the regular weekend dances. Jeff had bridled against joining; he wanted no part of it, either ‘back home’ (meaning Carolina) or here in the Delta. But Amy, turning on him, flung out in anger: “After all I gave up for you—”
“For me!” He pursed his small fat mouth.
“—Coming down to this God-forsaken back end of the country, this nowhere …”
“For me! And what did I give up for you?”
They paused. Blind, he glared at her and she drew back. He said coldly, “Where would I be now and what would I be doing if you hadnt been cavorting on the dance floor with that Perkins?”
“I told you to look out,” she muttered defensively. “I said that bus was coming round the curve.” She shouted, attempting to regain the offensive: “But no, oh no; you had to—” But he cut her off.
“Me!” he cried. “For me!”
They joined, however. As always, Amy had her way while seeming to yield. “All right: have it your way. Dont we always?”
Saturday and Sunday nights the long gray car would be parked among Fords and Chevrolets, as if it had littered or spawned on the gravel quay beside the club. Inside, the five-man Negro band pumped jazz—Button Up Your Overcoat and I’ll Get By and That’s My Weakness Now, interspersed with numbers that had been living before and would be living after: San and Tiger Rag and High Society—while the planters and bankers, the doctors and lawyers, the cotton men and merchants made a show of accompanying each other’s wives through the intricacies of the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Barney Google, or else backed off and watched one of the women take a solo break, improvising, bobbing and weaving, wetting her thumbs and rolling her eyes, ritualistic, clinging desperately to the tail end of the jazz age—so desperately, so frantically indeed, that a person looking back upon that time might almost believe they had foreseen the depression and Roosevelt and another war and were dancing thus, Cassandra-like, in a frenzy of despair.
Jeff and Amy were part of this, though never in the sense that the natives were. They were not indigenous: they were outlanders, ‘foreigners,’ distinguished by a sort of upcountry cosmopolitan glaze which permitted them to mingle but not merge. Even their drinking habits set them apart. Deltans drank only corn and Coca-Cola; gin was perfume, scotch had a burnt-stick taste. They would watch with wry expressions while Amy blended her weird concoctions, pink ladies and Collinses and whiskey sours, and those who tried one, finally persuaded, would sip and shudder and set the glass aside: “Thanks”—mildly outraged, smirking—“I’ll stick to burrbon.”
There were other differences. Jeff’s blindness, for instance, was an awkward thing to be around. He would turn his eyes from speaker to speaker, twitching his absurdly small, fat mouth; then suddenly he would retreat into himself, almost as if he had thrown a switch or had sound-proof flaps on his ears like a bat, and the voices would be left addressing emptiness; they would trail off and the people would look at one another, embarrassed, ill at ease. There was also that aura of money, of gilt-edged stocks and expensive prep and boarding schools; there were the various barriers which separate the well-off from the rich and the rich from the very rich. Though these were never forgotten, they were sometimes ignored. Given enough whiskey, people sometimes managed to say We, including Jeff and Amy, without self-consciousness. Whatever camaraderie was possible was enjoyed.
This was especially true at the Briartree parties. Within a month of the restoration they supplied the highlight of every Delta season. A glance through the files of the Bristol Clarion would show each of them occupying more Society space than any other two functions, not excepting the Christmas cotillion or the Easter Revellers dance: Mr and Mrs Jefferson T. Carruthers entertained at “Briartree,” their lovely Lake Jordan plantation home, last Tuesday evening, and so on for two galleys, concluding with the guest list, which ran as long again, a sort of roll-call of the elite. The musicians, the caterers, the decorators, all came up from New Orleans or down from Memphis. Whiskey and gin and brandy were racked inexhaustibly on the sideboard and on occasional tables; the lawn was hung with Japanese lanterns, twinkling above the guests and caterer’s men. Jeff and Amy wore formal attire, as indeed about half their guests did, Jeff posing in the entrance hall (where Bertha Tarfeller had turned on her mother, forty years ago) beside a long refectory table with two brass lamps, one hand thumb-deep in his jacket pocket, the manicured thumbnail making a pink glister against the ‘midnight’ blue, and Amy moving among her guests, passing from group to group, never pausing at any one group for long at a time. This was what she had wanted, and now she had it.
Yet it had already begun to pall before the end of the year. The trouble was the people, she told herself. The women were vacuous, flighty, really absurd. And the men: the men were boring. They were planters—or they imitated planters, which was worse—too bluff, too hale, too muscular, too sunburnt, talking cotton and niggers, niggers and cotton, as vacuous as the women. In her boredom Amy began to think that she had outgeneraled herself, maneuvering Jeff into coming down here to live. If she could have seen a bit into the future, however, she might have taken heart. Someone who would change all this was arriving even now.
3. Harley Drew
He was a tall slim young man in his middle thirties, with a red face and a straw-colored mustache, ‘buyer’ for a St Louis cotton trust. Not that he actually bought anything: they just called him that. He had pale, light blue, depthless eyes and a prominent jaw and his hair was parted carefully in the middle to show a line of scalp as neat and precise as if it had been run with a transit. In strong sunlight his eyebrows and lashes were invisible, which gave him a rather blank expression, like that of a face etched on a billiard ball, but in shadow they showed white and distinguished against his ruddy complexion. In rural communities of the cotton country where his business now for the first time took him, wearing urban-cut imitation tweed in contrast to the villatic duck and seersucker of the men with whom he dealt, Drew stood out—like the oldtime professional gamblers in their flowing broadcloth and tall hats, their sideburns and heavy watch chains, their aura of Chance—with an emphasized smartness which the men might view askance but which their women were apt to call romantic.
He came to Bristol in early November of 1928. It was a good crop year, following the flood which in turn had followed seasons of postwar panic when the price had fluctuated from high to low, ranging the scale like a dizzy soprano; but now it was leveling off, his employers told him, speaking with that particularly hard-headed optimism of money men. He was scheduled to b
e in town three days, going from door to door along the block of one-story office buildings known as Cotton Row, sitting for an hour or two in each, talking crops and the market, especially the market, always with a suggestion of inside information in the tone of his voice and the deepness of his reticence—especially the reticence. There was no real business to attend to, no orders for him to solicit or even confirm: his job was to lend a personal touch to contracts already closed. In a trade which considered the warm handshake as integral a part of a transaction as the dotted line, Drew supplied the handshake, the vital oil for the smaller gears of the big machine. The fact that clients viewed him a bit askance was to his credit: the company wanted him that way, remote and rather mysterious, representative of the twilight world of finance, an emissary of power, as different from the run of men as if he had been an agent from Mars or heaven or even hell. Personable, urbane, with his city tweeds, his removed and somewhat condescending affability, he had been selected for the job. The natural friendliness behind the sheen suggested that behind the façade of high finance the company also had a heart of gold—as indeed it had, though in another sense.
However, for all his natural manner, he had not come by it naturally. The war gave him his chance, as it gave so many others, though it was to his credit that he recognized and took it. Drafted in Youngstown, Ohio, where he had clerked in a downtown shoe store (—that at least had been done on his own; he had refused to follow his father and brothers into the steel-mill labor gang) he went overseas with an early contingent, a corporal, and finished the war with a DSC and a commission. He spent two years in Europe after the finish: six frost-bitten months fighting the Bolsheviki, six months getting over it, and a year with the army of occupation back in Germany, during which he experienced for the first time the leisured life and the social distinction due a handsome and decorated officer of a victorious army. Then he came home for discharge. In a ten-day poker game on the ship he won eight thousand dollars. So when he was mustered out he took a three-year vacation—“to look round,” he said, for he had no real plan. There was only one thing of which he was completely certain, and this was that he was not going back to the shoe store in Ohio.
As it turned out, he was not going back to Ohio at all. He spent his first thousand dollars on clothes and another five hundred on accessories; the rest he planned to spread over the three-year ‘look round.’ He even drew up a tentative budget, a future expense account—at least he began it. But he had not gone far, the pencil poised above the pad, before he discovered that his knowledge of the life he was about to lead was too limited for him even to estimate its cost; so he gave that up and satisfied himself with a resolve to watch his pennies. In point of fact it proved less expensive than he had imagined. Skimped breakfasts and counter lunches made dinners in elegant surroundings possible at a cost not much higher than for an average three meals. Two days of walking, though hard on shoe leather, enabled him to take a cab on the third and flattened his wallet little more than three days of riding the bus or elevated. He was learning; this was all preparatory, though he could not have said just what it was preparatory to.
After a year in New York, mingling with glittery women and starch-bosomed men in theater lobbies and midtown restaurants—always as an observer, never as a participant in any real meaning of the word; if they so much as looked in his direction (at first at least) he turned away with a start, like a peeping tom detected—he began to write to army friends. He had an address book in which he had them listed more or less in order of eligibility, with a complicated scoring system of dots and circles and stars. And when their replies suggested that he “come see us,” he would pack his thousand-dollar wardrobe in his expensive pigskin luggage and go visiting.
Now that he saw them at close quarters, the ensconced ones he envied, rather than from the periphery of their circles in public places, he admired them more extravagantly than ever: not for their personalities or their ‘wit’ or their general charm, but simply for the life they led. Now that he had seen them in their informality, in their off-hours so to speak, out of the public glare, he believed that he could lead the same life even better; certainly he could lead it with more appreciation of its satisfactions, since he had another life to compare it to. Mainly, though, he watched without conjecture; he watched and imitated, cultivating their air of boredom and disdain in the face of what was really the wildest excitement. He did well at it. Sooner or later, however, in conversation with them there arose the question he had come to fear; they wanted to know what he ‘did.’ In time he learned to avoid the question, to break off the exchange when he felt the question about to loom—he became expert at detecting this—or to sidestep it with a laugh. After all, he could not tell them the truth; he could not say, “I float.” But he knew he would have to find a way to answer it before he could feel at home among them.
As a house guest in St Louis he got a chance. His host, a cotton broker whose son had been killed in Drew’s platoon, offered him a job—something none of them had done before. Drew thanked him and said he would consider it. Then he put it out of his mind and moved on, continuing the round of visits. This was toward the close of the third year; he was approaching the postgraduate phase, still without any definite plan, and it was beginning to get a little stale. Six months later, while he was on a goose hunt up in Canada, his mail caught up with him. Among the letters—invitations in answer to notes he had written, a few old bills, and such—was a month-old bank statement showing a balance of two hundred and eleven dollars. He threw the mail into the campfire, bank statement, bills, invitations and all, and when he got back to town he wrote to the cotton broker. Then, without delaying for an answer, he took the first train for St Louis.
They gave him a desk at the home office and a list of reference books. He spent his office hours checking invoices and in his spare time he studied the books, learning the business. Before long he could quote prices on the New Orleans exchange, from the 190 record high of September, 1864, to the 4¾ record low of November, 1898. He became familiar with the life cycle of the boll weevil and read of Nicholas Biddle’s financial maneuvers with an excitement he had not known since the paperback Deadwood Dicks and Nick Carters of his Middle Western boyhood. This took up most of his time, yet the other was not altogether abandoned. He stayed in touch with highlife mainly through once-a-week dinners with his employer, an old man with trembling hands and a damp, rosy mouth that was shaped like a kiss.
Soon, though, he began to dread these evenings. Invariably they progressed toward a point at which his host would lead him apart, usually into his study, where he would mix drinks and set out Havanas and question Drew about his son and the war. Drew barely remembered the boy; he had come as a replacement, terribly frightened, had lasted less than a week before being sent back to the aid station with a bullet wound in his foot—self-inflicted, the medics said—and had died there of gangrene.
“Tell about Leo,” his host would say, watching him over the rim of his drink and nursing the lengthening ash of his cigar.
“Well: he joined us in October, as you know …”
And as he told it, attributing to the boy every heroism that had been credited to a soldier in his battalion, Drew would watch his employer’s eyes mist over, the trembling in his hands grow worse; the drink would slosh, the ashes spill, and Drew would continue: “One time down around Perle Capelle …” His voice was like a phonograph and he was listening too, surprised at what came out, thinking behind the drone of talk, telling himself that he was no scoundrel, that the old man was asking to be lied to, and the end was the justification of the means. But no matter how he lied, misattributed and finally invented, the father was insatiable. Drew was his protégé, and next week he would be led apart, the drinks mixed, cigars lighted, and: “Tell about Leo,” his host would say, already trembling.
When he had been at the desk for a little more than a year they sent him out on the road. After two seasons in the Texas area, they called him bac
k to the home office and told him he had passed—the Texans had liked him; his apprenticeship was over, and now he was to receive his reward. They sent him to the Yazoo-Mississippi delta, land of the long staple and big money. Coming south out of Memphis, first past the Chickasaw Bluffs and then through a region of broad flat fields, the air scented and hazed with wood-smoke, Drew watched the big, remote plantation houses slide past the daycoach window like a magic lantern show of baronial splendor. Three years of work had made him understand that even with the best of luck, the greatest ability, he would get what he wanted only after years of effort, protégé or not. But he had kept his goal in mind; he had not lost his eye for the main chance.
“Bristol!” the conductor cried, coming straddle-legged down the aisle, swinging his hands from seat to seat and balancing like a tightwire artist to counteract the buck and sway of the wheels on the old roadbed. The train took just under seven hours to make the hundred and fifty miles—which was why it was called the Cannonball, in inverse ratio to the compliment implied. Drew took his bag from the overhead rack. “Bristol!” the conductor cried again, jaws apart, as he passed through the windowed door toward the Jim Crow car ahead; “All out for—” and the door slammed shut behind him.