by Shelby Foote
“No sir,” the Negro said, unsmiling.
Within ten minutes there came a quiet scratching at the door, as if by claws. “It’s not locked,” he called, and a girl came in—his first since Memphis, almost a week ago. Drew lay with his hands behind his head. She was young, thick-bodied, and wore no makeup. “How much?” he said.
“Three dollars.”
“I’ll give you two.” She looked at him for a moment, then turned to go. “O.K.” he said. “Two-fifty.”
She began to unhook her placket. “You drive a hard bargain, honey.” She sat beside him on the bed, wearing stockings and brassiere. Her flanks were hard as a wrestler’s but quite smooth, as if the hair had been sandpapered out. “My name’s Alma,” she said; “I guess you better pay me now. It’s the rule.” And soon afterward: “Aready? Gee, honey, you were really badoff, werent you?” She still wore the brassiere; he had asked her to take it off, but when she made no move to comply he had not insisted. It turned out she was from Arkansas, directly across the river, and the nails on her toes were like little oyster shells. That came from going barefoot all through childhood.
On the fifth night, Thursday, Amanda let him walk to the door with her, but she slipped quickly through the doorway. The following night he took her arm going up the steps and did not release it while they crossed the porch; she was captive and he kissed her. She went rigid with fear of so many things she had never known before—the sudden heady odor of bay rum and tobacco, the harsh, man-smelling tweed as coarse as sackcloth, the thighs against her thighs and the hand at the small of her back, the pliant, nuzzling mustache—then turned with a spasmodic gesture, panting, and hurried into the house, running with her hands behind her, slightly raised, palms outward, as if in flight before fury. The screen door shut with a sharp slap, abrupt against the silence.
For a moment after she had broken away and left him standing alone on the veranda, Drew thought: I overplayed it. But the next night (it was Saturday again, still balmy; the weather had held) she met him as usual, and when they returned from their walk she took his hand and led him up the steps. At first he thought she was going to take him into the house; he was even about to begin rehearsing what he would say to Major Barcroft. Then she stopped beside the door, her back to the wall. This time, when he kissed her, Amanda put her hands on his shoulders and pressed herself against him with a shudder. Drew was surprised at her reaction, too surprised to speak, but he soon recovered himself and told her he loved her; he told her he always would. “I love you, Harley,” she said, murmuring, and when he asked her to marry him she held him closer and said she would. She said it softly, with her lips against his cheek. “But you must speak to papa,” she said.
Bells were tolling when he woke. Sabbath, musical, serene, they called the worshipers churchward. By crossing to the window he would be able to see them, townspeople dressed in Sunday finery, strolling with a deliberate and somewhat pompous sanctity along the Bristol street, clutching their hymnals and mite boxes. But he did not move; he lay in bed, listening. After a while the bells died away, reverberant and forlorn on the final strokes, and he heard a near-by congregation singing There Is a Fountain—they were Methodists. The Episcopalians were two blocks farther east, and he imagined Amanda among them, kneeling in the Barcroft pew, thinking of him as she murmured the responses. He remembered that Sunday morning a week ago when he walked up and down among the pigeons on the sidewalk opposite the church, waiting for the service to end so that he could overtake and walk home with her, pretending to admire the artificial roses on her hat and talking romantic nonsense like a scoundrel in a book.
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.
The organ pealed; the voices rose, gathering strength.
Lose all their guilty stains.
Lose all their guilty stains.
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.
Looking back over the past week, he believed he had done well: had moved with proper caution through the early stages of the courtship, never forgetting to be bold, yet always restraining impulses which might have spoiled his chances: had struck hard and swift when the time was ripe, giving an impression of a young man no longer able to contain his feelings. Now that much was done, and well done. There remained only the formality of an interview with the father, the drawing up of the articles of surrender, the scene in which he would offer his hand and pledge his heart and declare himself ready to devote his life to the happiness of the daughter. Amanda had told him to come to the house at four oclock; he would find the major waiting in his study. She had arranged it, with God only knew what fears, what palpitations.
Lying in the transient-grimed hotel room, as he had done the previous Sunday when he came directly from the telegraph office to map his campaign—the wire itself had been an opening gun, committing his forces—Drew began to make plans for the coming interview. Yet the more he tried to concentrate, the more his mind was distracted, crowded with unwanted memories of his boyhood, of the house in the workers’ district of Youngstown. When steel was being poured the night sky was a low red dome, like the vault of hell, and workers coming off shift moved in lockstep, their faces slack-jawed, empty, like the faces of the damned. His father’s name was Josef Drubashevski. He was short and dark and his head was round as a pot and flat on top. His eyes were a very pale blue, almost colorless, and his arms were long and hairy. Sundays he wore candy-striped shirts with sleeve garters; he played the concertina and sang in Polish, and when he had had enough to drink he would dance the trepak, banging the floor with his heels, “Hi! Hi!” His sons resembled him, all but Charles: Charles was the youngest and he took after his mother’s people, who were tall and fair and mostly Scandinavian. Five lunch boxes sat on a shelf in the kitchen, his father’s and four brothers’, and someday there would be six, including his own.
But one night—he was fourteen and in the seventh grade, which was already one year longer than any of his brothers had stayed in school—he woke and heard his father and mother talking. “Not this one, Joe,” his mother was saying. He slept on a cot in their room, in a far corner. “You took the others; that was all right. But not this one, Joe. Not the baby.”
“Baby?” his father said. “That boy’s a man: almost a man. I tell you, woman, a man ought to do a man’s work.” He turned over and the bedsprings groaned. It was late; he wanted to sleep.
But the mother persisted. “There’s other men beside steel men, hunkies. You think thats all there is in this whole creation? Leave me to do with this one. Just this one, Joe. Youll see.”
“Ah, woman,” his father said, and he believed that was all; his father had won.
Then it was June, the school year over, and he went to work in the mill as a puddler’s boy. That was that, he thought each night when he put his lunch box on the shelf beside the other five. They were made of black tin, all alike, with rounded lids like traveling hutches for lap dogs.
In September, however, he found that he had underestimated his mother. When he came home from work on the Saturday before the Monday school was to start, he found her waiting for him, dressed in her best. She took him to town and they spent his paycheck on clothes and tablets and pencils. He returned to his studies on Monday and continued through high school, working summers in the mill. By commencement he had risen to timekeeper, a white collar job, which caused his father to view him as an apostate. Then he quit. He got himself a job downtown, clerking in a shoe store, and went to night school, intending to become a CPA; that was his goal. He would whisper the words at night in bed: “Charles Drubashevski, Certified Public Accountant.”
Finally he took a room in a boarding house—to be near his work, he said. But he did not fool his brothers, who watched him with hostile eyes; it was the Joseph story all over again, though there was no coat
of many colors and he was far from being his father’s favorite. He didnt even fool his mother, in the end; for he visited home less and less frequently, and at last her eyes were hostile too. Then the war came and he returned—but not to Youngstown—an officer, decorated. He took the three-year ‘look round’ and the job with the St Louis cotton trust and now he was in Bristol, Mississippi, lying on the hotel bed and looking up at the water-marked ceiling, planning (or trying to plan) what he would say to the major, Amanda’s father.
It was momentous—he realized that now. Previously he had not given the interview much thought, beyond considering that parents usually were pleased with an offer that would relieve them of a daughter past her marriageable prime. It was a step he would take when he reached it, he had told himself. But now, with the scene only a few hours away, he began to see it as something more serious. Failure here, he suddenly realized, could be as ruinous as anywhere along the line. He remembered the major as he had been that one time in the office on Cotton Row, his high forehead with its crown of iron-gray hair, his stern manner at once abrupt and courteous, distant and comprehensive, with that glinting pince-nez clamped between his face and the world. Drew wondered if his tactics had been faulty. He began to think he should have gone to work on the major first. Phase Two, perhaps, should have been Phase One.
At two oclock, when he went down to lunch, the dining room was still crowded with Sunday guests. He sat a long time over his food, then ordered a second cup of coffee and sat still longer over that. At three-thirty, the room empty, the waiter standing by with an air of injured but patient martyrdom, a napkin crumpled in his fist—“More water?” he kept saying, chinking the ice in the pitcher—Drew paid the check and left. All this time he grew more and more worried about the coming interview, rehearsing possible checks the major might throw in his direction. His fears were no less present for being formless. By the time he approached the house on Lamar Street he was thoroughly frightened, even demoralized; but he found two consolations. First, like a general deploying for a final battle to conclude a successful campaign, he reminded himself of recent victories, each of them surely more difficult than the engagement now at hand. Second, like a cowardly boxer entering the ring to face a particularly savage opponent, he fixed his mind on the million-dollar purse.
As he went up the steps the door opened suddenly and a man in a belted jacket came out of the house, carrying a small black satchel. This was Dr Clinton; he had paid his monthly visit to Florence and the major. He nodded briskly to Drew at the top of the steps, obviously surprised to see at the Barcrofts’ a visitor who brought neither the ministrations of medicine nor of religion. Drew went to the door, where Amanda stood waiting for him. She seemed even paler than usual. Thinking perhaps there had been a scene, he wanted to take time to question her, to discover how much she had told her father and what he had said in reply when she arranged the interview. Perhaps it could be postponed. But she gave him no time for that; she led him straight down the high, dusky hall toward the door of the major’s study. Like some general whose Intelligence section has been shot from under him, Drew was going into battle blind, unbriefed. Just short of the door, however, Amanda paused and told him in a low voice that she would meet him at the regular time that evening, in front of the house. Then she turned and left him. It was as if she had vanished suddenly and forever; he was alone.
He rapped lightly. There was no answer. Knuckles poised, he was about to rap again: “Come in,” a voice said, and he opened the door.
The small back downstairs room, which the major called his office, was furnished with a walnut rolltop desk duplicating the one on Cotton Row, a squat green steel safe with a scroll design on its door, a button-studded horsehide couch built high at one end, with ball-and-claw legs, and a swivel chair. A leather-spined Plutarch with marbled boards lay open on the desk, an ivory letter opener resting crosswise on it. A fire had been laid but not lighted in the grate, and a scuttle of coal sat beside it; the individual lumps, all of about the size of a fist, had been wrapped in newspaper so as not to soil the hands. The walls were bare except for a space directly above the desk, where two sheathed sabers were crossed below a fading snapshot of a slim young man in wrinkled khaki (Drew recognized the uniform from having seen it reproduced in magazines and motion pictures; it was like the one worn by the Rough Riders) with a dusty bandanna neckerchief, canvas leggings, a wide-brimmed campaign hat, and captain’s bars. Another photograph was on the desk. It showed, full length in a silver frame, a young woman dressed in the style of thirty years ago, including a picture hat; both hands were on the knob of a shot-silk parasol, and her head was too large for her shoulders. Major Barcroft sat in the chair, tipped slightly back. His feet, in snub black hightop shoes with creases below the ankles and little hooks instead of eyes for the laces, were planted flat and parallel on the floor, like shoes beneath cots in a barracks when the troops are out for drill.
He did not rise for greeting; he sat with his head held back, looking up at the tall visitor. His pince-nez, opaque with highlight, flashed like a drawn blade. “Have a seat, young man,” he said at last. The couch yielded unexpectedly with Drew’s weight, and about his thighs there rose a musty, somehow faintly ammoniac odor of straw and horsehide. “My daughter has told me you want to see me. I want you to say what you have come to say.”
Drew faltered, perhaps for the first time in his adult life. As the major watched him from behind the glinting nippers, the stiff, iron-gray hair standing above the pale forehead, Drew felt something akin to panic. He had thought that once he began to speak, his confidence would return. But it did not; his dismay grew as he spoke. For one thing, he had trouble with Sir. It came naturally to these people—they used it to punctuate and shape their sentences; it lent their most casual remarks a dignity out of all proportion to what was actually communicated. But when Drew used it he felt that it made him sound subservient, like a man making application for a job he knew he lacked the qualifications to fill. Then, while he was speaking (his mind worked on two levels; he was thinking behind the sound of his words) he remembered that Amanda had said she would meet him that evening in front of the house, and it seemed to him, interpreting this, that he had already received her father’s answer. Yet he went on with it, hesitating and stammering like a schoolboy caught with a crib or a gambler with six cards, and as he talked the thought occurred to him that perhaps this was best: perhaps it was best to falter, to be at a loss for words at such a time. He remembered such scenes in the theater; the young man had bumbled and gawked and perspired, and the audience had understood and even sympathized. A measure of confidence began to edge into his manner. “I love Amanda very much,” he said in conclusion.
The major looked at him, testing the point of the letter opener against the ball of his thumb. The only sign of emotion was a slight expansion and contraction of his nostrils, which caused them to be ringed with white. Suddenly Drew knew he had failed; he knew he was being repulsed. If there had ever been any doubt about the outcome of the interview, that doubt was gone. Then Major Barcroft said softly, watching him: “What color are her eyes?”
“Sir?” Drew said. While the major looked at him without repeating the question, he considered whether to try to bluff his way through. Color? What color were they? A sort of muddy blue, he thought; but he could not say that. He did not know.
Major Barcroft, having waited, rose. He did not say anything; he just stood there, in an obvious pose of dismissal, and did not offer to see the young man to the door.
Amanda was nowhere in sight. As Drew passed down the hall, wondering if he was the first man ever to have his suit rejected—ostensibly, at any rate—because he could not remember the true color of his intended’s eyes, he became aware of a sharp hissing sound being repeated insistently, like an intermittent leak of gas: “Sst! Sst!” Then he saw at the end of the hall, to the left of the entrance, a door ajar about three inches and a face peering through the gap. It was a face he had never se
en, a woman’s face, with flesh the color of putty before it dries and two rigid curves of hair whose points sprang forward toward the corners of her mouth, clamping the upper two-thirds of her face like a pair of parentheses. She made a beckoning gesture with one hand, the forefinger crooked: “Sst! Sst!” and he saw that she wore a cretonne wrapper patterned violently with red and purple flowers. The crazy sister! he thought. She broke out of the attic!
He positively considered making a run for it. However, he controlled his fear and went toward her, holding his hat gingerly like a shield, on guard against a sudden rush—for all he knew, she might be holding a knife or even a hatchet in the hidden hand, waiting for a chance to strike. When she spoke, leaning forward so that only her mouth and nose, half of each eye and her bangs were visible through the aperture, her voice was high and quavery, with a creak like a hinge grown rusty from disuse. But the words were clear enough. “Youre Amanda’s young man,” she said. Her face was quite close; he could see the pores of her skin. She spoke harshly, hurriedly, as if in fear that someone would discover and interrupt them, perhaps do them harm. “Take her away! Take her out of this terrible house!”
Startled by her violence, Drew recoiled and rushed for the door. He was no coward—the DSC had been earned. But this was outside all his experience or expectation; it was like being in touch with the occult. Besides, he was already unnerved by his encounter with the major. He took the steps two at a time, not bothering to think that Amanda might be watching from an upstairs window.
But on his way to the hotel, recovering from his fright, he thought about what Florence had said. From this distance his fear seemed absurd. The mad woman had not been his enemy; she had been his friend, his adviser. She had given him the one true answer to his problem: elopement, then no doubt a furious scene, a period of estrangement, with perhaps some recrimination—and then forgiveness. After all, Amanda was practically an only child. Faced with the incontrovertible fact of marriage, the old man would come round in time: Drew felt it must be so. He even pictured the scene in which they returned to Lamar Street and stood before the major, not exactly repentant, but anyhow humble. The major would look at them sternly. Then gradually the lines of his face would soften; the glasses would mist over; finally he would spread his arms, and Amanda would hurry to him. Drew himself would stand by, delicately turning his head away from the sight and waiting for the time to step up for the handshake, man to man.