by Shelby Foote
The nurse had most of it right; she had the figures right at least, and as Drew lay listening he grew paler and paler, even under the hospital pallor; “Isnt it just a sin and a shame?” she cried. But he said nothing. He lay there almost fifteen minutes, subdued and morose—the major had foiled him here on earth and now he had foiled him from beyond the grave. Then he said, “Would you mind stepping out a minute? Ive got a business call to make.” She left and he took up the phone. He called the Memphis bank the men had called from Lamar Street that morning; he even talked to the same banker, the one with the urbane, silky voice.
“Mr Easely: Harley Drew, down in Bristol. Fine, and you? Fine. Mr Easely, Ive been thinking. That offer you made me a while back—Ive been thinking; Ive reconsidered. If the position is still open I’ll take you up on it.”
Next afternoon the doctor removed the stitches, and Wednesday morning he was released. Downstairs in the office when they handed him the bill he considered saying ‘Send it to Jeff Carruthers down at Briartree,’ thinking how much he would enjoy watching his face when Amy read it to him. But this was impossible in more ways than one. So he paid it and walked out into the sunlight of a Bristol that was no longer bright with promise and desire; even the trees looked ugly. That night at supper when he told Mrs Pentecost he was leaving she just nodded, prim and distant, like a wife beginning to get accustomed to evidence that her husband has been unfaithful, has betrayed her. The following morning, in Tilden’s office, he gave notice of his departure from the bank and resigned his commission in the Guard. “I sure hate to see you leave us, Harley,” Tilden told him. He said it without conviction, though, and the handshake was almost as brief as the one with Major Barcroft that first afternoon on Cotton Row. Drew spent the rest of the day closing out his affairs. He sold what he could, including his Ford, and gave the incidentals to the cook.
Friday he caught the noon train for Memphis, arriving at the station after it was already in. He boarded it in a hurry. Except for the golf bag he had no more luggage than he had brought to town twelve years ago. In fact he looked almost the same, still wearing the urban-cut tweeds; he had hardly aged at all. The biggest difference was the big white bandage across the back of his head—that and the paleness due to the loss of blood and the week spent indoors convalescing. He came down the aisle and took a seat just as the train jerked and began to roll; he did not look back. That was the last time Bristol saw him in the flesh.
For a lurid but briefer period Amanda was in the public eye again, moving once more among the turning heads and darted glances, leaving a trail of furtive, hand-cupped whispers. A practical nurse had come home from the hospital with her, on twenty-four-hour duty, but this was only a precaution on Dr Clinton’s part—Amanda kept her a week and let her go. By that time the cook’s son, the jazz cornetist who had returned from Harlem to rest up from t.b., had got into his trouble, had shot the gambler and been put in jail, awaiting trial, and Nora moved in with her mistress on Lamar Street. ‘Them folks aint never give no time-off to nobody,’ she had said, and now more than ever it was true. She slept on a folding canvas cot in the kitchen with a big mail-order nickel-plate revolver on the floor beneath her head, thrown down like a gauntlet in the face of all the prowlers in the Delta, black or white, man or beast.
Amanda was more removed from the life of the town than ever. This was not only because of the bulwark of her history (especially the latest chapter, the death watch) or Nora’s pistol, cocked and ready on the kitchen floor: it was just that she had never had any friends, and had none now. She lived all but alone in the big house, its lofty rooms filled for her with memories of the dead, whose shapes were yet preserved in the sagged chairs where they had sat and the worn places on the carpets where their feet had scuffed. They returned to her now, the stern father and the invalid sister. Sometimes in the night she would come awake with the sound of her sister’s screams in her ears; she would be out of bed, already knotting the sash of her robe, before she remembered that Florence had been dead almost two years; then, shaking her head in self-reproach, she would get back into bed. Nor was it only in her sleep they came. Occasionally as the afternoon wore on toward five oclock, the shadows lengthening, she would remind herself—speaking aloud in the big upstairs bedroom, her voice a bit reverberant because she was alone in the house except for Nora downstairs in the kitchen—“I must get my hat and go meet Papa.” Then she would stop, remembering. She would chide herself for being absent-minded. “Youre getting old,” she would say, half joking and half serious; for in her mind, using the eyes of children when they look down the long stretch of time between themselves and middle-age, she saw herself as old at forty-two.
Her only outside interest was the church. Florence had found the ritual exciting, taking the white Christ in her mouth and sipping his red blood, but Amanda found it soothing. What she enjoyed most was the sense of belonging, of making one among those who kneeled with their heads on the backs of the pews ahead, then rose all together like some many-legged animal to murmur the responses or confess their manifold sins and wickednesses. Where previously she had attended only the regular Sunday morning services, now she began to go to Wednesday vespers. She never missed a Sunday or a Wednesday; Mr Clinkscales was delighted. This was the path that led back to the world: so that toward the end of that first summer, when she was invited to become a member of the Altar Guild, she accepted. At first she was frightened; it was all so new to her, the society of women her own age—they were like nothing she had ever known before. Seeing thus at first hand their flashing teeth and bright flimsy dresses cut to feature instead of hide their bodily appointments, their lipsticked mouths and powdered arms, Amanda was like some puritan tourist who, lost from her party, strays in innocence about the grounds of an Eastern palace until at length, fairly desperate, panicky, she finds herself in the seraglio, a vaulted apartment littered with silken cushions, wreathed with incense, and dedicated to sin. She was startled; her first instinct was to run. But after a few meetings she became accustomed to them and began to understand that what she had mistaken for voluptuousness was just modernity.
By then the talk had diminished; it had flared too high to be lasting, and though Bristol still remembered all the tragedies of her life, it had become too worn a topic for conversation, let alone gossip. When she had moved among them for a while, wives began to tell their husbands, “Amanda Barcroft was at Altar Guild this afternoon. You know, she’s not as strange as I used to think. Of course she’s had any number of perfectly weird things happen to her and she’s got that awful haunted look around her eyes, but I declare she’s really kind of nice. At least you can see she wants to be. You know?”
Besides—as always—there were other things to talk about. News of Jeff and Amy Carruthers had filtered down from Baltimore. That was where they went for plastic surgery after the doctor from the Bristol clinic, despite the neatness of his appearance and the glittering array of instruments, turned out to be not so skilful after all; she might as well have accepted the services of Dr Kidderman, who had done such a fine preliminary job on Harley Drew. They had stayed at Briartree while the cuts healed, one at the point of her right cheekbone, the other almost through her upper lip, running diagonally down from one wing of her nose. Both scars were an angry red, puckered at the edges by a herringbone pattern of stitches like the seam on a baseball, only not so neat. The bridge of her nose, as the soreness left, got flatter every morning in her mirror until finally she would have stopped looking but could not, fascinated as she was by the wreckage of her face. She kept to her room, the shades all drawn, and had her meals served on a tray. Jeff brought them, for she would allow no one else to enter the room, not even the servants; she would not be seen.
She stayed up there a little better than two months, by which time the room had attained an almost unbelievable degree of squalor. Then they went to Baltimore—Jeff made the appointment by telephone. They left in mid-July, summer approaching its climax, but Amy came downs
tairs heavily veiled and the shot-silk blinds were drawn at the rear windows of the car. Two chauffeurs took turns sleeping; they drove straight through. Their meals were sandwiches at roadside places that advertised curb service, and Amy took a minimum of liquids because the only rest-rooms she would use were at dimly lighted filling stations in the dead of night.
The doctor, a specialist who had repaired and rebuilt some of the nation’s most famous faces—screen stars who had gone through windshields or dived into empty swimming pools or fallen on whiskey bottles or, like Amy, provoked a violent man—examined her under a strong light, his nurse moving white and silent in the darkness beyond his shoulder, and Amy sat there feeling horribly ashamed; he was the first to look at her since the Bristol doctor came back down to Briartree toward the end of May and removed the stitches. “Hm,” he said. His eyes glittered like the eyes of the Mad Scientist in the movies. He touched her face. “That hurt?”
“No.”
“Hm. That?”
“No.” But she winced.
“Hm.” He mused. “Top light,” he said, impersonal again. A switch clicked and the ceiling light came on. He rose. “All right, Mrs Carruthers. Tomorrow. You want to get this over with tomorrow?”
Next morning in the operating room the five masked heads around the table were like a whole stadium full of people; she was glad when the anesthetist brought the cone down over her face. Then she woke and she was looking out through slits in a bandage like a visor. Jeff sat in a chair beside the bed. She felt sick and was going to ask for something—what?—but fell back to sleep before she could think. Soon afterwards she woke again and he was still there. “You smashed my face,” she said, but Jeff said nothing. He was asleep.
“There now,” the nurse said. “It’s all right. The doctor says it’s going to be all right.”
And it was, nearly. When she and Jeff came down to Briartree two months later on a flying packing trip, though she still wore a veil it was not the heavy one she had worn when they left, and only the closest examination showed the thin pink scars like three short strands of scarlet thread that had been washed in too-strong soap so that the color had not held, one at the cheekbone, one at the lip, and one down the bridge of her now patrician nose; her teeth were as straight and even and dead-white as piano keys. Then they left, and Bristol later heard that she had discarded the veil. Pancake make-up had come into style by then; it covered the faint scars and now she had a beauty beyond all her former claims; she resembled Nefretete and that one model—apparently one—who looks out at you from page after page of Vogue. Not that the cuts had really changed her face. The difference lay in the absence of expression, or rather in the absence of any change of expression, for there was none; the slow, down-tending smile was gone.
All this was hearsay, however, as far as Jordan County was concerned. Their visit was only a short one; they were there less than two days, gathering up a few personal odds and ends. Then they were gone for good. They had sold Briartree, lock, stock and barrel, to the Wisten brothers, owners of a Bristol department store advertised in both the county papers as ‘the finest merchandising bazaar between Memphis and New Orleans’—which it was, though it had once been one of those near the levee at the foot of Marshall Avenue and their father had been an expert at cajoling Negroes inside off the boardwalk; but the ‘boys,’ now in their fifties, had turned this skill to better account and now they owned Briartree. As for Jeff and Amy, though they never came back to Jordan County, Bristol continued to hear of them in one place or another round the country, Jeff with his record collection, his polo shirts and crepe-sole shoes, his pistol, and Amy with her beautiful cold immobile Max Factor death mask.
The sale was in September and by that time Nora’s son, Duff Conway, had been tried and sentenced. All through the summer and into the fall whoever passed the county jail heard the cornet playing sweet and clear. Then in October the state executioner brought the portable electric chair (‘My old shocking chair’ he called it) and installed it in one of the ground-floor cells; wires ran from the electrodes, through the window bars, to the generator in the truck parked in the outer darkness of the yard. Amanda was alone in the house that night. Nora hired a drayman and waited down Jail Alley with a pine coffin that lay in the bed of the wagon like an elongated, pale six-sided shadow. The body was turned over to them not long after midnight; they buried him early that afternoon, and Nora was back on Lamar Street in time to prepare the evening meal.
Amanda was in the parlor; when she heard the front door come open, she got up and went to the hall and it was Nora. They stood within touching-distance, looking at each other. Amanda wanted to touch her, at least lay her hand on her arm, but she did not; she just stood there, conscious of belonging to the white conspiracy. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, hesitant, inadequate.
“Yessum,” Nora said, and went back to the kitchen.
They were two women of sorrow, cook and mistress, but just as Nora had her kitchen and the preparation of food to occupy her mind, Amanda had the church and her duties in the Altar Guild. No one had ever done such a careful job of polishing the brass angel that stood barefoot on the base of the lectern, a caryatid balancing the Bible on its head; she even removed the green, acid-smelling traces of polish from the grooves between the feathers on its wings. It glittered in the Sunday morning sunlight or reflected the glimmer of candles at Wednesday vespers, and Amanda would look at it and feel possessive. She had this. And sometimes Mr Clinkscales would glance at her, then at the angel and back at her, and smile congratulations.
The year went into November, nearing the anniversary of her meeting with Harley Drew. The local battery of the National Guard was mobilized and half the town turned out, lining Marshall Avenue to wave goodbye. Colonel Tilden rode up front in his command car, looking pudgy and severe, and everyone cheered when the howitzers rolled past, the cannoneers sitting at attention, forearms up, looking proud and balancing their heads like eggs, all alike in freshly blocked campaign hats. Amanda watched from the porch of the library; the Battle of Britain was in full swing and she came here to follow it in the papers, having canceled her subscription to the Memphis paper for economy’s sake, all but the Sunday edition which she read before and after church, almost as intensively as Florence once had done. She had never been much of a reader, but now she was—and not only of the paper; for she had been watching people coming and going, taking books down and putting them back, and one day on the way out she stopped at the circulation desk. “Could you suggest something you think I’d like to read?”
Startled, the librarian looked up. “Read? A book? … Well—” She appeared to think, tapping her teeth with a pencil. “I think Jane,” she said at last, and rose and went into the other room. Amanda remembered a large blue volume in her father’s study, Jane’s Fighting Ships. But the librarian returned with a small arsenic-colored book which she stamped and slid across the desk: Pride and Prejudice. Amanda took it and hurried home.
After lunch she went into the parlor and settled down in the Morris chair to read. But with every turning page she sat a little straighter, horrified; finally she had to give it up—the book read like a series of dispatches on the war between men and women, viewed from the women’s camp. Next morning when she put it back on the desk the librarian smiled. “You like it?” Amanda shook her head. “Oh,” the librarian said. She stopped smiling. “Well. Want to try something else?” Amanda nodded doubtfully, and the other woman (they were about of an age) took a thick pink book from the shelf beside her desk. “Try this,” she said.
It was Vanity Fair and after lunch Amanda went into the parlor. She was still there when Nora called her to supper; Becky Sharp seemed much less immoral than the Bennets—the Bennet women, anyhow. After supper she came back, and she was still reading at ten oclock when Nora made her go to bed. Next morning after breakfast she was in the Morris chair again. “You ghy put your eyes plum out,” Nora said when she came to tell her lunch was ready.
“Wait till I finish this chapter,” Amanda said.
That afternoon she was back at the library, checking out The Newcomes and Pendennis; she went straight through Thackeray in a week and within another week was half through Dickens. Thus began a year of omnivorous reading. By the end of that time the librarian was toying with the idea of recommending Proust. “That ought to hold her,” she said. She smirked. “But I dont believe she really reads them. Not that fast. Or pays much attention to what she’s reading, anyhow.”
This last was at least partly true, in a sense; for in time, and in widely spaced installments as it were—Balzac, James, Faulkner: Eugenie Grandet, Catherine Sloper, Emily Grierson—she read her own story without recognition. She did not think while she read; she lived. Nothing there applied to anything outside, and she preferred it so. If some author, up to the tricks of his trade, attempted to increase the verisimilitude of his book by having the narrator insist that the story was ‘true,’ had really occurred, Amanda was not impressed. It seemed to her that real people just had things happen to them; that was all. They lived along as best they could, never really comprehending either their triumphs or their setbacks. Reality was mostly numbness (and in ratio: the deeper the tragedy, the deeper the numbness) whereas in books the characters actually understood—the deeper the experience, the deeper the perception; they suffered or exalted on a comprehensive scale, and the proper emotion was always there, on tap. She read on, coming and going between Lamar Street and the library with her armloads of books, and in her case the law of diminishing returns did not obtain. Except for the trips to market, her duties in the Altar Guild, and the hours in bed, she spent as much time in the Morris chair as Florence once had done.