Jordan County

by Shelby Foote

  Mrs Sturgis, watching his progress — or rather, his lack of it — with misgivings and forebodings, told herself that they had gone at farming hind-part before. What Hector really needed, she decided, was practical experience in the field. But that worked no better. The agricultural digests had given him a superficial, technical knowledge of farming, an academic approach, always with an eye for innovations and a tongue that wanted to know not ‘how’ but why: so that the manager, who was charged with the instruction, would begin to mutter in his beard whenever Hector approached. Crowding sixty, he had been in charge of the plantation for more than twenty years, since back in the Wingate days; he was the one who had ridden alongside the carriage on the flatulent horse, a gruff, unsociable individual with an instant, violent dislike of anything new. After two weeks of seeing the young man daily and taking him with him wherever he went — Eastern clothes, proper accent, and all — the manager told Mrs Sturgis that she must make a choice; it would have to be himself or Hector. He knew he was safe. The twenty-odd successful years had given him a reputation, and good managers were beginning to be scarce. Any plantation owner in the delta would hire him at any reasonable figure he might name.

  “I can farm the place,” he said. “Or maybe I can learn that boy to farm it. I cant do both.”

  Mrs Sturgis made the foregone choice. That night she told Hector, “We were wrong, thinking you could move right in like that. What you need is a rest from all those years at school. Take yourself some time off. Take the balance of the year getting settled and meeting people all over again. We’ll see how it works out.”

  Thus he began a social interlude, during which people on street corners watched him go past in the bright-spoked surrey and called him a dude and bet he was hell with the ladies. This last was based on the yellow gloves and the surrey — for without them there was little that was prepossessing about him. His features were vague, the eyes somewhat bulging and pale gray, the nose broad at the base and sharp at the tip, the mouth with down-tending corners and a heavy upper lip, the chin short and recessive. His hair was dark brown; he wore it parted far on the left, brushed straight across, with a cowlick at the back as if that patch had been sprinkled with a special tonic that made it always dry and fine and tufted, paler than the rest. He was thin in the arms and legs, especially the biceps and thighs, but at twenty he already had the beginning of a paunch. Probably no one seeing him in a crowd on the street or at a ball would have recognized him ten minutes later in a parlor.

  At the preparatory school he had learned to see his homeland with new eyes, assigning new values after hearing how the Maryland boys spoke of it after their visit. But that was just at school. When he came home it was no different, in its physical aspect, from what it had been when he went away. The distance-lent enchantment having faded, he was faced with things as they were, essentially drab, even grimy, and he spent his vacations waiting for the time to return to school. Now, however, there would be no return. School was behind him, and he was busy learning at first hand, by necessity, what his homeland had to offer a young man settling down.

  It had a great deal to offer, as he soon began to learn. There were dances at the Elysian Club, gala occasions that drew young people from all over the delta, four big ones a year, a dance each season, with numerous lesser ones interspersed to keep the months between from growing dull. There were hayrides and boating parties on Lake Jordan, down at the south end of the county, a sheen of moonlight on the water, girls in gauzy dresses and young men in white flannels and blazers, plucking mandolins. Hector made one among them. He was willing enough, even eager at times, but the girls’ mothers were apt to regard him more agreeably than their daughters did. The daughters thought him stiff — ‘stuffy’; they could not talk to him, they said; they said he was no ‘fun.’ The Eastern clothes, the scrupulous accent, attributes of eligibility in that other world where he had got his schooling, were like a weight upon him, holding him down and back. Sometimes when he went toward a couple on the dance floor, intending to cut in, he would see the girl watching him over her partner’s shoulder and suddenly, in the middle of a dip or glide, they would stop and cross the ballroom to the punch bowl, hand in hand; Hector would be left alone among whirling couples, looking sheepish. It could happen to anyone, he told himself; but it happened to him too often.

  The year moved into winter, and the young men who had gone with Captain Barcroft came home from soldiering, those who had survived the embalmed beef. They were tanned and fit, Bristol’s first new veterans in more than thirty years, and though they had seen no battle they spoke of camp life in Florida as if it had been more eventful than San Juan Hill or Manila Bay, as if sand fleas had a sting that beat the bullets. There was a general reclaiming of girls, a reallotment, and those men who had not gone felt envious and resentful, seeing they could have had the glory with so little attendant risk. Hector was restless, fidgety, unable even to read through those evenings he stayed at home. That was odd, for books had been his chief pleasure. One summer, waiting to return to the university, he read straight through Walter Scott, thirty volumes without a pause between them. But not now. He was too fretful even for Scott.

  “I know what you need,” his mother told him, watching from behind her spectacles. “You need to find yourself some nice, congenial girl.”

  She made the remark off-hand, looking arch. Later she was to tell herself that this had been the cause of what followed.

  What followed came two nights after Christmas. She was sitting alone in the downstairs parlor, knitting. Hector had gone to the holiday ball at the Elysian Club. Near midnight she had begun to nod (she had been troubled with insomnia since the fever, and had taken to sitting up until she felt she could sleep) when she heard the driveway gravel crunching under the thin tires of the surrey: ‘He’s home!’ she thought, rousing out of a half-sleep. Footsteps crossed the veranda; the door came open, letting in the wind, and Hector entered with a girl on his arm. At first she thought she was dreaming.

  “Hello, mother,” he said. “I’m home early. Guess why.”

  Startled thus out of slumber, seeing their flushed faces and her son’s excited manner, Mrs Sturgis thought that he had been drinking; he had the false, selfconscious exuberance of the adolescent tippler. He did not stop talking. Apparently he could not. It was as if he feared that if he stopped she would say something to injure him.

  “It’s Ella,” he said. “We got married.”

  Then he did stop; he stopped short and stood there grinning foolishly as his mother came past him and closed the door against the cold wind coming around it. “Whats that?” she asked, turning with both hands behind her, holding the doorknob. “Whats that you said?”

  “This is Ella, mother: Ella Lowry. Ella, this is mother.”

  Hector made a one-handed, flipper-like gesture of introduction, indicating each in turn. The girl at first seemed undecided whether to curtsy or hold out her hand. Then, since Mrs Sturgis only stood and looked, with both hands still behind her and leaning now against the door as if in need of support, Ella did neither. She performed instead a supple, gooselike motion with her neck and bobbed her head.

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said.

  Mrs Sturgis looked at her, still not moving. Then: “I believe I know your mother,” she said hesitantly, hoping against hope. “Mrs Lowry?”

  “Yessum,” Ella said. Her voice was rather shrill, partly because she was frightened, being here in the Wingate house where she had never been before, and partly because it was always so, as if raised against the blare of music at dances.

  She had grown up in Bristol. Mrs Sturgis had seen her from time to time in the course of her carriage excursions and shopping trips downtown, but she had heard of her more often than she had seen her. Anyone but Mrs Sturgis, secure in her insularity, would have recognized the girl on sight. Perhaps even Mrs Sturgis did, behind the shock, the outrage, but she wanted to delay admitting even to herself this new daughter-in-law’s identity
. Ella had been strikingly pretty as a child, which won admiration first from older people, then from girls at school, classmates, and finally from boys. Many Bristol girls won their popularity on a basis of birth and station; Ella won hers in spite of it. Her father had been a railroad man, a brakeman in the C&B: ‘had been’ because he abandoned his wife soon after their child was born. They never saw him again, but Ella knew what he looked like from a picture in a tortoise-shell frame on Mrs Lowry’s night table, a daguerreotype of a small man neatly buttoned into what was obviously his Sunday suit. His hair, heavily pomaded, was brushed in pigeon wings above ears that were strangely pointed like a fawn’s. He wore a low collar without a tie; it was too tight, which gave his throat a naked, swollen look — but that was all right; apparently the tightness made him feel more dressed-up. All this, together with the humorous wrinkles at the outward corners of his eyes, was in contrast to the stern black mustache that lay like a bar across the middle of his face. He seemed to be hiding behind it; he seemed to wear it with guile. Ella thought for years that the mustache was false (it looked false, as if he had dressed hurriedly on the way to a masquerade or a highway robbery) but one day, apropos of nothing, her mother told her how proud he had been of it, how he would sit in front of a mirror to groom and admire it, and how he wore a bandage over it whenever he was working, a little hammock of gauze that hooked behind his ears like spectacles.

  “He thought the world and all of that mustache,” Mrs Lowry would say, and a dreamy look would come into her eyes.

  He had left with another woman — “gone to Texas,” Ella heard, the refuge of absconding bankers, seducers, and errant husbands; that was all she knew. But there were postcards, as many as four or five a year and always one for her birthday, lithographs of the Southwest, desert scenes with cattle skulls bleaching in the foreground or village squares with courthouses and churches built of mud and men in wide hats and striped blankets asleep in the shade, and on the reverse, scrawled in pencil or a sputtering post office pen: How is my little girl? Am fine hope your the same. Daddy. Ella kept them in a dresser drawer. There were over fifty of them, alike as carbon copies, when her mother received the letter that said he was dead, fallen between two cars, and the postcards stopped. The second wife, or maybe it was the third, got the insurance.

  Mrs Lowry was from Alabama, the eastern terminus of the railroad for which her husband was a brakeman at the time they met. He saw her at a church supper during a lay-over between runs, and after the marriage ceremony he brought her home to Bristol in the caboose. “Ive done enough running round,” he said. “It’s high time I was settling down. I’m saying goodbye to all that.” He seemed to mean it, though obviously he was fighting something in his blood, some heritage, some pattern of behavior. They were together a little more than a year. Then he left with one of the dancers from a tent show that came to town in the fall after Ella’s birth — ‘Little Egypt’ she was called, a belly dancer in baggy pink silk trousers, a girdle of pearls worn low on her hips, a halter, and shoes with upturned points; her hair had a glint like brass, and she emphasized her brows and lengthened the corners of her eyes with the soot from burnt matches. All his resolution went like smoke at that first sight of her. Those men who did not condemn him envied him openly, and some among those who condemned him loudest, those who had seen her dance at any rate, also envied him most.

  At first, in her despair, Mrs Lowry considered following him wherever he had gone, collaring him and bringing him back to face his altar-sworn responsibilities. It was clearly what he deserved; everyone was agreed as to that, especially the ones who envied him for having what they had not dared to try for and probably couldnt have gotten if they had dared. But before she could make up her mind how to go about it, just which point of the compass to strike out on, a strange thing happened. Her legs began to swell.

  Within a week they were twice their former size. The doctor, who could discover no organic cause for the swelling, put it down as dropsy (after all, he had to put down something) but predicted that this manifestation of bereavement (such he considered it, privately) would cure itself within a week. He was much interested in abnormal maladies; they were a sideline with him, along with false asthma, sinus, mysterious headaches, and the bloat. But he was wrong in his prognosis. By the end of the week she could not get across the room without someone on each side for her to lean on. “Hm,” the doctor said, shaking his head. It was strange. Eventually the swelling stopped, but it never went down. So now there was no question of following the wayward husband, nor of finding another to take his place. Mrs Lowry was left with no one to turn to, without support for herself and her child.

  That was when she put the sign out. She lettered it herself, with red enamel on a cypress shingle: ELIZABETH LOWRY. SEAMSTRESS, nailed to a pillar beside the steps, directly opposite another shingle nailed to the other pillar: ROOM & BOARD. APPLY WITHIN, nailed there fifteen years ago by the landlady when her husband died.

  The landlady was the one who gave Mrs Lowry the notion. “Look here,” she said, a gaunt, mannish woman who wore her hair in a bun at the top of her head. “You have my heartfelt sympathy and all that. I know how you feel; I do indeed. I know what it means to lose your only man. Why, when Mr Simmons passed I like to died. I did; I did indeed. But a woman’s got this world to live in, man or no.”

  “You had this house, Mrs Simmons, and all that went with it. What can I do, me with these bad legs?”

  “Do? Goodness. Just look at here.” They were sitting face to face, Mrs Lowry holding Ella on her lap, and Mrs Simmons leaned forward and fingered the hem of the baby’s dress. She pursed her lips as she did so, nodding positively. “Let me tell you, thats as nice a piece of stitching as ever I saw. Thats one thing you can do.”

  So the two signs, one weathered and the other shiny new, decorated the pillars on opposite sides of the boarding-house steps. After the shingles had been exposed to two years of rain and sun, alternate heat and cold, anyone without particular information would have thought they had been nailed to the flanking pillars at the same time. By then Mrs Lowry was established. She had a straight-back chair equipped with casters so that she could move about the room without having to stand on her swollen legs. Her skill with the needle was praised for miles around. Mothers from surrounding towns and plantations throughout the central delta brought their daughters to her sewing room for fittings whenever the dress was to be a special one. They could recognize her work from across a ballroom and they pronounced the name Lowry with the same tone of respect and awe that women in other parts of the world adopted when they said Worth or Fortuny.

  Ella grew up with the rapid stutter of the sewing machine constantly in her ears. Her mother’s customers cooed with admiration; “Such a lovely child!” they cried, partly to curry favor with Mrs Lowry but mostly because it was true. At school the other girls liked to be with her because she drew the boys. By then she was not as pretty as she had been, for this was a transition stage; the prettiness was changing into beauty, and also into something else which the boys could recognize by instinct though they could not identify it as readily as the men who saw her on the street, still in ribbed stockings and button shoes, carrying school books. Her popularity held, being based now on talk of her promiscuity. For the past five years, up to the month preceding her sudden marriage to Hector Sturgis when she was nineteen, her only concern had been young men (but she never called them that; she called them ‘boys’) and thus she had acquired a reputation. When she was fourteen the watchers downtown would see her pass the barber shop or pool hall window, legs wobbly on high heels and wearing the flimsy, violent-flowered dresses she persuaded her mother to make for her — a juvenile Lillian Russell, emphasizing the bosom she already had — and returning, out of the tail of her eye, the stares of all the watchers. She not only seemed not to care what they thought, she seemed to go out of her way to make sure they understood that she did not care: so that, in the end, she showed how much she did care a
fter all (but in reverse) and they responded with the frank, lickerish stares and the gossip she not only provoked but invited; it was reciprocal.

  In those days she would be with girls older than herself and usually from families who disapproved of their being in her company, the disapproval of course adding to her attractiveness in their eyes. The watchers observed her moving with a sort of vicious jerkiness — slouched posture, high-colored cheeks, and languid eyes — to the murmurous accompaniment of their gossip. Presently, however, she left the girls behind. They saw her in the Kandy Kitchen drinking sodas with high school boys, ululant, head backflung, lips parted and damp. Then she left the high school boys behind. On their way home to their farms, they saw her emerge from lonely back-roads, high on the seats of buggies with the blotch-faced youths of the town. And the watchers, farmers in Bristol for haircuts or pool or just for conversation, would return the following Saturday and tell about it, until finally it was mentioned only in passing — “I saw that Lowry girl again, out Dundrum way with a gig full of boys.” “Yair?” “Yair” — like fair weather or international politics. They had worn it out with too much talk, just as a popular song can be worn out with too much playing.

  Then something changed all this. Suddenly, without any preliminary gesture so far as anyone observed, Ella sloughed her promiscuity. It was puzzling to the watchers, especially to those who had compounded it with her. Certainly something must have caused the reformation, or anyhow led up to it; or maybe not, maybe it just happened. Anyhow, for whatever reason or lack of a reason, she no longer welcomed the advances of the rounders nor addressed them with the encouraging smile and sidelong glance of Lilith on the lookout; she wore instead the mournful, slightly soured expression of Magdalene redeemed.

  Some among the watchers, unable to account for it otherwise, claimed that her mother had straightened her out; but even those who said this did not believe it. For, two years earlier, when a delegation of Baptist ladies, members of the Bible Union carrying out a decision reached in caucus, called on Mrs Lowry to acquaint her with the talk about her daughter, the seamstress received them with smiles and an offer of tea, until the member previously appointed began to tell her why they had come: whereupon she cursed them from the room in a fit of indignation and passion, herding them out of the door like frightened sheep, the casters of her chair making a clatter like roller skates on the floorboards of the sewing room, and would never accept a dress order from one of them again.