Clock Without Hands

by Carson McCullers

  The bus ride back from the airport always made him feel squashed, and the old bus itself was plodding and terribly restricted compared to the air; and the more he flew the more he was convinced that every adult had the moral obligation to fly, no matter what Sherman Pew's convictions were about this matter.

  He left the bus at the corner of J. T. Malone's drugstore which was in the center of town. He looked at the town. On the next block was the Wedwell Spinning Mill. From the open basement window the heat from the dye vats made wavy lines in the sweltering air. Just to stretch his legs, he strolled around the business section of town. Pedestrians stayed close to the awnings and it was the time of late morning when their shadows cast on the glittering sidewalk were blunt and dwarfed. His unaccustomed coat made him very hot as he walked through town, waving to people he knew and blushing with surprise and pride when Hamilton Breedlove of the First National Bank tipped his hat at him—very likely because of the coat. Jester circled back to Malone's drugstore thinking of a cherry coke with cool crushed ice. On the corner, near where he had waited for the bus, a town character called Wagon sat in the shade of the awning with his cap on the sidewalk next to him. Wagon, a light-colored Negro who had lost both legs in a sawmill accident, was toted every day by Grown Boy and transported in the wagon where he would beg before awninged stores. Then when the stores closed, Grown Boy would wheel him back home in the wagon. When Jester dropped a nickel in the cap, he noticed that quite a few coins were there, and even a fifty-cent piece. The fifty-cent piece was a decoy coin Wagon always used in hope of further generosity.

  "How you do today, Uncle?"

  "Just tollable."

  Grown Boy, who often showed up at dinnertime, was standing there just watching. Wagon today had fried chicken instead of his usual side-meat sandwich. He ate the chicken with the lingering delicate grace with which colored people eat chicken.

  Grown Boy asked, "Why don you gimme a piece of chicken?" although he had already eaten dinner.

  "Go on, nigger."

  "Or some biscuits and molasses?"

  "I ain payin no min to you."

  "Or a nickel for a cone?"

  "Go on, nigger. You come before me like a gnat."

  So it would go on, Jester knew. The hulking, dimwitted colored boy begging from the beggar. Tipped panama hats, the separate fountains for white and colored people in the courthouse square, the trough and hitching post for mules, muslin and white linen and raggedy overalls. Milan. Milan. Milan.

  As Jester turned into the dim, fan-smelling drugstore, he faced Mr. Malone who stood behind the fountain in his shirtsleeves.

  "May I have a coke, sir?"

  Fancy and overpolite the boy was, and Malone remembered the dotty way he flapped his arms when he was waiting for the airport bus.

  While Mr. Malone made up the Coca-Cola, Jester moseyed over to the scales and stood on them.

  "Those scales don't work," Mr. Malone said.

  "Excuse me," Jester said.

  Malone watched Jester and wondered. Why did he say that, and wasn't it a dotty thing to say, apologizing because the pharmacy scales didn't work. Dotty for sure.

  Milan. Some people were content to live and die in Milan with only brief visits to relatives and so forth in Flowering Branch, Goat Rock, or other smaller towns near by. Some people were content to live their mortal lives and die and be buried in Milan. Jester Clane was not one of those. Maybe a minority of one, but a definitely not one. Jester pranced with irritation as he waited and Malone watched him.

  The coke was frosty-beaded on the counter and Malone said, "Here you are."

  "Thank you, sir." When Malone went to the compounding room, Jester sipped his icy coke, still brooding about Milan. It was the broiling season when everybody wore shirtsleeves except dyed-in-the-wool sticklers who put on their coats when they went to lunch in the Cricket Tea Room or the New York Café. His Coca-Cola still in hand, Jester moved idly to the open doorway.

  The next few moments would be forever branded in his brain. They were kaleidoscopic, nightmare moments, too swift and violent to be fully understood at the time. Later Jester knew he was responsible for the murder and the knowledge of that fact brought further responsibility. Those were the moments when impulse and innocence were tarnished, the moments which end the end, and which, many months later, were to save him from another murder—in truth, to save his very soul.

  Meanwhile Jester, Coca-Cola in hand, was watching the flame-blue sky and the burning noonday sun. The noon whistle blew from the Wedwell Mill. The millworkers straggled out for lunch. "The emotional scum of the earth," his grandfather had called them, although he had a great hunk of Wedwell Spinning Mill stock which had gone up very satisfactorily. Wages had increased, so that instead of bringing lunch pails the hands could afford to eat at luncheonettes. As a child, Jester had feared and abhorred "factory tags," appalled by the squalor and misery he saw in Mill Town. Even now he didn't like those blue-denimed, tobacco-chewing mill hands.

  Meanwhile, Wagon had only two pieces of fried chicken left ... the neck and the back. With loving delicacy he started on the neck which has as many stringy bones as a banjo and is just as sweet.

  "just a teeny bit," Grown Boy begged. He was looking yearningly at the back and his rusty black hand reached toward it a little. Wagon swallowed quickly and spat on the back to insure it for himself. The phlegmy spit on the crusty brown chicken angered Grown. As Jester watched him, he saw the dark, covetous eyes fix on the change in the begging cap. A sudden warning made him cry, "Don't, don't," but his stifled warning was lost by the clanging of the town clock striking twelve. There were the scrambled sensations of glare and brassy gongs and the resonance of the static midday; then it happened so instantly, so violently, that Jester could not take it in. Grown Boy dived for the coins in the begging cap and ran.

  "Git him. Git him," Wagon screamed, histing himself on his sawed-off legs with the leather "shoes" to protect them, and jumping from leg to leg in helpless fury. Meantime Jester was chasing Grown. And the hands from the mill, seeing a white-coated white man running after a nigger, joined in the chase. The cop on Twelfth and Broad saw the commotion and hastened to the scene. When Jester caught Grown Boy by the collar and was struggling to seize the money from Grown's fist, more than half a dozen people had joined in the fray, although none of them knew what it was about.

  "Git the nigger. Git the nigger bastard."

  The cop parted the melee with the use of his billy stick and finally cracked Grown Boy on the head as he struggled in terror. Few heard the blow, but Grown Boy limpened instantly and fell. The crowd made way and watched. There was only a thin trickle of blood on the black scalp, but Grown Boy was dead. The greedy, lively, wanting boy who had never had his share of sense lay on the Milan sidewalk ... forever stilled.

  Jester threw himself on the black boy. "Grown?" he pleaded.

  "He's dead," somebody in the crowd said.

  "Dead?"

  "Yes," said the cop after some minutes. "Break it up you all." And doing his duty, he went to the telephone booth at the pharmacy and called an ambulance, although he had seen that look of death. When he came back to the scene, the crowd had drifted back closer to the awning and only Jester remained near the body.

  "Is he really dead?" Jester asked, and he touched the face that was still warm.

  "Don't touch him," the cop said.

  The cop questioned Jester about what had happened and took out his notebook and paper. Jester began a dazed account. His head felt light like a gas balloon.

  The ambulance shrilled in the static afternoon. An intern in a white coat leaped out and put his stethoscope on Grown Boy's chest.

  "Dead?" the cop asked.

  "As a doornail," the intern said.

  "Are you sure?" Jester asked.

  The intern looked at Jester and noticed his panama hat that had been knocked off. "Is this your hat?" Jester took the hat, which was grimy now.

  The white-coated interns carri
ed the body to the ambulance. It was all so callous and swift and dreamlike that Jester turned slowly toward the drugstore, his hand on his head. The cop followed him.

  Wagon, who was still eating his spat-on back, said, "What happened?"

  "Dunno," said the cop.

  Jester felt lightheaded. Could it be possible he was going to faint? "I feel funny."

  The cop, glad to be doing something, steered him to a chair in the pharmacy and said, "Sit down here and hold your head between your legs." Jester did so and when the blood rushed back to his head he sat up, although he was very pale.

  "It was all my fault. If I hadn't been chasing him and those people piling in on top of us," he turned to the cop, "and why did you hit him so hard?"

  "When you are breaking up a crowd with a billy stick you don't know how hard you are hitting. I don't like violence any more than you do. Maybe I shouldn't even have joined the force."

  Meantime Malone had called the old Judge to come and get his grandson and Jester was crying with shock.

  When Sherman Pew drove up to bring him home, Jester, who was not thinking about impressing Sherman any more, was led to the car while the cop tried to explain what had happened. After listening, Sherman only commented, "Well, Grown Boy has always been just a feeb, and in my case, if I was just a feeb, I'd be glad if it happened to me. I put myself in other people's places."

  "I do wish you would shut up," Jester said.

  At the Judge's household there were tears and disorder when they arrived. Verily was sobbing for her nephew and the Judge patted her with awkward little pats. She was sent home to her own people to mourn over that sudden noonday death.

  Before the news came, the Judge had had a happy fruitful morning. He had been working joyfully; there had been none of the idle tedium that day, that endlessness of time that is as hard to bear in old age as it is in early childhood. Sherman Pew was panning out to his utmost expectations. Not only was he an intelligent colored boy who understood about insulin and the needles as soon as he was told and sworn to secrecy, he also had imagination, talked of diet and substitutions for calories, and so forth. When the Judge had impressed on him that diabetes was not catching, Sherman had said: "I know all about diabetes. My brother had it. We had to weigh his food on a teensy little balancing scale. Every morsel of food."

  The Judge, who suddenly recalled that Sherman was a foundling, wondered a second about this information but said nothing.

  "I know all about calories too, sir, on account of I am a house guest of Zippo Mullins and his sister went on a diet. I whipped the fluffy mashed potatoes with skimmed milk for her and made sucaryl jello. Yessireebob, I know all about diets."

  "Do you think you would make me a good amanuensis?"

  "A good what, Judge?"

  "An amanuensis is a kind of secretary."

  "Oh, a super-dooper secretary," Sherman said, his voice soft with enchantment. "I would adore that."

  "Harrumph," said the Judge, to hide his pleasure. "I have quite a voluminous correspondence, serious, profound correspondence and little niggling letters."

  "I adore writing letters and write a lovely hand."

  "Penmanship is most indicative." The Judge added, "Calligraphy."

  "Where are the letters, sir?"

  "In my steel file in my office at the courthouse."

  "You want me to get them?"

  "No," the Judge said hastily, as he had answered every letter; indeed, that was his chief occupation when he went in the morning to his office—that and the perusal of the Flowering Branch Ledger and the Milan Courier. Last week there had come a day when not a letter of moment had been received—only an advertisement for Kare Free Kamping Equipment which was probably meant for Jester anyway. Cheated that there were no letters of moment, the Judge had answered the ad, posing trenchant questions about sleeping bags and the quality of frying pans. The static tedium of old age had troubled him so often. But not today; this morning with Sherman he was on a high horse, his head literally teeming with plans.

  "Last night I wrote a letter that lasted to the wee hours," Sherman said.

  "A love letter?"

  "No." Sherman thought over the letter which he had posted on the way to work. At first the address had puzzled him, then he addressed it to: "Madame Marian Anderson, The steps of the Lincoln Memorial." If she wasn't right there, they would forward it. Mother ... Mother ... he was thinking, you are too famous to miss.

  "My beloved wife always said I wrote the most precious love letters in the world."

  "I don't waste time writing love letters. This long letter I wrote last night was a finding letter."

  "Letter writing is an art in itself."

  "What kind of letter do you wish me to write today?" Sherman added, timidly, "Not a love letter, I presume."

  "Of course not, silly. It's a letter concerning my grandson. A letter of petition, you might say."

  "Petition?"

  "I am asking an old friend and fellow congressman to put my boy up for West Point."

  "I see."

  "I have to draft it carefully in my mind beforehand. They are the most delicate letters of all ... petition letters." The Judge closed his eyes and placed his thumb and forefinger over his eyelids, thinking profoundly. It was a gesture almost of pain, but that morning the Judge had no pain at all; on the contrary, after the years of boredom and endless blank time, the utter joy of having important letters to compose and a genuine amanuensis at his disposal made the Judge as buoyant as a boy again. He sat furrowed and immobile so long that Sherman was concerned.

  "Head hurt?"

  The Judge jerked and straightened himself. "Mercy no, I was just composing the structure of the letter. Thinking to whom I'm writing and the various circumstances of his present and past life. I'm just thinking of the individual I'm writing to."

  "Who is he?"

  "Senator Thomas of Georgia. Address him: Washington, D.C."

  Sherman dipped the pen in the inkwell three times and straightened the paper very carefully, thrilled at the thought of writing to a senator.

  "My Dear Friend and Colleague, Tip Thomas."

  Again Sherman dipped the pen in ink and began to write with a flourish. "Yes, sir?"

  "Be quiet, I'm thinking ... Proceed now."

  Sherman was writing that when the Judge stopped him. "You don't write that. Start again. When I say 'proceed' and things like that, don't actually write them."

  "I was just taking dictation."

  "But, by God, use common sense."

  "I am using common sense, but when you dictate words I naturally write them."

  "Let's start at the very beginning. The salutation reads: My Dear Friend and Colleague, Tip Thomas. Get that?"

  "I shouldn't write the get that, should I?"

  "Of course not."

  The Judge was wondering if his amanuensis was as brilliant as he first supposed, and Sherman was wondering privately if the old man was nuts. So both regarded each other with mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy. The work went badly at first.

  "Don't write this in the letter. I just want to level with you personally."

  "Well, level personally."

  "The art of a true amanuensis is to write down everything in the letter or document, but not to record personal reflections or, in other words, things that go on in my mind that are more or less extraneous to the said letter. The trouble with me, boy, is my mind works too quick and so many random thoughts come into it that are not pertinent to any particular train of thought."

  "I understand, sir," said Sherman, who was thinking that the job was not what he had imagined.

  "Not many people understand me," the Judge said simply.

  "You mean you want me to read your mind about what to write in the letter and what to not."

  "Not read my mind," the Judge said indignantly, "but to gather from my intonations which is personal rumination and which is not."

  "I'm a wonderful mind reader."

  "You
mean you are intuitive? Why so am I."

  Sherman did not know what the word meant, but he was thinking that if he stayed on with the old Judge he would pick up a grand vocabulary.

  "Back to the letter," the Judge said sternly. "Write after the salutation, 'It has recently come to my attention that..." The Judge broke off and continued in a lower voice which Sherman, who was reading the Judge's mind, did not write down. "How recently is recently, boy? One—two—three years? I guess it happened ten years ago."

  "I wouldn't say recently in that case."

  "You are quite correct," the Judge decided in a firm voice. "Start the letter on a completely different tack."

  The gilt clock in the library sounded twelve strikes. "It's noon."

  "Yea," said Sherman, pen in hand and waiting.

  "At noon I interrupt my endeavors to have the first toddy of the day. The privilege of an old man."

  "Do you wish me to prepare it for you?"

  "That would be most kindly, boy. Would you like a little bourbon and branch water?"

  "Bourbon and branch water?"

  "I'm not a solitary drinker. I don't like to drink alone." Indeed, in the old days he used to call in the yardman, Verily, or anyone else to drink with him. Since Verily did not drink and the yardman was dead, the Judge was many times forced to drink alone, but he didn't like it. "A little toddy to keep me company."

  This was the delightful part of the job that Sherman hadn't thought about. He said, "I'd be very pleased, sir. What measure drink do you like?"

  "Half and half, and don't drown it."

  Sherman bustled to the kitchen to make the drinks. He was already worrying about dinner. If they had the drink together and became friends, he would hate to be sent to the kitchen to have dinner with the cook. He knew it would happen, but he would hate it. He rehearsed carefully what he would say. "I never eat dinner," or "I ate such a hearty breakfast I'm not hungry." He poured the half and halfs, both of them, and returned to the library.