Clock Without Hands

by Carson McCullers

  At the time of the bombing, Sherman was in trouble. He wanted to do something, do something, do something, but he did not know what he could do. The bombing went into his black book. And slowly he started to go out of line. First he drank water at the white fountain in the courthouse square. No one seemed to notice. He went to the white men's room at the bus station. But he went so hurriedly and furtively that again no one noticed. He sat on a back pew at the Baptist Church. Again, no one noticed except at the end of the service, and an usher directed him to a colored church. He sat down in Whelan's drugstore. A clerk said, "Get away, nigger, and never come back." All these separate acts of going out of line terrified him. His hands were sweaty, his heart lurching. But terrified as he was, he was more disturbed by the fact that nobody seemed to notice him except the clerk at Whelan's. Harassed and suffering, I've got to do something, do something, do something beat like a drum in his head.

  Finally he did something. When he gave the Judge his injections in the morning, he substituted water instead of insulin. For three days that went on and he waited. And again in that creepy way nothing seemed to happen. The Judge was as crickety as ever and did not seem sick at all. But although he hated the Judge and thought he ought to be wiped from the face of the earth, he knew all along it should have been a political murder. He could not kill him. If it were a political murder, maybe with a dagger or with a pistol he could have, but not in that sneaky way of substituting water for insulin. It was not even noticed. The fourth day he went back to insulin. Urgent, unceasing the drum beat in his head.

  Meanwhile, the Judge, no noticer, was pleasant and unusually agreeable. This infuriated Sherman. It got to the point that with the Judge, as well as other white men, there was no motive for his hate, just compulsion. Wanting to go out of line and afraid, wanting to be noticed and afraid to be noticed, Sherman was obsessed those early May days. I have got to do something, do something, do something.

  But when he did something it was so strange and zany that even he could not understand it. One glassy late afternoon while he was passing through the Judge's backyard going to the lane, Jester's dog, Tige, jumped on his shoulders and licked his face. Sherman would never know why he did what he did. But deliberately he picked up a clothesline, made a noose of it, and hanged the dog on an elm branch. The dog struggled only for a few minutes. The deaf old Judge did not hear his strangled yelps and Jester was away.

  Yet, early as it was, Sherman went to sleep without supper and slept like the dead that night and only woke up when Jester pounded at the door at nine in the morning.

  "Sherman!" Jester was calling in a voice that was shrill with shock. While Sherman took his time dressing, dabbling water on his face, Jester was still pounding at the door and screaming. When Sherman came out, Jester half dragged him to the Judge's yard. The dog, stiff in death, hung against the blue May sky. Jester was crying now. "Tige, Tige. How? What?" Then he turned to Sherman who stood looking at the ground. A nightmare suspicion came to Jester which was suddenly affirmed by Sherman's downward-staring face.

  "Why, Sherman? Why did you do this insane thing?" He stared at Sherman in the stun of not yet realized truth. He was hoping he would know the right thing to say, the right thing to do, and hoping he would not vomit. He did not vomit, but went to the shed to get a shovel to dig the grave. But as he lowered the body, cut the noose and placed Tige in the grave, he felt he was going to faint.

  "How did you know right away I done it?"

  "Your face, and I just knew."

  "I see you walking that white man's dog, getting all dressed up in them seersucker pants, going to the white man's school. Why don't nobody care about me? I do things, don't nobody notice. Good or mean, nobody notices. People pet that goddamned dog more than they notice me. And it's just a dog."

  Jester said, "But I loved him. And Tige loved you too."

  "I don't love no white man's dog and I don't love nobody."

  "But the shock. I can't get over it."

  Sherman thought of the May sun on the courthouse papers. "You're shocked. You ain't the only one who has been shocked."

  "A thing like this makes me think you ought to be in Milledgeville."

  "Milledgeville!" Sherman mocked. His limp hands waggled in an imitation of an idiot. "I'm too smart, kid, to get in Milledgeville. Nobody else would have believed what I done about the dog. Even a crazy-doctor. If you think that is something crazy, you wait and see what else I am going to do."

  Arrested by the threat in his voice, Jester couldn't help but say, "What?"

  "I am going to do the craziest thing I have ever done in my life before, me or any other nigger."

  But Sherman would not tell Jester what he was planning to do, nor could Jester make Sherman feel guilty about Tige's death or even realize that he was acting creepy. Too upset to go to school that day, too restless to hang around the house, he told his grandfather that Tige was dead, had died in his sleep and that he had buried him, and the old Judge did not question further. Then for the first time in his life, Jester played hooky from school and went to the airport.

  The old Judge waited in vain for Sherman, but Sherman was writing a letter with the "calligraphy of an angel." He was writing an Atlanta agency in order to rent a house in Milan in the white man's section. When the Judge called him, Sherman said that he was not going to come to work any longer and His Honor could get his injections somewhere else.

  "You mean you're leaving me high and dry?"

  "That's right. High and dry, Judge."

  The Judge was left on his own again without Sherman. Reading the Milan Courier with the new magnifying glass, with the silent half-Indian servant who never sang and Jester away at school, the Judge was tired and idle. It was a blessing when a veterinarians' convention was held in the town. Poke Tatum attended and he and a half-dozen other delegates stayed at the Judge's house. Mule doctors, pig doctors, dog doctors, they drank up a storm and slid down the banisters. The Judge felt that sliding down the banisters was going a little bit too far, and he missed his wife's dainty church conventions when the preachers and church delegates sang hymns and minded their P's and Q's. When the veterinarians' convention was over and Poke gone, the house was lonelier than ever and the emptiness of the old Judge blanker, more dismal. He blamed Sherman for leaving him. He thought back to the times when there was not only one servant in the house, but two or three, so that the voices of the house were like mingling brown rivers.

  Meanwhile, Sherman had got a reply from the agency and sent a money order for the rent. His race was not questioned. He began to move in two days later. The house was around the corner from Malone's house, next door to the three little houses that Mrs. Malone had inherited. A store was beyond the house that Sherman had rented, and after that the neighborhood was Negro. But shabby and beaten up as it was, his house was in a white section. Sammy Lank and the Lank brood lived next door. Sherman bought on time a baby grand piano and beautiful genuine antique-y furniture and had a mover move them to his new house.

  He moved in the middle of May and at last he was noticed. The news spread like wildfire through the town. Sammy Lank went to Malone to complain and Malone went to the Judge.

  "He's left me high and dry. I am too furious to fool with him any longer."

  Sammy Lank, Bennie Weems and Max Gerhardt, the chemist, milled around the Judge's house. The Judge began to work on Malone. "I don't hold with violence any more than you do, J.T., but when a thing like this comes up I feel it is my duty to act."

  Secretly the Judge was excited. In the old days the Judge had been a Ku Kluxer and he missed it when the Klan was suppressed and he could not go to those white-sheeted meetings at Pine Mountain and fill himself with a secret and invisible power.

  Malone, no Ku Kluxer, was feeling unusually peaked these days. The house was not his wife's property, thank goodness, and besides, it was a sagging, waucome-sided house.

  The Judge said, "It's not people like you and me, J.T., who will be affected
if things like this go on. I have my house here and you have your house on a very good street. We are not affected. Nigras are not likely to be moving in on us. But I am speaking as a chief citizen of this town. I am speaking for the poor, for the unprofited. We leading citizens have to be the spokesmen for the downtrodden. Did you notice Sammy Lank when he came to the house? I thought he was going to have apoplexy. All worked up, as what he should be since his house is the house next door. How would you like to be living next door to a Nigra?"

  "I wouldn't like it."

  "Your property would depreciate, the property that old Mrs. Greenlove left your wife would depreciate."

  Malone said, "For years I have advised my wife to sell those three houses. They have turned into nothing but a slum."

  "You and I as foremost citizens of Milan..." Malone was meekly proud that he was bracketed with the Judge.

  "Another thing," the Judge went on, "you and I have our property and our positions and our self-respect. But what does Sammy Lank have except those slews of children of his? Sammy Lank and poor whites like that have nothing but the color of their skin. Having no property, no means, nobody to look down on—that is the clue to the whole thing. It is a sad commentary on human nature but every man has to have somebody to look down on. So the Sammy Lanks of this world only have the Nigra to look down on. You see, J.T., it is a matter of pride. You and I have our pride, the pride of our blood, the pride in our descendants. But what does Sammy Lank have except those slews of white-headed triplets and twins and a wife worn out with child-bearing sitting on the porch dipping snuff?"

  It was arranged that a meeting would be held in Malone's pharmacy after hours, and that Jester should drive the Judge and Malone to the meeting. That night there was a moon serene in the May night. To Jester, to the old Judge, it was just a moon, but Malone looked at the moon with a hollow sadness. How many May nights had he seen the moon? And how many more moons like this would he ever see? Would this be the last one?

  While Malone sat quiet and wondering in the car, Jester was wondering also. What was this meeting all about? He felt it had something to do with Sherman moving into the white section.

  When Malone opened the side door to the compounding room, he and the Judge went inside. "You go on home, son," the Judge said to Jester. "Some of the boys will bring us back."

  Jester parked the car around the corner while Malone and the Judge went into the pharmacy. Malone turned on the fan so that the warm stale air was churned to a breeze. He did not fully light the drugstore and the half-light gave a sense of conspiracy.

  Assuming that the arrivals would come through the side door, he was surprised when there was a loud knock at the front. It was Sheriff McCall, a man with dainty purplish hands and a broken nose.

  Meanwhile, Jester had come back to the drugstore. The side door was closed but not locked and he entered very quietly. At the same moment, a group of new arrivals were knocking at the front and being admitted, and Jester's presence was unnoticed. Jester was very silent in the darkness of the compounding room, afraid of being discovered and sent away. What were they doing at this hour when the drugstore was closed?

  Malone did not know what the meeting would be like. He had expected a group of leading citizens, but except for Hamilton Breedlove, the cashier at the Milan Bank & Trust Company, and Max Gerhardt, the chemist at the Nehi plant, there were no leading citizens. There were old poker cronies of the Judge, and there was Bennie Weems and Sport Lewis and Sammy Lank. Some of the other new arrivals Malone knew by sight, but they were nameless. A group of boys arrived in overalls. No, they were not leading citizens, but ragtag and bobtail for the most part. Moreover, on arrival they were halfway liquored up and there was the atmosphere of a carnival. A bottle was passed around and put on the counter of the fountain. Before the beginning of the meeting, Malone was already regretting that he had lent his pharmacy to it.

  It may have been Malone's frame of mind, but he recalled somethiNg unpleasant about each of the men he met that night. Sheriff McCall had always sucked up to the old Judge so obviously that it had offended Malone. Besides, he had once seen the sheriff beat a Negro girl with his billy stick on the corner of Twelfth Street and Main. He looked hard at Sport Lewis. Sport had been divorced by his wife for extreme mental cruelty. A family man, Malone wondered what extreme mental cruelty could be. Mrs. Lewis had got a Mexican divorce and later on she had married again. But what was that—extreme mental cruelty? He realized he himself was no saint, and once he had even committed adultery. But no one was hurt and Martha never knew. An extreme mental cruelty? Bennie Weems was a deadbeat and his daughter was sickly so that he was always in debt to Malone and the bills were always unpaid. And it was said that Max Gerhardt was so smart that he could figure out how long it took a toot to get to the moon. But he was German, and Malone had never trusted Germans.

  Those gathered in the drugstore were all ordinary people, so ordinary that he usually didn't think of them one way or the other. But tonight he was seeing the weaknesses of these ordinary people, their little uglinesses. No, none of them were leading citizens.

  The round yellow moon made Malone feel sad and chilly although the night was warm. The smell of whiskey was strong in the drugstore and this faintly nauseated him. There were more than a dozen people there when he asked the Judge: "Is everybody here that's coming?"

  The Judge himself seemed a little disappointed when he said, "It's ten o'clock; I guess so."

  The Judge began in his old grandiloquent speech voice. "Fellow citizens, we are gathered here together as leading citizens of our community, as property owners and defenders of our race." There was a hush in the room. "Little by little we white citizens are being inconvenienced, even gravely put upon. Servants are scarce as hen's teeth and you have to pay them an arm and a leg to keep them." The Judge listened to himself, looked at the people, and realized he was off on the wrong tack. Because by and large these were not the people who kept servants.

  He started again. "Fellow citizens, are there no zoning laws in this town? Do you want coal-black niggers moving in right next door to your house? Do you want your children crowded in the back of the bus while coal-black niggers sit in the front? Do you want your wife carrying on behind the back fence with nigger bucks?" The Judge posed all the rhetorical questions. The crowd muttered among themselves and from time to time there were shouts of "No. Goddammit, no."

  "Are we going to let the zoning of our town be decided by niggers? I'm asking you, are we or are we not?" Balancing himself carefully, the Judge pounded his fist on the counter. "This is the hour of decision. Who is running this town, us or the niggers?"

  Whiskey was freely passed around and there was in the room a fraternity of hate.

  Malone looked at the moon through the plate glass window. The sight of the moon made him feel sickish, but he had forgotten why. He wished he was picking out nuts with Martha, or at home with his feet on the banisters of the porch drinking beer.

  "Who's going to bomb the bastard?" a hoarse voice called.

  Malone realized that few in the crowd actually knew Sherman Pew, but that a fraternity of hate made them all act together. "Should we draw lots, Judge?" Bennie Weems, who had done this sort of thing before, asked Malone for a pencil and paper and began to tear strips of paper. Then he marked an X on one strip. "The X is the one."

  Cold, confused by the bustle, Malone still looked at the moon. He spoke in a dry voice: "Can't we just talk with the Nigra? I never liked him, even when he was your houseboy, Judge. Just a biggity, disrespectful, and a thoroughly bad Nigra. But violence or bombing I don't hold with."

  "No more do I, J.T. And I am fully cognizant that we, as members of this citizens' committee, are taking the law into our own hands. But if the law doesn't protect our interests and the interests of our children and descendants, I am willing to go around the law if the cause is just and if the situation threatens the standards of our community."

  "Everybody ready?" Bennie Weems ask
ed. "The X mark is it." At that moment Malone particularly loathed Bennie Weems. He was a weasel-faced garage man and a real liquor-head.

  In the compounding room, Jester sat hugging the wall so closely that his face was pressed against a bottle of medicine. They were going to draw lots to bomb Sherman's house. He would have to warn Sherman, but he didn't know how to get out of the drugstore, so he listened to the meeting.

  Sheriff McCall said, "You can take my hat," as he proffered his Stetson. The Judge drew first and the others followed. When Malone took the balled-up paper his hands were trembling. He was wishing he was home where he belonged. His upper lip was pressed against the lower. Everybody unrolled his paper under the dim light. Malone watched them and he saw, one after another, the slackened face of relief. Malone, in his fear and dread, was not surprised when his unrolled paper had an X mark on it.

  "I guess it is supposed to be me," he said in a deadened voice. Everybody looked at him. His voice rose. "But if it's bombing or violence, I can't do it.

  "Gentlemen." Looking around the drugstore, Malone realized there were few gentlemen there. But he went on. "Gentlemen, I am too near death to sin, to murder." He was excruciatingly embarrassed, talking about death in front of this crowd of people. He went on in a stronger voice, "I don't want to endanger my soul." Everybody looked at him as though he had gone stark raving crazy.

  Somebody said in a low voice, "Chicken."

  "Well, be dumed," Max Gerhardt said. "Why did you come to the meeting?"

  Malone was afraid that in public, in front of the crowd in the drugstore, he was going to cry. "A year ago my doctor said I had less than a year or sixteen months to live, and I don't want to endanger my soul."