Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  ‘Make it happy and simple,’ he said, switching on the lamp behind her and stepping back from the piano.

  For a moment he stood just inside the bright circle the light made. Then impulsively he squatted down to the floor. ‘Vigorous,’ he said.

  She could not stop looking at him, sitting on one heel with the other foot resting squarely before him for balance, the muscles of his strong thighs straining under the cloth of his trousers, his back straight, his elbows staunchly propped on his knees. ‘Simply now,’ he repeated with a gesture of his fleshy hands. ‘Think of the blacksmith—working out in the sunshine all day. Working easily and undisturbed.’

  She could not look down at the piano. The light brightened the hairs on the backs of his outspread hands, made the lenses of his glasses glitter.

  ‘All of it,’ he urged. ‘Now!’

  She felt that the marrows of her bones were hollow and there was no blood left in her. Her heart that had been springing against her chest all afternoon felt suddenly dead. She saw it gray and limp and shriveled at the edges like an oyster.

  His face seemed to throb out in space before her, come closer with the lurching motion in the veins of his temples. In retreat, she looked down at the piano. Her lips shook like jelly and a surge of noiseless tears made the white keys blur in a watery line. ‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know why, but I just can’t—can’t any more.’

  His tense body slackened and, holding his hand to his side, he pulled himself up. She clutched her music and hurried past him.

  Her coat. The mittens and galoshes. The schoolbooks and the satchel he had given her on her birthday. All from the silent room that was hers. Quickly—before he would have to speak.

  As she passed through the vestibule she could not help but see his hands—held out from his body that leaned against the studio door, relaxed and purposeless. The door shut to firmly. Dragging her books and satchel she stumbled down the stone steps, turned in the wrong direction, and hurried down the street that had become confused with noise and bicycles and the games of other children.

  The Aliens

  IN AUGUST OF THE YEAR 1935 a Jew sat alone on one of the rear seats of a bus headed south. It was late afternoon and the Jew had been travelling since five o’clock in the morning. That is to say he had left New York at daybreak and except for a number of necessary brief stops he had been waiting patiently on his rear seat for the time when he would reach his destination. Behind him was the great city—that marvel of immensity and intricate design. And the Jew, who had set out at such an early hour on this journey, carried in him a last memory of a city strangely hollow and unreal. As the sun was rising he had walked alone in the unpeopled streets. As far ahead as he could see there were the skyscrapers, pastel mauve and yellow in color, clear and sharp as stalactites against the sky. He had listened to the sound of his own quiet footsteps and for the first time in that city he had heard on the streets the clear articulation of a single human voice. But even then there was the feeling of the multitude, some subtle warning of the raucous fury of the hours soon to come, the turmoil, the constant struggles around closing subway doors, the vast roaring of the city day. Such then was his last impression of the place he had left behind him. And now before him was the South.

  The Jew, a man of about fifty years of age, was a patient traveller. He was of middle height and only slightly under average weight. As the afternoon was hot he had removed his black coat and hung it carefully on the back of his seat. He wore a blue striped shirt and gray checked trousers. And of these rather threadbare trousers he was careful to the point of anxiousness, lifting the cloth at the knee each time he crossed his legs, flicking with his handkerchief the dust that seeped in the open window. Although there was no passenger beside him he kept himself well within the limits of his portion of the seat. On the rack above him there was a cardboard lunch box and a dictionary.

  The Jew was an observant person—and already with some care he had scanned each fellow passenger. Especially he had noticed the two Negroes who, although they had boarded the bus at widely separate points, had been talking and laughing together on the back seat all the afternoon. Also he watched with interest the passing landscape. He had a quiet face—this Jew—with a high, white forehead, dark eyes behind horn rimmed spectacles, and a rather strained, pale mouth. And for a patient traveller, a man of such composure, he had one annoying habit. He smoked constantly and as he smoked he quietly worried the end of his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger, rubbing and pulling out shreds of tobacco so that often the cigarette was so ragged that he was obliged to nip off the end before putting it to his lips again. His hands were slightly calloused at the fingertips and developed to a state of delicate muscular perfection; they were a pianist’s hands.

  At seven o’clock the long summer twilight had just begun. After a day of glare and heat the sky was now tempered to a restful greenish blue. The bus wound along a dusty unpaved road, flanked by deep fields of cotton. It was here that a halt was made to pick up a new passenger—a young man carrying a brand new cheap tin suitcase. After a moment of awkward hesitation the young man sat down beside the Jew.

  “Good evenin’, sir.”

  The Jew smiled—for the young man had a sunburned pleasant face—and replied to this greeting in a voice that was soft and slightly accented. For a while these were the only words that were said between them. The Jew looked out of the window and the young man watched him shyly from the corner of his eye. Then the Jew took down his lunch box from the rack above his head and prepared to eat his evening meal. In the box there was a sandwich made with rye bread and two lemon tarts. “Will you have some?” he asked politely.

  The young man blushed. “Why, much obliged. You see, when I come in I had to wash and I didn’t get a chance to eat my supper.” His sunburned hand hovered hesitantly over the two tarts until he chose the one that was stickier and a little crushed around the edges. He had a warm musical voice—with the vowels long drawn and the final consonants unsounded.

  They ate in silence with the slow enjoyment of those who know the worth of food. Then when his tart was finished the Jew moistened his fingertips with his mouth and wiped them with his handkerchief. The young man watched and gravely copied him. Dark was coming. Already the pine trees in the distance were blurred and there were flickering lights in the lonely little houses set back in the fields along the way. The Jew had been looking intently out the window and at last he turned to the young man and asked with a nod of his head toward the fields outside: “What is that?”

  The young man strained his eyes and saw above the trees in the distance the outline of a smokestack. “Can’t tell from here,” he said. “It might be a gin or even a sawmill.”

  “I mean out there all around—growing.”

  The young man was puzzled. “I can’t see what it is you’re talkin’ about.”

  “The plants with the white flowers.”

  “Why man!” said the southerner slowly. “That’s cotton.”

  “Cotton,” repeated the Jew. “Of course. I should have known.”

  There was a long pause in which the young man looked at the Jew with anxiety and fascination. Several times he wet his lips as though about to speak. After some deliberation he smiled genially to the Jew and nodded his head with elaborate reassurance. And then (God knows from what experience in what small-town Greek café) he leaned over so that his face was only a few inches from the Jew’s and said with a labored accent: “You Greek fallow?”

  The Jew, bewildered, shook his head.

  But the young man nodded and smiled even more insistently. He repeated his question in a very loud voice. “I say you Greek fallow?”

  The Jew drew back into his corner. “I can hear O.K. I just do not understand that idiom.”

  The summer twilight faded. The bus had left the dusty road and was travelling now on a paved but winding highway. The sky was a deep somber blue and the moon was white. The fields of cotton (belongin
g perhaps to some huge plantation) were behind them and now on either side of the road the land was fallow and uncultivated. Trees on the horizon made a dark black fringe against the blue of the sky. The atmosphere had a dusky lavender tone and perspective was curiously difficult, so that objects which were far appeared near and things close at hand seemed distant. Silence had settled in the bus. There was only the vibrant throb of the motor, so constant that by now it was scarcely realized.

  The sunburned young man sighed. And the Jew glanced quickly into his face. The southerner smiled and asked the Jew in a soft voice: “Where is your home, sir?”

  To this question the Jew had no immediate answer. He pulled out shreds of tobacco from the end of his cigarette until it was too mangled for further use and then stamped out the stub on the floor. “I mean to make my home in the town where I am going—Lafayetteville.”

  This answer, careful and oblique, was the best that the Jew could give. For it must be understood at once that this was no ordinary traveller. He was no denizen of the great city he had left behind him. The time of his journey would not be measured by hours, but by years—not by hundreds of miles, but by thousands. And even such measurements as these would be in only one sense accurate. The journey of this fugitive—for the Jew had fled from his home in Munich two years before—more nearly resembled a state of mind than a period of travelling computable by maps and timetables. Behind him was an abyss of anxious wandering, suspense, of terror and of hope. But of this he could not speak with a stranger.

  “I’m only going a hundred and eight miles away,” said the young man. “But this is the futherest I’ve ever been away from home.”

  The Jew raised his eyebrows with polite surprise.

  “I’m going to visit with my sister who’s only been wedded about a year. I think a mighty lot of this sister and now she’s—” He hesitated and seemed to be rummaging in his mind for some choice and delicate expression. “She’s with young.” His blue eyes fastened doubtfully on the Jew as though uncertain that a man who had never before seen cotton would understand this other fundament of nature.

  The Jew nodded and bit his lower lip with restrained amusement.

  “Her time is just about here and her husband is cooking his tobacco. So I thought maybe I would come in handy.”

  “I hope she will have an easy time,” the Jew said.

  Here there was an interruption. By now it was quite dark and the driver of the bus pulled to the side of the road and turned on the lights inside. The sudden brightness awoke a child who had been sleeping and she began to fret. The Negroes on the back seat, for a long time silent, resumed their languorous dialogue. An old man on the front seat who spoke with the hollow insistence of the deaf began to joke with his companion.

  “Are your folks already at this town where you going?” the young man asked the Jew.

  “My family?” The Jew took off his spectacles, breathed on the lenses, and polished them on the sleeve of his shirt. “No, they will join me there when I have settled myself—my wife and my two daughters.”

  The young man leaned forward so that his elbows rested on his knees and his chin was cupped in his palms. Beneath the electric light his face was round and rosy and warm. Beads of perspiration glistened on his short upper lip. His blue eyes had a sleepy look and there was something childish about the way the soft brown bangs of his hair lay damp on his forehead. “I mean to get married sometime soon,” he said. “I been picking around for a long time amongst the girls. And now I got them finally narrowed down to three.”

  “Three?”

  “Yeah—all fine good looking girls. And that’s another reason why I thought it fit to go off on this trip just now. You see when I come back I can look at them fresh and maybe make up my mind which one I want to ask.”

  The Jew laughed—a smooth hearty laugh that changed him completely. All trace of strain left his face, his head was thrown back, and his hands clasped tight. And although the joke was at his own expense, the southerner laughed with him. Then the Jew’s laughter ended as abruptly as it had begun, finished with a great intake and release of breath that trailed off in a groan. The Jew closed his eyes for a moment and seemed to be according this morsel of fun a place in some inward repertoire of the ridiculous.

  The two travellers had eaten together and had laughed together. By now they were no longer strangers. The Jew settled himself more comfortably in his seat, took a tooth-pick from his vest pocket and made use of it unobtrusively, half hiding his mouth with his hand. The young man removed his tie and unbuttoned his collar to the point where brown curling hairs showed on his chest. But it was evident that the southerner was not so much at ease as was the Jew. Something perplexed him. He seemed to be trying to frame some question that was painful and difficult to ask. He rubbed the damp bangs on his forehead and rounded his mouth as though about to whistle. At last he said: “You are a foreign man?”

  “Yes.”

  “You come from abroad?”

  The Jew inclined his head and waited. But the young man seemed unable to go further. And while the Jew waited for him either to speak or to be silent the bus stopped to take on a Negro woman who had signaled from the roadside. The sight of this new passenger disturbed the Jew. The Negro was of indeterminate age and, had she not been clothed in a filthy garment that served as a dress, even her sex would have been difficult at first glance to define. She was deformed—although not in any one specific limb; the body as a whole was stunted, warped and undeveloped. She wore a dilapidated felt hat, a torn black skirt and a blouse that had been roughly fashioned from a meal sack. At one corner of her mouth there was an ugly open sore and beneath her lower lip she carried a wad of snuff. The whites of her eyes were not white at all, but of a muddy yellow color veined with red. Her face as a whole had a roving, hungry, vacant look. As she walked down the aisle of the bus to take her place on the back seat the Jew turned questioningly to the young man and asked in a quiet, taut voice: “What is the matter with her?”

  The young man was puzzled. “Who? You mean the nigger?”

  “Sh—” the Jew cautioned, for they were on the next to the last seat and the Negro was just behind them.

  But already the southerner had turned in his seat and was staring behind him with such frankness that the Jew winced. “Why there’s nothing the matter with her,” he said when he had completed this scrutiny. “Not that I can see.”

  The Jew bit his lip with embarrassment. His brows were drawn and his eyes were troubled. He sighed and looked out of the window although, because of the light in the bus and the darkness outside, there was little to be seen. He did not notice that the young man was trying to catch his eye and that several times he moved his lips as though about to speak. Then finally the young man’s question was spoken. “Was you ever in Paris, France?”

  The Jew said yes.

  “That’s one place I always wanted to go. I know this man was over there in the war and somehow all my life I wanted to go to Paris, France. But understand—” The young man stopped and looked earnestly into the Jew’s face. “Understand it’s not the wimming.” (For, due either to the influence of the Jew’s careful syllables or to some spurious attempt at elegance the young man actually pronounced the word “wimming.”) “It’s not because of the French girls you hear about.”

  “The buildings—the boulevards?”

  “No,” said the young man with a puzzled shake of his head. “It’s not any of those things. That’s how come I can’t understand it. Because when I think about Paris just one thing is in my mind.” He closed his eyes thoughtfully. “I always see this little narrow street with tall houses on both sides. It’s dark and it’s cold and raining. And nobody is in sight except this French fellow standing on the corner with his cap pulled down over his eyes.” The young man looked anxiously into the Jew’s face. “Now how come I would have this homesick feeling for something like that? Why—do you reckon?”

  The Jew shook his head. “Maybe too much s
un,” he said finally.

  Soon after this the young man reached his destination—a little cross roads village that appeared to be deserted. The southerner took his time about leaving the bus. He pulled down his tin suitcase from the rack and shook hands with the Jew. “Goodbye, Mister—” The fact that he did not know the name seemed to come as a sudden surprise to him. “Kerr,” said the Jew. “Felix Kerr.” Then the young man was gone. At the same stop the Negro woman—that derelict of humanity the sight of whom had so disturbed the Jew—left the bus also. And the Jew was alone again.

  He opened his lunch box and ate the sandwich made with rye bread. Afterward he smoked a few cigarettes. For a time he sat with his face close to the window screen and tried to gather some impression of the landscape outside. Since nightfall clouds had gathered in the sky and there were no stars. Now and then he saw the dark outline of a building, vague stretches of land, or a clump of trees close to the roadside. At last he turned away.

  Inside the bus the passengers had settled down for the night. A few were sleeping. He looked about him with a certain rather jaded curiosity. Once he smiled to himself, a thin smile that sharpened the corners of his mouth. But then, even before the last trace of this smile had faded, a sudden change came over him. He had been watching the deaf old man in overalls on the front seat and some small observation seemed suddenly to cause in him intense emotion. Over his face came a swift grimace of pain. Then he sat with his head bowed, his thumb pressed to his right temple and his fingers massaging his forehead.

  For this Jew was grieving. Although he was careful of his checked threadbare trousers, although he had eaten with enjoyment and had laughed, although he hopefully awaited this new strange home that lay ahead of him—in spite of these things there was a long dark sorrow in his heart. He did not grieve for Ada, his good wife to whom he had been faithful for twenty-seven years, or for his little daughter, Grissel, who was a charming child. Those two—God be willing—would join him here as soon as he could prepare for them. Neither was this grief concerned with his anxiety for his friends, nor with the loss of his home, his security, and his content. The Jew sorrowed for his elder daughter, Karen, whose whereabouts and state of welfare were unknown to him.