Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  And grief such as this is not a constant thing, demanding in measure, taking its toll in fixed proportion. Rather (for the Jew was a musician) such grief is like a subordinate but urgent theme in an orchestral work—an endless motive asserting itself with all possible variations of rhythm and tonal coloring and melodic structure, now suggested nervously in flying-spiccato passage from the strings, again emerging in the pastoral melancholy of the English horn, or sounding at times in a strident but truncated version down deep among the brasses. And this theme, although for the most part subtly concealed, affects by its sheer insistence the music as a whole far more than the apparent major melodies. And also there are times in this orchestral work when this motive which has been restrained so long will at a signal volcanically usurp all other musical ideas, commanding the full orchestra to recapitulate with fury all that hitherto had been insinuated. But with grief there is a difference here. For it is no fixed summons, such as the signal from the conductor’s hand, that activates a dormant sorrow. It is the uncalculated and the indirect. So that the Jew could speak of his daughter with composure and without a quiver could pronounce her name. But when on the bus he saw a deaf man bend his head to one side to hear some bit of conversation the Jew was at the mercy of his grief. For his daughter had the habit of listening with her face turned slightly away and of looking up with one quick glance only when the speaker was done. And this old man’s casual gesture was the summons that released in him the grief so long restrained—so that the Jew winced and bowed his head.

  For a long time the Jew sat tense in his seat and rubbed his forehead. Then at eleven o’clock the bus made a scheduled stop. By turns the passengers hastily visited a cramped, stale urinal. Later in a café they gulped down drinks and ordered food that could be carried away and eaten with the hands. He had a beer and on his return to the bus prepared for sleep. He took from his pocket a fresh, unfolded handkerchief and, settling himself in his corner with his head resting in the crotch made by the side of the bus and the rounded back of his seat, he placed the handkerchief over his eyes to guard them from the light. He rested quietly with his legs crossed and his hands clasped loosely in his lap. By midnight he was sleeping.

  Steadily, in darkness, the bus travelled southward. Sometime in the middle of the night the dense summer clouds dispersed and the sky was clear and starry. They were travelling down the long coastal plain that lies to the east of the Appalachian hills. The road wound through melancholy fields of cotton, and tobacco, through long and lonesome stretches of pine woods. The white moonlight made dreary silhouettes of the tenant shacks close by the roadside. Now and then they went through dark, sleeping towns and sometimes the bus stopped to take on or leave off some traveller. The Jew slept the heavy sleep of those who are mortally tired. Once the jolting of the bus caused his head to fall forward on his chest but this did not disturb his slumber. Then just before daylight, the bus reached a town somewhat larger than most of those through which they had been passing. The bus stopped and the driver laid his hand on the Jew’s shoulder to awaken him. For at last his journey was ended.

  Untitled Piece

  THE YOUNG MAN at the table of the station lunch room knew neither the name nor the location of the town where he was, and he had no knowledge of the hour more exact than that it was some time between midnight and morning. He realized that he must already be in the south, but that there were many more hours journeying before he would reach home. For a long time he had sat at the table over a half finished bottle of beer, relaxed to a gangling position—with his thighs fallen loose apart and with one foot stepping on the other ankle. His hair needed cutting and hung down softly ragged over his forehead and his expression as he stared down at the table was absorbed, but mobile and quick to change with his shifting thoughts. The face was lean and suggestive of restlessness and a certain innocent, naked questioning. On the floor beside the boy were two suitcases and a packing box, each tagged neatly with a card on which was typewritten his name—Andrew Leander, and an address in one of the larger towns in Georgia.

  He had come into the place in a drunken turmoil, caused partly by the swallows of corn a man on the bus had offered him, mostly by a surge of expectancy that had come to him during the last few hours of travelling. And that feeling was not unaccountable. Three years before, when he was seventeen years old, the boy had left home in an inner quandary of violence, a gawky wanderer going with fear into the unknown, expecting never to come back. And now after these three years he was returning.

  Sitting at the table in the lunch room of that little nameless town, Andrew had become more calm. All during the time of his absence he had put away thoughts of his home town and his family—of his Dad and his sisters, Sara and Mick, and of the colored girl Vitalis, who worked for them. But as he sat with his beer (so completely a stranger, that it was as though he were magically suspended from the very earth) the memories of all of them at home revolved inside him with the clarity of a reel of films—sometimes precise and patterned, again in a chaos of disorder.

  And there was one little episode that kept recurring again and again in his mind, although until that night he had not thought of it in years. It was about the time he and his sister made a glider in the back yard, and perhaps he kept remembering it because the things he had felt at that time were so much like the expectancy this journey now brought.

  At that time they had all been kids and at the age when all the new things they learned about on the radio and in books and at the movies could set them wild with eagerness. He had been thirteen, Sara a year younger, and little Mick (she didn’t count in things like this) was still in kindergarten. He and Sara had read about gliders in a science magazine in the school library and immediately they began to build one in their back yard. (They began to build it one afternoon in the middle of the week and by Saturday they had worked so hard that it was almost finished.) The article had not given any exact directions for making the glider; they had had to go by the way they imagined it should be and to use whatever materials they could find. Vitalis would not give them a sheet to cover the wings and so they had to cut up his canvas camping tent to use instead. For the frame they used some bamboo sticks and some light wood they snitched from the carpenters who were building a garage up on the next block. When it was finished the glider was not very big, and seemed very different from the ones they had seen in the movies—but he and Sara kept telling each other that it was just as good and that there was nothing to keep their ship from flight.

  That Saturday was a time that none of them would ever forget. The sky was a deep, blazing blue, the color of gas flames, and at times there was a thick and sultry breeze. All morning he and Sara stayed out in the hot sun of the back yard working. Her face was strained and pale with excitement and her full, almost sullen lips were red and dry as though from a fever. She kept running back and forth to get things she thought they might need, her thin legs overgrown and clumsy, her damp hair streaming out behind her shoulders. Little Mick hung around the back steps, watching. It seemed to him then that they were as different as any sisters could be. Mick sat quietly, her hands on her fat little knees, not saying much but gazing at everything they did with a wondering look to her face and with her little mouth softly open. Even Vitalis was out there with them most of the time. She didn’t know whether to believe in it or not. She was a nervous, light colored girl and there was something about the glider that excited her as much as it did the rest of them—and that scared her too. As she watched them her fingers kept fooling with her red earrings or picking at her swollen quivering lips.

  They all felt that there was something wild about that day. It was like they were shut off from all other people in the world and nothing mattered except the four of them planning and working out in the quiet, sun-baked yard. It was as though they had never wanted anything except this glider and its flight from the earth up toward the hot blue sky.

  It was the launching that gave them the most worry. He kept saying t
o Sara: “We ought to have a car to hitch it to because that’s the way the real flyers get them up. Or else one of those elastic ropes like they described in the magazine.”

  But beside their garage was a tall pine tree, with the limbs growing high and stretching out almost as far as the house. From one of these branches hung a swing and it was from this that they intended to make their start. He and Sara took out the board seat and put in its place a larger plank. And it was from the start that the swing would give them that they would be launched.

  Vitalis felt like she ought to be responsible and she was afraid. “I been having this here queer feeling all day.”

  There was a hot slow breeze and from the top of the pine came a gentle soughing. She held up her hands to feel the wind and stood for a moment looking at the sky—intent as some savage rapt in prayer.

  “You all think just because your mother ain’t living that you don’t have to mind nobody. Why don’t you wait till your Daddy come home and ask him? I been having this here feeling all day that something bad ghy happen from that thing.”

  “Hush,” said Sara.

  “I know it ain’t no real airplane even if it do have them big wings made out of a old torn up tent. And I know you just as human as I is. And your head just as easy to bust.”

  But no matter what she said Vitalis believed in the glider as much as any of them. When she was in the kitchen they could see her come to the window every few minutes and stare out at them, her broad nose pressed to the glass, her dark face quivering.

  By the time they were finished the sun was almost down. The sky had blanched to a pale jade color and the breeze that had been blowing most of the day seemed cooler and stronger to them. The yard was very quiet and neither he nor Sara said anything or looked at each other as they tensely balanced the glider on the swing. They had already argued about who would be the one to go up first and he had won. They called Vitalis out from the house and told her to help Sara give the final push and when she did not want to they said they would call Chandler West or some other kid in the neighborhood so she might as well be the one. Little Mick got up from the steps where she had been looking at them all day long and watched him step carefully up into the swing and squat down on the frame of the glider, gripping the wood with the rubber soles of his sneakers.

  “Do you think you’ll go as far as Atlanta or Cleveland?” she asked. Cleveland was the place where their cousin lived and that was how she knew the name.

  It seemed to him as he crouched in there trying to keep his balance that already he was leaving the ground. He could feel his heart beating almost in his throat and his hands were shaking.

  Vitalis said: “And even if this slow little wind do carry you up in the air, what you ghy do then? Is you just ghy fly around up there all night like you is an angel?”

  “Will you be back in time for supper, Drew?” Mick asked.

  Sara looked like she didn’t hear anything that was said. There were drops of sweat on her forehead and he could hear her breath coming quick and shallow. She and Vitalis each took a rope of the swing and pulled with all their strength. Even little Mick helped them balance the glider. It seemed like it took them hours to hoist him up as far as their head while he waited, crouched tensely, with his jaw stiff and his eyes half closed. During that moment he thought of himself soaring up and up into the cool blue sky and the joy of it was such as he never felt before.

  Then came the part that afterward was the hardest to understand. As soon as the glider left the swing it crashed and he fell so hard that for a long time his stomach moved round and round in dizzy turns and he felt like someone was standing on his chest so that he could not breathe. But for some reason that did not matter at all. He got up from the ground and it was as though he would not let himself believe what had happened. He had not fallen on the glider and it was not hurt except for a little tear in the wing. He undid his belt buckle and tried to take a deep breath. He and Sara did not talk but kept themselves busy getting ready for the next take-off. And the queer thing was that they both knew that this second trial would be just like the first and that their glider would not fly. In a part of them they knew this but there was something that would not let them think about it—the wanting and the excitement that would not let them be quiet or stop to reason.

  Vitalis was different and her voice went up high and sing-song. “Here Andrew done almost bust hisself wide open and still you all ghy keep on with this thing. Time you all is near bout twenty-five and old as I is you’ll learn some sense.”

  Even Mick began to talk. She was always a quiet kid and hadn’t said more than ten words all the time she had been hanging around. That was the way she always was. She just looked with her little mouth half open and seemed to wonder about and take in everything you did or said without trying to answer. “When I’m twelve years old and a big girl I’m going to fly and I’m not going to fall. You just wait and see.”

  “Quit your talking like that,” Vitalis said. She did not want to watch them so she went into the house. Now and then they could see her dark face peering out at them from the kitchen window. He had to launch Sara by himself.

  When she got into the glider it was almost dark. She crashed even worse than he did but she did not act like she was hurt and at first he did not notice the bump over her eye and the long bloody smear on her knee where the skin had scraped off. The glider was not even damaged much this time and it was like they were really wild as Vitalis made them out to be. “Just one more time I’m going to try,” Sara said. “It keeps sticking to the seat and when I fix that it’s just got to go up.” She ran into the house, stepping light on the leg she had hurt, and came back with a hunk of butter on a piece of waxed bread wrapper to grease the swing. Vitalis’s high singing voice called out to them from the kitchen but no one answered.

  After the third time it was all over. He let Sara go because he was too heavy for her to launch. Their glider was smashed so you wouldn’t know what it was and he had to help Sara get up from the ground this time. Her eye was swollen and she looked sick. She stood with her weight on one foot and when she pulled up her skirt to show him a big bruise on her thigh, her leg was trembling so that she almost lost her balance. Everything was over and he felt dead and empty inside.

  It was almost dark and they stood there for a while just looking at each other. Mick still sat on the steps, watching them with a scared look and not saying anything. Their faces were white in the half-darkness and the smells of supper from the kitchen were strong in the hot still air. It was very quiet and again it seemed that lonely feeling came to him like they were the only people in the world.

  Finally, Sara said: “I don’t care. I’m glad anyway even if it didn’t work. I’d rather for it to be like it is now than not to have tried to build it. I don’t care.”

  He broke off a piece of the pine bark and looked at Vitalis moving around in the soft yellow light of the kitchen.

  “It ought to have worked though. It ought to have flown. I just can’t see why it didn’t.”

  In the dark sky there was a white star shining. Very slowly they walked across the yard toward their back steps and they were glad that their faces were half secret in the darkness. Quietly they went into the house and after that Vitalis was the only one who ever spoke of what had happened on that day.

  The young man finished his beer on the table and motioned to the sleepy waiter to bring him another. All at once he decided not to take the next bus, but to stay in this strange town until morning. He half closed his eyes to shut out the crude light, the few weary travellers waiting at the tables, the dirty checked cloth before him.

  It seemed to him that no one had ever felt just as he did. The past, the seventeen years of his life when he was at home, was before him like a dark and complex arabesque. But it was not a pattern to be comprehended at a glance, being more like a musical work that unfolds contrapuntally voice by voice and cannot be understood until after the time that it takes to reproduce
it. It took shape in a vague design, less composed of events than of emotions. The last three years in New York did not enter into this pattern at all and were no more than a dark background to reflect for the moment the clarity of what had passed before. And through all this, in counterpart to the interwoven feelings, there was music in his mind.

  Music had always meant a lot to him and Sara. Long ago, before Mick was even born and when their mother was still living, they would blow together on combs wrapped in toilet paper. Later there were harps from the ten cent store and the sad wordless songs that colored people sang. Then Sara began to take music lessons and although she didn’t like either her teacher or the pieces she was given, she stuck to her practicing pretty well. She liked to pick out the jazz songs she heard or just to sit at the piano, playing aimless notes that weren’t music at all.

  He was about twelve when the family got a radio and after that things began to change. They began to dial to symphony orchestras and programmes that were very different from the ones they had listened to before. In a way this music was strange to them and again it was like something they had been waiting for all of their lives. Then their Dad gave them a portable Victrola one Christmas and some Italian opera records. Over and over they would wind up their Victrola and finally they wore the records out—there began to be scratching noises in the music and the singers sounded like they were holding their noses. The next year they got some Wagner and Beethoven.

  All of that was before the time when Sara tried to run away from home. Because they lived in the same house and were together so much he was slow to notice the way she was changing. Of course she was growing very fast and couldn’t wear a dress two months before her wrists would be showing and the skirt would be shorter than her bony knees—but that wasn’t what it was. She reminded him of someone who had been sleepily stumbling through a dark room when a light was turned on. Often there was a lost, dazed look about her face that was hard to understand.