Collected Stories of Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  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 the 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 to 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 often 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 tme. 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.

  She would throw herself into first one thing and then another. For a while there were movies. She went to the show every Saturday with him and Chandler West and the rest of the kids, but when it was over and they had seen everything through she wouldn't come out with them but would stay on in the movie until almost dark. She always started looking at the picture as soon as she passed the ticket man and would stumble down the aisle without ever looking at the seats until she had almost reached the screen—then she would sit on about the third row with her neck bent back and her mouth not quite closed. Even after she had seen everything through twice she would keep turning back to look as she walked out of the show so that she would bump into people and was almost like somebody drunk. On week days she would save all but a dime of her lunch money and buy movie magazines. She had the pictures of Clive Brook and four or five other stars tacked up on the wall of her room and when she would go to the drug store to buy the magazines she would get a chocolate milk and look through all they had, then buy the ones with the most in them about the stars she liked. Movies were all she cared about for about three months. Then all of a sudden that was over and she didn't even go to the show anymore on Saturdays.

  Then there was the Girl Scout Camp she and the girls she knew were going on, out at a lake about twenty miles from town. That was all she talked about the month beforehand. She would priss around in front of the mirror in the khaki shorts and boy's shirts they were supposed to have, her hair slicked back close to her head, thinking it was grand to try to act like a boy. But after she had been on the camp just four days he came in one afternoon and found her playing the Victrola. She had made one of the counsellors bring her home and she looked all done in. She said all they did was swim and run races and shoot bows and arrows. And there weren't any mattresses on the cots and at night there were mosquitoes and she had growing pains in her legs and couldn't sleep. "I just ran and ran and then lay awake in the dark all night," she kept saying. "That's all there was to it." He laughed at her, but when she started crying—not in the way kids like Mick bawled but slowly and unsobbing—it was almost like he was part of her and crying, too. For a long time they sat on the floor together, playing their records. They were always a lot closer than most brothers and sisters.

  Music to them was something like the glider should have been. But it wasn't sudden like that and it didn't let them down. Maybe it was like whiskey was to their Dad. They knew it was something that would stay with them always.

  Sara played the piano more and more after she got to high school. She didn't like it there any more than he did and sometimes she would even worry him into writing excuses for her and signing their Dad's name. The first term she got seven bad cards. Their Dad never knew what to do about Sara and whenever she did something wrong he would just clear his throat and look at her in an embarrassed way like he didn't know how to say what was in his mind. Sara looked like pictures of their mother and he loved her a lot—but it was in a funny sort of timid way. He didn't fuss at all about the bad cards. She was just twelve and that was young to be in high school anyway.

  There is a time when everybody wants to run away—no matter how well they get along with their family. They feel they have to leave because of something they have done, or something they want to do, or maybe they don't know why it is they run away. Maybe it is a kind of slow hunger that makes them feel like they have to get out and go in search of something. He ran away from home once when he was eleven. A girl on the next block took her money out of the school savings bank and got a bus to Hollywood because the actress she had a crush on answered one of her letters and said that if she was ever in California to drop in and see her and swim in her swimming pool. Her folks couldn't get in touch with her for ten days and then her mother went out to Hollywood to bring her back. She had swum in the actress's pool and was trying to get a job in the movies. She was not sorry to come back home. Even Chandler West who was always slow and dumb tried to run away. Although Chandler had lived across the street from them all their lives there was something about him no one could ever understand. Even as little kids he and Sara felt that. It happened after Chandler had failed all his subjects at school, most of them for the second time. He said afterward that he wanted to build a hut up in the Canadian woods and live there by himself as a trapper. He was too dumb to hitch hike and he just kept walking toward the north until finally he was arrested for sleeping in a ditch and sent home. His mother had almost gone crazy and while he was gone her eyes were wild and like an animal's. You would think that Chandler was the only person that she had ever loved. And maybe it was from her that he was running away, too.


  So there was nothing very peculiar about what Sara did—that is unless you were a grown person like their Dad who just didn't understand things like that. There wasn't any real reason for her wanting to leave. It was just the way she had begun to feel in the last year. Maybe music had something to do with it. Or it might have been because she had grown so much and just didn't know what to do with herself.

  It happened on her thirteenth birthday and it was Monday morning. Vitalis had the breakfast table fixed nice with flowers and a new table cloth. Sara didn't seem any different that morning from any other time. But suddenly as she was eating her grits she saw a kinky hair on her plate and she burst out crying. Vitalis's feelings were hurt because she had tried to have breakfast so nice that morning. Sara grabbed her school books and went out the door. She said she wasn't mad with anybody about anything but that she was leaving home for good. He knew she was just talking and would just stay away until school was out. If it hadn't been for Vitalis their Dad would never have known about it. Sara went up the street running and when she came to the vacant lot at the corner she threw all her school books in the high grass there. When he went to pick them up there were papers scattered everywhere in the wind—homework and funny things she had drawn in her tablet.