Collected Stories of Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  "Tell me. Is it just us who call this hopping-john? Or is it known by that name through all the country? It seems a strange name somehow."

  "Well, I have heard it called various things," said Berenice.

  "What?"

  "Well, I have heard it called peas and rice. Or rice and peas and pot-liquor. Or hopping-john. You can vary and take your pick."

  "But I'm not talking about this town," F. Jasmine said. "I mean in other places. I mean through all the world. I wonder what the French call it."

  "Oh," said Berenice. "Well, you ask me a question I cannot answer."

  "Merci a la parlez," F. Jasmine said.

  They sat at the table and did not speak. F. Jasmine was tilted back in her chair, her head turned toward the window and the sun-crossed empty yard. The town was silent and the kitchen was silent except for the clock. F. Jasmine could not feel the world go round, and nothing moved.

  "Now a funny thing has happened to me," F. Jasmine began. "I don't hardly know how to tell just what I mean. It was one of those strange things you can't exactly explain."

  "What, Frankie?" John Henry asked.

  F. Jasmine turned from the window, but before she could speak again there was the sound. In the silence of the kitchen they heard the tone shaft quietly across the room, then again the same note was repeated. A piano scale slanted across the August afternoon. A chord was struck. Then in a dreaming way a chain of chords climbed slowly upward like a flight of castle stairs: but just at the end, when the eighth chord should have sounded and the scale made complete, there was a stop. This next to the last chord was repeated. The seventh chord, which seems to echo all of the unfinished scale, struck and insisted again and again. And finally there was a silence. F. Jasmine and John Henry and Berenice looked at each other. Somewhere in the neighborhood an August piano was being tuned.

  "Jesus!" said Berenice. "I seriously believe this will be the last straw."

  John Henry shivered. "Me too," he said.

  F. Jasmine sat perfecdy still before the table crowded with plates and dinner dishes. The gray of the kitchen was a stale gray and the room was too flat and too square. After the silence another note was sounded, and then repeated an octave higher. F. Jasmine raised her eyes each time the tone climbed higher, as though she watched the note move from one part of the kitchen to another; at the highest point her eyes had reached a ceiling corner, then, when a long scale slid downward, her head turned slowly as her eyes crossed from the ceiling corner to the floor corner at the opposite side of the room. The bottom bass note was struck six times, and F. Jasmine was left staring at an old pair of bedroom slippers and an empty beer bottle which were in that corner of the room. Finally she shut her eyes, and shook herself, and got up from the table.

  "It makes me sad," F. Jasmine said. "And jittery too." She began to walk around the room. "They tell me that when they want to punish them over in Milledgeville, they tie them up and make them listen to piano-tuning." She walked three times around the table. "There's something I want to ask you. Suppose you ran into somebody who seemed to you terribly peculiar, but you didn't know the reason why."

  "In what ways peculiar?"

  F. Jasmine thought of the soldier, but she could not further explain. "Say you might meet somebody you think he almost might be a drunk, but you're not sure about anything. And he wanted you to join with him and go to a big party or dance. What would you do?"

  "Well, on the face of it, I don't know. It would depend on how I fed. I might go with him to the big party and meet up with somebody that suited me better." The live eye of Berenice suddenly narrowed, and she looked hard at F. Jasmine. "But why do you ask that?"

  The quietness in the room stretched out until F. Jasmine could hear the drip-drop from the faucet of the sink. She was trying to frame a way to tell Berenice about the soldier. Then all at once the telephone rang. F. Jasmine jumped up and, turning over her empty milk glass, dashed to the hall—but John Henry, who was nearer, reached the telephone first. He knelt on the telephone chair and smiled into the mouthpiece before he said hello. Then he kept on saying hello until F. Jasmine took the receiver from him and repeated the hellos at least two dozen times before she finally hung up.

  "Anything like that makes me so mad," she said when they had gone back to the kitchen. "Or when the express truck stops before the door and the man peers at our number and then takes the box somewhere else. I look on those things as a kind of sign." She raked her fingers through her crew-cut blond hair. "You know I'm really going to get my fortune told before I leave home in the morning. It's something I've been meaning to do for a long time."

  Berenice said: "Changing the subject, when are you going to show me the new dress? I'm anxious to see what you selected."

  So F. Jasmine went up to get the dress. Her room was what was known as a hot box; the heat from the rest of the house rose up to her room and stayed there. In the afternoon the air seemed to make a buzzing sound, so it was a good idea to keep the motor running. F. Jasmine turned on the motor and opened the closet door. Until this day before the wedding she had always kept her six costumes hung in a row on coat-hangers, and she just threw her ordinary clothes up on the shelf or kicked them into a corner. But when she had come home this afternoon, she had changed this: the costumes were thrown up on the shelf and the wedding dress hung alone in the closet on a coat-hanger. The silver slippers were placed carefully on the floor beneath the dress with the toes pointed north, toward Winter Hill. For some reason F. Jasmine tiptoed around the room as she began to dress.

  "Shut your eyes!" she called. "Don't watch me coming down the stairs. Don't open your eyes until I tell you."

  It was as though the four walls of the kitchen watched her, and the skillet hanging on the wall was a watching round black eye. The piano-tuning was for a minute silent. Berenice sat with her head bowed, as though she was in church. And John Henry had his head bowed also, but he was peeking. F. Jasmine stood at the foot of the stairs and placed her left hand on her hip.

  "Oh, how pretty!" John Henry said.

  Berenice raised her head, and when she saw F. Jasmine her face was a study. The dark eye looked from the silver hair ribbon to the soles of the silver slippers. She said nothing.

  "Now tell me your honest opinion," F. Jasmine said.

  But Berenice looked at the orange satin evening dress and shook her head and did not comment. At first she shook her head with short little turns, but the longer she stared, the longer these shakes became, until at the last shake F. Jasmine heard her neck crack.

  "What's the matter?" F. Jasmine asked.

  "I thought you was going to get a pink dress."

  "But when I got in the store I changed my mind. What is wrong with this dress? Don't you like it, Berenice?"

  "No," said Berenice. "It don't do."

  "What do you mean? It don't do."

  "Exactly that. It just don't do."

  F. Jasmine turned to look in the mirror, and she still thought the dress was beautiful. But Berenice had a sour and stubborn look on her face, an expression like that of an old long-eared mule, and F. Jasmine could not understand.

  "But I don't see what you mean," she complained. "What is wrong?"

  Berenice folded her arms over her chest and said: "Well, if you don't see it I can't explain it to you. Look there at your head, to begin with."

  F. Jasmine looked at her head in the mirror.

  "You had all your hair shaved off like a convict, and now you tie a silver ribbon around this head without any hair. It just looks peculiar."

  "Oh, but I'm washing my hair tonight and going to try to curl it," F. Jasmine said.

  "And look at them elbows," Berenice continued. "Here you got on this grown woman's evening dress. Orange satin. And that brown crust on your elbows. The two things just don't mix."

  F. Jasmine hunched her shoulders and covered her rusty elbows with her hands.

  Berenice gave her head another quick wide shake, then bunched her lips in j
udgment. "Take it back down to the store."

  "But I can't!" said F. Jasmine. "It's bargain basement. They don't take back."

  Berenice always had two mottoes. One was the known saying that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And the other was the motto that you have to cut your suit according to the cloth, and make the best of what you have. So F. Jasmine was not certain if it was the last of these mottoes that made Berenice change her mind, or if she really began to improve her feelings about the dress. Anyway, Berenice stared for several seconds with her head to one side, and finally said:

  "Come here. We'll make it fit better at the waist and see what we can do."

  "I think you're just not accustomed to seeing anybody dressed up," F. Jasmine said.

  "I'm not accustomed to human Christmas trees in August."

  So Berenice took off the sash and patted and pulled the dress in various places. F. Jasmine stood stiff like a hatrack and let her work with the dress. John Henry had got up from his chair and was watching, with the napkin still tied around his neck.

  "Frankie's dress looks like a Christmas tree," he said.

  "Two-faced Judas!" F. Jasmine said. "You just now said it was pretty. Old double-faced Judas!"

  The piano tuned. Whose piano it was F. Jasmine did not know, but the sound of the tuning was solemn and insistent in the kitchen, and it came from somewhere not so far away. The piano-tuner would sometimes fling out a rattling little tune, and then he would go back to one note. And repeat. And bang the same note in a solemn and crazy way. And repeat. And bang. The name of the piano-tuner in the town was Mr. Schwarzenbaum. The sound was enough to shiver the gizzards of musicians and make all listeners feel queer.

  "It almost makes me wonder if he does that just to torment us," F. Jasmine said.

  But Berenice said no: "They tune pianos the same way in Cincinnati and the world over. It is just the way they do it. Less turn on the radio in the dining room and drown him out."

  F. Jasmine shook her head. "No," she said. "I can't explain why. But I don't want to have that radio turned on again. It reminds me too much of this summer."

  "Step back a little now," said Berenice.

  She had pinned the waist higher and done one thing and another to the dress. F. Jasmine looked in the mirror over the sink. She could only see herself from the chest up, so after admiring this top part of herself, she stood on a chair and looked at the middle section. Then she began to clear away a corner of the table so she could climb up and see in the mirror the silver shoes, but Berenice prevented her.

  "Don't you honestly think it is pretty?" F. Jasmine said. "I think so. Seriously, Berenice. Give me your candy opinion."

  But Berenice rared up and spoke in an accusing voice: "I never knew somebody so unreasonable! You ask me my candy opinion, and I give it to you. Then you ask me again, and I give it to you. But what you want is not my honest opinion, but my good opinion on something I know is wrong. Now what kind of way is that to act?"

  "All right," F. Jasmine said. "I only want to look good."

  "Well, you look very well," said Berenice. "Pretty is as pretty does. You look well enough for anybody's wedding. Excepting your own. And then, pray Jesus, we will be in a position to do better. What I have to do now is get John Henry a fresh suit and figure about the outfit I'm going to wear myself."

  "Uncle Charles is dead," John Henry said. "And we are going to the wedding."

  "Yes, Baby," said Berenice. And from the sudden dreaming quietness of her, F. Jasmine felt that Berenice was carried back to all the other dead people she knew. The dead were walking in her heart, and she was remembering back to Ludie Freeman and the long-gone time of Cincinnati and the snow.

  F. Jasmine thought back to the other seven dead people she knew. Her mother had died the very day that she was born, so she could not count her. There was a picture of her mother in the right-hand drawer of her father's bureau: and the face looked timid and sorry, shut up with the cold folded handkerchiefs in the drawer. Then there was her grandmother who had died when Frankie was nine years old, and F. Jasmine remembered her very well—but with crooked little pictures that were sunken far back in her mind. A soldier from that town called William Boyd had been killed that year in Italy, and she had known him both by sight and name. Mrs. Selway, two blocks away, had died; and F. Jasmine had watched the funeral from the sidewalk, but she was not invited. The solemn grown men stood around out on the front porch and it had rained, there was a gray silk ribbon on the door. She knew Lon Baker, and he was dead also. Lon Baker was a colored boy and he was murdered in the alley out behind her father's store. On an April afternoon his throat was slashed with a razor blade, and all the alley people disappeared in back doorways, and later it was said his cut throat opened like a crazy shivering mouth that spoke ghost words into the April sun. Lon Baker was dead and Frankie knew him. She knew, but only in a chancing kind of way, Mr. Pitkin at Brawer's Shoe Shop, Miss Birdie Grimes, and a man who had climbed poles for the telephone company: all dead.

  "Do you think very frequently about Ludie?" F. Jasmine asked.

  "You know I do," said Berenice. "I think about the years when me and Ludie was together, and about all the bad times I seen since. Ludie would never have let me be lonesome so that I took up with all kinds of no-good men. Me and Ludie," she said. "Ludie and me."

  F. Jasmine sat vibrating her leg and thinking of Ludie and Cincinnati. Of all the dead people out of the world, Ludie Freeman was the one F. Jasmine knew the best, although she had never laid eyes on him, and was not even born when he had died. She knew Ludie and the city of Cincinnati, and the winter when Ludie and Berenice had gone together to the North and seen the snow. A thousand times they had talked of all these things, and it was a conversation that Berenice talked slowly, making each sentence like a song. And the old Frankie used to ask and question about Cincinnati. What exactly they would eat in Cincinnati and how wide would be the Cincinnati streets? And in a chanting kind of voice they talked about the Cincinnati fish, the parlor in the Cincinnati house on Myrtle Street, the Cincinnati picture shows. And Ludie Freeman was a brickmason, making a grand and a regular salary, and he was the man of all her husbands that Berenice had loved.

  "Sometimes I almost wish I had never knew Ludie at all," said Berenice. "It spoils you too much. It leaves you too lonesome afterward. When you walk home in the evening on the way from work, it makes a little lonesome quinch come in you. And you take up with too many sorry men to try to get over the feeling."

  "I know it," F. Jasmine said. "But T. T. Williams is not sorry."

  "I wasn't referring to T.T. He and me is just good friends."

  "Don't you think you will marry him?" F. Jasmine asked.

  "Well, T.T. is a fine upstanding colored gentleman," said Berenice. "You never hear tell of T.T. raring around like a lot of other mens. If I was to marry T.T., I could get out of this kitchen and stand behind the cash register at the restaurant and pat my foot. Furthermore, I respect T.T. sincerely. He has walked in a state of grace all of his life."

  "Well, when are you going to marry him?" she asked. "He is crazy about you."

  Berenice said: "I ain't going to marry him."

  "But you just now was saying—" said F. Jasmine.

  "I was saying how sincerely I respect T.T. and sincerely regard him."

  "Well, then—?" F. Jasmine said.

  "I respect and regard him highly," said Berenice. Her dark eye was quiet and sober and her flat nose widened as she spoke. "But he don't make me shiver none."

  After a moment F. Jasmine said: "To think about the wedding makes me shiver."

  "Well, it's a pity," said Berenice.

  "It makes me shiver, too, to think about how many dead people I already know. Seven in all," she said. "And now Uncle Charles."

  F. Jasmine put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes, but it was not death. She could feel the heat from the stove and smell the dinner. She could feel a rumble in her stomach and the beating
of her heart. And the dead feel nothing, hear nothing, see nothing: only black.

  "It would be terrible to be dead," she said, and in the wedding dress she began to walk around the room.

  There was a rubber ball on the shelf, and she threw it against the hall door and caught it on the rebound.

  "Put that down," said Berenice. "Go take off the dress before you dirty it. Go do something. Go turn on the radio."

  "I told you I don't want that radio on."

  And she was walking around the room, and Berenice had said to go do something, but she did not know what to do. She walked in the wedding dress, with her hand on her hip. The silver slippers had squeezed her feet so that the toes felt swollen and mashed like ten big sore cauliflowers.

  "But I advise you to keep the radio on when you come back," F. Jasmine said suddenly. "Some day very likely you will hear us speaking over the radio."

  "What's that?"

  "I say very likely we might be asked to speak over the radio some day."

  "Speak about what, pray tell me," said Berenice.

  "I don't know exactly what about," F. Jasmine said. "But probably some eye-witness account about something. We will be asked to speak."

  "I don't follow you," said Berenice. "What are we going to eye-witness? And who will ask us to speak?"

  F. Jasmine whirled around and, putting both fists on her hips, she set herself in a staring position. "Did you think I meant you and John Henry and me? Why, I have never heard of anything so funny in my whole life."

  John Henry's voice was high and excited. "What, Frankie? Who is speaking on the radio?"

  "When I said we, you thought I meant you and me and John Henry West. To speak over the world radio. I have never heard of anything so funny since I was born."

  John Henry had climbed up to kneel on the seat of his chair and the blue veins showed in his forehead and you could see the strained cords of his neck. "Who?" he hollered. "What?"