The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [107]
During most of the day and night he had no time to think. But occasionally he found a chance to rest for a moment at home.
He would drink a pot of coffee by the kitchen stove and a deep uneasiness would come in him. Five of his patients had died.
And one of these was Augustus Benedict Mady Lewis, the little deaf-mute. He had been asked to speak at the burial service, but as it was his rule not to attend funerals he was unable to accept this invitation. The five patients had not been lost because of any negligence on his part. The blame was in the long years of want which lay behind. The diets of cornbread and sowbelly and syrup, the crowding of four and five persons to a single room. The death of poverty. He brooded on this and drank coffee to stay awake. Often he held his hand to his chin, for recently a slight tremor in the nerves of his neck made his head nod unsteadily when he was tired.
Then during the fourth week of February Portia came to the house. It was only six o’clock in the morning and he was sitting by the fire in the kitchen, warming a pan of milk for breakfast. She was badly intoxicated. He smelled the keen, sweetish odor of gin and his nostrils widened with disgust. He did not look at her but busied himself with his breakfast. He crumpled some bread in a bowl and poured over it hot milk. He prepared coffee and laid the table.
Then when he was seated before his breakfast he looked at Portia sternly. ‘Have you had your morning meal?’
‘I not going to eat breakfast,’ she said.
‘You will need it. If you intend to get to work today;’
‘I not going to work.’
A dread came in him. He did not wish to question her further.
He kept his eyes on his bowl of milk and drank from a spoon that was unsteady in his hand. When he had finished he looked up at the wall above her head. ‘Are you tongue-tied?’
‘I going to tell you. You going to hear about it. Just as soon as I able to say it I going to tell you.’
Portia sat motionless in the chair, her eyes moving slowly from one corner of the wall to the other. Her arms hung down limp and her legs were twisted loosely about each other.
When he turned from her he had for a moment a perilous sense of ease and freedom, which was more acute because he knew that soon it was to be shattered. He mended the fire and warmed his hands. Then he rolled a cigarette. The kitchen was in a state of spotless order and cleanliness. The saucepans on the wall glowed with the light of the stove and behind each one there was a round, black shadow.
‘It about Willie.’
‘I know.’ He rolled the cigarette gingerly between his palms.
His eyes glanced recklessly about him, greedy for the last sweet pleasures.
‘Once I mentioned to you this here Buster Johnson were at the prison with Willie. Us knowed him before. He were sent home yestiddy.’
‘So?’
‘Buster been crippled for life.’
His head quavered. He pressed his hand to his chin to steady himself, but the obstinate trembling was difficult to control.
‘Last night these here friends come round to my house and say that Buster were home and had something to tell me about Willie. I run all the way and this here is what he said. ‘
‘Yes.’
‘There were three of them. Willie and Buster and this other boy. They were friends. Then this here trouble come up.’
Portia halted. She wet her finger with her tongue and then moistened her dry lips with her finger. ‘It were something to do with the way this here white guard picked on them all the time. They were out on roadwork one day and Buster he sassed back and then the other boy he try to run off in the woods. They taken all three of them. They taken all three of them to the camp and put them in this here ice-cold room.’
He said yes again. But his head quavered and the word sounded like a rattle in his throat.
‘It were about six weeks ago,’ Portia said. ‘You remember that cold spell then. They put Willie and them boys in this room like ice.’
Portia spoke in a low voice, and she neither paused between words nor did the grief in her face soften. It was like a low song. She spoke and he could not understand. The sounds were distinct in his ear but they had no shape or meaning. It was as though his head were the prow of a boat and the sounds were water that broke on him and then flowed past. He felt he had to look behind to find the words already said.