The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [60]
Doctor Copeland cracked the points of his fingers. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, I come to see if I can’t get you to be there tomorrow at the reunion. All your childrens but Willie going to be there.
Seem to me like you ought to join us. I sure will be glad if you come.’
Hamilton and Karl Marx and Portia--and William. Doctor Copeland removed his spectacles and pressed his fingers against his eyelids. For a minute he saw the four of them very plainly as they were a long time ago. Then he looked up and straightened his glasses on his nose. Thank you,’ he said. ‘I will come.’
That night he sat alone by the stove in the dark room and remembered. He thought back to the time of his childhood.
His mother had been born a slave, and after freedom she was a washerwoman. His father was a preacher, who had once known John Brown. They had taught him, and out of the two or three dollars they had earned each week they saved. When he was seventeen years old they had sent him North with eighty dollars hidden in his shoe. He had worked in a blacksmith’s shop and as a waiter and as a bellboy in a hotel.
And all the while he studied and read and went to school. His father died and his mother did not live long without him. After ten years of struggle he was a doctor and he knew his mission and he came South again. He married and made a home. He went endlessly from house to house and spoke the mission and the truth. The hopeless suffering of his people made in him a madness, a wild and evil feeling of destruction. At times he drank strong liquor and beat his head against the floor. In his heart there was a savage violence, and once he grasped the poker from the hearth and struck down his wife. She took Hamilton, Karl Marx, William, and Portia with her to her father’s home. He wrestled in his spirit and fought down the evil blackness. But Daisy did not come back to him. And eight years later when she died his sons were not children any more and they did not return to him. He was left an old man in an empty house.
Promptly at five o’clock the next afternoon he arrived at the house where Portia and Highboy lived. They resided in the part of town called Sugar Hill, and the house was a narrow cottage with a porch and two rooms. From inside there was a babble of mixed voices. Doctor Copeland approached stiffly and stood in the doorway holding his shabby felt hat in his hand.
The room was crowded and at first he was not noticed. He sought the faces of Karl Marx and Hamilton. Besides them there was Grandpapa and two children who sat together on the floor. He was still looking into the faces of his sons when Portia perceived him standing in the door. ‘Here Father,’ she said.
The voices stopped. Grandpapa turned around in his chair. He was thin and bent and very wrinkled. He was wearing the same greenish-black suit that he had worn thirty years before at his daughter’s wedding. Across his vest there was a tarnished brass watch chain. Karl Marx and Hamilton looked at each other, then down at the floor, and finally at their father.
‘Benedict Mady--’ said the old man. ‘Been a long time. A real long time.’
‘Ain’t it, though!’ Portia said. ‘This here the first reunion us is all had in many a year. Highboy, you get a chair from the kitchen. Father, here Buddy and Hamilton.’ Doctor Copeland shook hands with his sons. They were both tall and strong and awkward. Against their blue shirts and overalls their skin had the same rich brown color as did Portia’s. They did not look him in the eye, and in their faces there was neither love nor hate. It sure is a pity everybody couldn’t come--Aunt Sara and Jim and all the rest,’ said Highboy. ‘But this here is a real pleasure to us.’
‘Wagon too full,’ said one of the children. ‘Us had to walk a long piece cause the wagon too full anyways.’
Grandpapa scratched Ms ear with a matchstick. ‘Somebody got to stay home.’
Nervously Portia licked her dark, thin lips. ‘It our Willie I thinking about. He were always a big one for any kind of party or to-do. My mind just won’t stay off our Willie.’
Through the room there was a quiet murmur of agreement.