The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [76]
Most of the time he just sat in the back yard or in the coal house by himself. It got closer and closer toward Christmas time. She really wanted a piano, but naturally she didn’t say anything about that. She told everybody she wanted a Micky Mouse watch. When they asked Bubber what he wanted from Santa Claus he said he didn’t want anything. He hid his marbles and jack-knife and wouldn’t let anyone touch his story books.
After that night nobody called him Bubber any more. The big kids in the neighborhood started calling him Baby-Killer Kelly. But he didn’t speak much to any person and nothing seemed to bother him. The family called him by his real name--George. At first Mick couldn’t stop calling him Bubber and she didn’t want to stop. But it was funny how after about a week she just naturally called him George like the others did.
But he was a different kid--George--going around by himself always like a person much older and with nobody, not even her, knowing what was really in his mind.
She slept with him on Christmas Eve night. He lay in the dark without talking. ‘Quit acting so peculiar,’ she said to him. ‘Less talk about the wise men and the way the children in Holland put out their wooden shoes instead of hanging up their stockings.’
George wouldn’t answer. He went to sleep.
She got up at four o’clock in the morning and waked everybody in the family. Their Dad built a fire in the front room and then let them go into the Christmas tree and see what they got. George had an Indian suit and Ralph a rubber doll. The rest of the family just got clothes. She looked all through her stocking for the Mickey Mouse watch but it wasn’t there. Her presents were a pair of brown Oxford shoes and a box of cherry candy. While it was still dark she and George went out on the sidewalk and cracked nigger-toes and shot firecrackers and ate up the whole two-layer box of cherry candy. And by the time it was daylight they were sick to the stomach and tired out. She lay down on die sofa. She shut her eyes and went into the inside room.
4
EIGHT O’CLOCK DOCTOR Copeland sat at his desk, studying a sheaf of papers by the bleak morning light from the window.
Beside him the tree, a thick-fringed cedar, rose up dark and green to the ceiling. Since the first year he began to practice he had given an annual party on Christmas Day, and now all was in readiness. Rows of benches and chairs lined the walls of the front rooms. Throughout the house there was the sweet spiced odor of newly baked cake and steaming coffee. In the office with him Portia sat on a bench against the wall, her hands cupped beneath her chin, her body bent almost double.
‘Father, you been scrouched over the desk since five o’clock. You got no business to be up. You ought to stayed in bed until time for the to-do.’
Doctor Copeland moistened his thick lips with his tongue. So much was on his mind that he had no attention to give to Portia. Her presence fretted him.
At last he turned to her irritably. ‘Why do you sit there moping?’
‘I just got worries,’ she said. ‘For one thing, I worried about our Willie.’
‘William?’
‘You see he been writing me regular ever Sunday. The letter will get here on Monday or Tuesday. But last week he didn’t write. Course I not really anxious. Willie--he always so good-- natured and sweet I know he going to be all right. He been transferred from the prison to the chain gang and they going to work up somewhere north of Atlanta. Two weeks ago he wrote this here letter to say they going to attend a church service today, and he done asked me to send him his suit of clothes and his red tie.’
‘Is that all William said?’
‘He written that this Mr. B. F. Mason is at the prison, too. And that he run into Buster Johnson--he a boy Willie used to know. And also he done asked me to please send him his harp because he can’t be happy without he got his harp to play on. I done sent everthing. Also a checker set and a white-iced cake.
But I sure hope I hears from him in the next few days.’
Doctor Copeland’s eyes glowed with fever and he could not rest his hands.