Clock Without Hands

by Carson McCullers

  That second supper was quite different from the Lutheran one. It turned out Miss Hettie adored oysters and was trying to get up nerve to swallow one whole. The old mother told a story about when she cooked an all-oyster dinner ... raw oysters, scalloped oysters and so forth, which the old lady named in detail ... for the business partner of Percy, "my beloved spouse," and how it turned out that the partner couldn't eat oysters at all. As the old lady drank her wine, her stories grew longer and more tedious and the daughter would try to change the subject with little success. After dinner when the Judge brought cards, the old lady said she was too blind to make out the cards and she would be perfectly satisfied just finishing her port and looking at the fire. The Judge taught Miss Hettie blackjack and found her an able pupil. But he so much missed Miss Missy's slender hands and diamond rings. And another thing, Miss Hettie was a little buxom to his taste and he could not but compare his wife's slender bosom to her somewhat hefty form. His wife had had very delicate breasts, arid indeed, he never forgot that one had been removed.

  On Valentine's Day, sick with that hollow feeling, he bought a five-pound box of heart-shaped candy, much to the interest of J. T. Malone, who made the sale. On the way to Miss Hettie's house he reconsidered judiciously and walked slowly home. He ate the candy himself. It took two months. However, after some other little episodes like this that came to nothing, the Judge devoted himself solely to his grandson and his love for him.

  The Judge spoiled his grandson beyond reason. It was the joke of the town that once at a church picnic the Judge had carefully picked the grains of pepper out of his small grandson's food, as the child did not like pepper. When the child was four years old he could recite the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-Third Psalm, thanks to his grandfather's patient coaching, and it was the old man's delight when townspeople gathered to hear this prodigy perform. Absorbed in his grandson, his hollowness of grief diminished, as well as his fascination for choir ladies. In spite of advancing age, which indeed the Judge did not admit, he went early every morning to his office in the courthouse—walking the morning way, being driven back at noon for a long midday dinner, and being driven back for the afternoon work hours. He argued vociferously in the court house square and in Malone's drugstore. On Saturday night he played poker in a game held in the back room of the New York Café.

  All these years the Judge had as his motto: "Mens sana in corpore sano." His "stroke" did not alter this as much as would have been supposed. After a cantankerous convalescence, he returned to his usual ways; although he went to the office only in the morning and did little but open his diminishing mail and read the Milan Courier, the Flowering Branch Ledger and, on Sundays, the Atlanta Constitution, which infuriated him. The Judge had fallen in the bathroom and had lain there for hours until Jester, sleeping his sound boy's sleep, finally heard his grandfather's cries. The "little seizure" had happened instantaneously so that the Judge had at first hoped that his recovery would come about with the same instant speed. He would not admit it was a true stroke—spoke of "a light case of polio," "little seizure," etc. When he was up and around, he declared he used the walking stick because he liked it and that the "little attack" had probably benefited him as his mind had grown keener because of contemplation and "new studies."

  The old man waited restlessly for the sound of a doorlatch. "Jester is out so late," he said, with a note of complaint. "He's usually such a thoughtful boy about letting me know where he is when he goes out at night. Before my bath, when I heard some sound of music from not far away, I wondered if he had not stepped out in the yard to listen. But the music stopped and when I called there was only silence, and although it's past his bedtime, he has not come home."

  Malone put his long upper lip against his mouth, as he did not like Jester, but he only said mildly: "Well, boys will be boys."

  "Often I have worried about him, brought up in a house of sorrow. If ever there was one. Sometimes I think that's why he loves sad music, although his mother was a great one for music," the Judge said, forgetting he had skipped a generation. "I mean of course his grandmother," he corrected. "Jester's mother was with us only at that time of violence, sorrow and confusion ... so much so that she passed through the family almost unnoticed, so that now I can hardly remember her face. Light hair, brownish eyes, a nice voice ... although her father was a well-known rum runner. In spite of our feelings she was a blessing in disguise if ever there was one.

  "The trouble was, she was just sandwiched in between Johnny's death, Jester's birth, and Miss Missy's second failing. It would take the strongest personality to not blur against all this and Mirabelle was not strong." Indeed, the only memory that stood out was one Sunday dinner when the gentle stranger said: "I love baked Alaskas" and the Judge took it upon himself to correct her. "Mirabelle," he said sternly, "you love me. You love the memory of your husband. You love Miss Missy. But you don't love baked Alaskas, see?" He pointed out, with a most loving glance at the piece he was cutting, "You like baked Alaskas. See the difference, child?" She saw, but her appetite had quite left her. "Yes sir," she said as she put down her fork. The Judge, feeling guilty, said angrily: "Eat, child. You've got to eat in your condition." But the idea of being in her condition only made her cry, and leave the table. Miss Missy, with a glance of reproach to her husband, followed soon after, leaving him to eat in solitary fury. As a punishment to them he deliberately deprived them of his presence most of the afternoon, playing solitaire in the library behind locked doors; it was a great satisfaction when the doorknob was rattled and he refused to budge or answer. He even went so far as to go to the cemetery alone instead of escorting his wife and daughter-in-law on the customary Sunday visit to Johnny's grave. The jaunt to the cemetery restored his usual good temper. After a stroll in the April twilight, he went to Pizzalatti's which was always open and bought sacks of candy, tangerines, and even a coconut, which the family enjoyed after supper.

  "Mirabelle," he said to Malone. "If she had only been taken to Johns Hopkins for the confinement. But Clanes have always been born at home, and who could know how it would turn out, besides. Hindsight is always better than foresight," he finished, dismissing his daughter-in-law who had died in childbirth.

  "Such a sad thing about Mirabelle," Malone said, just in order to say something. "Women seldom die in childbirth in this generation, and when they do it's especially sad. She used to come to the drugstore every afternoon for an ice cream cone."

  "She craved sweets," the Judge said with a peculiar satisfaction, as he had profited by this circumstance and would often say, "Mirabelle is craving strawberry shortcake," or some such delicacy, passing on his own desires to his pregnant daughter-in-law. Tactfully but firmly, his wife had kept the Judge within the three-hundred-pound weight range during her lifetime, although the words calorie or diet were never used. Secretly she read up on calorie lists and planned the meals accordingly, without the Judge's knowledge.

  "Every baby doctor in town was consulted toward the end," the Judge said almost defensively, as though he was being reproached for not caring for his kin. "But it was some rare complication that had not been foreseen. To my dying day I will regret that we had not taken her to Johns Hopkins to begin with. They specialize in complications and rare complaints. If it hadn't been for Johns Hopkins, I would be under the sod today."

  Malone, who found solace in this talk of the sickness of others, asked delicately: "Was your complaint complicated and rare?"

  "Not so much complicated and rare, but curious," the Judge said complacently. "When my beloved wife died I was so miserable I began digging my grave with my teeth."

  Malone shuddered, having an instant, vivid image of his friend chewing gritty dirt in the graveyard, crying with misery. His own illness had left him defenseless against such sudden, random images, no matter how repellent. The subjectivity of illness was so acute that Malone responded violently to whole areas of the most placid and objective concepts. For instance, the mere mention of a commonplace t
hing such as Coca-Cola suggested shame and the disgrace of not being thought a good provider, just because his wife had some shares of Coca-Cola stock which she had bought with her own money and kept in a safety deposit box at the Milan Bank and Trust. These reactions, cavernous and involuntary, were hardly realized by Malone as they had the volatile vigor and backward grace of the unconscious.

  "There came a time when I weighed at your drugstore and I weighed three hundred and ten pounds. But that didn't bother me particularly, and I was only troubled by those falling-out spells. But something outlandish had to happen before I took much serious notice. And finally the outlandish thing happened."

  "What?" Malone asked.

  "It was the time when Jester was seven." The Judge broke off his story to complain of those years. "Oh, the trouble for a man to raise a motherless child, and not only to raise but to rear him. Oh, the Clapps baby food, the sudden earaches in the night which I stopped with paregoric soaked in sugar and sweet oil dropped in his ear. Of course his nurse, Cleopatra, did most of the doing, but my grandson was my responsibility and no question about it." He sighed before he continued his story. "Anyway, when Jester was still a little nipper I decided to teach him to play golf, so one fair Saturday afternoon we set out to the Milan Country Club course. I was just playing away and showing Jester the various holds and positions. We came to that ... that little pond near the woods ... you know it, J.T."

  Malone, who had never played golf and was not a member of the Country Club, nodded with a certain pride.

  "Anyway, I was just swinging away when I suddenly had one of those falling-out spells. And I fell right spang into the pond. There I was drowning with nothing but a seven-year-old boy and a little colored caddy to save me. How they hauled me out I don't know, being too drenched and confused to help myself much. It must have been a job, my weighing over three hundred, but that colored caddy was both shrewd and smart and I was finally safe. However, that falling-out spell made me think seriously enough to consider going to a doctor. Since I didn't like or trust any doctor in Milan, it came to me in a divine flash ... Johns Hopkins. I knew they treated rare, uncommon diseases like mine. I gave the caddy who had saved me a solid gold watch engraved in Latin."

  "Latin?"

  "Mens sana in corpore sano," the Judge said serenely, as that was the only Latin he knew.

  "Most appropriate," said Malone, who did not know Latin either.

  "Unbeknownst to me, I had a peculiar and you might say tragic connection with the colored boy," the Judge said slowly; and he closed his eyes as a kind of curtain for the subject, leaving Malone's curiosity unsatisfied. "Nonetheless," he went on, "I'm hiring him as a body servant." The old-fashioned term struck Malone.

  "When I fell in the pond, I was sufficiently alarmed to take myself to Johns Hopkins, knowing they studied rare and curious diseases. I took little Jester with me to broaden his education and as a reward for helping that caddy save me." The Judge did not admit that he could not face such a horrendous experience as a hospital without his seven-year-old grandson. "So the day came I faced Dr. Hume."

  Malone paled at the unconscious image of a doctor's office with the smell of ether, the children's cries, Dr. Hayden's knife and a treatment table.

  "When Dr. Hume asked if I overate, I assured him I ate just an ordinary amount. Then his questions chiseled finer. He asked, for instance, how many biscuits I had at a meal and I said, 'Just the ordinary amount.' Chiseling in closer in the way that doctors do, he inquired what was the 'ordinary amount.' When I told him, 'Just a dozen or two,' I felt right then and there I had met my Waterloo."

  In a flash Malone saw soaked biscuits, disgrace, Napoleon.

  "The doctor said I had two choices ... either to go on living as I had been, which would not be for long, or to go on a diet. I was shocked, I admit. And I told him it was much too serious a question to decide offhand. I told him to let me think it over for twelve hours before my final decision. 'We won't find the diet too hard, Judge.' Don't you loathe it when doctors use the word 'we' when it applies only and solely to yourself? He could go home and gobble fifty biscuits and ten baked Alaskas ... while me, I'm starving on a diet, so I meditated in a furious way."

  "I hate that 'we' doctors use," Malone agreed, feeling the sickening ricochet of his own emotions in Dr. Hayden's office and the doomed words, "We have here a case of leukemia."

  "Furthermore," the Judge added, "I hate it, God damn it, when doctors presume to tell me the so-called truth. I was so angry meditating about that diet problem I might have then and there had a stroke." The Judge hastily corrected himself, "A heart attack or a 'little seizure.'"

  "No, it's not right," Malone assented. He had asked for the truth, but in asking, he had asked only for reassurance. How could he dream that an ordinary case of spring fever would be a fatal disease? He had wanted sympathy and reassurance, and he got a death warrant. "Doctors, by God; washing their hands, looking out windows, fiddling with dreadful things while you are stretched out on a table or half undressed on a chair." He finished in a voice that wailed with weakness and fury: "I'm glad I didn't finish medical school. I wouldn't have it on my soul nor conscience."

  "I meditated the full twelve hours as I said I would do. One portion of me said to go on the diet while another portion said, to hell, you live only once. I quoted Shakespeare to myself, 'To be or not to be,' and cogitated sadly. Then toward twilight a nurse came to the room with a tray. On the tray there was a steak twice as thick as my hand, turnip greens, lettuce and tomato salad. I looked at the nurse. She had dainty bosoms and a lovely neck ... for a nurse, that is. I told her about my problem and asked her truthfully what that diet was. You could have struck me over with a feather when she said: 'This, Judge, is the diet.' When I was sure it was no trick, I sent word to Dr. Hume that I was on the diet and I fell to. I had forgotten to mention liquor or little toddies. I managed that."

  "How?" asked Malone, who knew the Judge's little weaknesses.

  "The Lord works in strange ways. When I took Jester out of school to accompany me to the hospital, everybody thought it was mighty strange. Sometimes I thought so too, but secretly I was afraid I would die up North in that hospital. I didn't know the design beforehand, but a seven-year-old boy is just right to go to the nearest liquor store and get a bottle for his sick grandfather.

  "The trick in life is to change a miserable experience into a happy one. Once my gut was shrunk, I got along fine in Johns Hopkins and I lost forty pounds in three months."

  The Judge, seeing Malone's long-eyed wistfulness, felt suddenly guilty because he had talked so much about his own health. "You may think everything is roses and wine with me, J.T., but it's not and I'm going to tell you a secret I never breathed to a soul in this world, a serious, awful secret."

  "Why, what on earth..."

  "I was pleased after the diet to lose all that corpulence, but that diet had got in my system and just a year later, on my annual visit to Johns Hopkins, I was told I had sugar in the blood and that means diabetes." Malone, who had been selling him insulin for years, was not surprised but he did not comment. "Not a fatal disease but a diet disease. I cussed out Dr. Hume and threatened to bring suit but he reasoned with me and as a dyed-in-the-wool magistrate, I realized it wouldn't stand up in court. That brought certain problems. Do you know, J.T., while it's not a fatal disease, you have to have an injection every day. There is nothing catching about it but I felt there were too many health marks against me to make it known to the general public. I'm still in the zenith of my political career whether anybody recognizes it or not."

  Malone said, "I won't tell anybody, although it is no disgrace."

  "Corpulence, that little seizure, and then on top of everything, diabetes ... that's too much for a politician. Although there was a cripple in the White House for thirteen years."

  "I have every confidence in your political astuteness, Judge." He said this, but that evening he had strangely lost faith in the old Judge ... why he didn
't know ... medical faith anyhow.

  "For years I put up with those public nurses for the injections and now chance has led me to another solution. I have found a boy who will look after me and give me those needles. He is the same boy you inquired about in the spring."

  Malone, suddenly remembering, said, "Not the Nigra with the blue eyes."

  "Yes," the Judge said.

  "What do you know about him?" Malone asked.

  The Judge was thinking about the tragedy of his life and how that boy had centered in it. But he only said to Malone, "He was the colored caddy who saved my life when I fell into that pond."

  Then came about between the two friends that laughter of disaster. It was focused consciously on the image of the three-hundred-pound old man being dragged out of a golf pond, but the hysterical laughter was reverberated in the gloom of the evening. The laughter of disaster does not stop easily, and so they laughed for a long time, each for his own disaster. The Judge stopped laughing first. "Seriously, I wanted to find someone I could trust, and who else could I trust more than that little caddy who saved my life? Insulin is a very delicate, mysterious thing and has to be administered by someone who is mighty intelligent and conscientious, needles boiled and so forth."

  Malone thought the boy might be intelligent, but isn't there such a thing as a too intelligent colored boy? He feared for the Judge, seeing those cold, blazing eyes and associating them with the pestle, rats and death. "I wouldn't have hired that colored boy, but maybe you know best, Judge."

  The Judge was back with his own worries. "Jester doesn't dance, he doesn't drink liquor, he doesn't even go with girls, as far as I know. Where is that Jester? It's getting late. J.T., do you think I ought to call the police?"

  The idea of calling the police and such commotion unnerved Malone. "Why it's not late enough to worry about, but I think I'd better go home."