Clock Without Hands

by Carson McCullers

  It was nine-thirty when Jester came into the Judge's room. He was eating a double-decker sandwich which, after those hours of remembered anxiety and grief, the old man eyed hungrily.

  "I counted on you for supper."

  "I took in a show and made myself a sandwich when I got home."

  The Judge put on his spectacles and peered at the thick sandwich. "What's in it?"

  "Peanut butter, tomatoes, and bacon and onions."

  Jester took a gaping bite of the sandwich and a chunk of onion fell to the carpet. To quell his appetite, the Judge shifted his eager gaze from the delicious sandwich to the onion which was stuck to the carpet with mayonnaise. His appetite still remained, and so he said: "Peanut butter is loaded with calories." Opening the liquor chest he poured some whiskey. "Just eighty calories an ounce. And more what I wanted anyhow."

  "Where is my father's picture?"

  "In the drawer over there."

  Jester, who knew well his grandfather's habit of hiding the photograph when he was upset, asked, "What's the matter?"

  "Mad. Sad. Cheated. When I think of my son I often feel so."

  A certain stillness fell on Jester's heart, as it always did when his father was mentioned. The Christmas chimes were silvery in the frosty air. He stopped eating and silently placed the scallop-bitten sandwich on the end table beside the bed. "You never talk about my father to me," he said.

  "We were more like brothers than father and son. Blood twin brothers."

  "I doubt it. Only introverts commit suicide. And you're no introvert."

  "My son was not an introvert I'll have you know, sir," the Judge said with a voice that was shrill with rage. "Same sense of fun, same mental caliber. Your father would have been a genius if he'd lived, and that's not a word I bandy about lightly." (This was truer than anyone could have imagined, as the Judge used the word only when it applied to Fox Clane and William Shakespeare.) "Like blood twin brothers we were until he got involved with the Jones case."

  "Is that the case where you always said my father was trying to break an axiom?"

  "Laws, blood customs, axioms indeed!" Glaring at the bitten sandwich, he seized and ate it hungrily; but because his emptiness was not a hunger of the belly he remained uncomforted.

  Since the Judge seldom talked about his son to Jester or satisfied his grandson's natural curiosity, Jester was used to asking angled questions, and so he asked: "What was that case about?"

  The Judge responded at so wide an angle that the answer and question did not directly meet. "Johnny's adolescence was passed when communism was blaring wide and handsome in the grandstand. High muckety-mucks squatting in the very White House itself; the time of TVA, FHA, and FDR, all those muckety-muck letters. And one thing leading to another, a Negress singing at the Lincoln Memorial and my son...!" The Judge's voice soared with rage, "and my son defending a Nigra in a murder case. Johnny tried to..." Hysteria overcame the old man, the hysteria of the fantastic incongruity which strikes upon the heart's chagrin. He could not finish for the painful cackles and flying spittle.

  "Don't," Jester said.

  The rasping cackles and spittle continued while Jester watched soberly, his face white. "I'm not," the Judge managed to articulate until hysteria mounted again, "not laughing."

  Jester sat upright in the chair, and his face was white. Alarmed, he began to wonder if his grandfather was having an apoplectic fit. Jester knew that apoplectic fits were queer and sudden. He wondered if people turned red as fire and laughed like that in an apoplectic fit. He knew, also, that people died from apoplectic fits. Was his grandfather, red as fire and choking, laughing himself to death? Jester tried to raise the old man so he could slap him on the back, but the weight was too heavy for him, and at last the laughter weakened and finally stopped.

  Bewildered, Jester considered his grandfather. He knew that schizophrenia was a split personality. Was he acting crisscrossed in his old age, laughing fit to kill when he ought to be crying? He knew well that his grandfather loved his own son. A whole section of the attic was kept for his dead father: ten knives and an Indian dagger, a clown costume, the Rover Boy series, Tom Swift series, and stacks of child's books, a cow skull, roller skates, fishing tackle, football suits, catchers' mitts, trunks and trunks of fine things and junk. But Jester had learned that he must not play with the things in the trunks, fine things or junk, for once when he tacked the cow's skull to the wall of his own bedroom, his grandfather had been furious and threatened to switch him with the peach switch. His grandfather had loved his own and only son, so why did he laugh with hysterics?

  The Judge, seeing the question in Jester's eyes, said quietly: "Hysterics is not laughter, Son. It's a panic reaction of confusion when you cannot grieve. I was hysterical for four days and nights after my son's death. Doc Tatum helped Paul haul me into the bathtub for warm water baths and gave me sedatives and I kept on laughing—not laughing, that is—hysterical. Doc tried cold showers and more sedation. And there I was hysterical and the corpse of my son laid out in the parlor. The funeral had to be held over a day and I was so weak it took two big, strong men to hold me up when we went down the church aisle. Tight fit we must have been," he added soberly.

  Jester asked in the same quiet voice: "But why do you get hysterical now? It's over seventeen years since my father died."

  "And in all those years not a day has passed that I didn't think about my son. Sometimes for a glancing time, others for a brooding spell. I seldom ever trusted myself to speak of my son, but today most of the afternoon and the long evening I have been remembering—not only the skylarking times when we were young but the grown-up gravities that split and vanquished us. I was seeing my son at that last trial as plainly as I see you right now—plainer, in fact. And hearing his voice."

  Jester was holding the chair arms so tightly his knuckles whitened.

  "His defense was masterly except for one fatal flaw. The fatal flaw was that the jurors never got the gist at all. My son argued the case as though he was talking to a panel of New York Jew lawyers instead of the panel of twelve men good and true of the Circuit Court in Peach County, Georgia. Illiterate, one and all. Under the circumstances my son's opening move was a stroke of genius."

  Jester opened his mouth and breathed through it, so tense was his silence.

  "My son's first motion was to request the jurors to rise and pledge allegiance to the American flag. The jurors shambled to their feet and Johnny read them through the rigamarole, the pledge. Both Nat Webber and I were caught flatfooted. When Nat objected, I rapped the gavel and ordered the words struck from the record. But that didn't matter. My son had already made his point."

  "What point?"

  "At one stroke my son had joined those twelve men and prompted them to function at their highest level. They had been taught in school the pledge of allegiance and in speaking it, they were participating in some kind of holy exercise. I rapped the gavel!" The Judge grunted.

  "Why did you strike it from the record?"

  "Irrelevance. But my son, as defense lawyer, had made his point and lifted a sordid, cut-and-dried murder case to the level of constitutional law. My son went right on. 'Fellow jurors and your honor...' My son looked hard at each juror as he spoke, and at me. 'Each one of you twelve jurors has been lifted to an immense responsibility. Nothing takes precedence over you and your work at this hour.'" Jester listened with his hand and forefinger propping up his chin, his wine-brown eyes wide and asking in his listening face.

  "From the beginning, Rice Little maintained that Mrs. Little had been raped by Jones, and his brother had every right to attempt to kill him. Rice Little just stood there like a little dirty feist dog guarding his brother's property line and nothing could shake him. When Johnny asked Mrs. Little, she swore it wasn't so and that her husband had tried to kill Jones out of deliberate malice ... and in the struggle for the gun her husband was killed ... a strange thing for a wife to swear. Johnny asked if Jones had ever treated her in any way t
hat was not right and proper and she said, 'Never,' that he had treated her always like a lady."

  The Judge added, "I should have seen something. But then eyes had I, but saw not.

  "Plainer than yesterday I hear their words and see their faces. The accused had that peculiar color of a Nigra who is deathly scared. Rice Little in his tight, Sunday suit and his face as hard and yellow as a cheese paring. Mrs. Little just sat there, her eyes blue, blue and brazen, brazen. My son was trembling. After an hour my son shifted from the particular to the general. 'If two white people or two Negro people were being tried for this same accident, there would have been no case at all, for it was an accident that the gun went off when Ossie Little was trying to kill the defendant.'

  "Johnny went on: 'The fact is that the case involves a white man and a Negro man and the inequality that lies between the handling of such a situation. In fact, fellow jurors, in cases like this, the Constitution itself is on trial.' Johnny quoted the preamble and the amendments freeing the slaves and giving them citizenship and equal rights. 'These words I quote now were written a century and a half ago and spoken by a million voices. These words are the law of our country. I, as a citizen and lawyer, can neither add to nor subtract from them. My function in this court is to underscore and try to implement them.' Then carried away, Johnny quoted 'Four score and seven years ago...' I rapped."

  "What for?"

  "These were just private words that Lincoln spoke, words that every law student memorizes, but I was not bound to hear them quoted in my courtroom."

  Jester said, "My father wanted to quote them. Let me hear it now." Jester did not know clearly what the quote would be, but he felt nearer to his father than he had ever been, and the riddling skeleton of suicide and the old glory hole trunks were being fleshed by a living image. In his excitement Jester rose and stood with one hand on the bedpost, one leg drawn up against the other, waiting. Since the Judge never needed a second invitation to sing or recite or otherwise exercise his voice for an audience, he gravely quoted the Gettysburg Address while Jester listened with tears of glory in his eyes, his foot drawn up and his mouth open.

  At the end, the Judge seemed to be wondering why he was quoting that. He said, "One of the greatest pieces of oratory ever spoken, but a vicious rabble-rouser. Shut your mouth, boy."

  "I think it was terrible that you struck that from the record," Jester said. "What else did my father say?"

  "His closing words, which should have been his most eloquent, petered out sadly after the high-flown impractical words of the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. His own words drooped like a flag on a windless day. He pointed out that the amendments that followed the Civil War had not been implemented. But when he spoke of civil rights, he was so wrought up he pronounced it 'thivil' which made a bad impression and naturally undercut his own confidence. He pointed out that the population of Peach County was almost equally balanced between the Nigra and white races. He said he noticed that there was no Nigra represented on the jury and the jurors looked quickly at each other, suspicious and puzzled.

  "Johnny asked, 'Is the defense being accused of murder, or of rape? The prosecution has tried to smear the defendant's honor and the honor of Mrs. Little with sly and evil insinuations. But I am defending him against the accusation of murder.'

  "Johnny was trying to get to a climax. His right hand grabbed as though to conjure some word. 'For more than a century these words of the Constitution have been the law of our land, but words are powerless unless they are enforced by law, and after this long century our courts are stately halls of prejudice and legalized persecution as far as the Negro is concerned. The words have been spoken. The ideas have been shaped. And how long will be the lag between the words and the idea and justice?'

  "Johnny sat down," the Judge added bitterly, "and I unscrooched my behind."

  "You what?" Jester asked.

  "My behind, which had been scrooched up ever since that mistake about 'thivil' instead of civil. I relaxed when Johnny's speech was finished."

  "I think it was a brilliant defense," Jester said.

  "It didn't work. I retired to my chambers to await the verdict. They were out just twenty minutes. Just time enough to troop down to the courthouse basement and to check their decisions. I knew what the verdict would be."

  "How could you know?"

  "When rape is even rumored under such circumstances, the verdict is always guilty. And when Mrs. Little was so quick to speak up for her husband's killer, it just looked downright strange. Meanwhile, I was as innocent as a newborn babe, and so was my son. But the jury smelled a rat and returned a guilty verdict."

  "But wasn't it a frame-up?" Jester said angrily.

  "No. The jury had to decide who was telling the truth, and in this case they decided right, although little did I reck at the time. When the verdict was announced there was a great wail from Jones's mother in the courtroom, Johnny turned ghost pale, and Mrs. Little swayed in her chair. Only Sherman Jones seemed to take it like a man."

  "Sherman?" Jester paled and flushed in quick succession. "Was the Negro named Sherman?" Jester asked in a vacant voice.

  "Yes, Sherman Jones."

  Jester looked puzzled and his next question was widely angled, tentative. "Sherman is not a common name."

  "After Sherman marched through Georgia many a colored boy was named for him. Personally I have known half a dozen in my lifetime."

  Jester was thinking about the only Sherman he knew, but he kept silent. He only said, "I don't see it."

  "Neither did I at the time. Eyes had I and did not see. Ears had I and did not hear. If I had just used my God-born sense in that courtroom, or if my son had confided in me."

  "Confided what?"

  "That he was in love with that woman, or thought he was."

  Jester's eyes were suddenly still with shock. "But he couldn't be! He was married to my mother!"

  "Like blood twin brothers we are, Son, instead of grandfather and grandson. Like two peas in a pod. Same innocence, same sense of honor."

  "I don't believe it."

  "I didn't either when he told me so."

  Jester had often heard about his mother so that his curiosity about her had been satisfied. She had been, as he knew, fond of ice cream, especially baked Alaskas, she played the piano and was a music major at Hollins College. These scraps of information had been told him readily, casually, when he was a child, and his mother had not elicited the awe and mystery the boy felt for his father.

  "What was Mrs. Little like?" Jester asked finally.

  "A hussy. She was very pale, very pregnant, very proud."

  "Pregnant?" Jester asked, repelled.

  "Very. When she walked through the streets it was as though she expected the crowds to part for her and her baby like the Red Sea parted for the Israelites."

  "Then how could my father have fallen in love with her?"

  "Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. It's standing in love that matters. This was not real love. It was love like you are in love with a cause. Besides, your father never acted on it. Call it infatuation. My son was a Puritan and Puritans have more illusions than people who act out every love at first sight, every impulse."

  "How terrible for my father to be in love with another woman and be married to my mother, too." Jester was thrilled with the drama of the situation and felt no loyalty to his baked-Alaska mother. "Did my mother know?"

  "Of course not. My son only told me the week before he killed himself, he was so upset, so shocked. Otherwise, he would never have told me."

  "Shocked about what?"

  "To make an end to the story, after the verdict and execution, Mrs. Little called for Johnny. She had had her baby and she was dying."

  Jester's ears had turned very red. "Did she say she loved my father? Passionately, I mean?"

  "She hated him and told him so. She cursed him for being a fumbling lawyer, for airing his own ideas of justice at the expense of his client. Sh
e cursed and accused Johnny, maintaining that if he had conducted the case as a cut-and-dried matter of self-defense Sherman Jones would be a free man now. A dying woman, ranting, wailing, grieving, cursing. She said that Sherman Jones was the cleanest, most decent man she had ever known and that she loved him. She showed Johnny the newborn baby, dark-skinned and with her own blue eyes. When Johnny came home he looked like that man who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

  "I just let Johnny talk away, then I said, 'Son, I hope you have learned a lesson. That woman couldn't possibly have loved Sherman Jones. He is black and she is white.'"

  "Grandfather, you talk like loving a Negro is like loving a giraffe or something."

  "Of course it wasn't love. It was lust. Lust is fascinated by the strange, the alien, the perverse and dangerous. That's what I told Johnny. Then I asked him why he took it so to heart. Johnny said: 'Because, I love Mrs. Little, or would you have me call it lust?'

  "'Either lust or lunacy, Son,' I said."

  "What happened to the baby?" Jester asked.

  "Evidently, Rice Little took the baby after Mrs. Little died and left it on a pew of the Holy Ascension Church in Milan. It must have been Rice Little, he's the only one I can figure out."

  "Is it our Sherman?"

  "Yes, but don't tell him of any of this," the Judge warned.

  "Did my father kill himself the day Mrs. Little showed him the baby and cursed him and accused him?"

  "He waited until Christmas afternoon, a week later, after I thought I had knocked some sense into his head and it was all over and done with. That Christmas started like any other Christmas, opening presents in the morning, and piled up Christmas wrapping under the Christmas tree. His mother had given him a pearl stickpin and I had given him a box of cigars and a shockproof, waterproof watch. I remember Johnny banged the watch and put it in a cup of water to test it. Over and over I have reproached myself that I didn't notice anything in particular that day, since we were like blood twin brothers I should have felt the mood of his despair. Was it normal to horse around with the shockproof, waterproof watch like that? Tell me, Jester."