Malone said, "Darling, no man has ever had such a wife as you." It was the first time he had called her darling since the year after they were married.
Mrs. Malone went into the kitchen. When she came back, after having cried a little, she brought with her a hot water bottle. "The nights and early dawns are chilly." When she put the hot water bottle in the bed, she asked, "Comfy, Hon?"
Malone scrounged down from his bedrest and touched his feet to the hot water bottle. "Darling," he said again, "may I have some ice water?" But when Martha brought the ice water the cubes of ice bumped against his nose so he said, "This ice tickles my nose. I just wanted plain cold water." And having taken the ice from the water, Mrs. Malone withdrew into the kitchen to cry again.
He did not suffer. But it seemed to him that his bones felt heavy and he complained.
"Hon, how can your bones feel heavy?" Martha said.
He said he was hungry for watermelon, and Martha bought shipped watermelon from Pizzalatti's, the leading fruit and candy store in town. But when the slice of melon, pink with silvery frost, was on his plate, it did not taste like he thought it would.
"You have to eat to keep up your strength, J.T."
"What do I need strength for?" he said.
Martha made milkshakes and surreptitiously she put an egg in them. Two eggs in fact. It comforted her to see him drink it.
Ellen and Tommy came back and forth in the sickroom and their voices seemed loud to him, though they tried to talk softly.
"Don't bother your father," Martha said. "He is feeling pretty peaked now."
On the sixteenth Malone felt better and even suggested that he shave himself and take a proper bath. So he insisted on going to the bathroom, but when he reached the washbasin he only grasped the basin with his hands and Martha had to lead him back to the bed.
Yet the last flush of life was with him. His spirit was strangely raw that day. In the Milan Courier he read that a man had saved a child from burning and had lost his own life. Although Malone did not know the child or the man, he began to cry, and kept on crying. Raw to anything he read, raw to the skies, raw to the world outside the window—it was a cloudless, fair day—he was possessed by a strange euphoria. If his bones weren't so heavy, he felt he could get up and go down to the pharmacy.
On the seventeenth he did not see the May sunrise for he was asleep. Slowly the flush of life he had felt the last day was leaving him. Voices seemed to come from far away. He could not eat his dinner, so Martha made a milkshake in the kitchen. She put in four eggs, and he complained of the taste. The thoughts of the past and this day were commingled.
After he refused to eat his chicken supper, there was an unexpected visitor. Judge Clane suddenly burst into the sickroom. Veins of anger pulsed in his temples. "I came to get some Miltown, J.T. Have you heard the news on the radio?" Then he looked at Malone and was shocked by his sudden feebling. Sorrow battled with the old Judge's fury. "Excuse me, dear J.T.," he said in a voice that was suddenly humble. Then his voice rose: "But have you heard?"
"Well, what is it, Judge? Heard what?" Martha asked.
Sputtering, incoherent with anger, the Judge told about the Supreme Court decision for school integration. Martha, flabbergasted and taken aback, could only say "Well! I vow!" as she had not quite taken it in.
"There are ways we can get around it," cried the Judge. "It will never happen. We will fight. All Southerners will fight to the last ditch. To the death. Writing it in laws is one thing but enforcing it is another. A car is waiting for me; I am going down to the radio station to make an address. I will rally the people. I want something terse and simple to say. Dramatic. Dignified and mad, if you know what I mean. Something like: 'Four score and seven years ago...' I'll make it up on the way to the station. Don't forget to hear it. It will be a historic speech and will do you good, dear J.T."
At first Malone hardly knew the old Judge was there. There was just his voice, his huge sweaty presence. Then the words, the sounds, ricocheted in his ununderstanding ears: integration ... Supreme Court. Concepts and thought washed in his mind, but feebly. Finally Malone's love and friendship for the old Judge called him back from his dying. He looked at the radio and Martha turned it on, but since a dance band was playing, she turned it down very low. A newscast that announced again the Supreme Court decision preceded the speech by the Judge.
In the soundproof room of the radio station, the Judge had latched onto the microphone like a professional. But although he had tried to make up a speech on the way to the station, he had not been able to. The ideas were so chaotic, so inconceivable, he could not formulate his protests. They were too passionate. So, angry, defiant—expecting at any moment a little seizure, or worse—the Judge stood with the microphone in his hand and no speech ready. Words—vile words, cuss words unsuitable for the radio—raged in his mind. But no historic speech. The only thing that came to him was the first speech he had memorized in law school. Knowing dimly somehow that what he was going to say was wrong, he plunged in.
"Fourscore and seven years ago," he said, "our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure."
There was the sound of scuffling in the room and the Judge said in an outraged voice: "Why are you poking me!" But once you get on the track of a monumental speech, it's hard to get off. He went on, louder:
"We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."
"I said, quit poking me," the Judge shouted again.
"But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here..."
"For chrissakes!" somebody shouted, "cut it!"
The old Judge stood at the microphone with the echo of his own words ringing in his ears and the memory of the sound of his own gavel rapping in his courtroom. The shock of recognition made him crumble, yet immediately he shouted: "It's just the other way around! I mean it just the other way around! Don't cut me off!" pleaded the Judge in an urgent voice. "Please don't cut me off."
But another speaker began and Martha switched off the radio. "I don't know what he was talking about," she said. "What happened?"
"Nothing, darling," Malone said. "Nothing that was not a long time in the making."
But his livingness was leaving him, and in dying, living assumed order and a simplicity that Malone had never known before. The pulse, the vigor was not there and not wanted. The design alone emerged. What did it matter to him if the Supreme Court was integrating schools? Nothing mattered to him. If Martha had spread out all the Coca-Cola stocks on the foot of the bed and counted them, he wouldn't have lifted his head. But he did want something, for he said: "I want some ice-cold water, without any ice."
But before Martha could return with the water, slowly, gently, without struggle or fear, life was removed from J. T. Malone. His livingness was gone. And to Mrs. Malone who stood with the full glass in her hand, it sounded like a sigh.
About the Author
Carson McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. She published her first short story, "Wunderkind," in 1936; four years later, at the age of twenty-three, she won instant fame with her novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. While still in her twenties, she published three further novels— Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), and The Member of the Wedding (1946)—and most of her mature short stories, essays, and poetry. In 1950, her stage adaptation of The Member of the Wedding opened on Broadway to great acclaim; she followed it in 1954
with a comedy, The Square Root of Wonderful. In 1952 she was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, whose citation praised her "deeply penetrating yet compassionate observation of human nature," "unique talent for lyrical narrative," and "rare talent as a dramatist." Clock Without Hands, her final novel, was published in 1961. She died in Nyack, New York, in 1967, at the age of fifty.
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