The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

by Carson McCullers

  A timid smile from Singer followed Jake’s outburst of laughter. After a while the smile on Singer’s face grew strained and faded. Jake still laughed. The vein in his forehead swelled, his face was dusky red. He laughed too long. Singer looked up at the clock and indicated the time--half-past twelve. He took his watch, his silver pencil and pad, his cigarettes and matches from the mantel and distributed them among his pockets. It was dinner-time.

  But Jake still laughed. There was something maniacal in the sound of his laughter. He walked about the room, jingling the change in his pockets. His long, powerful arms swung tense and awkward. He began to name over parts of his coming meal. When he spoke of food his face was fierce with gusto.

  With each word he raised his upper lip like a ravenous animal.

  ‘Roast beef with gravy. Rice. And cabbage and light bread.

  And a big hunk of apple pie. I’m famished. Oh, Johnny, I can hear the Yankees coming. And speaking of meals, my friend, did I ever tell you about Mr. Clark Patterson, the gentleman who owns the Sunny Dixie Show? He’s so fat he hasn’t seen his privates for twenty years, and all day he sits in his trailer playing solitaire and smoking reefers. He orders his meals from a short-order joint nearby and every day he breaks his fast with--’ Jake stepped back so that Singer could leave the room. He always hung back at doorways when he was with the mute. He always followed and expected Singer to lead. As they descended the stairs he continued to talk with nervous volubility. He kept his brown, wide eyes on Singer’s face.

  The afternoon was soft and mild. They stayed indoors. Jake had brought back with them a quart of whiskey. He sat brooding and silent on the foot of the bed, leaning now and then to fill his glass from the bottle on the floor. Singer was at his table by the window playing a game of chess. Jake had relaxed somewhat. He watched the game of his friend and felt the mild, quiet afternoon merge with the darkness of evening.

  The firelight made dark, silent waves on the walls of the room.

  But at night the tension came in him again. Singer had put away his chess men and they sat facing each other.

  Nervousness made Jake’s lips twitch raggedly and he drank to soothe himself. A backwash of restlessness and desire overcame him. He drank down the whiskey and began to talk again to Singer. The words swelled with him and gushed from his mouth. He walked from the window to the bed and back again--again and again. And at last the deluge of swollen words took shape and he delivered them to the mute with drunken emphasis: ‘The things they have done to us! The truths they have turned into lies. The ideals they have fouled and made vile. Take Jesus. He was one of us. He knew. When He said that it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God--he damn well meant just what he said. But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of him. How they have turned every word he spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today. Jesus would be one who really knows. Me and Jesus would sit across the table and I would look at him and he would look at me and we would both know that the other knew. Me and Jesus and Karl Marx could all sit at a table and-- ‘And look what has happened to our freedom. The men who fought the American Revolution were no more like these D.A.R. dames than I’m a pot-bellied, perfumed Pekingese dog.

  They meant what they said about freedom. They fought a real revolution. They fought so that this could be a country where every man would be free and equal. Huh! And that meant every man was equal in the sight of Nature--with an equal chance. This didn’t mean that twenty per cent of the people were free to rob the other eighty per cent of the means to live.

  This didn’t mean for one rich man to sweat the piss out of ten thousand poor men so that he can get richer. This didn’t mean the tyrants were free to get this country in such a fix that millions of people are ready to do anything--cheat, lie, or whack off their right arm--just to work for three squares and a flop. They have made the word freedom a blasphemy. You hear me? They have made the word freedom stink like a skunk to all who know.’

  The vein in Jake’s forehead throbbed wildly. His mouth worked convulsively. Singer sat up, alarmed, Jake tried to speak again and the words choked in his mouth. A shudder passed through his body. He sat down in the chair and pressed his trembling lips with his fingers. Then he said huskily: ‘It’s this way, Singer. Being mad is no good. Nothing we can do is any good. That’s the way it seems to me. All we can do is go around telling the truth. And as soon as enough of the don’t knows have learned the truth then there won’t be any use for fighting. The only thing for us to do is let them know. All that’s needed. But how? Huh?’

  The fire shadows lapped against the walls. The dark, shadowy waves rose higher and the room took on motion. The room rose and fell and all balance was gone. Alone Jake felt himself sink downward, slowly in wavelike motions downward into a shadowed ocean. In helplessness and terror he strained his eyes, but he could see nothing except the dark and scarlet waves that roared hungrily over him. Then at last he made out the thing which he sought. The mute’s face was faint and very far away. Jake closed his eyes.

  The next morning he awoke very late. Singer had been gone for hours. There was bread, cheese, an orange, and a pot of coffee on the table. When he had finished his breakfast it was time for work. He walked somberly, his head bent, across the town toward his room. When he reached the neighborhood where he lived he passed through a certain narrow street that was flanked on one side by a smoke-blackened brick warehouse. On the wall of this building there was something that vaguely distracted him. He started to walk on, and then his attention was suddenly held. On the wall a message was written in bright red chalk, the letters drawn thickly and curiously formed: Ye shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth.

  He read the message twice and looked anxiously up and down the street. No one was in sight. After a few minutes of puzzled deliberation he took from his pocket a thick red pencil and wrote carefully beneath the inscription: Whoever wrote the above meet me here tomorrow at noon, Wednesday, November 29. Or the next day.

  At twelve o’clock the next day he waited before the wall.

  ‘Now and then he walked impatiently to the corner to look : up and down the streets. No one came. After an hour he ← had to leave for the show. The next day he waited, also. Then on Friday there was a long, slow winter rain. The wall was sodden and the messages streaked so that no word could be read. The rain continued, gray and bitter and cold. Bubber said. ‘I come to believe we all gonna drown.’ It was true that it like to never quit raining. Mrs. Wells rode them back and forth to school in her car, and every afternoon they had to stay on the front porch or in the house. She and Bubber played Parcheesi and Old Maid and shot marbles on the living-room rug. It was nearing along toward Christmas time and Bubber began to talk about the Little Lord Jesus and the red bicycle he wanted Santa Claus to bring him. The rain was silver on the windowpanes and the sky was wet and cold and gray. The river rose so high that some of the factory people had to move out of their houses. Then when it looked like the rain would keep on and on forever it suddenly stopped. They woke up one morning and the bright sun was shining. By afternoon the weather was almost warm as summer. Mick came home late from school and Bubber and Ralph and Spareribs were on the front sidewalk. The kids looked hot and sticky and their winter clothes had a sour smell. Bubber had his slingshot and a pocketful of rocks.

  Ralph sat up in his wagon, his hat crooked on his head, and he was fretful. Spareribs had his new rifle with him. The sky was a wonderful blue.

  ‘We waited for you a long time, Mick,’ Bubber said. ‘Where you been?’

  She jumped up the front steps three at a time and threw her sweater toward the hat rack. ‘Practicing on the piano in the gym.’

  Every afternoon she stayed after school for an hour to play.

  The gym was crowded and noisy because the girls’
team had basketball games. Twice today she was hit on the head with the ball. But getting a chance to sit at a piano was worth any amount of knocks and trouble. She would arrange bunches of notes together until the sound came that she wanted. It was easier than she had thought. After the first two or three hours she figured out some sets of chords in the bass that would fit in with the main tune her right hand was playing. She could pick out almost any piece now. And she made up new music too. That was better than just copying tunes. When her hands hunted out these beautiful new sounds it was the best feeling she had ever known.

  She wanted to learn how to read music already written down.

  Delores Brown had taken music lessons for five years. She paid Delores the fifty cents a week she got for lunch money to give her lessons. This made her very hungry all through the day. Delores played a good many fast, runny pieces--but Delores did not know how to answer all the questions she wanted to know. Delores only taught her about the different scales, the major and minor chords, the values of the notes, and such beginning rules as those.

  Mick slammed the door of the kitchen stove. ‘This all we got to eat?’

  ‘Honey, it the best I can do for you,’ Portia said. Just cornpones and margarine. As she ate she drank a glass of water to help wash down the swallows.

  ‘Quit acting so greedy. Nobody going to snatch it out your hand.’

  The kids still hung around in front of the house. Bubber had put his slingshot in his pocket and now he played with the rifle. Spareribs was ten years old and his father had died the month before and this had been his father’s gun--All the smaller kids loved to handle that rifle. Every few minutes Bubber would haul the gun up to his shoulder. He took aim and made a loud pow sound.

  ‘Don’t monkey with the trigger,’ said Spareribs. I got the gun loaded.’

  Mick finished the cornbread and looked around for something to do. Harry Minowitz was sitting on his front porch banisters with the newspaper. She was glad to see him. For a joke she threw up her arm and hollered to him, ‘Heil!’ But Harry didn’t take it as a joke. He went into his front hall and shut the door. It was easy to hurt his feelings. She was sorry, because lately she and Harry had been right good friends. They had always played in the same gang when they were kids, but in the last three years he had been at Vocational while she was still in grammar school. Also he worked at part-time jobs. He grew up very suddenly and quit hanging around the back and front yards with kids. Sometimes she could see him reading the paper in his bedroom or undressing late at night. In mathematics and history he was the smartest boy at Vocational. Often, now that she was in high school too, they would meet each other on the way home and walk together. They were in the same shop class, and once the teacher made them partners to assemble a motor. He read books and kept up with the newspapers every day. World politics were all the time on his mind. He talked slow, and sweat stood out on his forehead when he was very serious about something. And now she had made him mad with her.

  ‘I wonder has Harry still got his gold piece,’ Spareribs said.

  ‘What gold piece?’

  ‘When a Jew boy is born they put a gold piece in the bank for him. That’s what Jews do.’

  ‘Shucks. You got it mixed up,’ she said. ‘It’s Catholics you’re thinking about. Catholics buy a pistol for a baby soon as it’s born. Some day the Catholics mean to start a war and kill everybody else.’

  ‘Nuns give me a funny feeling,’ Spareribs said. ‘It scares me when I see one on the street.’

  She sat down on the steps and laid her head on her knees. She went into the inside room. With her it was like there was two places--the inside room and the outside room. School and the family and the things that happened every day were in the outside room. Mister Singer was in both rooms. Foreign countries and plans and music were in the inside room. The songs she thought about were there. And the symphony. When she was by herself hi this inside room the music she had heard that night after the party would come back to her. This symphony grew slow like a big flower in her mind. During the day sometimes, or when she had just waked up in the morning, a new part of the symphony would suddenly come to her. Then she would have to go into the inside room and listen to it many times and try to join it into the parts of the symphony she remembered. The inside room was a very private place. She could be in the middle of a house full of people and still feel like she was locked up by herself.

  Spareribs stuck his dirty hand up to her eyes because she had been staring off at space. She slapped him.

  ‘What is a nun?’ Bubber asked.

  ‘A Catholic lady,’ Spareribs said. ‘A Catholic lady with a big black dress that comes up over her head.’

  She was tired of hanging around with the kids. She would go to the library and look at pictures in the National Geographic.

  Photographs of all the foreign places in the world. Paris, France. And big ice glaciers. And the wild jungles in Africa.

  ‘You kids see that Ralph don’t get out in the street,’ she said.

  Bubber rested the big rifle on his shoulder. ‘Bring me a story back with you.’

  It was like that kid had been born knowing how to read. He was only in the second grade but he loved to read stories by himself--and he never asked anybody else to read to him.

  ‘What kind you want this time?’

  ‘Pick out some stories with something to eat in them. I like that one a whole lot about them German kids going out in the forest and coming to this house made out of all different kinds of candy and the witch. I like a story with something to eat in it.’

  ‘I’ll look for one,’ said Mick.

  ‘But I’m getting kinda tired of candy,’ Bubber said. ‘See if you can’t bring me a story with something like a barbecue sandwich in it. But if you can’t find none of them I’d like a cowboy story.’

  She was ready to leave when suddenly she stopped and stared.

  The kids stared too. They all stood still and looked at Baby Wilson coming down the steps of her house across the street.

  ‘Ain’t Baby cute!’ said Bubber softly.

  Maybe it was the sudden hot, sunny day after all those rainy weeks. Maybe it was because their dark winter clothes were ugly to them on an afternoon like this one. Anyway Baby looked like a fairy or something in the picture show. She had on her last year’s soiree costume--with a little pink-gauze skirt that stuck out short and stiff, a pink body waist, pink dancing shoes, and even a little pink pocketbook. With her yellow hair she was all pink and white and gold--and so small and clean that it almost hurt to watch her. She prissed across the street in a cute way, but would not turn her face toward them.

  ‘Come over here,’ said Bubber. ‘Lemme look at your little pink pocketbook--’ Baby passed them along the edge of the street with her head held to one side. She had made up her mind not to speak to them.

  There was a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, and when Baby reached it she stood still for a second and then turned a handspring.

  ‘Don’t pay no mind to her,’ said Spareribs. ‘She always tries to show off. She’s going down to Mister Brannon’s cafe to get candy. He’s her uncle and she gets it free.’

  Bubber rested the end of the rifle on the ground. The big gun was too heavy for him. As he watched Baby walk off down the street he kept pulling the straggly bangs of his hair. ‘That sure is a cute little pink pocketbook,’ he said.

  ‘Her Mama always talks about how talented she is,’ said Spareribs. ‘She thinks she’s gonna get Baby in the movies.’

  It was too late to go look at the National Geographic. Supper was almost ready. Ralph tuned up to cry and she took him off the wagon and put him on the ground. Now it was December, and to a kid Bubber’s age that was a long time from summer.

  All last summer Baby had come out in that pink soiree costume and danced in the middle of the street. At first the kids would flock around and watch her, but soon they got tired of it. Bubber
was the only one who would watch her as she came out to dance. He would sit on the curb and yell to her when he saw a car coming. He had watched Baby do her soiree dance a hundred times--but summer had been gone for three months and now it seemed new to him again.

  ‘I sure do wish I had a costume,’ Bubber said.

  ‘What kind do you want?’

  ‘A real cool costume. A real pretty one made out of all different colors. Like a butterfly. That’s what I want for Christmas. That and a bicycle!’

  ‘Sissy,’ said Spareribs.

  Bubber hauled the big rifle up to his shoulder again and took aim at a house across the street. ‘I’d dance around in my costume if I had one. I’d wear it every day to school.’ Mick sat on the front steps and kept her eyes on Ralph. Bubber wasn’t a sissy like Spareribs said. He just loved pretty things.

  She’d better not let old Spareribs get away with that.

  ‘A person’s got to fight for every single thing they get,’ she said slowly. ‘And I’ve noticed a lot of times that the farther down a kid comes in the family the better the kid really is. Younger kids are always the toughest. I’m pretty hard ‘cause I’ve a lot of them on top of me. Bubber --he looks sick, and likes pretty things, but he’s got guts underneath that. If all this is true Ralph sure ought to be a real strong one when he’s old enough to get around. Even though he’s just seventeen months old I can read something hard and tough in that Ralph’s face already.’

  Ralph looked around because he knew he was being talked about. Spareribs sat down on the ground and grabbed Ralph’s hat off his head and shook it in his face to tease him.

  ‘All right!’ Mick said. ‘You know what do to you if you start him to cry. You just better watch out’