The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

by Carson McCullers

  Ralph’s soft hair was sticky with oatmeal. She wiped it with a dishrag and rinsed his face and hands at the sink. Bill and Hazel finished their game. Bill’s long fingernails scraped on the table as he took up the matches. George carried Ralph off to bed. She and Portia were alone in the kitchen.

  ‘Listen! Look at me. Do you notice anything different?’

  ‘Sure I notice, Hon.’

  Portia put on her red hat and changed her shoes. Well--?’

  ‘Just you take a little grease and rub it on your face. Your nose already done peeled very bad. They say grease is the best thing for bad sunburn.’

  She stood by herself in the dark back yard, breaking off pieces of bark from the oak tree with her fingernails. It was almost worse this way. Maybe she would feel better if they could look at her and tell. If they knew.

  Her Dad called her from the back steps. ‘Mick! Oh, Mick!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The telephone.’ George crowded up close and tried to listen in, but she pushed him away. Mrs. Minowitz talked very loud and excited. ‘My Harry should be home by now. You know where he is? ’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘He said you two would ride out on bicycles. Where should he be now? You know where he is?’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ Mick said again.

  Now that the days were hot again the Sunny Dixie Show was always crowded. The March wind quieted. Trees were thick with their foliage of ocherous green. The sky was a cloudless blue and the rays of the sun grew stronger. The air was sultry.

  Jake Blount hated this weather. He thought dizzily of the long, burning summer months ahead. He did not feel well. Recently a headache had begun to trouble him constantly. He had gained weight so that his stomach developed a little pouch. He had to leave the top button of his trousers undone. He knew that this was alcoholic fat, but he kept on drinking. Liquor helped the ache in his head. He had only to take one small glass to make it better. Nowadays one glass was the same to him as a quart. It was not the liquor of the moment that gave him the kick--but the reaction of the first swallow to all the alcohol which had saturated his blood during these last months. A spoonful of beer would help the throbbing in his head, but a quart of whiskey could not make him drunk.

  He cut out liquor entirely. For several days he drank only water and Orange Crush. The pain was like a crawling worm in his head. He worked wearily during the long afternoons and evenings. He could not sleep and it was agony to try to read.

  The damp, sour stink in his room infuriated him. He lay restless in the bed and when at last he fell asleep daylight had come.

  A dream haunted him. It had first come to him four months ago. He would awake with terror--but the strange point was that never could he remember the contents of this dream. Only the feeling remained when his eyes were opened. Each time his fears at awakening were so identical that he did not doubt but what these dreams were the same. He was used to dreams, the grotesque nightmares of drink that led him down into a madman’s region of disorder, but always the morning light scattered the effects of these wild dreams and he forgot them.

  This blank, stealthy dream was of a different nature. He awoke and could remember nothing. But there was a sense of menace that lingered in him long after. Then he awoke one morning with the old fear but with a faint remembrance of the darkness behind him. He had been walking among a crowd of people and in his arms he carried something. That was all he could be sure about. Had he stolen? Had he been trying to save some possession? Was he being hunted by all these people around him? He did not think so. The more he studied this simple dream the less he could understand. Then for some time afterward the dream did not return.

  He met the writer of signs whose chalked message he had seen the past November. From the first day of their meeting the old man clung to him like an evil genius. His name was Simms and he preached on the sidewalks. The winter cold had kept him indoors, but in the spring he was out on the streets all day.

  His white hair was soft and ragged on his neck and he carried around with him a woman’s big silk pocketbook full of chalk and Jesus ads. His eyes were bright and crazy. Simms tried to convert him.

  ‘Child of adversity, I smell the sinful stink of beer on thy breath. And you smoke cigarettes. If the Lord had wanted us to smoke cigarettes He would have said so in His Book. The mark of Satan is on thy brow. I see it. Repent. Let me show you the light.’ Jake rolled up his eyes and made a slow pious sign in the air.

  Then he opened his oil-stained hand. ‘I reveal this only to you,’ he said in a low stage voice. Simms looked down at the scar in his palm. Jake leaned closer and whispered: ‘And there’s the other sign. The sign you know. For I was born with them.’

  Simms backed against the fence. With a womanish gesture he lifted a lock of silver hair from his forehead and smoothed it back on his head. Nervously his tongue licked the corners of his mouth. Jake laughed.

  ‘Blasphemer!’ Simms screamed. ‘God will get you. You and all your crew. God remembers the scoffers. He watches after me. God watches everybody but He watches me the most. Like He did Moses. God tells me things in the night. God will get you.’ He took Simms down to a corner store for Coca-Colas and peanut-butter crackers. Simms began to work on him again. When he left for the show Simms ran along behind him. ‘Come to this corner tonight at seven o’clock. Jesus has a message just for you.’ The first days of April were windy and warm. White clouds trailed across the blue sky. In the wind there was the smell of the river and also the fresher smell of fields beyond the town. The show was crowded every day from four in the afternoon until midnight. The crowd was a tough one. With the new spring he felt an undertone of trouble. One night he was working on the machinery of the swings when suddenly he was roused from thought by the sounds of angry voices. Quickly he pushed through the crowd until he saw a white girl fighting with a colored girl by the ticket booth of the flying-jinny. He wrenched them apart, but still they struggled to get at each other. The crowd took sides and there was a bedlam of noise. The white girl was a hunchback. She held something tight in her hand. ‘I seen you,’ the colored girl yelled. ‘I ghy beat that hunch off your back, too.’

  ‘Hush your mouth, you black nigger! ‘ ‘Low-down factory tag. I done paid my money and I ghy ride. White man, you make her give me back my ticket.’

  ‘Black nigger slut! ‘ Jake looked from one to the other. The crowd pressed close. There were mumbled opinions on every side. ‘I seen Lurie drop her ticket and I watched this here white lady pick it up. That the truth,’ a colored boy said. ‘No nigger going to put her hands on no white girl while--. ‘You quit that pushing me. I ready to hit back even if your skin do be white.’ Roughly Jake pushed into the thick of the crowd. ‘All right! ‘ he yelled. ‘Move on--break it up. Every damn one of you.’ There was something about the size of his fists that made the people drift sullenly away. Jake turned back to the two girls.

  ‘This here the way it is,’ said the colored girl. I bet I one of the few peoples here who done saved over fifty cents till Friday night. I done ironed double this week. I done paid a good nickel for that ticket she holding. And now I means to ride. Jake settled the trouble quickly. He let the hunchback keep the disputed ticket and issued another one to the colored girl. For the rest of that evening there were no more quarrels. But Jake moved alertly through the crowd. He was troubled and uneasy.

  In addition to himself there were five other employees at the show--two men to operate the swings and take tickets and three girls to manage the booths. This did not count Patterson.

  The show-owner spent most of his time playing cards with himself in his trailer. His eyes were dull, with the pupils shrunken, and the skin of his neck hung in yellow, pulpy folds.

  During the past few months Jake had had two raises in pay. At midnight it was his job to report to Patterson and hand over the takings of the evening. Sometimes Patterson did not notice him until he had been in the trailer for several m
inutes; he would be staring at the cards, sunk in a stupor. The air of the trailer was heavy with the stinks of food and reefers. Patterson held his hand over his stomach as though protecting it from something. He always checked over the accounts very thoroughly.

  Jake and the two operators had a squabble. These men were both former doffers at one of the mills. At first he had tried to talk to them and help them to see the truth. Once he invited them to a pool room for a drink. But they were so dumb he couldn’t help them. Soon after this he overheard the conversation between them that caused the trouble. It was an early Sunday morning, almost two o’clock, and he had been checking the accounts with Patterson. When he stepped out of the trailer the grounds seemed empty. The moon was bright.

  He was thinking of Singer and the free day ahead. Then as he passed by the swings he heard someone speak his name. The two operators had finished work and were smoking together. Jake listened.

  ‘If there’s anything I hate worse than a nigger it’s a Red.’

  ‘He tickles me. I don’t pay him no mind. The way he struts around. I never seen such a sawed-off runt. How tall is he, you reckon?’

  ‘Around five foot But he thinks he got to tell everybody so much. He oughta be in jail. That’s where. The Red Bolshivik.’

  ‘He just tickles me. I can’t look at him without laughing.’

  ‘He needn’t act biggity with me.’

  Jake watched them follow the path toward Weavers Lane. His first thought was to rush out and confront them, but a certain shrinking held him back. For several days he fumed in silence.

  Then one night after work he followed the two men for several blocks and as they turned a corner he cut in front of them.

  ‘I heard you,’ he said breathlessly. ‘It so happened I heard every word you said last Saturday night. Sure I’m a Red. At least I reckon I am. But what are you?’ They stood beneath a street light. The two men stepped back from him. The neighborhood was deserted. ‘You pasty-faced, shrunk-gutted, ricket-ridden little rats! I could reach out and choke your stringy necks--one to each hand. Runt or no, I could lay you on this sidewalk where they’d have to scrape you up with shovels.’

  The two men looked at each other, cowed, and tried to walk on. But Jake would not let them pass. He kept step with them, walking backward, a furious sneer on his face.

  ‘All I got to say is this: In the future I suggest you come to me whenever you feel the need to make remarks about my height, weight, accent, demeanor, or ideology. And that last is not what I take a leak with either--case you don’t know. We will discuss it together.’

  Afterward Jake treated the two men with angry contempt.

  Behind his back they jeered at him. One afternoon he found that the engine of the swings had been deliberately damaged and he had to work three hours overtime to fix it. Always he felt someone was laughing at him. Each time he heard the girls talking together he drew himself up straight and laughed carelessly aloud to himself as though thinking of some private joke. The warm southwest winds from the Gulf of Mexico were heavy with the smells of spring. The days grew longer and the sun was bright. The lazy warmth depressed him. He began to drink again. As soon as work was done he went home and lay down on his bed. Sometimes he stayed there, fully clothed and inert, for twelve or thirteen hours. The restlessness that had caused him to sob and bite his nails only a few months before seemed to have gone. And yet beneath his inertia Jake felt the old tension. Of all the places he had been this was the loneliest town of all. Or it would be without Singer. Only he and Singer understood the truth. He knew and could not get the don’t-knows to see. It was like trying to fight darkness or heat or a stink in the air. He stared morosely out of his window. A stunted, smoked-blackened tree at the corner had put out new leaves of a bilious green. The sky was always a deep, hard blue. The mosquitoes from a fetid stream that ran through this part of the town buzzed in the room.

  He caught the itch. He mixed some sulphur and hog fat and greased his body every morning. He clawed himself raw and it seemed that the itching would never be soothed. One night he broke loose. He had been sitting alone for many hours. He had mixed gin and whiskey and was very drunk. It was almost morning. He leaned out of the window and looked at the dark silent street. He thought of all the people around him.

  Sleeping. The don’t-knows. Suddenly he bawled out in a loud voice: ‘This is the truth! You bastards don’t know anything. You don’t know. You don’t know!’

  The street awoke angrily. Lamps were lighted and sleepy curses were called to him. The men who lived in the house rattled furiously on his door. The girls from a cat-house across the street stuck their heads out of the windows.

  ‘You dumb dumb dumb dumb bastards. You dumb dumb dumb dumb--’

  ‘Shuddup! Shuddup! The fellows in the hall were pushing against the door: .You drunk bull! You’ll be a sight dumber when we get thu with you.’

  ‘How many out there?’ Jake roared. He banged an empty bottle on the windowsill. ‘Come on, everybody. Come one, come all. I’ll settle you three at a time.’

  ‘That’s right, Honey,’ a whore called.

  The door was giving way. Jake jumped from the window and ran through a side alley. ‘Hee-haw! Hee-haw!’ he yelled drunkenly. He was barefooted and shirtless. An hour later he stumbled into Singer’s room. He sprawled on the floor and laughed himself to sleep.

  On an April morning he found the body of a man who had been murdered. A young Negro. Jake found him in a ditch about thirty yards from the showgrounds. The Negro’s throat had been slashed so that the head was rolled back at a crazy angle. The sun shone hot on his open, glassy eyes and flies hovered over the dried blood that covered his chest. The dead man held a red-and-yellow cane with a tassel like the ones sold at the hamburger booth at the show. Jake stared gloomily down at the body for some time. Then he called the police. No clues were found. Two days later the family of the dead man claimed his body at the morgue.

  At the Sunny Dixie there were frequent fights and quarrels.

  Sometimes two friends would come to the show arm in arm, laughing and drinking--and before they left they would be struggling together in a panting rage. Jake was always alert.

  Beneath the gaudy gaiety of the show, the bright lights, and the lazy laughter, he felt something sullen and dangerous.

  Through these dazed, disjointed weeks Simms nagged his footsteps constantly. The old man liked to come with a soapbox and a Bible and take a stand in the middle of the crowd to preach. He talked of the second coming of Christ. He said that the Day of Judgment would be October 2, 1951. He would point out certain drunks and scream at them in his raw, worn voice. Excitement made his mouth fill with water so that his words had a wet, gurgling sound. Once he had slipped in and set up his stand no arguments could make him budge. He made Jake a present of a Gideon Bible, and told him to pray on his knees for one hour each night and to hurl away every glass of beer or cigarette that was offered him.

  They quarreled over walls and fences. Jake had begun to carry chalk in his pockets, also. He wrote brief sentences.

  He tried to word them so that a passerby would stop and ponder over the meaning. So that a man would wonder. So that a man would think. Also, he wrote short pamphlets and distributed them in the streets.

  If it had not been for Singer, Jake knew that he would have left the town. Only on Sunday, when he was with his friend, did he feel at peace. Sometimes they would go for a walk together or play chess--but more often they spent the day quietly in Singer’s room. If he wished to talk Singer was always attentive. If he sat morosely through the day the mute understood his feelings and was not surprised. It seemed to him that only Singer could help him now.

  Then one Sunday when he climbed the stairs he saw that Singer’s door was open. The room was empty. He sat alone for more than two hours. At last he heard Singer’s footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘I was wondering about you. Where you been?’ Singer smiled. He brushed off
his hat with a handkerchief and put it away. Then deliberately he took his silver pencil from his pocket and leaned over the mantelpiece to write a note.

  ‘What you mean?’ Jake asked when he read what the mute had written. ‘Whose legs are cut off?’

  Singer took back the note and wrote a few additional sentences.

  ‘Huh!’ Jake said. That don’t surprise me.’

  He brooded over the piece of paper and then crumpled it in his hand. The listlessness of the past month was gone and he was tense and uneasy. ‘Huh!’ he said again.

  Singer put on a pot of coffee and got out his chessboard. Jake tore the note to pieces and rolled the fragments between his sweating palms. ‘But something can be done about this,’ he said after a while. ‘You know it? ‘ Singer nodded uncertainly. ‘I want to see the boy and hear the whole story. When can you take me around there? ‘ Singer deliberated. Then he wrote on a pad of paper, ‘Tonight.’ Jake held his hand to his mouth and began to walk restlessly around the room. ‘We can do something.’

  JAKE and Singer waited on the front porch. When they pushed the doorbell there was no sound of a ring in the darkened house. Jake knocked impatiently and pressed his nose against the screen door. Beside him Singer stood wooden and smiling, with two spots of color on his cheeks, for they had drunk a bottle of gin together. The evening was quiet and dark. Jake watched a yellow light shaft softly through the hall. And Portia opened the door for them.

  ‘I certainly trust you not been waiting long. So many folks been coming that us thought it wise to untach the bell. You gentlemens just let me take you hats--Father been mighty sick.’

  Jake tiptoed heavily behind Singer down the bare, narrow hall.

  At the threshold of the kitchen he stopped short The room was crowded and hot. A fire burned in the small wood stove and the windows were closed tight. Smoke mingled with a certain Negro smell. The glow from the stove was the only light in the room. The dark voices he had heard back in the hall were silent.