‘And you never got hold of her again?’
The boy did not know what to think of the man, and his child’s face was uncertain with mingled curiosity and doubt. He was new on the paper route; it was still strange to him to be out in the town in the black, queer early morning.
‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘I took a number of steps to get her back. I went around trying to locate her. I went to Tulsa where she had folks. And to Mobile. I went to every town she had ever mentioned to me, and I hunted down every man she had formerly been connected with. Tulsa, Atlanta, Chicago, Cheehaw, Memphis. . . . For the better part of two years I chased around the country trying to lay hold of her.’
‘But the pair of them had vanished from the face of the earth!’ said Leo.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ the man said confidentially. ‘And also just forget those two years. They are not important. What matters is that around the third year a curious thing begun to happen to me.’
‘What?’ the boy asked.
The man leaned down and tilted his mug to take a sip of beer. But as he hovered over the mug his nostrils fluttered slightly; he sniffed the staleness of the beer and did not drink. ‘Love is a curious thing to begin with. At first I thought only of getting her back. It was a kind of mania. But then as time went on I tried to remember her. But do you know what happened?’
‘No,’ the boy said.
‘When I laid myself down on a bed and tried to think about her my mind became a blank. I couldn’t see her. I would take out her pictures and look. No good. Nothing doing. A blank. Can you imagine it?’
‘Say Mac!’ Leo called down the counter. ‘Can you imagine this bozo’s mind a blank!’
Slowly, as though fanning away flies, the man waved his hand. His green eyes were concentrated and fixed on the shallow little face of the paper boy.
‘But a sudden piece of glass on a sidewalk. Or a nickel tune in a music box. A shadow on a wall at night. And I would remember. It might happen in a street and I would cry or bang my head against a lamppost. You follow me?’
‘A piece of glass . . .’ the boy said.
‘Anything. I would walk around and I had no power of how and when to remember her. You think you can put up a kind of shield. But remembering don’t come to a man face forward—it corners around sideways. I was at the mercy of everything I saw and heard. Suddenly instead of me combing the countryside to find her she begun to chase me around in my very soul. She chasing me, mind you! And in my soul.’
The boy asked finally: ‘What part of the country were you in then?’
‘Ooh,’ the man groaned. I was a sick mortal. It was like smallpox. I confess, Son, that I boozed. I fornicated. I committed any sin that suddenly appealed to me. I am loath to confess it but I will do so. When I recall that period it is all curdled in my mind, it was so terrible.’
The man leaned his head down and tapped his forehead on the counter. For a few seconds he stayed bowed over in this position, the back of his stringy neck covered with orange furze, his hands with their long warped fingers held palm to palm in an attitude of prayer. Then the man straightened himself; he was smiling and suddenly his face was bright and tremulous and old.
‘It was in the fifth year that it happened,’ he said. ‘And with it I started my science.’
Leo’s mouth jerked with a pale, quick grin. ‘Well none of we boys are getting any younger,’ he said. Then with sudden anger he balled up a dishcloth he was holding and threw it down hard on the floor. ‘You draggle-tailed old Romeo!’
‘What happened?’ the boy asked.
The old man’s voice was high and clear: ‘Peace,’ he answered.
‘Huh?’
‘It is hard to explain scientifically, Son,’ he said. ‘I guess the logical explanation is that she and I had fleed around from each other for so long that finally we just got tangled up together and lay down and quit. Peace. A queer and beautiful blankness. It was spring in Portland and the rain came every afternoon. All evening I just stayed there on my bed in the dark. And that is how the science come to me.’
The windows in the streetcar were pale blue with light. The two soldiers paid for their beers and opened the door—one of the soldiers combed his hair and wiped off his muddy puttees before they went outside. The three mill workers bent silently over their breakfasts. Leo’s clock was ticking on the wall.
‘It is this. And listen carefully. I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with?’
The boy’s soft mouth was partly open and he did not answer.
‘A woman,’ the old man said. ‘Without science, with nothing to go by, they undertake the most dangerous and sacred experience in God’s earth. They fall in love with a woman. Is that correct, Son?’
‘Yeah,’ the boy said faintly.
‘They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love?’
The old man reached over and grasped the boy by the collar of his leather jacket. He gave him a gentle little shake and his green eyes gazed down unblinking and grave.
‘Son, do you know how love should be begun?’
The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered:
‘A tree. A rock. A cloud.’
It was still raining outside in the street: a mild, gray, endless rain. The mill whistle blew for the six o’clock shift and the three spinners paid and went away. There was no one in the café but Leo, the old man, and the little paper boy.
‘The weather was like this in Portland,’ he said. ‘At the time my science was begun. I meditated and I started very cautious. I would pick up something from the street and take it home with me. I bought a goldfish and I concentrated on the goldfish and I loved it. I graduated from one thing to another. Day by day I was getting this technique. On the road from Portland to San Diego——’
‘Aw shut up!’ screamed Leo suddenly. ‘Shut up! Shut up!’
The old man still held the collar of the boy’s jacket; he was trembling and his face was earnest and bright and wild. ‘For six years now I have gone around by myself and built up my science. And now I am a master. Son. I can love anything. No longer do I have to think about it even. I see a street full of people and a beautiful light comes in me. I watch a bird in the sky. Or I meet a traveler on the road. Everything, Son. And anybody. All stranger and all loved! Do you realize what a science like mine can mean?’
The boy held himself stiffly, his hands curled tight around the counter edge. Finally he asked: ‘Did you ever really find that lady?’
‘What? What say, Son?’
‘I mean,’ the boy asked timidly. ‘Have you fallen in love with a woman again?’
The old man loosened his grasp on the boy’s collar. He turned away and for the first time his green eyes had a vague and scattered look. He lifted the mug from the counter, drank down the yellow beer. His head was shaking slowly from side to side. Then finally he answered: ‘No, Son. You see that is the last step in my science. I go cautious. And I am not quite ready yet.’
‘Well!’ said Leo. ‘Well well well!’
The old man stood in the open doorway. ‘Remember,’ he said. Framed there in the gray damp light of the early morning he looked shrunken and seedy and frail. But his smile was bright. ‘Remember I love you,’ he said with a last nod. And the door closed quietly behind him.
The boy did not speak for a long time. He pulled down the bangs on his forehead and slid his grimy little forefinger around the rim of his empty cup. Then without looking at Leo he finally asked:
‘Was he drunk?’
‘No,’ said Leo shortly.
The boy raised his clear voice higher. ‘Then was he a dope fiend?’
‘No.’
The boy looked up at Leo, and his flat little face was desperate, his voice urgent and shrill. ‘Was he crazy?
Do you think he was a lunatic?’ The paper boy’s voice dropped suddenly with doubt. ‘Leo? Or not?’
But Leo would not answer him. Leo had run a night café for fourteen years, and he held himself to be a critic of craziness. There were the town characters and also the transients who roamed in from the night. He knew the manias of all of them. But he did not want to satisfy the questions of the waiting child. He tightened his pale face and was silent.
So the boy pulled down the right flap of his helmet and as he turned to leave he made the only comment that seemed safe to him, the only remark that could not be laughed down and despised:
‘He sure has done a lot of traveling.’
About the Author
CARSON McCULLERS (1917–1967) was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Clock Without Hands. Born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19,1917, she became a promising pianist and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York when she was seventeen, but lacking money for tuition, she never attended classes. Instead she studied writing at Columbia University, which ultimately led to the publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the novel that made her an overnight literary sensation. On September 29, 1967, at age fifty, she died in Nyack, New York, where she is buried.
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
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