Clock Without Hands (21 page)

"Go on and tell him," Sherman said as he garnished his sandwich with bread and butter pickles.

"Just because you have them blue eyes is no reason to act so high and mighty. You nigger like the rest of us. You just had a white pappy who passed on them blue eyes to you, and that's nothin to put on airs about. You nigger like the rest of us."

Sherman took his tray and stalked carefully through the hall to the library. But in spite of the party sandwiches he could not eat. He was thinking about what the Judge had said and his eyes were fixed and bleak in his dark face. His mind felt that most of the Judge's words were crazy, but Sherman, slanted by anxiety, could not think rationally; he could only feel. He remembered the campaign addresses of certain Southerners, cunning, violent, menacing. To Sherman the Judge talked no crazier than many another Southern politician. Crazy, crazy, crazy. All of them!

Sherman did not forget that the Judge had once been a congressman, thus holding one of the highest offices in the United States. And he knew people in high places. Just look at his answer from Senator Tip Thomas. The Judge was smart—mighty foxy—he could play a soft game of footsie. In dwelling on the power of the old Judge, he forgot his sicknesses; it did not even occur to Sherman that the brain of the old man who had once been a congressman could have deteriorated in old age. Zippo Mullins had a grandfather who had lost his mind in his old age. Old Mr. Mullins ate with a towel around his neck, could not pick out the watermelon seeds but swallowed them whole; he had no teeth and would gum his fried chicken; at the end he had to go to the county home. The old Judge on the other hand carefully unfolded his napkin at the beginning of a meal and had beautiful table manners, asking Jester or Verily to cut up the food he couldn't manage. Those were the only two very old men that Sherman had actually known, and there was a world of difference between them. So Sherman never considered the possibility of brain-softening in the old Judge.

Sherman stared for a long time at the fancy lobster sandwich, but anxiety would not let him eat. He did eat one bread and butter pickle before going back to the kitchen. He wanted a drink. Some gin and tonic, half and half, would settle his spirits so that he could eat. He knew he faced another run-in with Verily, but he went straight to the kitchen and grasped the gin bottle.

"Look yonder," she said, "look what the Queen of Sheba is up to now."

Sherman deliberately poured his gin and added cold tonic.

"I try to be kind and pleasant to you, Sherman, but I knew from the first it was no use. What makes you so cold and airy? Is it them blue eyes passed on from your pappy?"

Sherman walked stiffly from the kitchen, his drink in hand, and settled himself again at the library table. As he drank the gin his inward turbulence increased. In his search for his true mother, Sherman had seldom thought about his father. Sherman thought only that he was a white man, he imagined that the unknown white father had raped his mother. For every boy's mother is virtuous, especially if she is imaginary. Therefore, he hated his father, hated even to think about him. His father was a crazy white man who had raped his mother and left the evidence of bastardy in Sherman's blue and alien eyes. He had never sought his father as he sought his mother, the dreams of his mother had lulled and solaced him, but he thought of his father with pure hate.

After dinner when the Judge was taking his usual nap, Jester came into the library. Sherman was still sitting at the table, his tray of sandwiches untouched.

"What's the matter, Sherman?" Jester noticed the gin-drunk somnolence in the rapt eyes and he was uneasy.

"Go fuck," Sherman said brutally, for Jester was the only white person to whom he could use words like that. But he was in a state where no words could relieve him now. I hate, I hate, I hate, he thought as his unseeing eyes fixed, brooding and drunk, at the open window.

"I have often thought that if I had been born a Nigerian or colored, I couldn't stand it. I admire you, Sherman, the way you stand up to it. I admire you more than I can say."

"Well save your peanuts for the zoo."

"I have thought often," went on Jester who had read the idea somewhere, "that if Christ was born now he would be colored."

"Well he wasn't."

"I'm afraid..." Jester began and found it hard to finish.

"What are you afraid of, chicken-out sissy?"

"I'm afraid that if I were a Nigerian or colored, I would be neurotic. Awfully neurotic."

"No you wouldn't." His right forefinger cut swiftly across his neck in a slashing gesture. "A neurotic nigger is a dead nigger."

Jester was wondering why it was so hard to make friends with Sherman. His grandfather had often said: "Black is black and white is white and never the two shall meet if I can prevent it." And the
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wrote of Southerners of good will. How could he tell Sherman that he was not like his grandfather, but a Southerner of good will?

"I respect colored people every whit as much as I do white people."

"You're one for the birds all right."

"Respect colored people even more than I do white people on account of what they have gone through."

"There's plenty of bad niggers around," Sherman said as he finished his gin drink.

"Why do you say that to me?"

"Just warning the pop-eyed baby."

"I'm trying to level with you about how I feel morally about the racial question. But you don't pay any mind to me."

His depression and rage accented by alcohol, Sherman only said in a threatening voice, "Bad niggers with police records and others without records like me."

"Why is it so hard to be friends with you?"

"Because I don't want friends," Sherman lied, because next to a mother, he wanted a friend the most. He admired and feared Zippo who was always insulting him, never washed a dish even when Sherman did the cooking, and treated him very much as he now treated Jester.

"Well, I'm going to the airport. Want to come along?"

"When I fly, I fly my own planes. None of those cheap, rented planes like you fly."

So Jester had to leave it at that; and Sherman watched him, brooding and jealous, as he walked down the drive.

The Judge awoke from his nap at two o'clock, washed his sleep-wrinkled face, and felt joyful and refreshed. He did not remember any tensions of the morning and as he went downstairs he was humming. Sherman, hearing the ponderous tread and the tuneless voice, made a face toward the hall door.

"My boy," said the Judge. "Do you know why I would rather be Fox Clane than Shakespeare or Julius Caesar?"

Sherman's lips barely moved when he said, "No."

"Or Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln or Babe Ruth?"

Sherman just nodded no without speaking, wondering what the tack was about now.

"I'd rather be Fox Clane than all these great and famous people. Can't you guess why?"

This time Sherman only looked at him.

"Because I'm alive. And when you consider the trillions and trillions of dead people you realize what a privilege it is to be alive."

"Some people are dead from the neck up."

The Judge ignored this and said, "To me it is simply marvelous to be alive. Isn't it to you, Sherman?"

"Not particularly," he said, as he wanted very much to go home and sleep off the gin.

"Consider the dawn. The moon, the stars and heavenly firmaments," the Judge went on. "Consider shortcake and liquor."

Sherman's cold eyes considered the universe and the comforts of daily life with disdain and he did not answer.

"When I had that little seizure, Doc Tatum told me, frankly, if the seizure had affected the left part of the brain instead of the right, I should have been mentally and permanently afflicted." The Judge's voice had dropped with awe and horror. "Can you imagine living in such a condition?"

Sherman could: "I knew a man who had a stroke and it left him blind and with a mind like a two-year-old baby. The county home wouldn't even accept him. Not even the asylum. I don't know what happened to him finally. Probably died."

"Well, nothing like that happened to me. I was just left with a slight motor impairment ... just the left arm and leg, ever so slightly damaged ... but the mind intact. So I reasoned to myself: Fox Clane, ought you to cuss God, cuss the heavenly elements, cuss destiny, because of that little old impairment which didn't really bother me anyhow, or ought I to praise God, the elements, nature and destiny because I have nothing wrong with me, my mind being sound? For after all, what is a little arm, what's a leg, if the mind is sound and the spirit joyful. So I said to myself: Fox Clane, you better praise and keep on praising."

Sherman looked at the shrunken left arm and the hand permanently clenched. He felt sorry for the old Judge and hated himself for feeling sorry.

"I knew a little boy who had polio and had to wear heavy iron braces on both legs and use iron crutches ... crippled for life," said Sherman who had seen a picture of such a boy in the newspapers.

The Judge was thinking that Sherman knew a whole galaxy of pitiful cases, and tears came to his eyes as he murmured, "Poor child." The Judge did not hate himself for pitying others; he did not pity himself, for by and large he was quite happy. Of course, he would love to eat forty baked Alaskas every day, but on the whole he was content. "I'd rather stick to any diet than have to start shoveling coal or picking a harp. I never could manage even my own furnace and I'm not the least bit musical."

"Yes, some people can't carry a tune in a basket."

The Judge ignored this, as he was always singing and the tunes seemed all right to him. "Let's proceed with the correspondence."

"What letters do you want me to write now?"

"A whole slew of them, to every congressman and senator I know personally and every politician who might cotton to my ideas."

"What kind of letters do you wish me to write?"

"In the general tenor of what I told you this morning. About the Confederate money and the general retribution of the South."

The zip of gin had turned to dour anger. Although he was emotionally keyed up, Sherman yawned and kept on yawning just to be rude. He considered his soft, clean, bossy job and the shock of the morning's conversation. When Sherman loved, he loved, when he admired, he admired, and there was no halfway emotional state. Until now he had both loved and admired the Judge. Who else had been a congressman, a judge; who else would give him a fine, dainty job as an amanuensis and let him eat party sandwiches at the library table? So Sherman was in a quandary and his mobile features quivered as he spoke, "You mean that part even about slavery?"

The Judge knew now that something had gone wrong. "Not slavery, Son, but restitution for slaves that the Yankees freed. Economic restitution."

Sherman's nostrils and lips were quivering like butterflies. "I won't do it, Judge."

The Judge had seldom been said "no" to, as his requests were usually reasonable. Now that his treasure, his jewel, had refused him, he sighed, "I don't understand you, Son."

And Sherman, who was always pleased with any term of affection, especially since they were so seldom addressed to him, basked for a moment and almost smiled.

"So you refuse to write this series of letters?"

"I do," said Sherman, as the power of refusal was also sweet to him. "I won't be a party to turning the clock back almost a century."

"The clock won't be turned back, it will be turned forward for a century, Son."

It was the third time he had so called him and the suspicion that was always dormant in Sherman's nature stirred wordlessly, inchoate.

"Great change always turns forward the clock. Wars particularly. If it weren't for World War I, women would still be wearing ankle-length skirts. Now young females go around dressed like carpenters in overalls, even the prettiest, most well-bred girl."

The Judge had noticed Ellen Malone going to her father's pharmacy in overalls and he had been shocked and embarrassed on Malone's behalf.

"Poor J. T. Malone."

"Why do you say that?" asked Sherman who was struck by the compassion and the tone of mystery in the Judge's voice.

"I'm afraid, my boy, that Mr. Malone is not long for this world."

Sherman, who didn't care about Mr. Malone one way or the next and was in no mood to pretend to feelings he didn't truly feel, only said, "Gonna die? Too bad."

"Death is worse than too bad. In fact, no one on this earth knows what death is really about."

"Are you awfully religious?"

"No, I'm not a bit religious. But I fear..."

"Why have you often referred to shoveling coal and picking harps?"

"Oh, that's just a figure of speech. If that's all I feared and if I was sent to the bad place, I would shovel coal along with the rest of the sinners, a lot of whom I would have already known beforehand. And in case I'm sent to heaven, by God I'd learn to be as musical as Blind Tom or Caruso. It's not that I fear."

"What is it you do fear?" asked Sherman who had never thought much about death.

"Blankness," said the old man. "An infinite blankness and blackness where I'd be all by myself. Without loving or eating or nothing. Just lying in this infinite blankness and darkness."