Clock Without Hands (29 page)

"Nope. Just younguns."

"How many younguns are there?"

"Fourteen," said Sammy. "Five of them grown."

Sammy, who was petrified of a plane, began to talk with nervous foolishness. "Me and my wife almost had quints. There were three younguns and two things. It was right after the quints in Canada were born and they were our first younguns. Every time me and my wife used to think of the quints in Canada—rich, famous, mother and daddy rich and famous too—a little quinch came in us. We almost hit the jackpot, and every time we did it we thought that we were making quints. But we only had triplets and twins and little ole singles. Once me and my wife took all the younguns to Canada to see the quints in their little glass playhouse. Our younguns all got the measles."

"So that's why you had so many children."

"Yep. We wanted to hit the jackpot. And me and my wife were naturals for borning twins and triplets and such. But we never hit it. However, there was an article in the
Milan Courier
about our Milan triplets. It's framed and on our living room wall. We've had a hard time raising those younguns but we never gave up. And now that my wife has changed life, it's all over. I'll never be nothing but Sammy Lank."

The grotesque pity of the story made Jester laugh that laughter of despair. And once having laughed and despaired and pitied, he knew he could not use the pistol. For in that instant the seed of compassion, forced by sorrow, had begun to blossom. Jester slipped the pistol from his pocket and dropped it out of the plane.

"What's that?" said Sammy, terrified.

"Nothing," Jester said. He looked across at Sammy who had turned green. "Do you want to go down?"

"No," said Sammy. "I ain't scared."

So Jester circled on.

Looking downward from an altitude of two thousand feet, the earth assumes order. A town, even Milan, is symmetrical, exact as a small gray honeycomb, complete. The surrounding terrain seems designed by a law more just and mathematical than the laws of property and bigotry: a dark parallelogram of pine woods, square fields, rectangles of sward. On this cloudless day the sky on all sides and above the plane is a blind monotone of blue, impenetrable to the eye and the imagination. But down below the earth is round. The earth is finite. From this height you do not see man and the details of his humiliation. The earth from a great distance is perfect and whole.

But this is an order foreign to the heart, and to love the earth you must come closer. Gliding downward, low over the town and countryside, the whole breaks up into a multiplicity of impressions. The town is much the same in all its seasons, but the land changes. In early spring the fields here are like patches of worn gray corduroy, each one alike. Now you could begin to tell the crops apart: the gray-green of cotton, the dense and spidery tobacco land, the burning green of corn. As you circle inward, the town itself becomes crazy and complex. You see the secret corners of all the sad back yards. Gray fences, factories, the flat main street. From the air men are shrunken and they have an automatic look, like wound-up dolls. They seem to move mechanically among haphazard miseries. You do not see their eyes. And finally this is intolerable. The whole earth from a great distance means less than one long look into a pair of human eyes. Even the eyes of the enemy.

Jester looked into Sammy's eyes which were popped with terror.

His odyssey of passion, friendship, love, and revenge was now finished. Gently Jester landed the airplane and let Sammy Lank out—to brag to his family that he is such a well-known man now that even Jester Clane had taken him up on an airplane ride.

AT FIRST
Malone cared. When he saw that Bennie Weems had taken his trade to Whelan's and that Sheriff McCall did not drink his customary cokes at the pharmacy, he cared. In the front of his mind he said, "To hell with Bennie Weems; to hell with the sheriff." But deep down he worried. Had that night at the drugstore jeopardized the good will of the pharmacy and a sale for the good will? Was it worth taking the stand he did at the meeting? Malone wondered and worried and still he did not know. Worry affected his health. He made mistakes—mistakes in bookkeeping that were unusual with a good figuring bookkeeper like Malone. He sent out inaccurate bills which customers complained about. He did not have the strength to push sales properly. He himself knew that he was failing. He wanted the shelter of his home, and often he would stay whole days in the double bed.

Malone, dying, was sensitive to sunrise. After the long, black night, he watched the false dawn and the first ivory and gold and orange of the eastern sky. If it were a fair and blossomy day, he sat up on the pillows and eagerly awaited breakfast. But if the day was gloomy with sour skies or rain, his own spirits were reflected in the weather so that he turned on the light and complained fretfully.

Martha tried to comfort him. "It's just this first hot spell. When you get accustomed to the weather you will feel better."

But no, it was not the weather. He no longer confused the end of life with the beginning of a new season. The wisteria trellis like lavender waterfalls had come and gone. He did not have the strength to plant the vegetable garden. And the gold-green willows were turning darker now. Curious, he had always thought of willows in connection with water. But his willows had no water, although there was a spring across the street. Yes, the earth had revolved its seasons and spring had come again. But there was no longer a revulsion against nature, against things. A strange lightness had come upon his soul and he exalted. He looked at nature now and it was part of himself. He was no longer a man watching a clock without hands. He was not alone, he did not rebel, he did not suffer. He did not even think of death these days. He was not a man dying ... nobody died, everybody died.

Martha would sit in the room knitting. She had taken up knitting and it soothed him to see her there. He no longer thought about the zones of loneliness that had so bewildered him. His life was strangely contracted. There was the bed, the window, a glass of water. Martha brought him meals on a tray and nearly always she had a vase of flowers on the bed table—roses, periwinkle, snapdragons.

The love for his wife that had so receded returned to him. As Martha thought of little dainty things to tempt his appetite or knitted in the sickroom, Malone felt a nearer value of her love. It touched him when she bought from Goody's Department Store a pink bedrest so he could sit propped up in bed without being supported by only the damp sliding pillows.

Since that meeting at the pharmacy, the old Judge treated Malone as an invalid. Their roles were now reversed; it was the Judge now who brought sacks of water-ground meal and turnip greens and fruit as one brings to a sick man.

On May fifteenth the doctor came twice, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. The current doctor was now Dr. Wesley. On May fifteenth, Dr. Wesley spoke with Martha alone in the living room. Malone did not care that they were talking about him in another room. He did not worry, he did not wonder. That night when Martha gave him his sponge bath, she bathed his feverished face and put cologne behind both his ears and poured more cologne in the basin. Then she washed his hairy chest and armpits in the scented water, and his legs and callused feet. And finally, very gently, she washed his limp genitals.

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..."