The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (31 page)

He grew taller and very fat. Every time she climbed the fence she would see him making himself something to eat in his kitchen. They both played around on the block, and sometimes they would wrestle. When she was a kid she liked to fight with boys--not real fights but just in play. She used a combination jujitsu and boxing. Sometimes he got her down and sometimes she got him. Harry never was very rough with anybody. When little kids ever broke any toy they would come to him and he always took the time to fix it. He could fix anything. The ladies on the block got him to fix their electric lights or sewing-machines when something went wrong. Then when he was thirteen he started back | at Vocational and began to study hard. He threw papers and worked on Saturdays and read. For a long time she didn’t see much of him--until after that party she gave. He was very changed.

‘Like this,’ Harry said. ‘It used to be I had some big . ambition for myself all the time. A great engineer or a great doctor or lawyer. But now I don’t have it that way. . All I can think about is what happens in the world now. About Fascism and the terrible things in Europe--and on the other hand Democracy. I mean I can’t think and work on what I mean to be in life because I think too much about this other. I dream about killing Hitler every night And I wake up in the dark very thirsty and scared of something--I don’t know what’ She looked at Harry’s face and a deep, serious feeling made her sad. His hair hung over his forehead. His upper lip was thin and tight, but the lower one was thick and it trembled. Harry didn’t look old enough to be fifteen. With the darkness a cold wind came. The wind sang up in the oak trees on the block and banged the blinds against the side of the house. Down the street Mrs. Wells was calling Sucker home.

The dark late afternoon made the sadness heavy inside her. I want a piano--I want to take music lessons, she said to herself. She looked at Harry and he was lacing his thin fingers together in different shapes. There was a warm boy smell about him.

What was it made her act like she suddenly did? Maybe it was remembering the times when they were younger. Maybe it was because the sadness made her feel queer. But anyway all of a sudden she gave Harry a push that nearly knocked him off the steps. ‘S.O.B. to your Grandmother,’ she hollered to him.

Then she ran. That was what kids used to say in the neighborhood when they picked a fight Harry stood up and looked surprised. He settled his glasses on his nose and watched her for a second. Then he ran back to the alley.

The cold air made her strong as Samson. When she laughed there was a short, quick echo. She butted Harry with her shoulder and he got a holt on her. They wrestled hard and laughed. She was the tallest but his hands were strong. He didn’t fight good enough and she got him on the ground. Then suddenly he stopped moving and she stopped too. His breathing was warm on her neck and he was very still. She felt his ribs against her knees and his hard breathing as she sat on him. They got up together. They did not laugh any more and the alley was very quiet. As they walked across the dark back yard for some reason she felt funny. There was nothing to feel queer about, but suddenly it had just happened. She gave him a little push and he pushed her back. Then she laughed again and felt all right.

‘So long,’ Harry said. He was too old to climb the fence, so he ran through the side alley to the front of his house.

‘Gosh it’s hot!’ she said. ‘I could smother in here.’

Portia was warming her supper in the stove. Ralph banged his spoon on his high-chair tray. George’s dirty little hand pushed up his grits with a piece of bread and his eyes were squinted in a faraway look. She helped herself to white meat and gravy and grits and a few raisins and mixed them up together on her plate. She ate three bites of them. She ate until all the grits were gone but still she wasn’t full.

She had thought about Mister Singer all the day, and as soon as supper was over she went upstairs. But when she reached the third floor she saw that his door was open and his room dark. This gave her an empty feeling.

Downstairs she couldn’t sit still and study for the English test.

It was like she was so strong she couldn’t sit on a chair in a room the same as other people. It was like she could knock down all the walls of the house and then march through the streets big as a giant.

Finally she got out her private box from under the bed. She lay on her stomach and looked over the notebook. There were about twenty songs now, but she didn’t feel satisfied with them. If she could write a symphony! For a whole orchestra--how did you write that? Sometimes several instruments played one note, so the staff would have to be very large. She drew five lines across a big sheet of test paper--the lines about an inch apart. When a note was for violin or ‘cello or flute she would write the name of the instrument to show. And when they all played the same note together she would draw a circle around them. At the top of the page she wrote SYMPHONY in large letters. And under that MICK KELLY. Then she couldn’t go any further.

If she could only have music lessons! If only she could have a real piano! A long time passed before she could get started. The tunes were in her mind but she couldn’t figure how to write them. It looked like this was the hardest play in the world. But she kept on figuring until Etta and Hazel came into the room and got into bed and said she had to turn the light off because it was eleven o’clock.

FOR six weeks Portia had waited to hear from William. Every evening she would come to the house and ask Doctor Copeland the same question: ‘You seen anybody who gotten a letter from Willie yet?’ And every night he was obliged to tell her that he had heard nothing.

At last she asked the question no more. She would come into the hall and look at him without a word. She drank. Her blouse was often half unbuttoned and her shoestrings loose.

February came. The weather turned milder, then hot. The sun glared down with hard brilliance. Birds sang in the bare trees and children played out of doors barefoot and naked to the waist. The nights were torrid as in midsummer. Then after a few days winter was upon the town again. The mild skies darkened. A chill rain fell and the air turned dank and bitterly cold. In the town the Negroes suffered badly. Supplies of fuel had been exhausted and there was a struggle everywhere for warmth. An epidemic of pneumonia raged through the wet, narrow streets, and for a week Doctor Copeland slept at odd hours, fully clothed. Still no word came from William. Portia had written four times and Doctor Copeland twice.

During most of the day and night he had no time to think. But occasionally he found a chance to rest for a moment at home.

He would drink a pot of coffee by the kitchen stove and a deep uneasiness would come in him. Five of his patients had died.

And one of these was Augustus Benedict Mady Lewis, the little deaf-mute. He had been asked to speak at the burial service, but as it was his rule not to attend funerals he was unable to accept this invitation. The five patients had not been lost because of any negligence on his part. The blame was in the long years of want which lay behind. The diets of cornbread and sowbelly and syrup, the crowding of four and five persons to a single room. The death of poverty. He brooded on this and drank coffee to stay awake. Often he held his hand to his chin, for recently a slight tremor in the nerves of his neck made his head nod unsteadily when he was tired.

Then during the fourth week of February Portia came to the house. It was only six o’clock in the morning and he was sitting by the fire in the kitchen, warming a pan of milk for breakfast. She was badly intoxicated. He smelled the keen, sweetish odor of gin and his nostrils widened with disgust. He did not look at her but busied himself with his breakfast. He crumpled some bread in a bowl and poured over it hot milk. He prepared coffee and laid the table.

Then when he was seated before his breakfast he looked at Portia sternly. ‘Have you had your morning meal?’

‘I not going to eat breakfast,’ she said.

‘You will need it. If you intend to get to work today;’

‘I not going to work.’

A dread came in him. He did not wish to question her further.

He kept his eyes on his bowl of milk and drank from a spoon that was unsteady in his hand. When he had finished he looked up at the wall above her head. ‘Are you tongue-tied?’

‘I going to tell you. You going to hear about it. Just as soon as I able to say it I going to tell you.’

Portia sat motionless in the chair, her eyes moving slowly from one corner of the wall to the other. Her arms hung down limp and her legs were twisted loosely about each other.

When he turned from her he had for a moment a perilous sense of ease and freedom, which was more acute because he knew that soon it was to be shattered. He mended the fire and warmed his hands. Then he rolled a cigarette. The kitchen was in a state of spotless order and cleanliness. The saucepans on the wall glowed with the light of the stove and behind each one there was a round, black shadow.

‘It about Willie.’

‘I know.’ He rolled the cigarette gingerly between his palms.

His eyes glanced recklessly about him, greedy for the last sweet pleasures.

‘Once I mentioned to you this here Buster Johnson were at the prison with Willie. Us knowed him before. He were sent home yestiddy.’

‘So?’

‘Buster been crippled for life.’

His head quavered. He pressed his hand to his chin to steady himself, but the obstinate trembling was difficult to control.

‘Last night these here friends come round to my house and say that Buster were home and had something to tell me about Willie. I run all the way and this here is what he said. ‘

‘Yes.’

‘There were three of them. Willie and Buster and this other boy. They were friends. Then this here trouble come up.’

Portia halted. She wet her finger with her tongue and then moistened her dry lips with her finger. ‘It were something to do with the way this here white guard picked on them all the time. They were out on roadwork one day and Buster he sassed back and then the other boy he try to run off in the woods. They taken all three of them. They taken all three of them to the camp and put them in this here ice-cold room.’

He said yes again. But his head quavered and the word sounded like a rattle in his throat.

‘It were about six weeks ago,’ Portia said. ‘You remember that cold spell then. They put Willie and them boys in this room like ice.’

Portia spoke in a low voice, and she neither paused between words nor did the grief in her face soften. It was like a low song. She spoke and he could not understand. The sounds were distinct in his ear but they had no shape or meaning. It was as though his head were the prow of a boat and the sounds were water that broke on him and then flowed past. He felt he had to look behind to find the words already said.

‘. . . and their feets swolled up and they lay there and struggle on the floor and holler out. And nobody come. They hollered there for three days and three nights and nobody come.’

‘I am deaf,’ said Doctor Copeland. ‘I cannot understand.’

‘They put our Willie and them boys in this here ice-cold room.

There were a rope hanging down from the ceiling. They taken their shoes off and tied their bare feets to this rope. Willie and them boys lay there with their backs on the floor and their feets in the air. And their, feets swolled up and they struggle on the floor and holler out. It were ice-cold in the room and their feets froze. Their feets swolled up and they hollered for three nights and three days. And nobody come.’ Doctor Copeland pressed his head with his hands, but still the steady trembling would not stop. ‘I cannot hear what you say.’

‘Then at last they come to get them. They quickly taken Willie and them boys to the sick ward and their legs were all swolled and froze. Gangrene. They sawed off both our Willie’s feet.

Buster Johnson lost one foot and the other boy got well. But our Willie--he crippled for life now. Both his feet sawed off.’

The words were finished and Portia leaned over and struck her head upon the table. She did not cry or moan, but she struck her head again and again on the hard-scrubbed top of the table. The bowl and spoon rattled and he removed them to the sink. The words were scattered in his mind, but he did not try to assemble them. He scalded the bowl and spoon and washed out the dish-towel. He picked up something from the floor and put it somewhere.

‘Crippled?’ he asked. ‘William?’

Portia knocked her head on the table and the blows had a rhythm like the slow beat of a drum and his heart took up this rhythm also. Quietly the words came alive and fitted to the meaning and he understood.

‘When will they send him home?’

Portia leaned her drooping head on her arm. ‘Buster don’t know that. Soon afterward they separate all three of them in different places. They sent Buster to another camp. Since Willie only haves a few more months he think he liable to be home soon now.’

They drank coffee and sat for a long time, looking into each other’s eyes. His cup rattled against his teeth. She poured her coffee into a saucer and some of it dripped down on her lap.

‘William--’ Doctor Copeland said. As he pronounced the name his teeth bit deeply into his tongue and he moved his jaw with pain. They sat for a long while. Portia held his hand.

The bleak morning light made the windows gray. Outside it was still raining.

‘If I means to get to work I better go on now,’ Portia said.

He followed her through the hall and stopped at the hat-rack to put on his coat and shawl. The open door let in a gust of wet, cold air. Highboy sat out on the street curb with a wet newspaper over his head for protection. Along the sidewalk there was a fence. Portia leaned against this as she walked. Doctor Copeland followed a few paces after her and his hands, also, touched the boards of the fence to steady himself. Highboy trailed behind them.

He waited for the black, terrible anger as though for some beast out of the night. But it did not come to him. His bowels seemed weighted with lead, and he walked slowly and lingered against fences and the cold, wet walls of buildings by the way. Descent into the depths until at last there was no further chasm below. He touched the solid bottom of despair and there took ease.