The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (9 page)

‘What happened?’

The man with the sore on his mouth shuffled his feet and dropped the stub of his cigarette to the ground. ‘Well --they just quit work because they wanted twenty cents a hour. There was about three hundred did it. They just hung around the streets all day. So the mill sent out trucks, and in a week the whole town was swarming with folks come here to get a job.’

Jake turned so that he was facing them. The men sat two steps above him so that he had to raise his head to look into their eyes. ‘Don’t it make you mad?’ he asked.

‘How do you mean--mad?’

The vein in Jake’s forehead was swollen and scarlet.

‘Christamighty, man! I mean mad-m-a-d-mad! He scowled up into their puzzled, sallow faces. Behind them, through the open front door he could see the inside of the house. In the front room there were three beds and a wash-stand. In the back room a barefooted woman sat sleeping in a chair. From one of the dark porches nearby there was the sound of a guitar.

‘I was one of them come in on the trucks,’ the tall man said.

‘That makes no difference. What I’m trying to tell you is plain and simple. The bastards who own these mills are millionaires. While the doffers and carders and all the people behind the machines who spin and weave the cloth can’t hardly make enough to keep their guts quiet. See? So when you walk around the streets and. think about it and see hungry, worn-out people and ricket-legged young-uns, don’t it make you mad? Don’t it?’

Jake’s face was flushed and dark and his lips trembled. The three men looked at him warily. Then the man in the straw hat began to laugh.

‘Go on and snicker. Sit there and bust your sides open.’

The men laughed in the slow and easy way that three men laugh at one. Jake brushed the dirt from the soles of his feet and put on his shoes. His fists were closed tight and his mouth was contorted with an angry sneer. ‘Laugh--that’s all you’re good for. I hope you sit there and snicker ‘til you rot!’ As he walked stiffly down the street, the sound of their laughter and catcalls still followed him.

The main street was brightly lighted. Jake loitered on a corner, fondling the change in his pocket. His head throbbed, and although the night was hot a chill passed through his body. He thought of the mute and he wanted urgently to go back and sit with him awhile. In the fruit and candy store where he had bought the newspaper that afternoon he selected a basket of fruit wrapped in cellophane. The Greek behind the counter said the price was sixty cents, so that when he had paid he was left with only a nickel. As soon as he had come out of the store the present seemed a funny one to take a healthy man. A few grapes hung down below, the cellophane, and he picked them off hungrily.

Singer was at home when he arrived. He sat by the window with the chess game laid out before him on the table. The room was just as Jake had left it, with the fan turned on and the pitcher of ice water beside the table. There was a panama hat on the bed and a paper parcel, so it seemed that the mute had just come in. He jerked his head toward the chair across from him at the table and pushed the chessboard to one side.

He leaned back with his hands in his pockets, and his face seemed to question Jake about what had happened since he had left. Jake put the fruit on the table. ‘For this afternoon,’ he said.

‘The motto has been: Go out and find an octopus and put socks on it.’

The mute smiled, but Jake could not tell if he had caught what he had said. The mute looked at the fruit with surprise and then undid the cellophane wrappings. As he handled the fruits there was something very peculiar in the fellow’s face. Jake tried to understand this look and was stumped. Then Singer smiled brightly.

‘I got a job this afternoon with a sort of show. I’m to run the flying-jinny.’

The mute seemed not at all surprised. He went into the closet and brought out a bottle of wine and two glasses. They drank in silence. Jake felt that he had never been in such a quiet room. The light above his head made a queer reflection of himself in the glowing wineglass he held before him--the same caricature of himself he had noticed many times before on the curved surfaces of pitchers or tin mugs--with his face egg-shaped and dumpy and his mustache straggling almost up to his ears. Across from him the mute held his glass in both hands. The wine began to hum through Jake’s veins and he felt himself entering again the kaleidoscope of drunkenness.

Excitement made his mustache tremble jerkily. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and fastened a wide, searching gaze on Singer.

‘I bet I’m the only man in this town that’s been mad--I’m talking about really mean mad--for ten solid long years. I damn near got in a fight just a little while ago. Sometimes it seems to me like I might even be crazy. I just don’t know.’

Singer pushed the wine toward his guest. Jake drank from the bottle and rubbed the top of his head.

‘You see, it’s like I’m two people. One of me is an educated man. I been in some of the biggest libraries in the country. I read. I read all the time. I read books that tell the pure honest truth. Over there in my suitcase I have books by Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen and such writers as them. I read them over and over, and the more I study the madder I get. I know every word printed on every page. To begin with I like words.

Dialectic materialism--Jesuitical prevarication’--Jake rolled the syllables in his mouth with loving solemnity--’teleological propensity.’

The mute wiped his forehead with a neatly folded handkerchief.

‘But what I’m getting at is this. When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?’

Singer reached for a wineglass, filled it to the brim, and put it firmly into Jake’s bruised hand. ‘Get drunk, huh?’ Jake said with a jerk of his arm that spilled drops of wine on his white trousers. ‘But listen! Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness.

Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear--and nobody seems to know.

Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed--stupid and mean.’

Jake pressed his fists to his temples. His thoughts had careened in several directions and he could not get control of them. He wanted to go berserk. He wanted to get out and fight violently with someone in a crowded street.

Still looking at him with patient interest, the mute took out his silver pencil. He wrote very carefully on a slip of paper, Are you Democrat or Republican? and passed the paper across the table. Jake crumpled it in his hand. The room had begun to turn around him again and he could not even read.

He kept his eyes on the mute’s face to steady himself. Singer’s eyes were the only things in the room that did not seem to move. They were varied in color, flecked with amber, gray, and a soft brown. He stared at them so long that he almost hypnotized himself. He lost the urge to be riotous and felt calm again. The eyes seemed to understand all that he had meant to say and to hold some message for him. After a while the room was steady again.

‘You get it,’ he said in a blurred voice. ‘You know what I mean.’

From afar off there was the soft, silver ring of church bells.

The moonlight was white on the roof next door and the sky was a gentle summer blue. It was agreed without words that Jake would stay with Singer a few days until he found a room.

When the wine was finished the mute put a mattress on the floor beside the bed. Without removing any of his clothes Jake lay down and was instantly asleep.

FAR from the main street, in one of the Negro sections of the town, Doctor Benedict Mady Copeland sat in his dark kitchen alone. It was past nine o’clock and the Sunday bells were silent now. Although the night was very hot, there was a small fire in the round-bellied wood stove. Doctor Copeland sat close to it, leaning forward in a straight-backed kitchen chair with his head cupped in his long, slender hands. The red glow from the chinks of the stove shone on his face--in this light his heavy lips looked almost purple against his black skin, and his gray hair, tight against his skull like a cap of lamb’s wool, took on a bluish color also. He sat motionless in this position for a long time. Even his eyes, which stared from behind the silver rims of his spectacles, did not change their fixed, somber gaze. Then he cleared his throat harshly, and picked up a book from the floor beside his chair. All around him the room was very dark, and he had to hold the book close to the stove to make out the print. Tonight he read Spinoza. He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, true purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.

Often at night the sharp jangle of the doorbell would rouse him from his silence, and in the front room he would find a patient with a broken bone or with a razor wound. But this evening he was not disturbed. And after the solitary hours spent sitting in the dark kitchen it happened that he began swaying slowly from side to side and from his throat there came a sound like a kind of singing moan. He was making this sound when Portia came.

Doctor Copeland knew of her arrival in advance. From the street outside he caught the sound of an harmonica playing a blues song and he knew that the music was played by William, his son. Without turning on the light he went through the hall and opened the front door. He did not step out on the porch, but stood in the dark behind the screen. The moonlight was bright and the shadows of Portia and William and Highboy lay black and solid on the dusty street. The houses in the neighborhood had a miserable look. Doctor Copeland’s house was different from any other building nearby. It was built solidly of brick and stucco.

Around the small front yard there was a picket fence. Portia said goodbye to her husband and brother at the gate and knocked on the screen door.

‘How come you sit here in the dark like this?’

They went together through the dark hall back to the kitchen.

‘You haves grand electric lights. It don’t seem natural why you all the time sitting in the dark like this.’

Doctor Copeland twisted the bulb suspended over the table and the room was suddenly very bright. ‘The dark suits me,’ he said.

The room was clean and bare. On one side of the kitchen table there were books and an inkstand--on the other side a fork, spoon, and plate. Doctor Copeland held himself bolt upright with his long legs crossed and at first Portia sat stiffly, too.

The father and daughter had a strong resemblance to each other--both of them had the same broad, flat noses, the same mouths and foreheads. But Portia’s skin was very light when compared to her Father’s.

‘It sure is roasting in here,’ she said. ‘Seems to me you would let this here fire die down except when you cooking.’

‘If you prefer we can go up to my office,’ Doctor Copeland said.

‘I be all right, I guess. I don’t prefer.’

Doctor Copeland adjusted his silver-rimmed glasses and then folded his hands in his lap. ‘How have you been since we were last together? You and your husband--and your brother?’

Portia relaxed and slipped her feet out of her pumps. ‘Highboy and Willie and me gets along just fine.’

‘William still boards with you?’

‘Sure he do,’ Portia said. ‘You see--us haves our own way of living and our own plan. Highboy--he pay the rent. I buys all the food out of my money. And Willie--he tends to all of our church dues, insurance, lodge dues, and Saturday Night. Us three haves our own plan and each one of us does our parts.’ Doctor Copeland sat with his head bowed, pulling at his long fingers until he had cracked all of his joints. The clean cuffs of his sleeves hung down past his wrists--below them his thin hands seemed lighter in color than the rest of his body and the palms were soft yellow. His hands had always an immaculate, shrunken look, as though they had been scrubbed with a brush and soaked for a long time in a pan of water.

‘Here, I almost forgot what I brought,’ Portia said. ‘Haves you had your supper yet?’

Doctor Copeland always spoke so carefully that each syllable seemed to be filtered through his sullen, heavy lips. ‘No, I have not eaten.’

Portia opened a paper sack she had placed on the kitchen table. ‘I done brought a nice mess of collard greens and I thought maybe we have supper together. I done brought a piece of side meat, too. These here greens need to be seasoned with that. You don’t care if the collards is just cooked in meat, do you?’

‘It does not matter.’

‘You still don’t eat nair meat?’

‘No. For purely private reasons I am a vegetarian, but it does not matter if you wish to cook the collards with a piece of meat’ Without putting on her shoes Portia stood at the table and carefully began to pick over the greens. This here floor sure do feel good to my feets. You mind if I just walk around like this without putting back on them tight, hurting pumps?’

‘No,’ said Doctor Copeland. ‘That will be all right’

‘Then--us’ll have these nice collards and some hoecake and coffee. And I, going to cut me off a few slices of this here white meat and fry it for myself.’

Doctor Copeland followed Portia with his eyes. She moved slowly around the room in her stockinged feet, taking down the scrubbed pans from the wall, building up the fire, washing the grit from the collards. He opened his mouth to speak once and then composed his lips again.

‘So you and your husband and your brother have your own cooperative plan,’ he said finally.

‘That’s right.’

Doctor Copeland jerked at his fingers and tried to pop the joints again. ‘Do you intend to plan for children?’

Portia did not look at her father. Angrily she sloshed the water from the pan of collards. ‘There be some things,’ she said, ‘that seem to me to depend entirely upon God.’

They did not say anything else. Portia left the supper to cook on the stove and sat silently with her long hands dropping down limp between her knees. Doctor Copeland’s head rested on his chest as though he slept. But he was not sleeping; now and then a nervous tremor would pass over his face. Then he would breathe deeply and compose his face again. Smells of the supper began to fill the stifling room. In the quietness the clock on top of the cupboard sounded very loud, and because of what they had just said to each other the monotonous ticking was like the word ‘children, children,’ said over and over.