The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [16]
She hummed one of the tunes, and after a while in the hot, empty house by herself she felt the tears come in her eyes. Her throat got tight and rough and she couldn’t sing any more.
Quickly she wrote the fellow’s name at the very top of the list--MOTSART.
Ralph was tied in the wagon just as she had left him. He sat up quiet and still and his fat little hands held on to the sides.
Ralph looked like a little Chinese baby with his square black bangs and his black eyes. The sun was in his face, and that was why he had been hollering. Bubber was nowhere around. When Ralph saw her coming he began tuning up to cry again. She pulled the wagon into the shade by the side of the new house and took from her shirt pocket a blue-colored jelly bean. She stuck the candy in the baby’s warm, soft mouth.
‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it,’ she said to him. In a way it was a waste, because Ralph was still too little to get the real good flavor out of candy. A clean rock would be about the same to him, only the little fool would swallow it. He didn’t understand any more about taste than he did about talking.
When you said you were so sick and tired of dragging him around you had a good mind to throw him in the river, it was the same to him as if you had been loving him. Nothing much made any difference to him. That was why it was such an awful bore to haul him around.
Mick cupped her hands, clamped them tight together, and blew through the crack between her thumbs. Her cheeks puffed out and at first there was only the sound of air rushing through her fists. Then a high, shrill whistle sounded, and after a few seconds Bubber came out from around the corner of the house.
She rumpled the sawdust out of Bubber’s hair and straightened Ralph’s cap. This cap was the finest thing Ralph had. It was made out of lace and all embroidered. The ribbon under his chin was blue on one side and white on the other, and over each ear there were big rosettes. His head had got too big for the cap and the embroidery scratched, but she always put it on him when she took him out. Ralph didn’t have any real baby carriage like most folks’ babies did, or any summer bootees.
He had to be dragged around in a tacky old wagon she had got for Christmas three years before. But the fine cap gave him face. There was nobody on the street, for it was late Sunday morning and very hot. The wagon screeched and rattled. Bubber was barefooted and the sidewalk was so hot it burned his feet. The green oak trees made cool-looking black shadows on the ground, but that was not shade enough. ‘Get up in the wagon,’ she told Bubber. ‘And let Ralph sit in your lap.’
‘I can walk all right.’ The long summer-time always gave Bubber the colic. He didn’t have on a shirt and his ribs were sharp and white. The sun made him pale instead of brown, and his little titties were like blue raisins on his chest. ‘I don’t mind pulling you,’ Mick said. ‘Get on in.’
‘O.K.’ Mick dragged the wagon slowly because she was not in any hurry to get home. She began talking to the kids. But it was really more like saying things to herself than words said to them. ‘This is a funny thing--the dreams I’ve been having lately. It’s like I’m swimming. But instead of water I’m pushing out my arms and swimming through great big crowds of people. The crowd is a hundred times bigger than in Kresses’ store on Saturday afternoon. The biggest crowd in the world. And sometimes I’m yelling and swimming through people, knocking them all down wherever I go--and other times I’m on the ground and people are trompling all over me and my insides are oozing out on the sidewalk. I guess it’s more like a nightmare than a plain On Sundays the house was always full of folks because the boarders had visitors. Newspapers rustled and there was cigar smoke, and footsteps always on the stairs.