The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [70]
Ralph sat up in his wagon, his hat crooked on his head, and he was fretful. Spareribs had his new rifle with him. The sky was a wonderful blue.
‘We waited for you a long time, Mick,’ Bubber said. ‘Where you been?’
She jumped up the front steps three at a time and threw her sweater toward the hat rack. ‘Practicing on the piano in the gym.’
Every afternoon she stayed after school for an hour to play.
The gym was crowded and noisy because the girls’ team had basketball games. Twice today she was hit on the head with the ball. But getting a chance to sit at a piano was worth any amount of knocks and trouble. She would arrange bunches of notes together until the sound came that she wanted. It was easier than she had thought. After the first two or three hours she figured out some sets of chords in the bass that would fit in with the main tune her right hand was playing. She could pick out almost any piece now. And she made up new music too. That was better than just copying tunes. When her hands hunted out these beautiful new sounds it was the best feeling she had ever known.
She wanted to learn how to read music already written down.
Delores Brown had taken music lessons for five years. She paid Delores the fifty cents a week she got for lunch money to give her lessons. This made her very hungry all through the day. Delores played a good many fast, runny pieces--but Delores did not know how to answer all the questions she wanted to know. Delores only taught her about the different scales, the major and minor chords, the values of the notes, and such beginning rules as those.
Mick slammed the door of the kitchen stove. ‘This all we got to eat?’
‘Honey, it the best I can do for you,’ Portia said. Just cornpones and margarine. As she ate she drank a glass of water to help wash down the swallows.
‘Quit acting so greedy. Nobody going to snatch it out your hand.’
The kids still hung around in front of the house. Bubber had put his slingshot in his pocket and now he played with the rifle. Spareribs was ten years old and his father had died the month before and this had been his father’s gun--All the smaller kids loved to handle that rifle. Every few minutes Bubber would haul the gun up to his shoulder. He took aim and made a loud pow sound.
‘Don’t monkey with the trigger,’ said Spareribs. I got the gun loaded.’
Mick finished the cornbread and looked around for something to do. Harry Minowitz was sitting on his front porch banisters with the newspaper. She was glad to see him. For a joke she threw up her arm and hollered to him, ‘Heil!’ But Harry didn’t take it as a joke. He went into his front hall and shut the door. It was easy to hurt his feelings. She was sorry, because lately she and Harry had been right good friends. They had always played in the same gang when they were kids, but in the last three years he had been at Vocational while she was still in grammar school. Also he worked at part-time jobs. He grew up very suddenly and quit hanging around the back and front yards with kids. Sometimes she could see him reading the paper in his bedroom or undressing late at night. In mathematics and history he was the smartest boy at Vocational. Often, now that she was in high school too, they would meet each other on the way home and walk together. They were in the same shop class, and once the teacher made them partners to assemble a motor. He read books and kept up with the newspapers every day. World politics were all the time on his mind. He talked slow, and sweat stood out on his forehead when he was