Free Clock Without Hands by Carson Mccullers

go to the cemetery alone instead of escorting his wife and daughter-in-law on the customary Sunday visit to Johnny's grave. The jaunt to the cemetery restored his usual good temper. After a stroll in the April twilight, he went to Pizzalatti's which was always open and bought sacks of candy, tangerines, and even a coconut, which the family enjoyed after supper.
    "Mirabelle," he said to Malone. "If she had only been taken to Johns Hopkins for the confinement. But Clanes have always been born at home, and who could know how it would turn out, besides. Hindsight is always better than foresight," he finished, dismissing his daughter-in-law who had died in childbirth.
    "Such a sad thing about Mirabelle," Malone said, just in order to say something. "Women seldom die in childbirth in this generation, and when they do it's especially sad. She used to come to the drugstore every afternoon for an ice cream cone."
    "She craved sweets," the Judge said with a peculiar satisfaction, as he had profited by this circumstance and would often say, "Mirabelle is craving strawberry shortcake," or some such delicacy, passing on his own desires to his pregnant daughter-in-law. Tactfully but firmly, his wife had kept the Judge within the three-hundred-pound weight range during her lifetime, although the words calorie or diet were never used. Secretly she read up on calorie lists and planned the meals accordingly, without the Judge's knowledge.
    "Every baby doctor in town was consulted toward the end," the Judge said almost defensively, as though he was being reproached for not caring for his kin. "But it was some rare complication that had not been foreseen. To my dying day I will regret that we had not taken her to Johns Hopkins to begin with. They specialize in complications and rare complaints. If it hadn't been for Johns Hopkins, I would be under the sod today."
    Malone, who found solace in this talk of the sickness of others, asked delicately: "Was your complaint complicated and rare?"
    "Not so much complicated and rare, but curious," the Judge said complacently. "When my beloved wife died I was so miserable I began digging my grave with my teeth."
    Malone shuddered, having an instant, vivid image of his friend chewing gritty dirt in the graveyard, crying with misery. His own illness had left him defenseless against such sudden, random images, no matter how repellent. The subjectivity of illness was so acute that Malone responded violently to whole areas of the most placid and objective concepts. For instance, the mere mention of a commonplace thing such as Coca-Cola suggested shame and the disgrace of not being thought a good provider, just because his wife had some shares of Coca-Cola stock which she had bought with her own money and kept in a safety deposit box at the Milan Bank and Trust. These reactions, cavernous and involuntary, were hardly realized by Malone as they had the volatile vigor and backward grace of the unconscious.
    "There came a time when I weighed at your drugstore and I weighed three hundred and ten pounds. But that didn't bother me particularly, and I was only troubled by those falling-out spells. But something outlandish had to happen before I took much serious notice. And finally the outlandish thing happened."
    "What?" Malone asked.
    "It was the time when Jester was seven." The Judge broke off his story to complain of those years. "Oh, the trouble for a man to raise a motherless child, and not only to raise but to rear him. Oh, the Clapps baby food, the sudden earaches in the night which I stopped with paregoric soaked in sugar and sweet oil dropped in his ear. Of course his nurse, Cleopatra, did most of the doing, but my grandson was my responsibility and no question about it." He sighed before he continued his story. "Anyway, when Jester was still a little nipper I decided to teach him to play golf, so one fair Saturday afternoon we set out to the Milan Country Club course. I was just playing away and showing Jester