Free Clock Without Hands by Carson Mccullers Page A

the various holds and positions. We came to that ... that little pond near the woods ... you know it, J.T."
    Malone, who had never played golf and was not a member of the Country Club, nodded with a certain pride.
    "Anyway, I was just swinging away when I suddenly had one of those falling-out spells. And I fell right spang into the pond. There I was drowning with nothing but a seven-year-old boy and a little colored caddy to save me. How they hauled me out I don't know, being too drenched and confused to help myself much. It must have been a job, my weighing over three hundred, but that colored caddy was both shrewd and smart and I was finally safe. However, that falling-out spell made me think seriously enough to consider going to a doctor. Since I didn't like or trust any doctor in Milan, it came to me in a divine flash ... Johns Hopkins. I knew they treated rare, uncommon diseases like mine. I gave the caddy who had saved me a solid gold watch engraved in Latin."
    "Latin?"
    "Mens sana in corpore sano," the Judge said serenely, as that was the only Latin he knew.
    "Most appropriate," said Malone, who did not know Latin either.
    "Unbeknownst to me, I had a peculiar and you might say tragic connection with the colored boy," the Judge said slowly; and he closed his eyes as a kind of curtain for the subject, leaving Malone's curiosity unsatisfied. "Nonetheless," he went on, "I'm hiring him as a body servant." The old-fashioned term struck Malone.
    "When I fell in the pond, I was sufficiently alarmed to take myself to Johns Hopkins, knowing they studied rare and curious diseases. I took little Jester with me to broaden his education and as a reward for helping that caddy save me." The Judge did not admit that he could not face such a horrendous experience as a hospital without his seven-year-old grandson. "So the day came I faced Dr. Hume."
    Malone paled at the unconscious image of a doctor's office with the smell of ether, the children's cries, Dr. Hayden's knife and a treatment table.
    "When Dr. Hume asked if I overate, I assured him I ate just an ordinary amount. Then his questions chiseled finer. He asked, for instance, how many biscuits I had at a meal and I said, 'Just the ordinary amount.' Chiseling in closer in the way that doctors do, he inquired what was the 'ordinary amount.' When I told him, 'Just a dozen or two,' I felt right then and there I had met my Waterloo."
    In a flash Malone saw soaked biscuits, disgrace, Napoleon.
    "The doctor said I had two choices ... either to go on living as I had been, which would not be for long, or to go on a diet. I was shocked, I admit. And I told him it was much too serious a question to decide offhand. I told him to let me think it over for twelve hours before my final decision. 'We won't find the diet too hard, Judge.' Don't you loathe it when doctors use the word 'we' when it applies only and solely to yourself? He could go home and gobble fifty biscuits and ten baked Alaskas ... while me, I'm starving on a diet, so I meditated in a furious way."
    "I hate that 'we' doctors use," Malone agreed, feeling the sickening ricochet of his own emotions in Dr. Hayden's office and the doomed words, "We have here a case of leukemia."
    "Furthermore," the Judge added, "I hate it, God damn it, when doctors presume to tell me the so-called truth. I was so angry meditating about that diet problem I might have then and there had a stroke." The Judge hastily corrected himself, "A heart attack or a 'little seizure.'"
    "No, it's not right," Malone assented. He had asked for the truth, but in asking, he had asked only for reassurance. How could he dream that an ordinary case of spring fever would be a fatal disease? He had wanted sympathy and reassurance, and he got a death warrant. "Doctors, by God; washing their hands, looking out windows, fiddling with dreadful things while you are stretched out on a table or half undressed on a chair." He finished in a voice that wailed with weakness and fury: