Free Clock Without Hands by Carson Mccullers Page B

"I'm glad I didn't finish medical school. I wouldn't have it on my soul nor conscience."
    "I meditated the full twelve hours as I said I would do. One portion of me said to go on the diet while another portion said, to hell, you live only once. I quoted Shakespeare to myself, 'To be or not to be,' and cogitated sadly. Then toward twilight a nurse came to the room with a tray. On the tray there was a steak twice as thick as my hand, turnip greens, lettuce and tomato salad. I looked at the nurse. She had dainty bosoms and a lovely neck ... for a nurse, that is. I told her about my problem and asked her truthfully what that diet was. You could have struck me over with a feather when she said: 'This, Judge, is the diet.' When I was sure it was no trick, I sent word to Dr. Hume that I was on the diet and I fell to. I had forgotten to mention liquor or little toddies. I managed that."
    "How?" asked Malone, who knew the Judge's little weaknesses.
    "The Lord works in strange ways. When I took Jester out of school to accompany me to the hospital, everybody thought it was mighty strange. Sometimes I thought so too, but secretly I was afraid I would die up North in that hospital. I didn't know the design beforehand, but a seven-year-old boy is just right to go to the nearest liquor store and get a bottle for his sick grandfather.
    "The trick in life is to change a miserable experience into a happy one. Once my gut was shrunk, I got along fine in Johns Hopkins and I lost forty pounds in three months."
    The Judge, seeing Malone's long-eyed wistfulness, felt suddenly guilty because he had talked so much about his own health. "You may think everything is roses and wine with me, J.T., but it's not and I'm going to tell you a secret I never breathed to a soul in this world, a serious, awful secret."
    "Why, what on earth..."
    "I was pleased after the diet to lose all that corpulence, but that diet had got in my system and just a year later, on my annual visit to Johns Hopkins, I was told I had sugar in the blood and that means diabetes." Malone, who had been selling him insulin for years, was not surprised but he did not comment. "Not a fatal disease but a diet disease. I cussed out Dr. Hume and threatened to bring suit but he reasoned with me and as a dyed-in-the-wool magistrate, I realized it wouldn't stand up in court. That brought certain problems. Do you know, J.T., while it's not a fatal disease, you have to have an injection every day. There is nothing catching about it but I felt there were too many health marks against me to make it known to the general public. I'm still in the zenith of my political career whether anybody recognizes it or not."
    Malone said, "I won't tell anybody, although it is no disgrace."
    "Corpulence, that little seizure, and then on top of everything, diabetes ... that's too much for a politician. Although there was a cripple in the White House for thirteen years."
    "I have every confidence in your political astuteness, Judge." He said this, but that evening he had strangely lost faith in the old Judge ... why he didn't know ... medical faith anyhow.
    "For years I put up with those public nurses for the injections and now chance has led me to another solution. I have found a boy who will look after me and give me those needles. He is the same boy you inquired about in the spring."
    Malone, suddenly remembering, said, "Not the Nigra with the blue eyes."
    "Yes," the Judge said.
    "What do you know about him?" Malone asked.
    The Judge was thinking about the tragedy of his life and how that boy had centered in it. But he only said to Malone, "He was the colored caddy who saved my life when I fell into that pond."
    Then came about between the two friends that laughter of disaster. It was focused consciously on the image of the three-hundred-pound old man being dragged out of a golf pond, but the hysterical laughter was reverberated in the gloom of the evening. The laughter of disaster does not stop easily, and so they