Free Collected Stories of Carson McCullers by Carson Mccullers

biggest orphans leading and the two smallest orphans at the end. I was about eleven when changes occurred that drew me in closer as a spectator, and opened an unexpected area of romance. First, my Grandmother was made a member of the Board of the Orphans' Home. That was in the autumn. Then at the beginning of the spring term the orphans were transferred to the Seventeenth Street School, where I was going, and three of the orphans were in the room with mc in the sixth grade. The transfer was made because of a change in the boundary line of the school districts. My Grandmother was elected to the Board because she enjoyed Boards, Committees, and the meetings of associations, and a former member of the Board had died at about that time.
    My Grandmother visited the Home about once a month, and on her second visit I went with her. It was the best time of the week, a Friday afternoon, spacious with the sense of coming holiday. The afternoon was cold, and the late sunlight made fiery reflections on the windowpanes. Inside, the Home was quite different from the way I had imagined it. The wide hall was bare, and the rooms were uncurtained, rugless, and scantily furnished. Heat came from stoves in the dining room and in the general room that was next to the front parlor. Mrs. Wesley, the matron of the Home, was a large woman, rather hard of hearing, and she kept her mouth slightly ajar when anyone of importance spoke. She always seemed to be short of breath, and she spoke through her nose in a placid voice. My Grandmother had brought some clothes (Mrs. Wesley called them garments) donated by the various churches and they shut themselves in the cold parlor to talk. I was entrusted to a girl of my own age, named Susie, and we went out immediately to the board fenced back yard.
    That first visit was awkward. Girls of all ages were playing different games. There was in the yard a joggling board, and an acting bar, and a hopscotch game was marked on the ground. Confusion made me see the yard full of children as an unassorted whole. One little girl came up to me and asked me what was my father. And, as I was slow in answering she said: "My father was a walker on the railroad." Then she ran to the acting bar and swung by her knees—her hair hung straight down from her red face and she wore brown cotton bloomers.

Instant of the Hour After
    Light as shadows her hands fondled his head and then came placidly to rest; the tips of her fingers hovered on his temples, throbbed to the warm slow beat inside his body, and her palms cupped his hard skull.
    "Re
ver
berating va-cuity," he mumbled so that the syllables lolloped ponderously into each other.
    She looked down at his lax, sound body that stretched the length of the couch. One foot—the sock wrinkled around the ankle—hung limp over the edge. And as she watched his sensitive hand left his side and crept up drunkenly to his mouth—to touch his lips that had remained pursed out and loose after his words. "Immense hollowness—" he mouthed behind his feeling fingers.
    "Enough out of you tonight—my darling," she said. "The show's over and the monkey's dead."
    They had turned off the heat an hour before and the apartment was beginning to chill. She looked at the clock, the hands of which pointed to one. Not much heat anyway at that hour, she thought. No draughts, though; opalescent ribbons of smoke lay motionless close to the ceiling. Speculatively her glance shifted to the whiskey bottle and the confused chessmen on the card table. To a book that lay face downward on the floor—and a lettuce leaf lying forlornly in the corner since Marshall had lost it while waving his sandwich. To the dead little butts of cigarettes and the charred matches scattered.
    "Here cover up," she said absently, unfolding a blanket at the foot of the couch. "You're so susceptible to draughts."
    His eyes opened and stared stolidly up at her—blue-green, the color of the sweater he wore. One of