The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

by Carson McCullers

Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved—so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a second time in the soul of the living?

Mick had grown so much in the past year that soon she would be taller than he was. She was dressed in the red sweater and blue pleated skirt she had worn every day since school started. Now the pleats had come out and the hem dragged loose around her sharp, jutting knees. She was at the age when she looked as much like an overgrown boy as a girl. And on that subject why was it that the smartest people mostly missed that point? By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means. The proof? Real youth and old age. Because often old men’s voices grow high and reedy and they take on a mincing walk. And old women sometimes grow fat and their voices get rough and deep and they grow dark little mustaches. And he even proved it himself—the part of him that sometimes almost wished he was a mother and that Mick and Baby were his kids. Abruptly Biff turned from the cash register.

The hopeless suffering of his people made in him a madness, a wild and evil feeling of destruction. At times he drank strong liquor and beat his head against the floor. In his heart there was a savage violence, and once he grasped the poker from the hearth and struck down his wife.

Biff uncorked the bottle. He stood shirtless before the mirror and dabbled some of the perfume on his dark, hairy armpits. The scent made him stiffen. He exchanged a deadly secret glance with himself in the mirror and stood motionless.

‘Bartholomew, you’d make a mighty good mother.’

‘Listen’—he rubbed his glasses on his lumberjack in a nervous way—‘You needn’t mention to him what I said. I mean I doubt if he would remember me. He don’t talk to me. He just talks to Mr. Singer. He might think it was funny if you—you know what I mean.’ ‘O.K.’ She read between the words that he had a crush on Mister Blount and she knew how he felt. ‘I wouldn’t mention it.’