Read Online Collected Stories of Carson McCullers by Carson Mccullers - Free Book Online

Arizona."
    "It was funny tasting," said Mick.
    Mrs. Lane began cutting the flowers again with hurried snips. "I—I think I hear that dog of yours howling somewhere. Go tend to him—go—run along, Mick."
    "You don't hear King, Mother. Howard's teaching him to shake hands out on the back porch. Please don't make me go." She laid her hands on her soft mound of stomach. "Look! You haven't said anything about my bathing suit. Aren't I nice in it, Constance?"
    The sick girl looked at the flexed, eager muscles of the child before her, and then gazed back at the sky. Two words shaped themselves soundlessly on her lips.
    "Gee! I wanna hurry up and get in. Did you know they're making people walk through a kind of ditch thing so you won't get sore toes this year—And they've got a new chute-ty-chute."
    "Mind me this instant, Mick, and go on in the house."
    The child looked at her mother and started off across the lawn. As she reached the path that led to the door she paused and, shading her eyes, looked back at them. "Can we go soon?" she asked, subdued.
    "Yes, get your towels and be ready."
    For several minutes the mother and daughter said nothing. Mrs. Lane moved jerkily from the spirea bushes to the fever-bright flowers that bordered the driveway, snipping hastily at the blooms, the dark shadow at her feet dogging her with noonday squatness. Constance watched her with eyes half closed against the glare, with her bony hands against the bubbling, thumping dynamo that was her chest. Finally she shaped the words on her lips and let them emerge. "Am I going up there by myself?"
    "Of course, my dear. We'll just put you on a bicycle and give you a shove—"
    She mashed a string of phlegm with her tongue so that she would not have to spit, and thought about repeating the question.
    There were no more blooms ready for cutting. The woman looked sidewise at her daughter from over the flowers in her arm, her blue veined hand shifting its grasp on the stems. "Listen, Constance—The garden club's having some sort of a to-do today. They're all having lunch at the club—and then going to somebody's rock garden. As long as I'm taking the children over I thought I—you don't mind if I go, do you?"
    "No," said Constance after a moment.
    "Miss Whelan promised to stay on. Tomorrow maybe—"
    She was still thinking about the question that she must repeat, but the words clung to her throat like gummy pellets of mucus and she felt that if she tried to expel them she would cry. She said instead, with no special reason: "Lovely—"
    "Aren't they? Especially the spirea—so graceful and white."
    "I didn't even know they'd started blooming until I got out."
    "Didn't you? I brought you some in a vase last week."
    "In a vase—" Constance murmured.
    "At night, though. That's the time to look at them. Last night I stood by the window—and the moonlight was on them. You know how white flowers are in the moonlight—"
    Suddenly she raised her bright eyes to those of her mother. "I heard you," she said half accusingly. "In the hall—tipping up and down. Late. In the living room. And I thought I heard the front door open and close. And when I was coughing once I looked at the window and I thought I saw a white dress up and down the grass like a ghost—like a—"
    "Hush!" said her mother in a voice as jagged as splintered glass. "Hush. Talking is exhausting."
    It was time for the question—as though her throat were swollen with its matured syllables. "Am I going by myself to Mountain Heights, or with Miss Whelan, or—"
    "I'm going with you. I'll take you up on the train. And stay a few days until you're settled."
    Her mother stood against the sun, stopping some of the glare so that she could look into her eyes. They were the color of the sky in the cool morning. They were looking at her now with a strange stillness—a hollow restfulness. Blue as the sky before the sun had burned it to its gaseous