A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud by Carson McCullers

“The man leaned his head down  and tapped his forehead on the counter. For a few seconds he stayed bowed over in this position, the back of his stringy neck covered with orange furze, his hands with their long warped fingers held palm to palm in an attitude of prayer. Then the man straightened himself; he was smiling and suddenly his face was bright and tremulous and old…’It is this. And listen carefully. I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with?’

 The boys soft mouth was partly open and he did not answer.

 ‘A woman,’ the old man said.’Without science, with nothing to go by, they undertake the most dangerous and sacred experience in God’s earth. They fall in love with a woman. Is that correct, Son?’

 ‘Yeah,” the boy said faintly.

 ‘They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love?’ The old man reached over and grasped the boy by the collar of his leather jacket. He gave him a gentle little shake and his green eyes gazed down unblinking and grave.

 ‘Son, do you know how love should be begun?’ The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered: ‘A tree. A rock. A cloud.’

In this story, a 12 year old pint-sized paperboy encounters the early morning crowd at a streetcar cafe “owned by a bitter and stingy man called Leo”. Before he can leave he is accosted by an older man sitting in front of a beer who tells the boy that he loves him. The boy assumes the man is a lonely old drunk , and looks to Leo for confirmation, but the cafe owner and self-proclaimed “critic of craziness” refuses to satisfy the boy with a straight answer. Instead he allows the encounter to continue as he lays pink strips of bacon on the grill and serves up refills, but never for free. The older man with the beer tells the boy his tale of love lost and lesson learned – “the science” as he calls it, of love. He says that one has to build up to loving another person – first you have to love the trees, the rocks, the clouds, and so on. The boy is cautious as he listens to this stranger ramble on – looking for reactions and answers from the other adults around.  In the end you know that he will only get answers through his own experience. Does anyone really take advice from strange adults at age twelve anyway? Love inevitably is trial and error for us all, though we try to advise one another. This man was like the streetcar cafe buddha, explaining that we must expand our embrace to include love for all things on this earth. Sometimes the best advice comes from the most unexpected places – but that still doesn’t mean we necessarily take from it. Thanks Carson McCullers.

 

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers

“Children love to sleep in houses other than their own, and to eat at a neighbor’s table; on such occassions they behave themselves decently and are proud. The people in town were likewise proud when sitting at the tables in the cafe. They washed before coming to Miss Amelia’s, and scraped their feet very politely on the threshhold as they entered the cafe. There, for a few hours at least, the deep bitter knowing that you are not worth much in this world could be laid low. ”

Carson McCullers’s story is set in a dusty, primitive Southern town where life is gnawed to the bone for lack of anything to do. She favors freaks of nature as her main characters: Miss Amelia is lanky and strong, with thick hairy thighs; her Cousin Lymon is an extroverted hunchback whose age and appearance remain an eternal enigma. Together, the two open up a small cafe that brings the people of the town a certain amount of pride they never had before. The cafe becomes a bright spot in an otherwise dreary existence. 

People pause to wonder over each other’s lives, tell stories, and find healing through shared meals and moonshine. With the arrival of the hunchaback and the opening of the cafe, Miss Amelia becomes vulnerable to the town in a way that she never was before and the people expect to learn what really happened during her mysterious ten-day marriage to the no-good Marvin Macy. It turns out however that it is not Miss Amelia who pops the biggest surprise in the end, but her odd cousin who appears and disappears along with the existence of the cafe.

The story ends exactly where it began…in a dreary town where there is absolutely nothing to do, and” the soul rots with boredom”. The tune carried on the wind by the chain gang is the nearest form of entertainment to be found in those parts.