All the King's Men (28 page)

When he turned from the library into the hall again, a white-coated Negro boy came out of the dining room. “Boy,” the Boss asked, “you seen Mrs. Stark?”

“Yassuh.”

“Where, dammit?” the Boss snapped. “You think I’m asking for my health?”

“Naw, suh, I didn’t think nuthin, I–”

“Where?” the Boss demanded in a tone to set the chandelier tingling.

After the first paralysis, the lips began to work in the black face. In the beginning without effect. Then a sound was detectable. “Upstairs–she done gone upstairs–I reckin she done gone to bed–she–”

The Boss had headed up the stairs.

He came back almost immediately, walked past me without a word, and back to the library. I trailed along. He flung himself down on the big leather couch, heaved his feet off the floor to the leather, and said, “Shut the God-damned door.”

I shut the door, he leaned back on the cushions, at about a thirty-degree angle from horizontal, and glumly studied his knuckles. “You would have thought she might wait up for me tonight,” he said finally, still studying the knuckles. Then, looking at me, “She’s gone to bed. Gone to bed and locked her door. Said she had a headache. I go upstairs and there id Tom sitting in the room across from her room doing his schoolwork. Before I lay hand to the knob of her door, he comes out and says, ‘She don’t want to be bothered.’ Like I was a delivery boy. ‘I’m not going to bother her,’ I said to him, ‘I’m just going to tell her what happened.’ He looked at me and said, ‘She’s got a headache, and she don’t want to be bothered.’ ” He hesitated, looked at the knuckles again, then back to me, and said with a hint of defensiveness in his tone, “All I was going to do was tell her how it came out tonight.”

“She wanted you to throw Byram to the wolves,” I said. “Did she want you to throw yourself to the wolves?”

“I don’t know what the hell she wants,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell any of ‘em want. A man can’t tell. But you can tell this, if any man tried to run things the way they want him to half the time, he’d end up sleeping on the bare ground. And how would she like that?”

“I imagine Lucy could take it,” I said.

“Lucy–” he said, and looked sort of surprised, as though I had introduced a new topic in the conversation. Then I recollected that Lucy’s name hadn’t been mentioned. Sure, he had been talking about Lucy Stark, he knew that and I knew that. But as soon as the name
Lucy
_ was mentioned, to take the place of that
she
_, somehow it was different. It was as though she had walked into the room, and looked at us.

“Lucy–” he repeated. Then, “All right–Lucy. She could take it. Lucy could sleep on the bare ground, and eat red beans, but it wouldn’t change the world a damned bit. But can Lucy understand that? No, Lucy cannot.” He was, apparently,, taking a relish in using the name now, in saying
Lucy
_ instead of
She
_, as though he proved something about something, or about her, or about himself, by saying it, by being able to say it. “Lucy,” he was saying, “she could sleep on the bare ground. And that’s exactly what she’s going to raise Tom to do, too, if she has her way. She’d have him so the six-year kids will be plugging him with nigger-shooters, and then no bothering to run. He’s a good stout boy–plays a good game of football, bet he makes the team when he gets to college–but she’s going to ruin him. Make him a sissy. Looks like I say a word to the boy and you can just see her face freeze. I called up here tonight to get Tom to come down and see the crowd. Was going to send Sugar-Boy to get him because I wasn’t going to have time to get home. But would she let him go? No, sir. Said he had to stay home and study. Study,” he said. Then, “Didn’t want him down there, that was it. Me and the crowd.”

“Take it easy,” I said. “That’s the way all women treat their kids. Besides, you got to be a big-shot by hitting your books.”

“He’s smart, smart enough without being a sissy,” he said. “He makes good grades in school, and, by God, he better. Sure, I want him to study. And he better, but what I don’t get is–”

There was a racket out in the hall, voice, then a knock at the door.

“See who it is,” the Boss said.

I opened the door and in stormed the familiar faces, somewhat flushed, Tiny Duffy’s in the lead. They ringed round the Boss and wheezed and shoved and chortled. “We fixed ‘em!–We damned well fixed ‘em!–You’re telling it, we stopped that clock!–It’ll be a long time till next time!” While the Boss lay back on the cushions at his thirty-degree angle, with his feet propped on the leather, and his eyes flickering around from face to face, under the half-lowered lids, you got the notion he was spying through a peephole. He hadn’t said a word.

“Champagne,” one of the boys was saying, “real champagne! A case and it is honest-to-God stuff. French, from France. Out in the kitchen, and Sambo is icing up. Boss, it’s a celebration!”

The Boss didn’t say anything.

“Celebrate, it’s a celebration, ain’t you gonna celebrate, Boss?”

“Duffy,” the Boss said, not loud, “if you aren’t too drunk you can see I don’t want this assing around here. Take your rabble over to the other side of the house and stay out from under foot.” Then in the silence of his pause his eyes flickered over the faces again, to come back to Duffy. To whom he said, “You think you grasp the idea?”

Tiny Duffy did grasp the idea. But the others grasped it, too, and I thought that I detected a slight competition among the brothers of the lodge to be among the first out.

The Boss regarded the fine paneling of the closed door for a couple of minutes. Then he said, “You know what Lincoln said?”

“What,” I asked.

“He said a house divided against itself cannot stand. Well, he was wrong.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” the Boss said, “for this government is sure half slave and half son-of-a-bitch, and it is standing.”

“Which is which?” I asked.

“Slaves down at the Legislature, and the sons-of-bitches up here,” he said. And added, “Only sometimes they overlap.”

But Lucy Stark did not leave the Boss after the settlement of the impeachment trouble. Not even after the next election, when the Boss came in for a second term in 1934. (A Governor can succeed himself in our state, and the Boss succeeded himself with a vengeance. There never had been a vote like it.) I suppose Tom was the reason she hung on. When she did leave him, there wasn’t any noise. Health. She went to Florida for a long pull. When she got back, she stayed out of town at a little place her sister had, a poultry farm and hatchery just out of town. Tom used to spend a lot of his time out with her, but I imagined that by that time she figured he wasn’t Mamma’s Boy any more. By that time he was a strapping fellow, cocky and fast on his feet, a natural-born quarterback, and he had discovered that something besides pasteurized milk came in bottles and that approximately half the human race belonged to a sex interestingly different from his own. Lucy probably figured that she could do something to hold Tom down, and so there wasn’t any absolute break with Willie. Now and then, but not often, she would appear in public with him. For instance, on that trip up to Mason City–the time the Boss and I made the midnight visit on Judge Irwin–Lucy came along. That was in 1936, and by that time Lucy had been staying out at her sister’s poultry farm for going on a year.

The Boss himself used to go out to the poultry farm occasionally, to keep up appearances. Two or three times the papers–the administration papers, that is–ran photographs of him standing with his wife and kid in front of a hen yard or incubator house. The hens didn’t do any harm, either. They gave a nice, homey atmosphere. The inspired confidence.

Chapter Four

That night when the Boss and I called on Judge Irwin in the middle of the night and when, burning the road back to Mason City in the dark, the car hurtled between the black fields, he said to me, “There is always something.”

And I said, “Maybe not on the Judge.”

And he said, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”

And he told me to dig it out, dig it up, the dead cat with patches of fur still clinging to the tight, swollen, dove-gray hide. It was the proper job for me, for, as I have said, I was once a student of history. A student of history does not care what he digs out of the ash pile, the midden, the sublunary dung heap, which is the human past. He doesn’t care whether is the dead pussy or the Kohinoor diamond. So it was a proper assignment for me, an excursion into the past.

It was to be my second excursion into the past, more interesting and sensational than the first, and much more successful. In fact, this second excursion into the past was to be perfectly successful. But the first one had not been successful. It had not been successful because in the midst of the process I tried to discover the truth and not the facts. Then, when the truth was not to be discovered, or discovered could not be understood by me, I could not bear to live with the cold-eye reproach of the facts. So I walked out of a room, the room where the facts lived in a big box of three-by-five inch note cards, and kept on walking until I walked into my second job of historical research, the job which should be known as the “Case of the Upright Judge.”

But I must tell about the first excursion into the enchantments of the past. Not that the first excursion has anything directly to do with the story of Willie Stark, but it has a great deal to do with the story of Jack Burden, and the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story.

Long ago Jack Burden was a graduate student, working for his Ph. D. in American History, in the State University of his native state. This Jack Burden (of whom the present Jack Burden,
Me
_, is a legal, biological, and perhaps even metaphysical continuator) lived in a slatternly apartment with two other graduate students, one industrious, stupid, unlucky, and alcoholic and the other idle, intelligent, lucky, and alcoholic. At least, they were alcoholic for a period after the first of the month, when they received the miserable check paid them by the University for their miserable work as assistant teachers. The industry and ill luck of one canceled out against the idleness and luck of the other and they both amounted to the same thing, and they drank what they could get when they could get it. They drank because they didn’t really have the slightest interest in what they were doing now, and didn’t have the slightest hope for the future. They could not even bear the thought of pushing on to finish their degrees, for that would mean leaving the University (leaving the first-of-the-month drunks, the yammer about “work” and the “ideas” in smoke-blind rooms, the girls who staggered slightly and giggled indiscreetly on the dark stairs leading to the apartment) to go to some normal school on a sun-baked crossroads or a junior college long on Jesus and short on funds, to go to face the stark reality of drudgery and dry rot and prying eyes and the slow withering of the green wisp of dream which had, like some window plant in an invalid’s room, grown out of a bottle. Only the bottle hadn’t had water in it. It had had something which looked like water, smelled like kerosene, and tasted like carbolic acid: one-run corn whisky.

Jack Burden lived with them, in the slatternly apartment among the unwashed dishes in the sink and on the table, the odor of stale tobacco smoke, the dirty shirts and underwear piled in corners. He even took a relish in the squalor, in the privilege of letting a last crust of buttered toast fall to the floor to be undisturbed until the random heel should grind it into the mud-colored carpet, in the spectacle of the fat roach moving across the cracked linoleum of the bathroom floor while he steamed in the tub. Once he had brought his mother to the apartment for tea, and she had sat on the edge of the overstuffed chair, holding a cracked cup and talking with a brittle and calculated charm out of a face which was obviously being held in shape by a profound exercise of will. She saw a roach venture out from the kitchen door. She saw one of Jack Burden’s friends crush an ant on the inner lip of the sugar bowl and flick the carcass from his finger. The nail of the finger itself was not very clean. But she kept right on delivering the charm, out of the rigid face. He had to say that for her.

But afterward, as they walked down the street, she had said, “Why do you live like that?”

“It’s what I’m built for, I reckon,” Jack Burden said.

“With those people,” she said.

“They’re all right,” he said, and wondered if they were, and wondered if he was.

His mother didn’t say anything for a minute, making a sharp, bright clicking on the pavement with her heels as she walked along, holding her small shoulders trimly back, carrying her famished-cheeked, blue-eyed, absolutely innocent face slightly lifted to the pulsing sunset world of April like a very expensive present the world ought to be glad even to have a look at.

Walking along beside him she said meditatively, “That dark-haired one–if he’d get cleaned up–he wouldn’t be bad looking.”

“That’s what a lot of other women think,” Jack Burden said, and suddenly felt a nauseated hatred of the dark-haired one, the one who had killed the ant on the sugar bowl, who had the dirty nails. But he had to go on, something in him made him go on, “Yes, and a lot of them don’t even care about cleaning him up. They’ll take him like he is. He’s the great lover of the apartment. He put the sag in the springs of that divan we got.”

“Don’t be vulgar,” she said, because she definitely did not like what id known as vulgarity in conversation.

“It’s the truth,” he said.

She didn’t answer, and her heels did the bright clicking. Then she said, “If he’d throw those awful clothes away–and get something decent.”

“Yeah,” Jack Burden said, “on his seventy-five dollars a month.”

She looked at him now, down at his clothes. “Yours are pretty awful, too,” she said.

“Are they?” Jack Burden demanded.

“I’ll send you money for some decent clothes,” she said.