All the King's Men (34 page)

Then, outside Atlanta, the bullet found him. He lay in the hospital and totted slowly to death. But even before the infection set in, when the wound in the leg seemed scarcely serious, he knew that he would die. “I shall die,” he wrote in the journal, and shall be spared the end and the last bitterness of war. I have lived to do no man good, and have seen others suffer for my sin. I do not question the Justice of God, that others have suffered for my sin, for it may be that only by the suffering of the innocent does God affirm that men are brothers, and brothers in His Holy Name. And in this room with me now, men suffer for sins not theirs, as for their own. It is a comfort to know that I suffer only for my own.” He knew not only that he was to die, but that the war was over. “It is over. It is all over but the dying, which will yet go on. Tough the boil has come to a head and has burst, yet must the pus flow. Men shall come together yet and die in the common guilt of man and in the guilt that sent them hither from far places and distant firesides. But God in His Mercy has spared me the end. Blessed be His Name.”

There was no more in the journal. There was only the letter to Gilbert, written in the strange hand, dictated by Cass after he had gown to weak to write. “Remember me, but without grief. If one of us is lucky, it is I …”

Atlanta fell. In the last confusion, the grave of Cass Mastern was not marked. Someone at the hospital, a certain Albert Calloway, kept Cass’s papers and the ring he had carried on the cord around his neck, and much later, after the war in fact, sent them to Gilbert Mastern with a courteous note. Gilbert preserved the journal, the letters from Cass, the picture of Cass, and the ring on the cord, and after Gilbert’s death, the heir finally sent the packet to Jack Burden, the student of history. So they came to rest on the little pine table in Jack Burden’s bedroom in the slatternly apartment which he occupied with the two other graduate students, the unlucky, industrious, and alcoholic one, and the lucky, idle, and alcoholic one.

Jack Burden lived with the Mastern papers for a year and a half. He wanted to know all the facts of the world in which Cass and Gilbert Mastern had lived, and he did many of the facts. And he felt that he knew Gilbert Mastern Gilbert Mastern had kept no journal, but Jack Burden felt that he knew him, the man with the head like the block of bare granite, who had lived through one world into another and had been at home in both. But the day came when Jack Burden sat down at the pine table and realized that he did not know Cass Mastern. He did not have to know Cass Mastern to get the degree; he only had to know the facts about Cass Mastern’s world. But without knowing Cass Mastern, he could not put down the facts about Cass Mastern’s world. Not that Jack Burden said that to himself. He simply sat there at the pine table, night after night, staring at the photograph, and writing nothing, Then he would get up to get a drink of water, and would stand in the dark kitchen, holding and old jelly glass in his hand, waiting for the water to run cold from the tap.

I have said that Jack Burden could not put down the facts about Cass Mastern’s world because he did not know Cass Mastern. Jack Burden did not say definitely to himself why he did not know Cass Mastern. But I (who am what Jack Burden became) look back now, years later, and try to say why.

Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but spring out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. You happy foot or you gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God’s eye, and the fangs dripping.

But how could Jack Burden, being what it he was, understand that? He could read the words written many years before in the lonely plantation house after Cass Mastern had freed his slaves or in the lawyer’s room in Jackson, Mississippi, or by candlelight in the hotel room in Vicksburg after the conversation with Jefferson Davis or by the dying campfire in some bivouac while the forms of men lay stretched on the ground in the night around and the night was filled with a slow, sad, susurrus rustle, like the wind fingering the pines, which was not, however, the sound of wind in the pines but the breath of thousands of sleeping men. Jack Burden could read those words, but how could he be expected to understand them? They could only be words to him, for to him the world then was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the broken and misused and dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret. Or it was a flux of things before his eyes (or behind his eyes) and one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else.

Or perhaps, he laid aside the journal of Cass Mastern not because he could not understand, but because he was afraid to understand for what might be understood there was a reproach to him.

In any case, he laid aside the journal and entered upon one of the periods of the Great Sleep. He would come home in the evening, and because he knew that he could not work he would go to bed immediately. He would sleep twelve hours, fourteen hours, fifteen hours, feeling himself, while asleep, plunge deeper and deeper into sleep like a diver groping downward into dark water feeling for something which may be there and which would glitter if there were any light in the depth, but there isn’t any light. Then in the morning he would lie in bed, not wanting anything, not even hungry, hearing the small sounds of the world sneaking and seeping back into the room, under the door, through the glass, through the cracks in the wall, through the very pores of the wood and plaster. Then he would think:
If I don’t get up I can’t go back to bed
_. And he would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.

Then one morning he went out into that world and did not come back to the room and the pine table. The black books, in which the journal was written, the ring, the photograph, the packet of letters were left there, beside the thick stack of manuscript, the complete works of Jack Burden, which was already beginning to curl at the edges under the paperweight.

Some weeks later, the landlady of the apartment sent him a big parcel, collect, containing the stuff he had left on the little pine table. The parcel, unopened, traveled around with him from furnished room to furnished room, to the apartment where he lived for a while with his beautiful wife Lois until the time came when he just walked out the door and didn’t come back; to the other furnished rooms and hotel rooms, a big squarish parcel with the brown paper turning yellow and the cords sagging, and the name
Mr. Jack Burden
_ fading slowly.

Chapter Five

That was the end of my first journey into the enchantments of the past, my first job of historical research. It was, as I have indicated, not a success. But the second job was a sensational success. It was the “Case of the Upright Judge” and I had every reason to congratulate myself on a job well done. It was a perfect research job, marred in its technical perfection by only one thing: it meant something.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was hat Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be), “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.”

The black Cadillac made its humming sound through the night and the tires sang on the slab and the black fields streaked with mist swept by. Sugar-Boy was hunched over the wheel, which looked too big for him, and the Boss sat straight up, up there in the front seat. I could see the black mass of his head against the tunnel of light down which we raced. Then I dozed off.

It was the stopping of the car that woke me up. I realized that we were back at the Stark place. I crawled out of the car. The Boss was already out, standing in the yard, just inside the gate in the starlight; Sugar-Boy was locking the car doors.

When I went into the yard, the Boss said, “Sugar-Boy is going to sleep on the couch downstairs, but there’s a cot made up for you upstairs, second door on the left at the head of the stairs. Your better get some shut-eye, for tomorrow you start digging for what the Judge dropped.”

“It will be a long dig,” I said.

“Look here,” he said, “if you don’t want to do it you don’t have to. I can always pay somebody else. Or do you want a raise?”

“No, I don’t want a raise,” I said.

“I am raising you a hundred a month, whether you want it or not.”

“Give it to the church,” I said. “If I wanted money, I could think of easier ways to make it than the way I make with you.”

“So you work for me because you love me,” the Boss said.

“I don’t know why I work for you, but it’s not because I love you. And not for money.”

“No,” he said, standing there in the dark, “you don’t know why you work for me. But I know,” he said, and laughed.

Sugar-Boy came into the yard, said good night, and went into the house.

“Why?” I asked.

“Boy,” he said, “you work for me because I’m the way I am and you’re the way you are. It is an arrangement founded on the nature of things.”

“That’s a hell of a fine explanation.”

“It’s not an explanation,” he said, and laughed again. “There ain’t any explanations. Not of anything. All you can do is point at the nature of things. If you are smart enough to see ‘em.”

“I’m not smart enough,” I said.

“You’re smart enough to dig up whatever it is on the Judge.”

“There may not be anything.”

“Nuts,” he said. “Go to bed.”

“Aren’t you coming to bed?”

“No,” he said, and I left him walking across the yard in the dark, with his head bowed a little, and his hands clasped behind him, walking casually as though he had come out to stroll through the park on Sunday afternoon. But it was not afternoon: it was 3:15 A.M.

I lay on the cot upstairs, but I didn’t go right to sleep. I thought about Judge Irwin. About the way he had looked at me that very night from his tall old head, the way the yellow eyes had glittered and the lip curled over the strong old yellow teeth as he said, “I’m dining with your mother this week. Shall I tell her you still like your work?” But that didn’t last, and I saw him sitting in the long room in the white house by the sea, leaning over a chessboard, facing the Scholarly Attorney, and he wasn’t an old man, he was a young man, and the high aquiline florid face was brooding over the board. But that didn’t last, and the face leaned toward me among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in the damp gray wintry dawn, and said, “You ought to have led that duck more, Jack. You got to lead a duck, son. But, son, I’ll make a duck hunter out of you yet.” And the face smiled. And I wanted to speak out and demand, “Is there anything, Judge? Will I find anything?” But the face only smile, and I went to sleep. Before I could say anything, I went to sleep in the middle of the smile.

Then it was another day, and I set out to dig up the dead cat, to excavate the maggot from the cheese, to locate the canker in the rose, to find the deceased fly among the raising in the rice pudding.

I found it.

But not all at once. You do not find it all at once if you are hunting for it. It is buried under the sad detritus of time, where, no doubt, it belongs. And you do not want to find it all at once, not if you are a student of history. If you find it all at once, there would be no opportunity to use your technique. But I had an opportunity to use my technique.

I took the first step the next afternoon while I sat in a beer parlor in the city, surrounded by a barricade of empty beer bottles. I lighted a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last one and asked myself the following question: “For what reason, barring Original Sin, is a man most likely to step over the line?”

I answered: “Ambition, love, fear, money.”

I asked: “Is the Judge ambitious?”

I answered: No. An ambitious man is a man who wants other people to thing he is great. The Judge knows he is great and doesn’t care what other people think.”

I asked: “What about love?”

I was perfectly sure that the Judge had had his innings, but I was also perfectly sure that nobody around the Landing had anything on him in that respect. For if anybody in a small town has anything on anybody it isn’t long before everybody knows it.

I asked: “Is the Judge a man to scare easy?”

I answered: “He does not scare easy.”

That left money.

So I asked: “Does the Judge love money?”

“All the money the Judge wants is just enough money the make the Judge happy.”

I asked: “Was there ever a time when the Judge didn’t have enough money to make the Judge happy?” But naturally that wouldn’t be chicken feed.

I lighted another cigarette and turned that question over in my mind. I did not know the answer. Some voice out of my childhood whispered, but I could not catch what it said. I had the vague sense, rising from a depth of time, and of myself, of being a child, of entering the room where the grown people were, of knowing that they had just that instant stopping talking because I had come into the room and was not supposed to know what they were talking about. Had I overheard what they had been talking about? I listened for the voice whispering out of my childhood, but that voice was a long way off. It could not give me the answer. So I rose from the table, and left the empty beer bottles and the cigarette butts, and went out into the street, which still steamed from the late afternoon shower like a Turkish bath, and where now the tires of automobiles hissed hotly through the film of moisture on the asphalt. If we were lucky there might be a breeze of the Gulf later. If we were lucky.