Then I closed the door and went down the hall.
That had been the night of the fourth of April. I was almost sorry, the next day as I looked out the high window at the mass of people filling the streets and the wide sweep of lawn beyond the statues in front of the Capitol, that I knew what I knew. If I hadn’t known, I could have stood there in the full excitement of the possibilities of the moment. But I knew how the play would come out. This was like a dress rehearsal after the show has closed down. I stood there and felt like God-Almighty brooding on History.
Which must be a dull business for God-Almighty, Who knows how it is gone to come out. Who knew, in fact, how it was going to come out even before He knew there was going to be any History. Which is complete nonsense, for that involved Time and He is out of Time, for God is Fullness of Being, and in Him the End is the Beginning. Which is what you can read in the little tracts written and handed out on the streets corners by the fat, grubby, dandruff-sprinkled old man, with the metal-rimmed spectacles, who used to be the Scholarly Attorney and who married the girl with the gold braids and the clear, famished-looking cheeks, up in Arkansas. But those tracts he wrote were crazy, I thought back then. I thought God cannot be Fullness of being. For Life is Motion.
(I use the capital letters as the old man did in the tracts. I had sat across the table from him, with the foul unwashed dishes on one end of it and the papers and books piled on the other end, in the room over across the railroad tracks, and he had talked and I had heard the capital letters in his voice. He had said, “God is Fullness of Being.” And I had said, “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick. For Life is Motion. For–”
(For Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of being, we worship Death, the Father. That was what I said to the old man, who had looked at me across the papers and fouled dishes, and his red-streaked eyes had blinked above the metal-rimmed spectacles, which had hung down on the end of his nose. He had shaken his head and a flake or two of dandruff had sifted down from the spare white hair ends which fringed the skull within which the words had been taking shape from the electric twitches in the tangled and spongy and blood-soaked darkness. He had said then, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” And I had said, “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick.”
(For Life is a fire burning along a piece of string–or is it a fuse to a power keg which we call God?–and the string is what we don’t know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man’s Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man’s Knowledge will be equal to God’s Knowledge and there won’t be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a power keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be blown completely away. So I had said to the old man.
(But he had replied, “You think in Finite terms.” And I had said, “I’m not thinking at all, I’m just drawing a picture.” He had said, “Ha!” The way I remembered he had done a long time back when he played chess with Judge Irwin in the long room in the white house toward the sea. I had said, “I’ll draw you another picture. It is a picture of a man trying to paint a picture of a sunset. But before he can dip his brush the color always changes and the shape. Let us give a name to the picture which is trying to paint: Knowledge. Therefore if the object which a man looks at changes constantly so that Knowledge of it is constantly untrue and is therefore Non-Knowledge, the Eternal Motion is possible. And Eternal Life. Therefore we can believe in Eternal Life only if we deny God, Who is Complete Knowledge.”
(The old man had said, “I will pray for your soul.”)
But even if I didn’t believe in the old man’s God, that morning as I stood at the window of the Capitol and looked down on the crowd, I felt like God, because I had the knowledge of what was to come. I felt like God brooding on History, for as I stood there I could see a little chunk of History right there in front. There were the bronze statues on their pedestals, on the lawn, in frock coats, with the right hand inserted under the coat, just over the heart, in military uniforms with a hand on the sword hilt, even one in buckskin with the right hand grasping a barrel of grounded long rifle. They were already History, and the grass around their pedestals was shaved close and the flowers were planted in stars and circles and crescents. Then over beyond the statues, there were the people who weren’t History yet. Not quite. But to me they looked like History, because I knew the end of the event of which they were part. Or thought I knew the end.
I knew, too, how the newspapers would regard that crowd of people, as soon as they knew the end of the event. They would regard that crowd as cause, “A shameful display of cowardice on the part of the Legislature …” You could look at the crowd out there and hear that undertone in its cry, hoarse like surf, and think that the crowd there could cause the event. But no, it could be said, Willie Stark caused the event by corrupting and blackmailing the Legislature. But no, in turn it could be replied that Willie Stark merely gave the Legislature the opportunity to behave in the way appropriate to its nature and that MacMurfee, who sponsored the election of those men, thinking to use their fear and greed for his own ends, was truly responsible. But no, to that it could be replied that the responsibility belonged, after all, to that crowd of people, indirectly in so far as it had, despite MacMurfee, elected Willie Stark. But why had they elected Willie Stark? Because of a complex of forces which had made them what they were, or because Willie Stark could lean toward them with bulging eyes and right arm raised to Heaven?
One thing was certain: The sound of that chant hoarsely rising and falling was to be the cause of nothing, nothing at all. I stood in the window of the Capitol and hugged that knowledge like a precious and thorny secret, and did not think anything.
I watched the fat man get out of the black limousine and mount the bandstand. I saw the crowd shift and curdle and thin and dissolve. I looked across beyond the now lonely and occupationless policemen, beyond the statues–frock coats, uniforms, buckskin–to the great lawn, which was empty and bright in the spring sunshine. I spewed out the last smoke from my cigarette and flicked the butt out the open window and watched it spin over and over to the stone steps far below.
Willie Stark was to stand on those steps at eight o’clock that night, in a flood of light, looking small at the top of the great steps with the mountainous heave of the building behind him.
That night the people pressed up to the very steps, filling all the shadow beyond the sharply defined area of light. (Lighting apparatus had been mounted on the pedestals of two statues, one buckskin, one frock coat.) They called and chanted, “Willie–Willie–Willie,” pressing at the cordon of police at the foot of the steps. Then, after a while, out of the tall doorway of the Capitol, he appeared. Then, as he stood there, blinking in the light, the words of the chant disappeared, and there was a moment of stillness, and then there was only the roar. It seemed a long time before he lifted his hand to stop it. Then the roar seemed to die away, slowly, under the downward pressure of his hand.
I stood in the crowd with Adam Stanton and Anne Stanton and watched him come out on the steps of the Capitol. When it was over–when he had said what he had to say to the crowd and had gone back inside leaving the new, unchecked roar of voices behind him–I told Anne and Adam good night and went to meet the Boss.
I rode with him back to the Mansion. He hadn’t said a word when I joined him at the car. Sugar-Boy worked through the back streets, while behind us we could still hear the roaring and shouting and the protracted blatting of automobile horns. Then Sugar-Boy shook himself free into a quiet little street where the houses sat back from the pavement, lights on inside them now and people in the lighted rooms, and where the budding boughs interlaced above us. At the corners where the street lamps were you could catch the hint of actual green on the
boughs. Sugar-Boy drove up to the rear entrance of the Mansion. The Boss got out and went into the door. I followed him. He walked down the back hall, where we met nobody, and then into the big hall. He paced right across the hall, under the chandeliers and mirrors, past the sweep of the stairway, looked into the drawing room, crossed the hall again to look into the back sitting room, then again to look into the library. I caught on, and quit following him. I just stood in the middle of the big hall and waited. He hadn’t said he wanted me, but he hadn’t said he didn’t. In fact he hadn’t said anything. Not a word.
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.”