All the King's Men (62 page)

“Littlepaugh,” he said musingly, and waited. “You know,” he said marveling, “you know, I didn’t remember his name. I swear, I didn’t even remember his name.”

He waited again.

“Don’t you think it remarkable,” he asked, “that I didn’t even remember his name?”

“Maybe so,” I said.

“You know,” he said, still marveling, “for weeks–for months sometimes–I don’t even remember any of–” he touched the papers lightly with his strong right forefinger–”of this.”

He waited, drawn into himself.

Then he said, “You know, sometimes–for a long time at a stretch–it’s like it hadn’t happened. Not to me. Maybe to somebody else, but not to me. Then I remember, and when I first remember I say, No, it could not have happened to me.”

Then he looked up at me, straight in the eye. “But it did,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “it did.”

“Yes,” he nodded, “but it is difficult for me to believe.”

“It is for me, too,” I said.

“Thanks for that much, Jack,” he said, and smiled crookedly.

“I guess you know the next move,” I said.

“I guess so. Your employer is trying to put pressure on me. To blackmail me.”

“_Pressure__ is a prettier word,” I averred.

“I don’t care much about pretty words any more. You live with words a long time. Then all at once you are old, and there are the things and the words don’t matter any more.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Suit yourself,” I replied, “but you get the idea.”

“Don’t you know–your employer ought to know, since he claims to be a lawyer, that this stuff,” he tapped the papers again with the forefinger, “wouldn’t stick? Not for one minute. In a court of law. Why, it happened almost twenty-five years ago. And you wouldn’t get any testimony, anyway. Except from this Littlepaugh woman. Which would be worthless. Everybody is dead.”

“Except you, Judge,” I said.

“It wouldn’t stick in court.”

“But you don’t live in a court. You aren’t dead, and you live in the world and people think you are a certain kind of man. You aren’t the kind of man who could bear for them to think different, Judge.”

“They couldn’t think it!” he burst out, leaning forward. “By God, they haven’t any right to think it. I’ve done right, I’ve done my duty, I’ve–”

I took my gaze from his face and directed it to the papers on his lap. He saw me do that, and looked down, too. The words stopped, and his fingers touched the papers, tentatively as though to verify their reality. Quite slowly, he raised his eyes back to me. “You’re right,” he said. “I did this, too.”

“Yes,” I said, “you did.”

“Does Stark know it?”

I tried to make out what was behind that question, but I couldn’t read him.

“No, he doesn’t,” I replied. “I told him I wouldn’t tell him till I’d seen you. I had to be sure, you see, Judge.”

“You have a tender sensibility,” he said. For a blackmailer.”

“We won’t start calling names. All I’ll say is that you’re trying to protect a blackmailer.”

“No, Jack,” he said quietly, “I’m not trying to protect MacMurfee. Maybe–” he hesitated–”I’m trying to protect myself.”

“You know how to do it, then. And I’ll never tell Stark.”

“Maybe you’ll never tell him, anyway.”

He said that even more quietly, and for the instant I though he might be ready to reach for a weapon–the desk was near him–or ready to spring at me. He might be old but he would still be a customer.

He must have guessed the thought, for he shook his head, smiled, and said, “No, don’t worry. You needn’t be afraid.”

“Look here–” I began angrily.

“I wouldn’t hurt you,” he said. Then, reflectively, added, “But I could stop you.”

“By stopping MacMurfee,” I said.

“A lot easier than that.”

“How?”

“A lot easier than that,” he repeated.

“How?”

“I could just–” he began, “I could just say to you–I could just tell you something–” He stopped, the suddenly rose to his feet, spilling the papers off his knees. “But I won’t,” he said cheerfully, and smiled directly at me.

“Won’t tell me what?”

“Forget it,” he said, still smiling, and waved his hand in a gay dismissal of the subject.

I stood there irresolutely for a moment. Things were not making sense. He was not supposed to be standing there, brisk and confident and cheerful, with the incriminating papers at his feet. But he was.

I stooped to pick up the papers, and he watched me from his height.

“Judge,” I said, “I’ll be back tomorrow. You think it over, and make up your mind tomorrow.”

“Why, it’s made up.”

“You’ll–”

“No, Jack.”

I went to the hall door. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said.

“Sure, sure. You come back. But my mind is made up.”

I walked down the hall without saying good-bye. I had my hand lifted to the front door when I heard his voice calling my name. I turned and took a few steps toward him. He had come out into the hall. “I just wanted to tell you,” he said, “that I did learn something new from those interesting documents. I learned that my old friend Governor Stanton impaired his honor to protect me. I do not know whether to be more glad or sorry, at the fact. At the knowledge of his attachment or the knowledge of the pain it cost him. He had never told me. That was the pitch of his generosity. Wasn’t it? Not ever telling me.”

I mumbled something to the effect that I supposed it was.

“I just wanted you to know about the Governor. That his failing was a defect of his virtue. The virtue of affection for a friend.”

I didn’t mumble anything to that.

“I just wanted you to know that about the Governor,” he said.

“All right,” I said, and went to the front door, feeling his yellow gaze and calm smile upon me, and out into the blaze of light.

It was still hotter than hell’s hinges as I walked up the Row toward home. I debated a swim or getting into my car and heading back to town to tell the Boss that Judge Irwin wouldn’t budge. Then I decided that I might wait over another day. I might wait on just the chance that the Judge would change his mind. But I wouldn’t swim till later. It was too hot even to swim now. I would take a shower when I got in and lie down till it had cooled off enough for a swim.

I took my shower and lay down on my bed and went to sleep.

I came out of the sleep and popped straight up in the bed. I was wide awake. The sound that had awakened me was still ringing in my ears. I knew that it had been a scream. Then it came again. A bright, beautiful, silvery soprano scream.

I bounced off the bed and started for the door, realized that I was buck-naked, grabbed a robe, and ran out. There was a noise down the hall from my mother’s room, a sound like moaning. The door was open and I ran in.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing a negligee, clutching the white bedside telephone in her hand, staring at me with wide, wild eyes, and moaning in a spaced, automatic fashion. I went toward her. She dropped the telephone to the floor with a clatter, and pointed her finger at me and cried out, “You did it, you did, you killed him!”

“What?” I demanded, “what?”

“You killed him!”

“Killed who?”

“You killed him!” She began to laugh hysterically.

I was holding her by the shoulders now, shaking her, trying to make her stop laughing, but she kept clawing and pushing at me. She stopped laughing an instant to gasp for breath, and in that interval I heard the dry, clicking signal the telephone was making to call attention to the fact it was not on its rack. Then her laughter drowned out the sound.

“Shut up, shut up!” I commanded, and she suddenly stared at me as though just discovering my presence.

Then, not loud now but with intensity, she said, “You killed him, you killed him.”

“Killed who?” I demanded, shaking her.

“Your father,” she said, “your father and oh! you killed him.”

That was how I found out. At the moment the finding out simply numbed me. When a heavy-caliber slug hits you, you may spin around but you don’t feel a thing. Not at first. Anyway, I was busy. My mother was in bad shape. By this time there were a couple of black faces at the door, the cook and the maid, and I was damning them to get Dr. Bland and stop gawking. Then I raked the clicking telephone up off the floor so they could use the one downstairs, and let my mother go long enough to slam the door to keep those all-seeing, all-knowing eyes off what was happening.

My mother was talking between her moans and laughing. She was saying how she had loved him and how he was the only person she had ever loved and how I had killed him and had killed my own father and a lot of stuff like that. She was still carrying on when Dr. Bland arrived and gave her the hypodermic. Across her form on the bed, from which the moans and the mutterings were now subsiding, he turned his gray, gray-bearded owlish face and said, “Jack, I’m sending a nurse up here. A very trustworthy woman. Nobody else is to come in here. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I told him, for I understood, and understood that he had understood perfectly well what my mother’s wild talking had meant.

“You stay here till the nurse arrives,” he said, “and don’t let anybody in. And the nurse isn’t supposed to let anybody in until I get back to see if your mother is normal. Not anybody.”

I nodded, and followed him to the door of the room.

After he had said his good-bye, I detained him a moment. “Doctor,” I asked, “what about the Judge? I didn’t get it straight from my mother. Was it a stroke?”

“No,” he said, and inspected my face.

“Well, what was it?”

“He shot himself this afternoon,” he replied, still inspecting my face. But then he added quite matter-of-factly, “It was undoubtedly a question of health. His health was failing. A very active man–a sportsman–very often–” he was even more dry and detached in his tone–”very often such a man doesn’t want to face the last years of limited activity. Yes, I am sure that that was the reason.”

I didn’t answer.

“Good day, sir,” the doctor said, and took his eyes off me and started down the hall.

He was almost to the head of the stairs before I called, “Doctor!” and ran after him.

I came up to him and said, “Doctor, where did he shoot himself? What part of the body, I mean? Not the head?”

“Straight to the heart,” he said. And added, “A.38 automatic. A very clean wound.”

Then he went off down the stairs. I stood there and thought how the dead man was shot through he heart, a very clean wound, and not through the head with the muzzle of the weapon put into the mouth to blaze into the soft membranes to scorch them and the top of the skull exploding off like an egg to make an awful mess. I stood there, and was greatly relieved to think of the nice clean wound.

I went to my own room, snatched up some clothes, and then went back to my mother’s room, and shut the door. I dressed and sat by the side of the big magnificent tester bed in which the lace-filmed form looked so small. I noticed how the bosom looked slack and the face sunken and grayish. The mouth was somewhat open and the breath through it heavy. I scarcely recognized the face. Certainly it was not the face of the girl in the lettuce-green dress and with the golden hair who had stood by the stocky, dark-suited man on the steps of a company commissary in a lumber town in Arkansas, forty years before, while the scream of saws filled the air and the head like a violated nerve and the red earth between the fields of stumps curdled with pale green and steamed in the spring sun. it was not the famish-cheeked, glowing face that, back in those years, had looked up eagerly and desperately to the hawk-headed, hot-eyed man in alleys of myrtle or in secret pine groves or in shuttered rooms. No, it was an old face now. And I felt very sorry for it. I reached across to take one of the unconscious hands which lay loose on the sheet.

I held the hand and tried to image how things would have been if it had not been the Scholarly Attorney but his friend who had gone to the little lumber town in Arkansas. No, that wouldn’t have helped much, I decided, remembering that at that time Monty Irwin had been married to an invalid wife, who had been crippled by being thrown from a horse and who had lain in bed for some years and had then died quietly and sunk from our sight and thought at the Landing. No doubt Monty Irwin had been held by some notion of obligation to that invalid wife: he hadn’t been able to divorce her and marry the other woman. No doubt that was why he had not married the famish-cheeked girl, why he had not gone to his friend the Scholarly Attorney and told him, “I love your wife,” or why, after the husband had learned the truth, as he must have done to make him walk out of the house and away to all the years in the slum garrets, he had not then married her. He still had his own wife then, to whom, because she was an invalid, he must have felt bound with a kind of twisted honor. Then my mother had married again. There must have been bitterness and dire quarrels all along mixed with the stolen satisfactions and ardors. Then the invalid had died. Why hadn’t they married then? Perhaps my mother wouldn’t then, to punish him for his own earlier refusals. Or perhaps their life was by this time set into a pattern they couldn’t break. Anyway, he had married the woman from Savannah, the woman who hadn’t brought him anything, neither money nor happiness, but who had, after a certain time, died. Why hadn’t they married then?

I dismissed the question finally. Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we had made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made? At least that was the way I argued the case back then.

As I say, I dismissed the question, and dismissed the answer I had tried to give to it, and simply held the lax hand between my own, and listened to the heavy breathing from the sunken face, and thought how in the scream which had snatched me from sleep that afternoon there had been the bright, beautiful, silver purity of feeling. It had been, I decided, the true cry of the buried soul which had managed, for one instant after all the years, to utter itself again. Well, she had loved Monty Irwin, I supposed. I had thought that she had never loved anybody. So now, as I held the hand, I felt not only pity for her but something like love, too, because she had loved somebody.