Chapter Three 5 страница

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."

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.

A few days later the check came and a note telling him to get a "couple of decent suits and accessories." The check was for two hundred and fifty dollars. He did not even buy a necktie. But he and the two other men in the apartment had a wonderful blowout, which lasted for five days, and as a result of which the industrious and unlucky one lost his job and the idle and lucky one got too sociable, and despite his luck, contracted a social disease. But nothing happened to Jack Burden, for nothing ever happened to Jack Burden, who was invulnerable. Perhaps this was the curse of Jack Burden: he was invulnerable.

So Jack Burden lived in the slatternly apartment with the two other graduate students, for even after being fired the unlucky, industrious one still lived in the apartment. He simply stopped paying anything but he stayed. He borrowed money for cigarettes. He sullenly ate the food the others brought in and cooked. He lay around during the day, for there was no reason to be industrious any more, ever again. Once at night, Jack Burden woke up and thought he heard the sounds of sobs from the living room, where the unlucky, industrious one slept on a wall bed. Then one day the unlucky, industrious one was not there. They never did know where he had gone, and they never heard from him again.

But before that they lived in the apartment, in an atmosphere of brotherhood and mutual understanding. They had this in common: they were all hiding. The difference was in what they were hiding from. The two others were hiding from the future, from the day would get degrees and leave the University. Jack Burden, however, was hiding from the present. The other two took refuge in the present. Jack Burden took refuge in the past. The other two sat in the living room and argued and drank or played cards or read, but Jack Burden was sitting, as like as not, back in his bedroom before a little pine table, with the notes and papers and books before him, scarcely hearing the voices. He might come out and take a drink or take a hand of cards or argue or do any of the other things they did, but what was real was back in that bedroom on the pine table.

What was back in the bedroom on the pine table?

A large packet of letters, eight tattered, black‑bound account books tied together with red tape, a photograph, about five by eight inches, mounted on cardboard and stained in its lower half by water, and a plain gold ring, man‑sized, with some engraving in it, on a loop of string. The past. Or that part of the past which had gone by the name of Cass Mastern.

Cass Mastern was one of the two maternal uncles of Ellis Burden, the Scholarly Attorney, a brother of his mother, Lavinia Mastern. The other uncle was named Gilbert Mastern, who died in 1914, at the age of ninety‑four or ‑five, rich, a builder of railroads, a sitter on board of directors, and left the packet of letters, the black account books, and the photograph, and a great deal of money to a grandson (and not a penny to Jack Burden). Some ten years later the heir of Gilbert Mastern, recollecting that Jack Mastern, with whom he had no personal acquaintance, was a student of history, or something of the sort, sent him the packet of letters, the account books, and the photograph, asking if he, Jack Burden, thought that the enclosures were of any "financial interest" since he, the heir, had heard that libraries sometimes would pay a "fair sum for old papers and antebellum relics and keepsakes." Jack Burden replied that since Cass Mastern had been of no historical importance as an individual, it was doubtful that any library would pay more than a few dollars, if anything, for the material, and asked for instructions as to the disposition of the parcel. The heir replied that under the circumstances Jack Burden might keep the things for "sentimental reasons."

Jack Burden made the acquaintance of Cass Master, who had died in 1864 at a military hospital in Atlanta, who had been only a heard but forgotten name to him, and who was the pair of dark, wide‑set, deep eyes which burned out of the photograph, through the dinginess and dust and across more than fifty years. The eyes who were Cass Mastern, stared out of a long, bony face, but a young face with full lips above a rather thin, curly black beard. The lips did not seem to belong to that bony face and the burning eyes.

The young man in the picture, standing, visible from the thighs up, wore a loose‑fitting, shapeless jacket, too large in the collar, short in the sleeves to show strong wrists and bony hands clasped at the waist. The thick dark hair, combed sweepingly back from the high brow, came down long and square‑cut, after the fashion of time, place, and class, almost to brush the collar of the coarse, hand‑me‑down‑looking jacket, which was the jacket of an infantryman in the Confederate Army.

But everything in the picture in contrast with the dark, burning eyes, seemed accidental. That jacket, however, was not accidental. It was worn as the result of calculation and anguish, in pride and self‑humiliation, in the conviction that it would be worn in death. But the death was not to be that quick and easy. It was to come slow and hard, in a stinking hospital in Atlanta. The last letter in the packet was not in Cass Mastern's hand. Lying in the hospital with his rotting wound, he dictated his farewell letter to his brother, Gilbert Mastern. The letter, and the last of the account books in which Cass Mastern's journal was kept, were eventually sent back home to Mississippi, and Cass Mastern was buried somewhere in Atlanta, nobody had ever known where.

It was in a sense, proper that Cass Mastern–in the gray jacket, sweat‑stiffened, and prickly like a hair shirt, which it was for him at the same time that it was the insignia of a begrudged glory–should have gone to Georgia to rot slowly to death. For he had been born in Georgia, he and Gilbert Mastern and Lavinia Mastern, in the red hills up toward Tennessee. "I was born," the first page of the first volume of the journal said, "in a log cabin in north Georgia, in circumstances of poverty, and if in later years I have lain soft and have supped from silver, may the Lord not let die in my heart the knowledge of frost and of coarse diet. For all men came naked into the world, and in prosperity 'man is prone to evil as he sparks fly upward,' " The lines were written when Cass was a student at Transylvania College, up in Kentucky, after what he called his "darkness and trouble" had given place to the peace of God. For the journal began with an account of the "darkness and trouble"–which was perfectly real trouble, with a dead man and a live woman and long nail scratches down Cass Mastern's bony face. "I write this down," he said in the journal, "with what truthfulness a sinner may attain unto, that if ever pride is in me, of flesh or spirit, I can peruse these pages and know with shame what evil has been in me, and may be in me, for who knows what breeze may blow upon the charred log and fan up flame again?"

The impulse to write the journal sprang from the "darkness and trouble," but Cass Mastern apparently had a systematic mind, and so he went back to the beginning, to the log cabin in the red hills of Georgia. It was the older brother, Gilbert, some fifteen years older than Cass, who lifted the family from the log cabin. Gilbert, who had runaway from home when a boy and gone west to Mississippi, was well on the way to being "A cotton snob" by the time he was in his thirties, that is, by 1850. The penniless and no doubt hungry boy walking barefoot onto the black soil of Mississippi was to become, ten or twelve years later, the master sitting the spirited roan stallion (its name was Powhatan–that from the journal) in front of the white veranda. How did Gilbert make his first dollar? Did he cut the throat of a traveler in the canebrake? Did he black boots at an inn? It is not recorded. But he made his fortune, and sat on the white veranda and voted Whig. After the war when the white veranda was a pile of ashes and the fortune was gone, it was not surprising that Gilbert, who had made a fortune with his bare hands, out of the very air, could now, with all his experience and cunning and hardness (the hardness harder now for the four years of riding and short rations and disappointment), snatch another one, much greater than the first. If in later years he ever remembered his brother Cass and took out the last letter, the one dictated in the hospital in Atlanta, he must have mused over it with a tolerant irony. For it said: "Remember me, but without grief. If one of us is lucky, it is I. I shall have rest and I hope in the mercy of the Everlasting and in His blessed election. But you, my dear brother, are condemned to eat bread in bitterness and build on the place where the charred embers and ashes are and to make bricks without straw and to suffer in the ruin and guilt of our dear Land and in the common guilt of man. In the next bed to me there is a young man from Ohio. He is dying. His moans and curses are prayers are not different from any others to be heard in this tabernacle of pain. He marched hither in his guilt as I in mine. And in the guilt of his Land. May a common Salvation lift us both from the dust. And, dear brother, I pray God to give you strength for what is to come." Gilbert must have smiled, looking back, for he had eaten little bread in bitterness. He had had his own kind of strength. By 1870 he was again well off. By 1875 or '76 he was rich. By 1880 he had a fortune, was living in New York, was a name, a thick, burly man, slow of movement, with a head like a block of bare granite. He had lived out of one world into another. Perhaps he was even more at home in the new than in the old. Or perhaps the Gilbert Masterns are always at home in ant world. As the Cass Masterns are never at home in any world.

But to return: Jack Burden came into possession of the papers from the grandson of Gilbert Mastern. When the time came for him to select a subject for his dissertation for his Ph. D., his professor suggested that he edit the journal and letters of Cass Mastern, and write a biographical essay, a social study based on those and other material. So Jack Burden began his first journey into the past.

I seemed easy at first. It was easy to reconstruct the life of the log cabin in the red hills. There were the first letters back from Gilbert after he had begun his rise (Jack Burden managed to get possession of the other Gilbert Mastern papers of the period before the Civil War). There was the known pattern of that life, gradually altered toward comfort as Gilbert's affluence was felt at that distance. Then, in one season, the mother and father died, and Gilbert returned to burst, no doubt, upon Cass and Lavinia as an unbelievable vision, a splendid impostor in black broadcloth, varnished boots, white linen, heavy gold ring. He put Lavinia in a school in Atlanta, bought her trunks of dresses, and kissed her good‑bye. ("Could you not have taken me with you, dear Brother Gilbert? I would have been ever so dutiful and affectionate a sister," so she wrote to him in the copybook hand, in brown ink, in a language not her own, a language of schoolroom propriety. "May I not come to you now? Is there no little task which I–" But Gilbert had other plans. When the time came for her to appear in his house she would be ready.) But he took Cass with him, a hobbledehoy now wearing black and mounted on a blooded mare.

At the end of three years Cass was not a hobbledehoy. He had spent three years of monastic rigor at Valhalla, Gilbert's house, under the tuition of a Mr. Lawson and of Gilbert himself. From Gilbert he learned the routine of plantation management. From Mr. Lawson, a tubercular and vague young man from Princeton, New Jersey, he learned some geometry, some Latin, and a great deal of Presbyterian theology. He liked the books, and once Gilbert (so the journal said) stood in the doorway and watched him bent over the table and then said, "At least you may be good for _that__."

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