"I have settled the matter in my own mind," the Judge said.
"Well, if I recollect right–" the Boss ruminatively turned the glass in his hands–"back in town, when we had our little talk, you sort of felt my boy Masters was all right."
"I made no commitment," the Judge said sharply. "I didn't make any commitment except to my conscience,"
"You been messing in politics a long time, Judge," the Boss said, easy, "and–" he took a drag from the glass–"so has your conscience."
"I beg your pardon," the Judge snapped.
"Nuts," the Boss said, and grinned. "But what got you off Masters?"
"Certain features of his career came to my attention."
"Somebody dug up some dirt for you, huh?"
"If you choose to call it that," the Judge said.
"Dirt's a funny thing," t he Boss said. " Come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and that's dir too. It's dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?
"That doesn't alter the fact," the Judge said from way up there where his head was, above the rays of the desk lamp, "that Masters doesn't strike me as a responsible man."
"He better be responsible," the Boss said, "or I'll break his God-damned neck!"
"That's the trouble, Masters would be responsible to you."
"It's a fact," the Boss admitted ruefully, lifting his face under the light, and shaking his face in fatalistic sadness. "Masters'd be responsible to me. I can't help it. But Callahan–now take Callahan–it sort of seems to me he's gonna be responsible to you and Alta Power and God knows who else before he's through. And what's the difference? Huh?"
"Well–"
"Well, hell!" The Boss popped straight up in the chair with that inner explosiveness he had when, all of a sudden, he would snatch a fly out of the air or whip his head at you and his eyes would snap open. He popped up and his heels dug into the red carpet. Some of the liquor sloshed out of his glass onto his Palm Beach pants. "Well, I'll tell you the difference, Judge! I can deliver Masters and you can't deliver Callahan. And that's a big difference."
"I'll have to take my chance," the Judge said from way up there.
"Chance?" And the Boss laughed. "Judge," he said, and quit laughing, "you haven't got but one chance. You been guessing right in this state going on forty years. You been sitting back here in this room and nigger boys been single-footing in here bringing you toddies and you been guessing right. You been sitting back here and grinning to yourself while the rest of 'em were out sweating on the stump and snapping their suspenders, and when you wanted anything you just reached out and took it. Oh, if you had a little time off from duck hunting and corporation law you might do a hitch as Attorney General. So you did. Or play at being a judge. You been a judge a long time. How it would feel not to be a judge any more?"
"No man," Judge Irwin said, and stood up there straight in the middle of the floor, "has ever been able to intimidate me."
"Well, I never tried," the Boss said, "yet. And I'm not trying now. I'm going to give you a chance. You say somebody gave you some dirt on Masters? Well, just suppose I gave you some dirt on Callahan?–Oh, don't interrupt! Keep your shirt on!"–and he held up his hand. "I haven't been doing any digging, but I might, and if I went out in the barn lot and stuck my shovel in and brought you in some of the sweet-smelling and put it under the nose of your conscience, then do you know what your conscience would tell you to do? It would tell you to withdraw your endorsement of Callahan. And the newspaper boys would be over here thicker'n bluebottle flies on dead dog, and you could tell 'em all about you and your conscience. You wouldn't even have to back Masters. You and your conscience could just go off arm in arm and have a fine time telling each other how much you think of each other."
"I have endorsed Callahan," the Judge said. He didn't flicker.
"I maybe could give you the dirt," the Boss said speculatively. "Callahan's been playing around for a long time, and he who touches pitch shall be defiled, and little boys just will walk barefoot in the cow pasture." He looked up at Judge Irwin's face, squinting, studying it, cocking his own head to one side.
The grandfather's clock in the corner of the room, I suddenly realized, wasn't getting any younger. It would drop out a _tick__, and the _tick__ would land inside my head like a rock dropped in a well, and the ripples would circle out and stop, and the _tick__ would sink down the dark. For a piece of time which was no long or short, and might not even be time, there wouldn't be anything. Then the _tock__ would drop down the well, and the ripples would circle out and finish.
The Boss quit studying Judge Irwin's face, which didn't show anything. He let himself sink in the chair, shrugged his shoulders, and lifted the glass up for a drink. Then he said, "Suit yourself, Judge. But you know, there is another way to play it. Maybe somebody might give Callahan a little shovelful on somebody else and Callahan might grow a conscience all of a sudden and repudiate his endorser. You know, when this conscience business starts, ain't no telling where it'll stop, and when you start the digging–"
"I'll thank you, sir–" Judge Irwin took a step toward the big chair, and his face wasn't the color of calf's liver now–it was long past that and streaked white back from the base of the jutting nose–"I'll thank you, sir, to get out of that chair and get out of this house!"
The Boss didn't lift his head off the leather. He looked up at the Judge, sweet and trusting, and then cocked his eyes over to me. "Jack," he said, "you were sure right. The Judge don't scare easy."
"Get out," the judge said, not loud this time.
"Those old bones don't move fast," the Boss murmured sadly, "but now I have tried to do my bounden duty, let me go." Then he drained his glass, set it on the floor beside the chair, and rose. He stood in front of the Judge, looking up at him, squinting again, cocking his head to one side again, like a farmer getting ready to buy a horse.
I set my glass on the shelf of the bookcase behind me. I discovered that I hadn't touched it, not since the first sip. _Well, to hell with it__, I thought, and let it stand. Some nigger boy would get it in the morning.
Then, as though he had decided against buying the horse, the Boss shook his head and passed around the Judge, as though the Judge weren't a man at all, or even a horse, as though he were the corner of a house or a tree, and headed for the hall door, putting his feet down slow and easy on the red carpet. No hurry.
For a second or two the Judge didn't even move his head; then he swung round and watched the Boss going toward the door, and his eyes glittered up there in the shadow above the lamp.
The Boss laid his hand on the doorknob, opened the door, and then, with his hand still on the knob, he looked back. "Well, Judge," he said, "more in pain than wrath I go. And if your conscience decides it could gag at Callahan, just let me know. In, of course–" and he grinned–"a reasonable time."
Then he looked over to me and said, "Let's haul ass, Jack," and started down toward the front door, out of sight.
Before I could get into lower gear, the Judge swung his face in my direction, and focused his eyes on me, and his upper lip lifted under that nose to form a smile of somewhat massive irony, and he said, "Your employer is calling you, Mr. Burden."
"I don't use any ear trumpet yet." I said, and pulled off toward the door, and thought to myself: _Christ, Jack, you talk like a snot, Christ, you are a smart guy__.
I had just about made the door, when he said, "I'm dining with your mother this week. Shall I tell her you still like your work?"
_Why won't he lay off?__ I thought, but he wouldn't, and that lip lifted up again.
So I said, "Suit yourself, Judge. But if I were you I wouldn't go around advertising this visit to anybody. In case you changed your mind, somebody might figure you had stooped to a low political deal with the Boss. In the dark of night."
And I went out the door and down the hall and out the hall door and left it open but let the screen door slam.
God damn him, why hadn't he laid off me?__
But he hadn't scared.
We left the bay, and lost the salt, sad, sweet, fishy smell of the tidelands out of our nostrils. We headed north again. It was darker now. The ground mist lay heavier on the fields, and in the dips of the road the mist frayed out over the slab and blunted the headlights. Now and then a pair of eyes would burn at us out of the dark ahead. I knew that they were the eyes of a cow–a poor dear stoic old cow with a cud, standing on the highway shoulder, for there wasn't any stock law–but her eyes burned at us out of the dark as though her skull were full of blazing molten metal like blood and we could see inside the skull into that bloody hot brightness in that moment when the reflection was right before we picked up her shape, which is so perfectly formed to be pelted with clods, and knew what she was and knew that inside that unlovely knotty head there wasn't anything but a handful of coldly coagulated gray mess in which something slow happened as we went by. We were something slow happening inside the cold brain of a cow. That's what the cow would say if she were a brass-bound Idealist like little Jackie Burden.
The Boss said, "Well, Jackie, it looks like you got a job cut out for you."
And I said, "Callahan?"
And he said, "Nope, Irwin."
And I said, "I don't reckon you will find anything on Irwin."
And he said, "You find it."
We bored into the dark for another twenty miles and eighteen minutes. The ectoplasmic fingers of the mist reached out of the swamp, threading out from the blackness of the cypresses, to snag us, but didn't have any luck. A possum came out of the swamp and started across the road and might have made it, too, if Sugar-Boy hadn't been too quick for him. Sugar-Boy just shaded the steering wheel delicately to the left, just a fraction. There wasn't even a jounce or twitch, but something thumped against the underside of the left front fender, and Sugar-Boy said, "The b-b-b-b-bas-tud." Sugar-Boy could thread a needle with that Cadillac.
At about the end of that eighteen minutes and twenty miles, I said: "But suppose I don't find anything before election day?"
The Boss said, "To hell with election day. I can deliver Masters prepaid, special handling. But if it takes ten years, you find it."
We clocked off five miles more, and I said, "But suppose there isn't anything to find?"
And the Boss said, "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."
Two miles more, and he said, "And make it stick."
And that was all a good while ago. And masters is dead now, as dead as mackerel, but the Boss was right and he went to the Senate. And Callahan is not dead but he has wished he were, no doubt, for he used up his luck a long time back and being dead was not part of it. And Adam Stanton is dead now, too, who used to go fishing with me and who lay on the sand in the hot sunshine with me and with Anne Stanton. And Judge Irwin is dead, who leaned toward me among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in the gray damp wintry dawn, and said, "You ought to have led that duck more, Jack. You got to lead a duck, son." And the Boss is dead, who said to me. "And make it stick."
Little Jackie made it stick, all right
Chapter Two
The last time I saw Mason City I went up there in that big black Cadillac with the Boss and the gang, and we burned up that new concrete slab, and it was a long time ago–nearly three years, for it is now into 1939, but it seems like forever. But the first time I went up there it was a lot longer time ago, back in 1922, and I went there in my Model-T, hanging on to the steering post to stay in the saddle when I sideslipped in the gray dust, which plumed out behind for a mile and settled on the cotton leaves to make them gray too, or when I hit a section of gravel, holding my jaws clamped tight to keep the vibration from the washboard from chipping the enamel off my teeth. You'll have to say this for the Boss: when he got through you could drive out for a breath of air and still keep your bridgework in place. But you couldn't that first time I went to Mason City.
The managing editor of the _Chronicle__ called me in and said, "Jack, get in your car and go up to Mason City and see who the hell that fellow Stark is who thinks he is Jesus Christ scourging the money-changers out of that shinplaster courthouse up there."
"He married a school-teacher," I said.
"Well, it must have gone to his head," Jim Madison, who was managing editor of the _Chronicle__, said. "Does he think he is the first one ever popped a school-teacher?"
"The bond issue [u17] was for building a schoolhouse," I said, "and it looks like Lucy figures they might keep some of it for that purpose."
"Who the hell is Lucy?"
"Lucy is the school-teacher," I said.
"She won't be a school-teacher long," he said. "Not on the Mason County payroll if she keeps that up. Not if I know Mason County."
"Lucy don't favor drinking either," I said.
"Was it you or the other guy popped Lucy?" he demanded. "You know so much about Lucy."
"I just know what Willie told me."
"Who the hell is Willie?"
"Willie is the fellow with the Christmas tie," I said. "He is Cousin Willie from the country. He is Willie Stark, the teacher's pet, and I met him in the back room of Slade's place a couple of months ago and he told me Lucy didn't favor drinking. I'm just guessing about her not favoring stealing."
"She don't favor Willie being County Treasurer either," Jim Madison allowed, "if she is the one putting him up to what he is doing. Doesn't she know they run things up in Mason County?"
"They run 'em up there just like they run 'em down here," I said.
"Yeah," Jim Madison said, and took the foul, chewed, and spit-bright butt of what had been a two-bit cigar out of the corner of his mouth and inspected it and reached out at arm's length and let it fall into the big brass spittoon which stood on the clover-deep, Kelly-green carpet which bloomed like an oasis of elegance in the four floors of squalor of the Chronicle Building. He watched it fall, and said again, "Yeah, but you leave down here and go on up there."
So I went up to Mason City in the Model-T, and kept my jaws clamped tight when I went over the washboard and hung to the steering post when I went over the sideslipping dust, and that was a very long time ago.
I got to Mason City early in the afternoon and went to the Mason City Café, Home-Cooked Meals for Ladies and Gents, facing the square, and sampled the mashed potatoes and fried ham and greens with pot-likker with one hand while with the other I competed with seven or eight flies for the possession of a piece of custard pie.
I went out into the street, where the dogs lay on the shady side under the corrugated iron awnings, and walked down the block till I came to the harness shop. There was one vacant seat out front, so I said howdy-do, and joined the club. I was the junior member by forty years, but I thought I was going to have liver spots on my swollen old hands crooked on the head of the hickory stick like the rest of them before anybody was going to say anything. In a town like Mason City the bench in front of the harness shop is–or was twenty years ago before the concrete slab got laid down–the place where Time gets tangled in its own feet and lies down like an old hound and gives up the struggle. It is a place where you sit down and wait for night to come and arteriosclerosis. It is the place the local undertaker looks at with confidence and thinks he is not going to starve as long as that much work is cut out for him. But if you are sitting on the bench in the middle of the afternoon in late August with the old ones, it does not seem that anything will ever come, not even your funeral, and the sun beats down and the shadows don't move across the bright dust, which, if you stare at it long enough, seems to be full of glittering speck like quartz. The old ones sit there with their liver-spotted hands crooked on the hickory sticks, and they emit a kind of metaphysical effluvium by virtue of which your categories are altered. Time and motion cease to be. It is like sniffing ether, and everything is sweet and sad and far away. You sit there among the elder gods, disturbed by no sound except the slight _râle__ of the one who has asthma, and wait for them to lean from the Olympian and sunlight detachment and comment, with their unenvious and foreknowing irony, on the goings-on of the folks who are still snared in the toils of mortal compulsions. _I seen Sim Saunders done built him a new barn. __Then, _Yeah, some folks thinks they is made of money.__ And, _Yeah.__
So I sat there and waited. And one of them said it, and another one leaned and shifted the quid and answered, and the last one said, "Yeah." Then I waited again for a spell, for I knew my place in the picture, and then I said, "They tell me there's gonna be a new schoolhouse." Then I waited another spell while the words died away and it was as though I hadn't said anything. Then one of them let the ambeer drop to the dry ground, and touched the spot with the end of the hickory stick, and said, "Yeah, and steam heat, hear tell."
And Number Two: "Give them young 'uns pneumony, steam heat."
And Number Three: "Yeah."
And Number Four: "If'n they git hit built."
I looked across the square at the painted clock face on the courthouse tower, which was the clock the old ones kept time by, and waited. Then I said, "What's stopping 'em?"
And Number One: "Stark. Thet Stark."
And Number Two: "Yeah, thet Willie Starl."
And Number Three: "Too big fer his britches. Gits in the courthouse and gits his front feet in the through, and gits too big fer his britches."
And Number Four: Yeah."
I waited, then I said, "Wants 'em to take the low bid[u18], they tell me."
And Number One: "Yeah, wants 'em to take the low bid and git a passel of niggers in here."
And Number Two: "To put white folks out of work. Builden hit."
And Number Three: "You want to work longside a nigger? And specially him a strange nigger? Builden schoolhouse or backhouse, how so be hit?
And Number Four: "And white folk needen work."
And Number One: "Yeah."
_Yeah, __I said to myself, _so that is the tale__, for Mason County is red-neck country and they don't like niggers, not strange niggers anyway, and they haven't got many of their own. "How much could they save," I asked, "taking the low bid?"
And Number One: Couldn't save enuff to pay fer bringen no passel of niggers in here."
"Putten white folks out of work," Number Two said.
I waited till it was decent, then I got up and said, "Got to be moving. Good afternoon, gentlemen."
One of the old ones looked up at me as though I had just come, and said, "What you work at, boy?"
"I don't," I said.
"Porely?" he asked.
"Not porely," I said. "It is just I lack ambition."
Which was God's truth, I reckoned, as I walked on down the street.
I reckoned, too, that I had killed enough time and I might as well go to the courthouse and get my story in the way I was supposed to get it. All this sitting around in front of harness shops was not the way any newspaperman would go about getting his story. There isn't ever anything you get that way which you can put into a newspaper. So I went on over to the courthouse.
Inside the courthouse, where the big hall was empty and shadowy and the black oily floor was worn down to humps and ridges under your feet and the air was dry and dusty so that you felt in the stillness that you were breathing in the air from all the talk, loud and little, there had been in there for seventy-five years–well, inside there, just off the hall I saw some men sitting in a room. Above the doorway there was a tin sign with the letters about faded off. But they still said _Sheriff__.
I went into the room where the three men were cocked back in split-bottom chairs and an electric fan set on top of the roll-top desk was burring away with little effect, and said howdy-do to the faces. The biggest face, which was round and red and had its feet cocked on the desk and its hands laid on its stomach, said howdy-do.
I took a card out of my pocket and gave it to him. He looked at the card for a minute, holding it off near arm's length as though he were afraid it would spit in his eye, the he turned it over and looked at the back side a minute till he was dead sure it was blank. Then he laid the hand with the card in it back down on his stomach, where it belonged, and looked at me. "You done come a piece," he said.
"That's right," I said.
"What you come fer?"
"To see what's going on about the schoolhouse," I said.
"You come a piece," he said, "to stick yore nose in somebody else's bizness."
"That's right," I agreed cheerfully, "but my boss on the paper can't see it that way."
"It ain't any of his bizness either."
"No," I said, "but what's the ruckus [u19] about, now I've come all that piece?"
"It ain't any of my bizness. I'm the Sheriff."
"Well, Sheriff," I said, "whose business it it?"
"Them as is tending to it. If folks would quit messen and let 'em"
"Who is _them?
__"Commissioners," the Sheriff said. "The County Commissioners, the voters of Mason County done elected to tend to their bizness and not take no butten-in from nobody."
"Yeah, sure–the Commissioners. But who are they?"
The Sheriff's little wise eyes blinked at me a couple of times, then he said, "The constable ought to lock you up fer vagruncy."
"Suits me," I said. "And the _Chronicle__ would send up another boy to cover my case, and when the constable pinched him the _Chronicle__ would send up another one to cover that case, and after a while you'd get us all locked up. But it might get in the papers."
The Sheriff just lay there, and out of his big round face his little eyes blinked. Maybe I hadn't said anything. Maybe I wasn't there.
"Who are the Commissioners?" I said. "Or maybe they are hiding out?"
"One of 'em is setten right there," the Sheriff said, and rolled his big round head on his shoulders to indicate one of the other fellows. When the head had fallen back into place, and his fingers had let go my card, which wafted down to the floor in the gentle breeze from the fan, the little eyes blinked again and he seemed to sink below the surface of the roiled waters. He had done his best, and now he had passed the ball.
"Are you a Commissioner?" I asked the fellow just indicated. He was just another fellow, made in God's image and wearing a white shirt with a ready-tied black bow tie and jean pants held up with web galluses. Town from the waist up, country from the waist down. Get both votes.
"Yeah," he said.
"He's the head man," another fellow said, reverently, a little old squirt of a fellow with a bald knotty old head and a face he himself couldn't recollect from one time he looked in the mirror to the next, the sort of a fellow who hangs around and sits in a chair when the big boys leave one vacant and tries to buy his way into the game with a remark like the one he had just made.
"You the Chairman?" I asked the other fellow.
"Yeah," he said.
"You mind telling me your name?"
It ain't no secret," he said. "It is Dolph Pillsbury."
"Glad to know you, Mr. Pillsbury," I said and held out my hand. Not getting up, he took it as though I had offered him the business end of a cottonmouth moccasin in shedding time.
"Mr. Pillsbury," I said, "you are in a position to know the situation in regard to the schoolhouse contract. No doubt you are interested in having the truth of that situation made public."
There ain't any situation," Mr. Pillsbury said.
"Maybe there isn't any situation," I said, "but there's been a right smart racket."
"Ain't any situation. Board meets and takes a bid what's been offered. J. H. Moore's bid, the fellow's name."
"Was that fellow Moore's bid low?"
"Not egg-zackly."
"You mean it wasn't low?"
"Well–" Mr. Pillsbury said, and his face was shadowed by an expression which might have been caused by a gas pain, "well, if'n you want to put it that a-way."
"All right," I said, "let's put it that way."
"Now look a-here–" and the shadow passed from Mr. Pillsbury's face and he sat up in his chair as suddenly as though he had been stuck by a pin–"you talk like that, and ain't nuthen done but legal. Ain't nobody can tell the Board what bid to take. Anybody can come along and put in a little piss-ant bid, but the Board doan have to take it. Naw-sir-ee. The Board takes somebody kin do the work right."
"Who was it put the little piss-ant bid in?"
"Name of Jeffers," Mr. Pillsbury said peevishly, as at an unpleasant recollection.
"Jeffers Construction?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"What's wrong with Jeffers Construction?"
"The Board picks the fellow kin do the work right, and it ain't nobody's bizness."
I took out my pencil and a pad of paper, and wrote on it. Then I said to Mr. Pillsbury, "How's this?" And I began to read to him: "Mr. Dolph Pillsbury, Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners of Mason County, stated that the bid of J. H. Moore for the construction of the Mason County School was accepted, even though it was not the low bid, because the Board wanted somebody 'who could do the work right.' The low bid, which was submitted by the Jeffers Construction Company, was rejected, Mr. Pillsbury stated. Mr. Pillsbury started further–"
"Now look a-here–" Mr. Pillsbury was sitting very straight up as though it were not a pin this time but a hot tenpenny and in the brown–"now look a-here, I didn't state nuthen. You write it down and claim I stated it. Now you look a-here–"
The Sheriff heaved massively in the chair and fixed his gaze upon Mr. Pillsbury. "Dolph," he said, "tell the bugger to git out of here."
"I didn't state nuthen," Dolph said, "and you git out!"
"Sure," I said, and put the pad in my pocket, "but maybe you can kindly tell me where Mr. Stark is?"
"I knowed it," the Sheriff exploded and dropped his feet off the desk with a noise like a brick chimney, and heaved up in the chair and glared apoplectically at me. "That Stark, I knowed it was that Stark!"
"What's wrong with Stark?" I asked.
"Jesus Gawd!" roared the Sheriff, and his face went purple with congestion of language which couldn't get out.
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