</p>
−
<p>
The theory of historical costs. The theory of the moral neutrality of history. All that was a high historical view from a chilly pinnacle. Maybe it took a genius to see it. To really see it. Maybe you had to get chained to the high pinnacle with the buzzards pecking at your liver and lights before you could see it. Maybe it took a genius to see it. Maybe it took a hero to act on it.
</p>
−
<p>
But sitting there in the lobby, waiting for the call which did not come, I was willing to let those speculations rest. I went back to the editorial. That editorial was shadow-boxing, all right. It was shadow-boxing, for at the very minute it was just as likely true as not that the vote was being called up in the Capitol, and it would take the winged hosts to make the vote different from what it was going to be after the MacMurfee boys had talked themselves out and the count was called.
</p>
−
<p>
It was around nine o'clock when I was paged. But it wasn't Adam. It was a message from the Capitol saying the Boss was there and wanted me to come up. I left word at the desk that if Dr. Stanton should call me, he was to be asked to call the Capitol, I would leave instructions with the operator on the switchboard there. Then I ran up Anne to give her the news, or rather, the no-news, about my efforts to date. She sounded calm and tired. I went out to my car. It had been raining again, for the gutter by the curb was running with a black stream which gleamed like oil in the lights of the street. But it had let up now.
</p>
−
<p>
When I pulled into the Capitol grounds I saw that the place was pretty well lit up. But that wasn't surprising, even at that hour, when the Legislature was in session. And when I got inside, the place was certainly not uninhabited. The solons had broken up shop for the evening and were milling about in the corridors, especially at those strategic points where the big brass spittoons stood. And there were plenty of other people around, too. There were a lot of reporters, and herds of bystanders, those people who love to have the feeling that they are around when something big is happening.
</p>
−
<p>
I worked through the place and up to the Boss's office. They told me there that he had gone down with somebody to the Senate.
</p>
−
<p>
"There wasn't any hitch about the tax bill passing, was there? I asked the girl.
</p>
<p>"Don't be silly," the girl said.</p>
−
<p>
I started to tell her that I had been around there back when she was lying in the crib sucking her thumb, but didn't do it. Instead, I asked her to take care of the business of Adam's call for me, and went down to the Senate.
</p>
−
<p>
At first I didn't spot the Boss. Then I saw him off to one side, with a couple of the Senators and Calvin Sperling and discreetly in the background several other men, just hangers-on who were warming their hands at the blaze of greatness. Over to one side of the Boss, I saw Sugar-Boy lounging against the marble wall, with his cheeks drawn in to suck the sugar cube which, at that moment no doubt, was dissolving its bliss down his gullet. The Boss stood with his hands clasped behind him and his head hanging a little forward. He was listening to something one of the Senators was telling him.
</p>
−
<p>
I approach the group and stood back from it, waiting. In a minute I caught the Boss's eye and knew that he had seen me. So I went over to Sugar-Boy and said, "Hello."
</p>
−
<p>
He managed to get the word out after several efforts. The he resumed work on the sugar. I leaned against the wall beside him, and waited.
</p>
−
<p>
Four or five minutes passed, and the Boss still stood there with his head hanging forward, listening. He could listen a long time and not say a word, just let the fellow our it out. The stuff would pour out and pour out, and the Boss would just be waiting to see what was in the bottom of the bucket. Finally, I knew that he had enough. He knew what was in the bottom of the fellow's bucket or that there wasn't anything there, after all. I knew that he had had enough, for I saw him suddenly lift his head up sharp and look straight at the man. That was the sign. I stopped leaning against the wall. I knew the Boss was ready to go.
</p>
−
<p>
He looked at the man and shook his head. "It won't wash," he said in a perfectly amiable fashion. It was loud enough for me to hear. The other fellow had been talking low and fast.
</p>
−
<p>
Then the Boss looked over at me and called, "Jack."
</p>
<p>I went to him.</p>
−
<p>
"Let's get upstairs," he said to me, "I want to tell you something."
</p>
<p>"O. K.," I said, and started toward the door.</p>
−
<p>
He left the men and followed me, catching up with me at the door. Sugar-Boy fell in just on his other side and a little back.
</p>
−
<p>
I started to ask the Boss how the boy was, but thought better of it. It was just a question of the kind of badness, and there wasn't any use asking about that. So we moved on through the corridor to the big lobby, where we would take an elevator up to his office. Some of the men lounging along the corridor stepped back a little and said, "Howdy-do, Governor," or "
</p>
−
<p>
"Hi, Boss," but the Boss only bowed his response to the greetings. The other men, those who said nothing, turned their heads to watch the Boss as he passed. There wasn't anything out of the ordinary about all that. He must have passed down that corridor a thousand times, or near that many, with men calling out to him, or saying nothing and following with their eyes his progress over the glittering marble.
</p>
−
<p>
We came out into the great lobby, under the dome, where there was a blaze of light over the statues which stood with statesmanlike dignity on pedestals to mark the quarters of the place, and over the people who moved about in the area. We walked along the east wall, toward the inset where the elevators were. Just as we approached the statue of General Moffat (a great Indian fighter, a successful land speculator, the first governor of the state), I noticed a figure leaning against the pedestal.
</p>
−
<p>
It was Adam Stanton. I saw that his clothes were soaked and that mud and filth were slopped up his trousers half to the knees. I understood the abandoned car. He had walked away from it, in the rain.
</p>
−
<p>
Just as I saw him, he looked in our direction. But his eyes were on the Boss, not on me. "Adam," I said, "Adam!"
</p>
−
<p>
He took a step toward us, but still did not look at me.
</p>
−
<p>
Then the Boss veered toward Adam, and thrust out his hand in preparation for a handshake. "Howdy-do, Doctor," he began, holding out his hand.
</p>
−
<p>
For an instant Adam stood there immobile, as though about to refuse to shake the hand of the man approaching him. Them he put out his hand, and as he did so I felt a surge of relief and thought: _He's shaking hands with him, he's all right now, he's all right__.
</p>
−
<p>
Then I saw what was in his hand, and even as I recognized the object, but before the significance of the recognition had time to form itself in my mind and nerves, I saw the two little spurts of pale-orange flame from the muzzle of the weapon.
</p>
−
<p>
I did not hear the report, for it was lost and merged with the other more positive staccato series of reports, on my left. With his right arm still extended Adam reeled back a step, swung his reproachful and haggard gaze upon me and fixed it, even as a second burst of firing came and he spun to the floor.
</p>
−
<p>
In the astonishing silence, I rushed toward Adam as he fell. Then I heard somewhere in the lobby a woman begin screaming, then a great rush of feet and babble of voices. Adam was bleeding heavily. He was stitched across the chest. The chest was all knocked in. He was already dead.
</p>
−
<p>
I looked up to see Sugar-Boy standing there with the smoking automatic in his hand, and off to the right, near the elevator, a highway patrolman with a pistol in his hand.
</p>
−
<p>
I didn't see the Boss. And thought: _He didn't hit him__.
</p>
−
<p>
But I was wrong. Even as I thought that and looked around, Sugar-Boy dropped his automatic clattering to the marble, and uttering some strangled, animal-like sound, rushed back beyond the statue of Governor Moffat.
</p>
−
<p>
I laid Adam's head back on the marble and went beyond the statue. I had to shove the people back now, they were crowding so. Somebody was yelling, "Stand back, stand back, give him air!" But they kept crowding up, running to the spot from all over the lobby and from the corridors.
</p>
−
<p>
When I broke through, I saw the Boss sitting on the floor, breathing heavily, staring straight ahead. He had both hands pressed to his body, low on the chest and toward the center. I could see no sign that he was hit. Then I saw a very little ooze of blood between two of the fingers, just a little.
</p>
−
<p>
Sugar-Boy was leaning above him, weeping and sputtering, trying to speak. He finally managed to get out the words: "D-d-d-d-does it hur-hur-hur-hurt much, Boss–does it hur-hur-hur-hurt?"
</p>
−
<p>
The Boss did not die there in the lobby under the dome. In fact, he lived quite a while and died on a clean, white, antiseptic bed, with all the benefits of science. For a couple of days it was given out that he would not die at all. He was seriously wounded–there were two little.25-caliber slugs in his body, slugs from a little toy target pistol Adam had had since he was a kid–but an operation was possible, and he was a very strong man.
</p>
−
<p>
So there was all over again the business of the waiting room with the potted plants and water colors and artificial logs on the cozy hearth. A sister of Lucy Stark came with Lucy the morning of the operation. Old Man Stark, the Boss's father, was too feeble to leave Mason City. You could see that Lucy's sister, a woman a good deal older than Lucy, dressed in country black with high-laced black kid shoes, was a strong-minded, sensible woman who had been through a lot and knew how to help somebody else through. You could look at her squarish, slightly reddened, coarse-skinned hands, with their square-cut nails, and know that she knew how to take hold. When she entered the waiting room there at the hospital and cast a practiced and critical, not quite scornful, glance over the potted plants and the artificial logs, it was like a pilot mounting to the pilothouse and taking over.
</p>
−
<p>
She sat very stiff and severe in a chair, not one of the chintz-covered soft ones. She was going to permit no spilling over of emotion, not in a strange room and at that time of the day–the time of day when every day there was breakfast to get and the children to fix and the men to clear out of the house. There would be a proper place and time. After it was over, after she got Lucy home, she would put her to bed in a room with the curtains drawn, and would put a cloth dabbled with vinegar on her forehead, and would sit by the bed and hold her hand, and would say, "Now just you cry if you want to, baby, then you'll feel better, then you lie still and I'll sit here, I won't leave you, baby." But that would come later. Meanwhile Lucy now and then stole a look across at her sister's hewn and eroded face. It wasn't exactly a sympathetic face, but it seemed to have what Lucy was looking for.
</p>
−
<p>
I sat over on the couch and looked at the same old picture magazines. I felt definitely that I was out of place. But Lucy had asked me to come. "He would want you to be there," she had said.
</p>
<p>"I'll wait down in the lobby," I said.</p>
<p>She shook her head. "Come upstairs," she said.</p>
−
<p>
"I don't want to be underfoot. You sister will be there, you said."
</p>
−
<p>
"I want you to," she had said, and so there I was. And it was better, I decided, even if I was out of place, than being down in the lobby with all the newshawks and politicos and curiosity-seekers.
</p>
−
<p>
It didn't take them awfully long. They said the operation was a success. When the nurse who had brought the news said that, Lucy slumped in her chair and uttered a dry, gasping sob. The sister, who herself had seemed to relax a little at the words, looked sharply at Lucy. "Lucy," she said, not loud but with some severity, "Lucy!"
</p>
−
<p>
Lucy raised her head, met the sister's reproving gaze, murmured humbly, "I'm sorry, Ellie, I'm sorry. It's just that I've–I've–"
</p>
−
<p>
"We must thank God," Ellie announced. The she rose briskly, as though she were about to step right out and do that before it slipped her mind. But she turned to the nurse. "When can she see her husband?" she asked.
</p>
−
<p>
"It will be some time," the nurse said. "I can't tell you exactly, but it will be some time. If you wait here I can let you know." She moved to the door. There she turned, and asked, "Can I get anything for you? Some lemonade? Some Coffee?"
</p>
−
<p>
"That's right kind and considerate," the sister said, "but we'll just say no thanks this time of morning."
</p>
−
<p>
The nurse went out, and I excused myself and followed. I went down to the office of Dr. Simmons, who had performed the operation. I had known him around the place. He was a sort of friend of Adam–about as good a one as Adam had, for he never had chummed up with anybody, that is, anybody except me, and I didn't count, for I was the Friend of His Youth. I had known Dr. Simmons around the place. Adam had introduced us.
</p>
−
<p>
Dr. Simmons, a dry, thin, grayish man, was at his desk, writing something on a big card. I told him to finish what he was doing. He said he was about through, the secretary picked up the card and put it into a filing cabinet, and he turned to me. I asked him how the Governor was doing. The operation had been a success, he said.
</p>
<p>"You mean you got the bullets out?" I asked.</p>
−
<p>
He smiled in a sort of chilly way, and said he meant a little more than that. "He's got a chance," he said. "He's a strong man."
</p>
<p>"He's that," I agreed.</p>
−
<p>
Dr. Simmons picked up a little envelope from his desk, and emptied the contents into his hand. "No matter how strong they are they can take much of this diet," he said, and held out his hand, open, to show me the two little pellets resting there. A.25-caliber slug is small, all right, but these looked even smaller and more trivial than I had remembered.
</p>
−
<p>
I picked one of them out of his hand and examined it. It was a little misshapen slug of lead. Fingering it, I thought of how a long time back, when we were kids at the Landing, Adam and I used to shoot at a pine board, and how sometimes we had dug the lugs out of the soft wood with a pocketknife. Sometimes the slug dug out of the wood hadn't been a bit more misshapen than this one, the wood was so soft.
</p>
−
<p>
"The son-of-a-bitch," Dr. Simmons said irrelevantly.
</p>
−
<p>
I gave the slug back to him and went down to the lobby. It was pretty well cleared out down there now. The politicos had gone. Two or three newspapermen still hung around, waiting for developments.
</p>
−
<p>
There weren't ant developments that day. Or the next day either. The Boss seemed to be getting on all right. But the third day he turn a turn for the worse. An infection had started up. It moved pretty fast. I knew for the way Dr. Simmons looked, even if he wouldn't say much, that he was a gone gosling.
</p>
−
<p>
That evening, shortly after I had arrived at the hospital and had gone up to the waiting room to see how Lucy was making out, I got the message that the Boss wanted to see me. He had rallied, they said.
</p>
−
<p>
He was a sick-looking customer when I saw him. The flesh had fallen away on his face till the skin sacked off the bone the way it does on an old man's face. He looked like Old Man Stark, up at Mason City. He was white as chalk.
</p>
−
<p>
When I first saw the eyes in the white face, they seemed to be filmed and unrecognizing. Then, as I moved toward the bed, they fixed on me and a thin light flickered up in them. His mouth twisted a little in a way which I took to be the feeble shorthand for a grin.
</p>
−
<p>
I came over close to the bed. "Hello, Boss," I said, and hung something on my features which I meant to be taken for a grin.
</p>
−
<p>
He lifted the forefinger and the next finger of his right hand, which lay prone on the sheet, in an incipient salute, then left them drop. The strength of the muscles which held his mouth twisted gave out, too, and the grin slid off his face and the weight of flesh sagged back.
</p>
−
<p>
I stood up close to the bed and looked down at him, and tried to think of something to say. But my brain felt as juiceless as an old sponge left out in the sun a long time.
</p>
−
<p>
Then he said, in something a little better than a whisper, "I wanted to see you, Jack."
</p>
<p>"I wanted to see you, too, Boss."</p>
−
<p>
For a minute he didn't speak, but his eyes looked up at me, with the light still flickering in them. Then he spoke: "Why did he do it to me?"
</p>
−
<p>
"Oh, God damn it," I burst out, very loud, "I don't know."
</p>
<p>The nurse looked warningly at me.</p>
<p>"I never did anything to him," he said.</p>
<p>"No, you never did."</p>
−
<p>
He was silent again, and the flicker went down in his eyes. Then, "He was all right. The Doc."
</p>
<empty-line/>
<empty-line/>
<empty-line/>
<p>I nodded</p>
<empty-line/>
−
<p>
I waited, but it began to seem that he wasn't going to say any more. His eyes were on the ceiling and I could scarcely tell that he was breathing. Finally, the eyes turned toward me again, very slowly, and I almost thought that I could hear the tiny painful creak of the balls in their sockets. But the light flickered up again. He said, "It might have been all different, Jack."
</p>
<empty-line/>
<empty-line/>
<empty-line/>
<p>I nodded again</p>
<empty-line/>
−
<p>
He roused himself more. He even seemed to be straining to lift his head from the pillow. "You got to believe that," he said hoarsely.
</p>
−
<p>
The nurse stepped forward and looked significantly at me.
</p>
<p>"Yes," I said to the man on the bed.</p>
−
<p>
"You got to," he said again. "You got to believe that."
</p>
<p>"All right."</p>
−
<p>
He looked at me, and for a moment it was the old strong, probing, demanding glance. But when the words this time, they were very weak. "And it might even been different yet he whispered. "If it hadn't happened, it might–have been different–even yet."
</p>
<p>He barely got the last words out, he was so weak.</p>
<p>The nurse was making signals to me.</p>
−
<p>
I reached down and took the hand on the sheet. It felt like a piece of jelly.
</p>
<p>"So long, Boss," I said. "I'll be seeing you."</p>
−
<p>
He didn't answer, and I wasn't even sure that there was recognition in the eyes now. I turned away and went out.
</p>
−
<p>
He died the next morning, just about day. There was a hell of a big funeral. The city was jam-packed with people, all kinds of people, county-courthouse slickers and red-necks and wool-hat boys and people who had never been on pavement before. And they had their women with them. They filled all the space around the Capitol and spilled and eddied back into the streets beyond, while the drizzle came down and the loud-speakers placed on the trees and poles blared out the words which made you want to puke.
</p>
−
<p>
Then after the coffin had been brought down the great steps of the Capitol and loaded into the hearse and after the state patrolmen and the mounted cops had fought out a passage, the procession rolled slowly away to the cemetery. The crowd seethed after it. At the cemetery they surged and swayed over the grass, trampling the graves, breaking down shrubbery. A couple of gravestones were overturned and broken. It was two hours after the burial before the police managed to clear the place.
</p>
−
<p>
That was my second funeral within a week. The first one had been very different. It had been the funeral of Adam Stanton, down at Burden's Landing.
</p>
<empty-line/>
<empty-line/>
<empty-line/>
</section>
−
<section>
−
<title>
<p>Chapter Ten</p>
</title>
−
<p>
After the Boss was safe underground, and the pussel-gutted city cops sweating in their blue and the lean, natty boys of the State Patrol and the mounted police on glossy, dancing horses whose hoofs sank fetlock deep in the flower beds had driven the crowd sullenly out of the cemetery–but long before the tramped grass began to lift itself or the caretakers came to repair the knocked-over tombstones–I left town and took out for the Landing. There were two reasons. First, I couldn't stand to stay in town. Second, Anne Stanton was at the Landing.
</p>
−
<p>
She had been there since Adam's funeral. She had gone down with the body, trailing the sun-glittering, expensive hearse in an undertaker's limousine with a nurse, who proved to be superfluous, and Katy Maynard, an old friend who proved, no doubt to be superfluous, too. I didn't see her as she sat in the rented limousine which moved at its decorous torturer's pace the near-hundred miles, lifting the miles slowly off the concrete slab, slowly and fastidiously as though you were peeling and endless strip of skin off the live flesh. I didn't see her, but I know how she had been: erect, white in the face, the beautiful bones of her face showing under the taut flesh, her hands clenched in her lap. For that was the way she was when I saw her standing under the moss-garlanded oaks, looking absolutely alone despite the nurse and Katy Maynard and all the people–friend of the family, curiosity-seekers come to gloat and nudge, newspapermen, big-shot doctors from town and from Baltimore and Philadelphia–who stood there while the shovels did their work.
</p>
−
<p>
And she was that way when she walked out of the place, not leaning on anybody, with the nurse and Katy Maynard trailing along with that look of embarrassed and false piety which people get on their faces when they are caught in the open with the principal mourner at a funeral.
</p>
−
<p>
Even when–just as she was coming out the gate of the cemetery–a newspaperman jammed a camera at her and took her picture, she didn't change the expression on her face.
</p>
−
<p>
He was still there when I came up, a squirt with his hat over one eye and the camera hung round his neck and a grin on his squirt face. I thought maybe I had seen him around town, but maybe not, the squirts look so much alike when they grind them out of journalism school. "Hello," I said.
</p>
<p>He said hello.</p>
<p>"I saw you get that picture," I said.</p>
<p>He said yeah.</p>
−
<p>
"Well, son," I said, "if you live long enough, you'll find out there are son kinds of a son-of-a-bitch you don't have to be even to be a newspaperman."
</p>
−
<p>
He said yeah, out of his squirt face, and looked at am. Then he asked. "You're Burden?"
</p>
<empty-line/>
<empty-line/>
<empty-line/>
<p>I nodded</p>
<empty-line/>
−
<p>
"Jesus Christ," he exclaimed, "you work for Stark and you call somebody a son-of-a-bitch."
</p>
−
<p>
I just looked at him. I'd been over all that ground before. I had been over it a thousand times with a thousand people. Hotel lobbies and dinner tables and club cars and street corners and bedrooms and filling stations. Sometimes they didn't say it just exactly that way and sometimes they didn't say it at all, but it was there. Oh, I'd fixed them, all right. I knew how to roll with that punch and give it right back in the gut. I ought to have known, I'd had plenty of practice.
</p>
−
<p>
But you get tired. In a way it is too easy, and so it isn't fun any more. And then you get so you don't get mad any more, it has happened so often. But those aren't the reasons. It is just that those people who say that to you–or don't say it–aren't right and they are wrong. If it were absolutely either way, you wouldn't have to think about it, you could just shut your eyes and let them have it in the gut. But the trouble is, they are half right and half wrong, and in the end that is what paralyzes you. Trying to sort out the one from the other. You can't explain it to them, for there isn't ever time and there is always that look on their faces. So you get to a point in the end where you don't even let them have it in the gut. You just look at them, and it is like a dream or something remembered from a long time back or like they weren't there at all.
</p>
<p>So I just looked at the squirt face.</p>
−
<p>
There were other people there. They were looking at me. They expected me to say something. Or do something. But somehow I didn't even mind their eyes on me. I didn't even hate them. I didn't feel anything except a kind of numbness and soreness inside, more numbness than soreness. I stood there and looked at him and waited the way you wait for the pain to start after you have been hit. Then, if the pain started, I would give it to him. But it didn't start, and there was just the numbness. So I turned around and walked away. I didn't even mind the eyes that were following me or the snatch of a laugh somebody gave and cut off short because it was a funeral.
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