All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [117]
It was the stopping of the car that woke me up. I realized that we were back at the Stark place. I crawled out of the car. The Boss was already out, standing in the yard, just inside the gate in the starlight; Sugar-Boy was locking the car doors.
When I went into the yard, the Boss said, “Sugar-Boy is going to sleep on the couch downstairs, but there’s a cot made up for you upstairs, second door on the left at the head of the stairs. Your better get some shut-eye, for tomorrow you start digging for what the Judge dropped.”
“It will be a long dig,” I said.
“Look here,” he said, “if you don’t want to do it you don’t have to. I can always pay somebody else. Or do you want a raise?”
“No, I don’t want a raise,” I said.
“I am raising you a hundred a month, whether you want it or not.”
“Give it to the church,” I said. “If I wanted money, I could think of easier ways to make it than the way I make with you.”
“So you work for me because you love me,” the Boss said.
“I don’t know why I work for you, but it’s not because I love you. And not for money.”
“No,” he said, standing there in the dark, “you don’t know why you work for me. But I know,” he said, and laughed.
Sugar-Boy came into the yard, said good night, and went into the house.
“Why?” I asked.
“Boy,” he said, “you work for me because I’m the way I am and you’re the way you are. It is an arrangement founded on the nature of things.”
“That’s a hell of a fine explanation.”
“It’s not an explanation,” he said, and laughed again. “There ain’t any explanations. Not of anything. All you can do is point at the nature of things. If you are smart enough to see ’em.”
“I’m not smart enough,” I said.
“You’re smart enough to dig up whatever it is on the Judge.”
“There may not be anything.”
“Nuts,” he said. “Go to bed.”
“Aren’t you coming to bed?”
“No,” he said, and I left him walking across the yard in the dark, with his head bowed a little, and his hands clasped behind him, walking casually as though he had come out to stroll through the park on Sunday afternoon. But it was not afternoon: it was 3:15 A.M.
I lay on the cot upstairs, but I didn’t go right to sleep. I thought about Judge Irwin. About the way he had looked at me that very night from his tall old head, the way the yellow eyes had glittered and the lip curled over the strong old yellow teeth as he said, “I’m dining with your mother this week. Shall I tell her you still like your work?” But that didn’t last, and I saw him sitting in the long room in the white house by the sea, leaning over a chessboard, facing the Scholarly Attorney, and he wasn’t an old man, he was a young man, and the high aquiline florid face was brooding over the board. But that didn’t last, and the face leaned toward me among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in the damp gray wintry dawn, and said, “You ought to have led that duck more, Jack. You got to lead a duck, son. But, son, I’ll make a duck hunter out of you yet.” And the face smiled. And I wanted to speak out and demand, “Is there anything, Judge? Will I find anything?” But the face only smile, and I went to sleep. Before I could say anything, I went to sleep in the middle of the smile.
Then it was another day, and I set out to dig up the dead cat, to excavate the maggot from the cheese, to locate the canker in the rose, to find the deceased fly among the raising in the rice pudding.
I found it.
But not all at once. You do not find it all at once if you are hunting for it. It is buried under the sad detritus of time, where, no doubt, it belongs. And you do not want to find it all at once, not if you are a student of history. If you find it all at once, there would be no opportunity to use your technique. But I had an opportunity to use my technique.
I took the first step the next afternoon while I sat in a beer parlor in the city, surrounded by a barricade of empty beer bottles. I lighted a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last one and asked myself the following question: “For what reason, barring Original Sin, is a man most likely to step over the line?”
I answered: