All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [135]
But is any relationship a relationship in time and only in time? I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge. The flower-in-the-crannied-wall theory. We have to accept it because so often our teeth are on edge from persimmons we didn’t eat. So I plucked the flower out of its cranny and discovered an astonishing botanical fact. I discovered that its delicate little root, with many loops and kinks, ran all the way to New York City, where it tapped the lush dung heap called the Madison Corporation. The flower in the cranny was the Southern Belle Fuel Company. So I plucked another little flower called the American Electric Power Company, and discovered that its delicate little root tapped the same dung heap.
I was not prepared to say that I knew what God and men are, but I was getting ready to make a shrewd guess about a particular man. But just a guess.
It was just a guess for a long time. For I had reached the stage in my problem where there was nothing to do but pray. That stage always comes. You do all you can, and you pray till you can’t pray, and then you go to sleep and hope to see it all in the dream, by grace. “Kubla Khan,” the benzine ring, Caedmon’s song–they all came in the dream.
It came to me. Just as I fell asleep one night. It was only a name. A funny name. Mortimer L. Littlepaugh. The name drifted around inside my head, and I thought how funny it was and went to sleep. But when I woke up in the morning, my first thought was: Mortimer L. Littlepaugh. Then walking down the street that day, I bought a newspaper and as I looked at it I saw the name Mortimer L. Littlepaugh. Only it was not in the newspaper I had just bought. It was on a yellow, crumbling, old-cheese-smelling sheet, which I saw, suddenly, in my mind’s eye. Mortimer L. Littlepaugh’s Death Accident, Coroner’s Jury Decides. That was it. Then, wavering slowly up, like a chunk of waterlogged wood stirred loose from the depth, the phrase came: Counsel for the American Electric Power Company. That was it.
I went back to the files, and found the story. Mortimer had fallen out of a hotel window, or rather, off the little iron-railed balcony outside the window. He had fallen from the fifth floor, and that was the end of Mortimer. At the inquest her sister, who lived with him, said he had recently been in ill health and had complained of fits of dizziness. There had been some theory of suicide, for Mortimer’s affairs were in a tangled condition, it developed, and the railing was high for an accidental fall. And there was a little mystery about a letter a bellhop swore Mortimer had given him the evening before his death, with a four-bit tip and instructions to go out and mail it immediately. The bellhop swore it had been addressed to Miss Littlepaugh. Miss Littlepaugh swore that she had received no letter. Well, Mortimer had been dizzy.
He had also been a lawyer for the American Electric. He had, I learned, been let out not long before Irwin came in. It did not sound too promising, but one more dead end wouldn’t matter. There had been plenty of dead ends in the six or eight months I had been on the job.
But this was not a dead end. There was Miss Lily Mae Littlepaugh, whom, after five weeks, I tracked down to a dark, foul, fox-smelling lair in a rooming house on the edge of the slums, in Memphis. She was a gaunt old woman, wearing black spotted and stained with old food, almost past the pretense of gentility, blinking slowly at me from weak red eyes set in the age-crusted face, sitting there in the near-dark room, exuding her old-fox smell, which mixed with the smell of oriental incense and candle wax. There were holy pictures on the walls on every spare space, and in one corner of the room, on a little table, a sort of shrine, with a curtain of faded wine-colored velvet hanging above it, and inside not a Madonna or crucifix as you would expect from the other pictures, but a big image made of felt and mounted on a board which I at first took to be a sunflower pincushion swollen to an impractical size, but then realized was an image of the sun and its rays, The Life-Giver. And in that room. Before it, on the table, a candle burned fatly as though fed not merely from wax but from the substance of the greasy air.