All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [197]
“You will try?” she asked.
“I’ll try,” I said, “but don’t get your hopes up. I can only prove to Adam what he would already know if he hadn’t gone crazy. He just has the high cantankerous moral shrinks. He does not like to play with the rough boys. He is afraid they might dirty his Lord Fauntleroy suit.”
“That’s no fair,” she burst out.
I shrugged, then said, “Well, I’ll try, anyway.”
“What will you do?”
“There is only one thing to do. I’ll go to Governor Stark, get him to agree to arrest Coffee on the grounds of attempted bribery of an official–Adam is an official, you know–and call on Adam to swear to the charges. If he’ll swear to them. That ought to make him see how things line up. That ought to show him the Boss will protect him. And–” to that point I had only been thinking of the Adam end but now my mind got to work on the possibilities of the situation–“it wouldn’t do the Boss any harm to hang a rap on Coffee. Particularly if he will squeal on the behind-guy. He might bust up Larson. And with Larson out, MacMurfee wouldn’t mean much. He might hang it on Coffee, too, if you–” And I stopped dead.
“If I what?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” I said, and felt the way you do when you are driving merrily across the drawbridge, and all at once the span starts up.
“What,” she demanded.
I looked into her level eyes and saw the way her jaw was set, and knew that I might as well say it. She would work on me till she had it. So I said it. “If you will testify,” I said.
“I’ll do it,” she said without hesitation.
I shook my head. “No,” I said.
“I’ll do it.”
“No, it won’t wash.”
“Why?”
“It just won’t. After all, you didn’t see anything.”
“I was there.”
“It would just be hearsay testimony. Absolutely that. It would never stand up.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know about those things. But I know this. I know that isn’t the reason you changed your mind. What made you change your mind?”
“You never have been on a witness stand. You don’t know what it is to have a mean, smart lawyer saw at you while you sweat.”
“I’ll do it,” she said.
“No.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Listen here,” I said, and shut my eyes and took the plunge off the end of the open drawbridge, “if you think Coffee’s lawyer wouldn’t have plenty on the ball you are crazy as Adam. He would be mean and he would be smart and he would not have one damned bit of fine old Southern chivalry.”
“You mean–” she began, and I knew from her face that she had caught the point.
“Exactly,” I said. “Nobody may know anything now, but when the fun started they would know everything.”
“I don’t care,” she affirmed, and lifted her chin up a couple of notches. I saw the little creases in the flesh of her neck, just the tiniest little creases, the little mark left day after day by the absolutely infinitesimal gossamer cord of thuggee which time throws around the prettiest neck every day to garrote it. The cord is so gossamer that it breaks every day, but the marks get there finally, and finally one day the gossamer cord doesn’t break and is enough. I looked at the marks when Anne lifted her chin, and realized that I had never noticed them before and would always notice then again. I suddenly felt awful–literally sick, as though I had been socked in the stomach, or as though I had met a hideous betrayal. Then before I knew, the way I felt changed into anger, and I lashed out.
“Yeah,” I said, “you don’t care, but you forget one thing. You forget that Adam will be sitting right there looking at little sister.”
Her face was white as a sheet.
The she lowered her head a little and was looking at her hands, which were clenched together now around the empty Coca Cola glass. Her head was low enough so that I could not see her eyes, only the lids coming down over them.
“My dear, my dear,” I murmured. Then as I seized her hands pressed around the glass, the words wrenched out of me, “Oh, Anne, why did you do it?”
It was the one question I had never meant to ask.
For a moment she did not answer. Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice,