All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [212]
I bounced off the bed and started for the door, realized that I was buck-naked, grabbed a robe, and ran out. There was a noise down the hall from my mother’s room, a sound like moaning. The door was open and I ran in.
She was sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing a negligee, clutching the white bedside telephone in her hand, staring at me with wide, wild eyes, and moaning in a spaced, automatic fashion. I went toward her. She dropped the telephone to the floor with a clatter, and pointed her finger at me and cried out, “You did it, you did, you killed him!”
“What?” I demanded, “what?”
“You killed him!”
“Killed who?”
“You killed him!” She began to laugh hysterically.
I was holding her by the shoulders now, shaking her, trying to make her stop laughing, but she kept clawing and pushing at me. She stopped laughing an instant to gasp for breath, and in that interval I heard the dry, clicking signal the telephone was making to call attention to the fact it was not on its rack. Then her laughter drowned out the sound.
“Shut up, shut up!” I commanded, and she suddenly stared at me as though just discovering my presence.
Then, not loud now but with intensity, she said, “You killed him, you killed him.”
“Killed who?” I demanded, shaking her.
“Your father,” she said, “your father and oh! you killed him.”
That was how I found out. At the moment the finding out simply numbed me. When a heavy-caliber slug hits you, you may spin around but you don’t feel a thing. Not at first. Anyway, I was busy. My mother was in bad shape. By this time there were a couple of black faces at the door, the cook and the maid, and I was damning them to get Dr. Bland and stop gawking. Then I raked the clicking telephone up off the floor so they could use the one downstairs, and let my mother go long enough to slam the door to keep those all-seeing, all-knowing eyes off what was happening.
My mother was talking between her moans and laughing. She was saying how she had loved him and how he was the only person she had ever loved and how I had killed him and had killed my own father and a lot of stuff like that. She was still carrying on when Dr. Bland arrived and gave her the hypodermic. Across her form on the bed, from which the moans and the mutterings were now subsiding, he turned his gray, gray-bearded owlish face and said, “Jack, I’m sending a nurse up here. A very trustworthy woman. Nobody else is to come in here. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I told him, for I understood, and understood that he had understood perfectly well what my mother’s wild talking had meant.
“You stay here till the nurse arrives,” he said, “and don’t let anybody in. And the nurse isn’t supposed to let anybody in until I get back to see if your mother is normal. Not anybody.”
I nodded, and followed him to the door of the room.
After he had said his good-bye, I detained him a moment. “Doctor,” I asked, “what about the Judge? I didn’t get it straight from my mother. Was it a stroke?”
“No,” he said, and inspected my face.
“Well, what was it?”
“He shot himself this afternoon,” he replied, still inspecting my face. But then he added quite matter-of-factly, “It was undoubtedly a question of health. His health was failing. A very active man–a sportsman–very often–” he was even more dry and detached in his tone–“very often such a man doesn’t want to face the last years of limited activity. Yes, I am sure that that was the reason.”
I didn’t answer.
“Good day, sir,” the doctor said, and took his eyes off me and started down the hall.
He was almost to the head of the stairs before I called, “Doctor!” and ran after him.
I came up to him and said, “Doctor, where did he shoot himself? What part of the body, I mean? Not the head?”
“Straight to the heart,” he said. And added, “A .38 automatic. A very clean wound.”
Then he went off down the stairs. I stood there and thought how the dead man was shot through he heart, a very clean wound, and not through the head with the muzzle of the weapon put into the mouth to blaze into the soft membranes to scorch them and the top of the skull exploding off like an egg to make an awful mess. I stood there, and was greatly relieved to think of the nice clean wound.