All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [215]
So I left my father, and walked down the Row. I had by this time grown accustomed to think of him as my father. But this meant that I had disaccustomed myself o thinking of the man who had been the Scholarly Attorney as my father. There was a kind of relief in knowing that that man was not my father. I had always felt some curse of his weakness upon me, or what I had felt to be that. He had had a beautiful and eager young wife and another man had taken her away from him and had fathered his child, and all he had done was to walk away, leaving her in possession of everything he owned, and crawl into a hole in the slums and lie there like a wounded animal and let his intellect bleed away into pious drivel and his strength bleed away into weakness. And he had been good. But his goodness had told me nothing except that I could not live by it. My new father, however, had not been good. He had cuckolded a friend, betrayed a wife, taken a bribe, driven a man, though unwittingly, to death. But he had done good. He had been a just judge. And he had carried his head high. That last afternoon of his life he had done that. He hadn’t said, “Look here, Jack, you can’t do it–you can’t–you see, you see–I am your father.”
Well, I had swapped the good, weak father for the evil, strong one. I didn’t feel bad about it. I felt sorry for the Judge as I walked down the Row by the sea, but as far as I myself was concerned I didn’t feel dissatisfied with the swap. Then I thought of the other old man leaning over the half-wit acrobat in the grubby room and holding out the bit of chocolate to the tear-stained face, and I thought of the child on the rug before the fire and the stocky black-coated man leaning to him and saying, “Here, Son, just one bite before supper.” Then I wasn’t so sure what I felt.
So I quit trying to decide. There was no use trying to probe my feelings about them, for I had lost both of them. Most people lose one father, but I was peculiarly situated, I had lost two at the same instant. I had dug up the truth and the truth always kills the father, the good and weak one or the bad and strong one, and you are left alone with yourself and the truth, and can never ask Dad, who didn’t know anyway and who is deader than mackerel.
The next day, after I was back in town, I got a call from the Landing. It was a Mr. Pettus, who, it turned out, was the Judge’s executor. According to what he said, I was, except for a few minor bequests to servants, the sole heir. I was the sole heir to the estate which Judge Irwin had saved, years before, by his single act of dishonesty, the act for which I, as the blameless instrument of justice, had put the pistol to his heart.
The whole arrangement seemed so crazy and so logical that after I had hung up the phone I burst out laughing and could scarcely stop. Before I stopped, as a matter of fact, I found that I was not laughing at all but was weeping and was saying over and over again, “The poor old bugger, the poor old bugger.” It was like the ice breaking up after a long winter. And the winter had been long.
Chapter Nine
After a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of change has been used up. You adjust yourself, and are sure that the new equilibrium is for eternity. After the death of Judge Irwin, after I got back to the city, I felt that way. I felt that a story was over, that what had been begun a long time back had been played out, that the lemon had been squeezed dry. But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn’t the game that is over, it is just an innings, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day.
The little game the Boss was playing was not over. But I had nearly forgotten all about it. I had forgotten that the story of Judge Irwin, which seemed so complete in itself, was only a chapter in the longer story of the Boss, which was not over and which was itself merely a chapter in another bigger story.