All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [33]
Inside the courthouse, where the big hall was empty and shadowy and the black oily floor was worn down to humps and ridges under your feet and the air was dry and dusty so that you felt in the stillness that you were breathing in the air from all the talk, loud and little, there had been in there for seventy-five years–well, inside there, just off the hall I saw some men sitting in a room. Above the doorway there was a tin sign with the letters about faded off. But they still said Sheriff.
I went into the room where the three men were cocked back in split-bottom chairs and an electric fan set on top of the roll-top desk was burring away with little effect, and said howdy-do to the faces. The biggest face, which was round and red and had its feet cocked on the desk and its hands laid on its stomach, said howdy-do.
I took a card out of my pocket and gave it to him. He looked at the card for a minute, holding it off near arm’s length as though he were afraid it would spit in his eye, the he turned it over and looked at the back side a minute till he was dead sure it was blank. Then he laid the hand with the card in it back down on his stomach, where it belonged, and looked at me. “You done come a piece,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said.
“What you come fer?”
“To see what’s going on about the schoolhouse,” I said.
“You come a piece,” he said, “to stick yore nose in somebody else’s bizness.”
“That’s right,” I agreed cheerfully, “but my boss on the paper can’t see it that way.”
“It ain’t any of his bizness either.”
“No,” I said, “but what’s the ruckus about, now I’ve come all that piece?”
“It ain’t any of my bizness. I’m the Sheriff.”
“Well, Sheriff,” I said, “whose business it it?”
“Them as is tending to it. If folks would quit messen and let ’em”
“Who is them?
“Commissioners,” the Sheriff said. “The County Commissioners, the voters of Mason County done elected to tend to their bizness and not take no butten-in from nobody.”
“Yeah, sure–the Commissioners. But who are they?”
The Sheriff’s little wise eyes blinked at me a couple of times, then he said, “The constable ought to lock you up fer vagruncy.”
“Suits me,” I said. “And the Chronicle would send up another boy to cover my case, and when the constable pinched him the Chronicle would send up another one to cover that case, and after a while you’d get us all locked up. But it might get in the papers.”
The Sheriff just lay there, and out of his big round face his little eyes blinked. Maybe I hadn’t said anything. Maybe I wasn’t there.
“Who are the Commissioners?” I said. “Or maybe they are hiding out?”
“One of ’em is setten right there,” the Sheriff said, and rolled his big round head on his shoulders to indicate one of the other fellows. When the head had fallen back into place, and his fingers had let go my card, which wafted down to the floor in the gentle breeze from the fan, the little eyes blinked again and he seemed to sink below the surface of the roiled waters. He had done his best, and now he had passed the ball.
“Are you a Commissioner?” I asked the fellow just indicated. He was just another fellow, made in God’s image and wearing a white shirt with a ready-tied black bow tie and jean pants held up with web galluses. Town from the waist up, country from the waist down. Get both votes.
“Yeah,” he said.
“He’s the head man,” another fellow said, reverently, a little old squirt of a fellow with a bald knotty old head and a face he himself couldn’t recollect from one time he looked in the mirror to the next, the sort of a fellow who hangs around and sits in a chair when the big boys leave one vacant and tries to buy his way into the game with a remark like the one he had just made.
“You the Chairman?” I asked the other fellow.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You mind telling me your name?”
It ain’t no secret,” he said. “It is Dolph Pillsbury.”
“Glad to know you, Mr. Pillsbury,” I said and held out my hand. Not getting up, he took it as though I had offered him the business end of a cottonmouth moccasin in shedding time.
“Mr. Pillsbury,” I said, “you are in a position to know the situation in regard to the schoolhouse contract. No doubt you are interested in having the truth of that situation made public.