All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [82]
The Boss had stood up and padded across in his sock-feet, holding out his hand, saying, “Hello, Hugh.”
Hugh Miller shook hands, and stepped into the room, and I started to edge out the door. Then I caught the Boss’s eye, and he nodded, quick, toward my chair. So I shook hands with Hugh Miller, too, and sat back down.
“Have a seat,” the Boss said to Hugh Miller.
“No, thanks, Willie,” Hugh Miller replied in his slow solemn way. “But you sit down, Willie.”
The Boss dropped back into his chair, cocked his feet up again, and demanded, “What’s on your mind?”
“I reckon you know,” Hugh Miller said.
“I reckon I do,” the Boss said.
“You are saving White’s hide, aren’t you?”
“I don’t give a damn about White’s hide,” the Boss said. “I’m saving something else.”
“He’s guilty.”
“As hell,” the Boss agreed cheerfully. “If the category of guilt and innocence can be said to have any relevance to something like Byram B. White.”
“He’s guilty,” Hugh Miller said.
“My God, you talk like Byram was human! He’s a thing! You don’t prosecute an adding machine if a spring goes bust and makes a mistake. You fix it. Well, I fixed Byram. I fixed him so his unborn great-grandchildren will wet their pants on this anniversary and not know why. Boy, it will be the shock in the genes. Hell, Byram is just something you use, and he’ll sure be useful from now on.”
“That sounds fine, Willie, but it just boils down to the fact you’re saving White’s hide.”
“White’s hide be damned,” the Boss said, “I’, saving something else. You let that gang of MacMurfee’s boys in the Legislature get the notion they can pull something like this and there’s no telling where they’d stop. Do you think they like anything that’s been done? The extraction tax? Raising the royalty rate on state land? The income tax? The highway program? The Public Health Bill?”
“No, they don’t,” Hugh Miller admitted. “Or rather, the people behind MacMurfee don’t like it.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yes,” Hugh Miller said, “I like it. But I can’t say I like some of the stuff around it.”
“Hugh,” the Boss said, and grinned, “the trouble with you is you are a lawyer. You are a damned fine lawyer.”
“You’re a lawyer,” Hugh Miller said.
“No,” the Boss corrected, “I’m not a lawyer. I know some law. In fact, I know a lot of law. And I made me some money out of law. But I’m not a lawyer. That’s why I can see what the law is like. It’s like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbones to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different. Do you think half the things I’ve done were clear, distinct, and simple in the constitution of this state?”
“The Supreme Court has ruled–” Hugh Miller began.
“Yeah, and they ruled because I put ’em there to rule it, and they saw what had to be done. Half the things weren’t in the constitution but they are now, by God. And how did they get there? Simply because somebody did ’em.”
The blood began to climb up in Hugh Miller’s face, and he shook his head just a little, just barely, the way a slow animal does when a fly skims by. Then he said, “There’s nothing in the constitution says that Byram B. White can commit a felony with impunity.”
“Hugh,” the Boss began, soft, “don’t you see that Byram doesn’t mean a thing? Not in this situation. What they’re after is to break the administration. They don’t care about Byram, except so far as it’s human nature to hate to think somebody else is getting something when you aren’t. What they care about is undoing what this administration has done. And now is the time to stomp ’em. And when you start out to do something–” he sat up straight in the chair now, with his hands on the overstuffed sides, and thrust his head forward at Hugh Miller