All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [95]
The Boss himself used to go out to the poultry farm occasionally, to keep up appearances. Two or three times the papers–the administration papers, that is–ran photographs of him standing with his wife and kid in front of a hen yard or incubator house. The hens didn’t do any harm, either. They gave a nice, homey atmosphere. The inspired confidence.
Chapter Four
That night when the Boss and I called on Judge Irwin in the middle of the night and when, burning the road back to Mason City in the dark, the car hurtled between the black fields, he said to me, “There is always something.”
And I said, “Maybe not on the Judge.”
And he said, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”
And he told me to dig it out, dig it up, the dead cat with patches of fur still clinging to the tight, swollen, dove-gray hide. It was the proper job for me, for, as I have said, I was once a student of history. A student of history does not care what he digs out of the ash pile, the midden, the sublunary dung heap, which is the human past. He doesn’t care whether is the dead pussy or the Kohinoor diamond. So it was a proper assignment for me, an excursion into the past.
It was to be my second excursion into the past, more interesting and sensational than the first, and much more successful. In fact, this second excursion into the past was to be perfectly successful. But the first one had not been successful. It had not been successful because in the midst of the process I tried to discover the truth and not the facts. Then, when the truth was not to be discovered, or discovered could not be understood by me, I could not bear to live with the cold-eye reproach of the facts. So I walked out of a room, the room where the facts lived in a big box of three-by-five inch note cards, and kept on walking until I walked into my second job of historical research, the job which should be known as the “Case of the Upright Judge.”
But I must tell about the first excursion into the enchantments of the past. Not that the first excursion has anything directly to do with the story of Willie Stark, but it has a great deal to do with the story of Jack Burden, and the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story.
Long ago Jack Burden was a graduate student, working for his Ph.D. in American History, in the State University of his native state. This Jack Burden (of whom the present Jack Burden, Me, is a legal, biological, and perhaps even metaphysical continuator) lived in a slatternly apartment with two other graduate students, one industrious, stupid, unlucky, and alcoholic and the other idle, intelligent, lucky, and alcoholic. At least, they were alcoholic for a period after the first of the month, when they received the miserable check paid them by the University for their miserable work as assistant teachers. The industry and ill luck of one canceled out against the idleness and luck of the other and they both amounted to the same thing, and they drank what they could get when they could get it. They drank because they didn