All the King's Men (5 page)

One time I had wondered why the Boss never had the house painted after he got his front feet in the trough and a dollar wasn’t the reason you got up in the morning any more. Then I figured the Boss knew best. Suppose he had painted it up, then the next fellow down the road would be saying to the next one, “Seen Old man Stark got his house painted? Yeah, putten on airs. Hit looks lak hit wuz good enuff fer him to live in all his life lak hit wuz, and his boy gits up thar in the cappy-tell, and hit ain’t good enuff no more. Fust thing you know and Old Man Stark’ll be going to be privy in the house and maken ‘em cook cabbige out behind the barn.” (As a matter of fact, Old Man Stark was going to the privy in the house, for the Boss had put in running water and a bathroom. Water pumped by a little automatic electric pump. But you can’t see a commode from the road when you pass by. It doesn’t hit you in the eye or run out and bite you in the leg. And what the voter doesn’t know doesn’t prey on his mind.)

Anyway, if he had painted the house it wouldn’t have made half as good picture as it was going to make that day with Willie and his Old Man on the front steps, with Lucy Starks and the boy and the old white dog.

The old man was on the front steps now. By the time we got through the front gate, which had a couple of old plow points hung on a wire to pull it shut and clank to announce the visitor, and had started up the path, the old man had come out of the door. He stopped on the steps and waited, a not very tall old man, and thin, wearing blue jean pants and a blue shirt washed so much that it had a powdery pastel shade to it and a black bow tie, the kind that comes ready-tied on an elastic band. We got up close and could see his face, brown and tooled-looking, with the skin and flesh thin on the bone and hanging down from the bone to give that patient look old men’s faces have, and his gray hair plastered down on his narrow, egg-thin old skull–the hair still wet as though he had given it a dab with the wet brush when he heard the car, just to be looking right at the last minute—and slow blue eyes in the middle of the brown folded skin. The blue of the eyes was pale and washed out like the blue of the shirt. He didn’t have any whiskers or mustache, and you could see that he had shaved pretty recently, for there were two or three little nicks, with the little crusts of blood on them, where the razor had got tangled in the folds of the brown dry skin.

He stood on the steps, and for any sign he gave we might as well have been back in the city.

Then the Boss went up to him, and put out his hand, and said, “Hello, Pappy. How you making it?”

“Gitten along,” the old man said, and shook hands, or rather putting out his hand with that same motion from the elbow which Old Leather-Face had had in the drugstore back in Mason City, he let the Boss shake it.

Lucy Stark went up to him, not saying anything, and kissed him on his left cheek. He didn’t say anything either when she did it. He just reached his right arm a little around her shoulder, not quite a hug, just putting his arm there, and you could see his knobby, crooked, brown old hand, which looked too big for the wristbone, and the hand gave her shoulder two or three little tired, apologetic pats. Then the hand dropped away and hung at his side beside the blue jean pants leg, and Lucy Stark stepped back. The he said, not very loud, “Howdy, Lucy.”

“Howdy, Papa,” she said, and the hand hanging beside the jean pants jerked as though it were getting ready to reach out and pat her again, but it didn’t.

I suppose it didn’t have to, anyway. Not to tell Lucy Stark what Lucy Stark already knew, and had known without words ever since the days when she had married Willie Stark and had come out here and had sat by the fire at night with the old man, whose wife had been dead a long time then and who hadn’t had a woman in the house for a long time. That they had something in common, Old Man Stark and Lucy Stark, who had loved and married Willie Stark, the Willie Stark who at that moment when she and the old man sat wordlessly before the fire was upstairs in his room with his face bent down over a law book, his face puzzled and earnest and the tousle of hair hanging, and who was not with them by the fire, but was up there in that room, but not even in that room, either, but in a room, a world, inside himself where something was swelling and growing painfully and dully and imperceptibly like a great potato in a dark, damp cellar. What they had in common was a word of wordless silence by the fire, a world which could absorb effortlessly and perfectly the movements of their day and their occupations, and of all the days they had lived, and of the days that were to come for them to move about in and do the thing which were the life for which they were made. So they sat there in their common knowledge, while the chunk on the hearth stewed and hissed and crumbled, and were together in the down beat and pause of the rhythm of their lives. That was what they had in common now, and nothing could take that away. But they had something else in common; they had in common the knowledge that they did not have what they had.

The Boss was introducing Mr. Duffy, who was delighted to meet Mr. Stark, yes, sir, and introducing the gang who had just come up in the second car. Then the Boss jerked a thumb at me, and said to his father, “You recollect Jack Burden, don’t you?”

“I recollect,” the old man said, and we shook hands.

We all went into the parlor, and sat around on a few pieces of stuffed horsehair furniture, which had an acid, mummy smell in your parched-out nostrils, or on straight split-bottom chairs, which Old man Stark and the Boss had fetched in from the kitchen, and the motes of dust swam on the rays of light striking in under the shades of the western windows of the room through the one-time white but now yellowish lace curtains, which looped uncertainly from their rods like fish nets hung up to wait for mending. The gang of us sat around, and moved our thighs on the horsehair or on the split-bottom and stared down at the unpainted boards of the floor or at the design on the linoleum mat in the middle of the floor as though we were still bright-reds and tans and blues slick and varnished-looking–a kind of glib, impertinent geometrical island floating there in the midst of the cornerless shadows and the acid mummy smell and the slow swell of Time which had fed into this room, day by day since long back, as into a landlocked sea where the fish were dead and the taste was brackish on your tongue. You had the feeling that if the Boss and Mr. Duffy and Sadie Burke and the photographer and the reporters and you and the rest got cuddled up together on that linoleum mat it would lift off the floor by magic and scoop you all up together and make a lazy preliminary circuit of the room and whisk right out of the door or out the roof like the floating island of Gulliver or the carpet in the Arabian Nights and carry you off where you and it belonged and leave Old Man Stark sitting there as though nothing had happened, very clean and razor-nicked, with his gray hair plastered down damp, sitting there by the table where the big Bible and the lamp and the plush-bound album were under the blank, devouring gaze of the whiskered face in the big crayon portrait above the mantel shelf.

Then the nigger woman brought in a pitcher of water on a tray, with three glasses, slipping her feet in old tennis shoes dryly along the board. Lucy Stark took one glass and Sadie Burke another, and the rest of us just passed around the third glass.

Then the photographer took a secret look at his watch, and cleared his throat, and said, “Governor–”

“Yeah?” the Boss answered.

“I just reckoned–if you and Mrs. Stark is rested and all–” he made a sitting-down bow in the direction of Lucy Stark, a bow from the waist that was quite a feat and gave the impression he had had a couple too many for the heat and was passing out in the chair–”if you all–”

The Boss stood up. “All right,” he said, grinning. “I just reckon I get you.” Then he looked at his wife questioningly.

Lucy Stark stood up, too.

“All set, Pappy,” the Boss said to the old man, and the old man stood up, too.

The Boss led the way out to the front porch. We all tailed him out like a procession. The photographer went to the second car and unpacked a tripod and the rest of his plunder and got it rigged up facing the steps. The Boss was standing on the steps, blinking and grinning, as though he were half asleep and knew what kind of a dream he was going to have.

“We’ll just take you first, Governor,” the photographer said, and the rest of us eased off the porch and out of range.

The photographer hid his head under the black cloth, then he popped out again agog with an idea. “The dog,” he said, “get the dog in there with you, Governor. You be petting the dog or something. Right there on the steps. It’ll be swell. It will be the nuts. You be petting that dog, he’s pawing up on you like he was glad to see you when you come home. See? It will be nuts.”

“Sure, the nuts,” the Boss said.

Then he turned toward the old white dog, which hadn’t moved a muscle since the Cadillac pulled up at the gate and was lying over to one side of the porch like a worn-out fur rug. “Here, Buck,” the Boss said, and snapped his fingers.

But the dog didn’t show a thing.

“Here, Buck,” the Boss called.

Tom Stark prodded the dog with his toe for a little encouragement, but he might just as well have been prodding a bolster.

“Buck is gitten on,” Old Man Stark said. “He ain’t right spry any more.” Then the old man went to the steps and stooped down with a motion which made you expect to hear the sound of old rusty hinges on a barn door. “Hi, Buck, hi, Buck,” the old man wheedled without optimism. He gave up, and lifted his gaze to the Boss. “If s hongry now,” he said, and shook hid head. “If he was hongry we could guile him. But he ain’t hongry. His teeth gone bad.”

The Boss looked at me, and I knew what I was paid to do.

“Jack,” the Boss said, “get the hairy bastard up here and make him look like he was glad to see me.”

I was supposed to do a lot of different things, and one of them was to lift up fifteen-year-old, hundred-and-thirty-five pound hairy white dogs on summer afternoons and paint an expression of unutterable bliss upon their faithful features as they gaze deep, deep into the Boss’s eyes. I got hold of Buck’s forelegs, as though I were girding myself to shove a wheelbarrow, and heaved. It didn’t work. I got his front end up for a second, but just as I got him up, he breathed out and I breathed in. One gust of Buck was enough. It was like a gust from a buzzard’s nest. I was paralyzed. Buck hit the porch boards and lay there like the old polar-bear rug he resembled.

Then Tom Stark and one of the reporters shoved on the tail end and I heaved on the front end and held my breath and we got Buck the seven feet to the Boss. The Boss braced himself, and we heaved up the front end, and the Boss got a gust of Buck.

That gust was enough.

“God’s sake, Pappy,” the Boss demanded as soon as he had mastered his spasm, “what you been feeding this dog?”

“He ain’t any appetite,” Old man Stark said.

“He ain’t any appetite for violets,” the Boss said, and spat on the ground.

“The reason he fell,” the photographer observed, “was because his hind legs gave down. Once we get him propped we got to work fast.”

“We?” the Boss said. We! What the hell you mean
we
_. You come kiss him. One whiff would curdle milk and strip pine tree.
We
_, hell!”

The Boss took a deep breath, and we heaved again. It didn’t work. Buck didn’t have any starch in him. We tried six or seven times, but it was no sale. Finally the Boss had to sit down on the steps, and we dragged Buck up and laid the faithful head on the Boss’s knee. The Boss put his hand on Buck’s head and looked at the photographer’s birdie. The photographer shot it, and said, “It is the nuts,” and the Boss said, “Yeah, the nuts.”

The Boss sat there a few seconds with his hand on Buck’s head. “A dog,” the Boss said, “is man’s best friend. Old Buck, he’s the best friend I ever had.” He scratched the brute’s head. “Yeah, good old Buck,” the Boss said, “the best friend I ever had. But God damn it,” he said, and stood up so quick that Buck’s head slid off his knee, “he don’t smell a bit better’n the rest of ‘em.”

“Is that for the record, Boss?” one of the reporters asked.

“Sure,” the Boss said. “He smells just like the rest of ‘em.”

Then we cleared Buck’s carcass off the steps, and the photographer settled into the grind. He took the Boss and the family in every possible combination. Then he got his rig together, and said: “Governor, you know we want a picture of you upstairs. In the room you used to have when you were a kid. It will be nuts.”

“Yeah,” the Boss said, “the nuts.”

That was my idea. It would be nuts all right. The Boss sitting there with an old schoolbook in his hands. A good example for the tots. So we went upstairs.

It was a little room, with bare board floor and tongue-and groove beaded walls, which had been painted yellow one time, but had the paint crazing off the wood now in sections where any paint was left. There was a big wooden bed with a high head and foot standing somewhat off the perpendicular, and a white counterpane on the bed. There was a table–a pine table–and a couple of straight chairs, and a stove–the kind of tin stove they call a trash-burner, pretty rusty now–and against the wall beyond the stove a couple of homemade bookcases, crammed with books. Third readers and geographies and algebras and such in one of them, and a lot of crummy old law books in the other.

The Boss stood in the middle of the floor and took a good look, all around, while the rests of us hung around the door bunched up like sheep and waited. “Jesus,” the Boss said, “put the old white thunder-mug under the bed and it’ll look just like home.”

I looked over at the bed, and the crockery wasn’t there. It was the only prop missing. That and a kid with a pudgy face and freckles on his face and sandy hair falling down on his forehead, bending down at the table by a coal-oil lamp–it must have been a coal-oil lamp then–and a pencil in his hand, tooth marks on the pencil where he’d been gnawing at it, and the fire in the trash-burner getting low, and the wind pounding on the north side of the house, pounding down off the Dakotas a thousand miles away and across the plains which were icy and pearl-blind with the snow polished hard under the wind and glimmering in the dark, and across the river bottoms, and across the hills where the pine trees had stood once and moaned in the wind but where wasn’t anything to break the wind now. The sash in the window on the north wall of the room would rattle under the wind, and the flame in the coal-oil lamp would bend and shiver in what current of air sneaked in, but the kid wouldn’t look up. He would gnaw his pencil, and hunch down. Then after a while he would blow out the lamp and pull off his clothes and get into bed, wearing his underwear. The sheets would be cold to the skin and stiff-feeling. He would lie there and shiver in the dark. The wind would come down a thousand miles and pound on the house and the sash would rattle and inside him something would be big and coiling slow and clotting till he would hold his breath and the blood would beat in his head with s hollow sound as though his head were a cave as big as the dark outside. He wouldn’t have any name for what was big inside him. Maybe there isn’t any name.