All the King's Men

by Robert Penn Warren

  He was almost to the head of the stairs before I called, “Doctor!” and ran after him.

  I came up to him and said, “Doctor, where did he shoot himself? What part of the body, I mean? Not the head?”

  “Straight to the heart,” he said. And added, “A.38 automatic. A very clean wound.”

  Then he went off down the stairs. I stood there and thought how the dead man was shot through he heart, a very clean wound, and not through the head with the muzzle of the weapon put into the mouth to blaze into the soft membranes to scorch them and the top of the skull exploding off like an egg to make an awful mess. I stood there, and was greatly relieved to think of the nice clean wound.

  I went to my own room, snatched up some clothes, and then went back to my mother’s room, and shut the door. I dressed and sat by the side of the big magnificent tester bed in which the lace-filmed form looked so small. I noticed how the bosom looked slack and the face sunken and grayish. The mouth was somewhat open and the breath through it heavy. I scarcely recognized the face. Certainly it was not the face of the girl in the lettuce-green dress and with the golden hair who had stood by the stocky, dark-suited man on the steps of a company commissary in a lumber town in Arkansas, forty years before, while the scream of saws filled the air and the head like a violated nerve and the red earth between the fields of stumps curdled with pale green and steamed in the spring sun. it was not the famish-cheeked, glowing face that, back in those years, had looked up eagerly and desperately to the hawk-headed, hot-eyed man in alleys of myrtle or in secret pine groves or in shuttered rooms. No, it was an old face now. And I felt very sorry for it. I reached across to take one of the unconscious hands which lay loose on the sheet.

  I held the hand and tried to image how things would have been if it had not been the Scholarly Attorney but his friend who had gone to the little lumber town in Arkansas. No, that wouldn’t have helped much, I decided, remembering that at that time Monty Irwin had been married to an invalid wife, who had been crippled by being thrown from a horse and who had lain in bed for some years and had then died quietly and sunk from our sight and thought at the Landing. No doubt Monty Irwin had been held by some notion of obligation to that invalid wife: he hadn’t been able to divorce her and marry the other woman. No doubt that was why he had not married the famish-cheeked girl, why he had not gone to his friend the Scholarly Attorney and told him, “I love your wife,” or why, after the husband had learned the truth, as he must have done to make him walk out of the house and away to all the years in the slum garrets, he had not then married her. He still had his own wife then, to whom, because she was an invalid, he must have felt bound with a kind of twisted honor. Then my mother had married again. There must have been bitterness and dire quarrels all along mixed with the stolen satisfactions and ardors. Then the invalid had died. Why hadn’t they married then? Perhaps my mother wouldn’t then, to punish him for his own earlier refusals. Or perhaps their life was by this time set into a pattern they couldn’t break. Anyway, he had married the woman from Savannah, the woman who hadn’t brought him anything, neither money nor happiness, but who had, after a certain time, died. Why hadn’t they married then?

  I dismissed the question finally. Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we had made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made? At least that was the way I argued the case back then.

  As I say, I dismissed the question, and dismissed the answer I had tried to give to it, and simply held the lax hand between my own, and listened to the heavy breathing from the sunken face, and thought how in the scream which had snatched me from sleep that afternoon there had been the bright, beautiful, silver purity of feeling. It had been, I decided, the true cry of the buried soul which had managed, for one instant after all the years, to utter itself again. Well, she had loved Monty Irwin, I supposed. I had thought that she had never loved anybody. So now, as I held the hand, I felt not only pity for her but something like love, too, because she had loved somebody.

  After a while the nurse came and released me from the room. Then Mrs. Daniell, who was a neighbor of Judge Irwin, came by to see my mother. It had been her telephone call which brought the news to my mother. Mrs. Daniell had heard the shot in the afternoon but had thought nothing about it until the colored boy at the Irwin place ran out into the yard and began yelling. She had gone back into the house with the boy, and had seen the Judge sitting in one of the big leather chairs in his library with the pistol on his knee, his head canted over one shoulder, and the blood spreading out over the left side of the white coat. She had plenty to tell, and she was working down the Row in a systematic fashion. She told me her story, pried unsuccessfully into my visit there of the afternoon and into my mother’s indisposition (she had, of course, heard the scream on the telephone), and then took her leave without much to add to her basic narrative at the next port of call.

  The Young Executive came in about seven o’clock. He already knew about the death of Judge Irwin, but I had to tell him about my mother. I made it damned plain and without trimmings that he was to stay out of her room. Then he and I went out on the side gallery and had a silent drink together. I didn’t mind his presence more than a shadow.

  Two days later Judge Irwin was buried in the churchyard under the ghostly, moss-garlanded oaks. Earlier, in his house, I had filed past the coffin with everybody else and had looked down at the dead face. The hawk nose seemed to be paper thin and almost transparent. The usual strong color of the flesh was gone and on the cheeks there was only the coy tint of the mortician’s art. But the coarse rufous hair, thinner than ever, seemed to stand up electrically and individually from the high-domed skull. The people filed past, looked down, murmured to each other, and went to stand at the end of the drawing room near the potted palms imported for the occasion. Thus the fact of his death was absorbed effortlessly into the life of the community, like a single tiny drop of stain dropped into a glass of clear water. it would spread outward and outward from the point of vindictive concentration, raveling and thinning away, drawing away the central fact of the stain until nothing at all was visible.

  I stood then in the churchyard, while the process was being completed, and the earth, a mixture of sand and the black surface humus, was being shoveled into the hole where Judge Irwin lay. I thought how he had forgotten the name of Mortimer L. Littlepaugh, had forgotten that he had ever existed, but how Mortimer had never forgotten him. Mortimer had been dead more than a score of years but he had never forgotten Judge Irwin. Remembering the letter in his sister’s trunk, he had worn his fleshless grin and soundless chuckle and waited. Judge Irwin had killed Mortimer L. Littlepaugh. But Mortimer had killed Judge Irwin in the end. Or had it been Mortimer? Perhaps I had done it. That was one way of looking at it. I turned that thought over and speculated upon my responsibility. It would be quite possible to say that I had none, no more than Mortimer had. Mortimer had killed Judge Irwin because Judge Irwin had killed him, and I had killed Judge Irwin because Judge Irwin had created me, and looking at matters in that light one could say that Mortimer and I were merely the twin instruments of Judge Irwin’s protracted and ineluctable self-destruction. For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal’s own hand and every man is a suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.

  They filled up the hole and rounded off a neat mound on which they placed a carpet of artificial grass, savagely green, in the churchyard where, under the dense shade of moss and boughs and under the mat of trodden leaves, no natural grass ever spran
g. Then following the decorous crowd, I left the dead man under that green grass of the mortician’s fancy which spared all tender sensibilities the sight of raw earth and proclaimed that nothing whatsoever had happened and veiled, as it were, all significance of life and death.

  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.

  The Boss looked across the desk at me as I walked in, and said, “God damn it, so the bastard crawled out on me.”

  I didn’t say anything

  “I didn’t tell you to scare him to death, I just told you to scare him.”

  “He wasn’t scared,” I said “What the hell did he do it for then?”

  “I told you a long time back when the mess started he wouldn’t scare.”

  “Well, why did he do it?”

  “I don’t want to discuss it.”

  “Well, why did he do it?”

  “God damn it,” I said, “didn’t I tell you I didn’t want to discuss it?”

  He looked at me with some surprise, got up from his chair and came around the desk. “I’m sorry,” he said, and put his heavy hand on my shoulder.

  I moved out under the hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “He had been quite a pal of yours at one time, hadn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” I said He sat back on the desk and raised one big knee to clasp his hands around it.

  “There is still MacMurfee,” he said reflectively.

  “Yes, there is MacMurfee, but if you want any blackmailing done, get somebody else to do it.”

  “Even on MacMurfee?” he asked, with a hint of jocularity, to which I didn’t respond.

  “Even on MacMurfee.” I said.

  “Hey,” he demanded, “you aren’t quitting me?”

  “No, I’m just quitting certain things.”

  “Well, it was true, wasn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “What the Judge did, whatever the hell it was.”

  I couldn’t deny that. I had to say yes. So I nodded and said, “Yes, he did it.”

  “Well? he demanded.

  “I aid what I said.”

  He was studying me drowsily from under the shagged-down forelock. “Boy,” he said then, soberly, “we been together a long time. I hope we’ll be in it together all the way. We been in it up to the ears, both of us, you and me, boy.”

  I didn’t answer.

  He continued to study me. Then he said, “Don’t you worry. It’ll all come out all right.”

  “Yeah,” I said sourly, “you’ll be Senator.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I could be Senator right now if that was all.”

  “What did you mean?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment, not even looking at me but down at the hands clasped around the crooked knee. “Hell,” he said suddenly, “forget it.” Suddenly, he released the knee, the leg dropped, the foot struck the floor heavily, and he lunged off the desk. “But nobody had better forget–MacMurfee and nobody else–that I’ll do what I’ve got to do. By God, I’ll do it if I’ve got to break their bones with my bare hands.” And he held the hands before him with spread fingers, crooked and tense as though to seize.

  He sank back against the support of the desk then, and said, half as though to himself, “That Frey, now. That Frey.”

  Then he fell into a brooding silence, which, had Frey been able to see it, would have made him very happy to be way off there on the Arkansas farm with no forwarding address left behind.

  So the story of the Boss and MacMurfee, of which the story of Judge Irwin had been a part, went on, but I had no hand in it. I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the earth leaned on its axis and shouldered the spot I occupied a little out of the direct, billowing, crystalline, consuming blaze of the enormous sun. The leaves rattled dryly on the live oaks when a breeze sprang up in the evenings, the matted jungles of sugar cane in the country beyond the concrete walks and trolley lines were felled now by the heavy knife and in the evenings the great high-wheeled carts groaned along the rutted tracks, piled high with the fetid-sweet burde
n, and far off across the flat black fields laid bare by the knife, under the saffron sky, some nigger sang sadly about the transaction between him and Jesus. Out at the University, on the practice field, the toe of some long-legged, slug-footed, box-shouldered lad kept smacking the leather, over and over, and farther away the scrimmage surged and heaved to the sound of shouts and peremptory whistles. On Saturday nights under the glare of the battery of lights, the stadium echoed to the roar of “Tom!–Tom!–Tom!–yea, Tom!” For Tom Stark carried the ball, Tom Stark wheeled the end, Tom Stark knifed the line, and it was Tom, Tom, Tom.

  The sport writers said he was better than ever. Meanwhile he was making his old man sweat. The Boss was dour as a teetotaling Scot, and the office force walked on tiptoe and girls suddenly burst out crying over their typewriters after they had been in to take dictation and state officials coming out of the inner room laid a handkerchief to the pallid brow with one hand and with the other groped across the long room under the painted eyes of all the other groped across the long room under the painted eyes of all the gilt-framed dead governors. Only Sadie suffered no change. She bit her syllables off the way a seamstress snaps off the thread, and looked at the Boss with her dark, unquenched glance, like the spirit of the future meditating on your hopeful plans. The only times the Boss got the black dog off his shoulder those days were at the games. I went with him a couple of times, and when Tom uncorked his stuff the Boss was a changed man. His eyes would bug and gleam, and he would slap me on the back and grab me like a bear. There might be a flicker of that left the next morning when he opened the Sunday sporting page, but it certainly didn’t last out the week. And Tom was not doing a thing to make up to the old man for the trouble he had caused. They had high words once or twice because Tom would slack off on his training and had had a row with Billie Martin, the coach. “What the hell’s it to you?” Tom demanded, standing there in the middle of the hotel room, his feet apart as though he were on a swaying deck and his head wreathed in the cigar smoke of the place. “What the hell’s it to you, or Martin either, so long as I can put ‘em across, and what the hell else do you want? I can put ‘em across and you can big-shot around about it. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”