All the king's men

Chapter Five

That was the end of my first journey into the enchantments of the past, my first job of historical research. It was, as I have indicated, not a success. But the second job was a sensational success. It was the "Case of the Upright Judge" and I had every reason to congratulate myself on a job well done. It was a perfect research job, marred in its technical perfection by only one thing: it meant something.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was hat Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be), "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."

The black Cadillac made its humming sound through the night and the tires sang on the slab and the black fields streaked with mist swept by. Sugar-Boy was hunched over the wheel, which looked too big for him, and the Boss sat straight up, up there in the front seat. I could see the black mass of his head against the tunnel of light down which we raced. Then I dozed off.

It was the stopping of the car that woke me up. I realized that we were back at the Stark place. I crawled out of the car. The Boss was already out, standing in the yard, just inside the gate in the starlight; Sugar-Boy was locking the car doors.

When I went into the yard, the Boss said, "Sugar-Boy is going to sleep on the couch downstairs, but there's a cot made up for you upstairs, second door on the left at the head of the stairs. Your better get some shut-eye, for tomorrow you start digging for what the Judge dropped."

"It will be a long dig," I said.

"Look here," he said, "if you don't want to do it you don't have to. I can always pay somebody else. Or do you want a raise?"

"No, I don't want a raise," I said.

"I am raising you a hundred a month, whether you want it or not."

"Give it to the church," I said. "If I wanted money, I could think of easier ways to make it than the way I make with you."

"So you work for me because you love me," the Boss said.

"I don't know why I work for you, but it's not because I love you. And not for money."

"No," he said, standing there in the dark, "you don't know why you work for me. But I know," he said, and laughed.

Sugar-Boy came into the yard, said good night, and went into the house.

"Why?" I asked.

"Boy," he said, "you work for me because I'm the way I am and you're the way you are. It is an arrangement founded on the nature of things."

"That's a hell of a fine explanation."

"It's not an explanation," he said, and laughed again. "There ain't any explanations. Not of anything. All you can do is point at the nature of things. If you are smart enough to see 'em."

"I'm not smart enough," I said.

"You're smart enough to dig up whatever it is on the Judge."

"There may not be anything."

"Nuts," he said. "Go to bed."

"Aren't you coming to bed?"

"No," he said, and I left him walking across the yard in the dark, with his head bowed a little, and his hands clasped behind him, walking casually as though he had come out to stroll through the park on Sunday afternoon. But it was not afternoon: it was 3:15 A.M.

I lay on the cot upstairs, but I didn't go right to sleep. I thought about Judge Irwin. About the way he had looked at me that very night from his tall old head, the way the yellow eyes had glittered and the lip curled over the strong old yellow teeth as he said, "I'm dining with your mother this week. Shall I tell her you still like your work?" But that didn't last, and I saw him sitting in the long room in the white house by the sea, leaning over a chessboard, facing the Scholarly Attorney, and he wasn't an old man, he was a young man, and the high aquiline florid face was brooding over the board. But that didn't last, and the face leaned toward me among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in the damp gray wintry dawn, and said, "You ought to have led that duck more, Jack. You got to lead a duck, son. But, son, I'll make a duck hunter out of you yet." And the face smiled. And I wanted to speak out and demand, "Is there anything, Judge? Will I find anything?" But the face only smile, and I went to sleep. Before I could say anything, I went to sleep in the middle of the smile.

Then it was another day, and I set out to dig up the dead cat, to excavate the maggot from the cheese, to locate the canker in the rose, to find the deceased fly among the raising in the rice pudding.

I found it.

But not all at once. You do not find it all at once if you are hunting for it. It is buried under the sad detritus of time, where, no doubt, it belongs. And you do not want to find it all at once, not if you are a student of history. If you find it all at once, there would be no opportunity to use your technique. But I had an opportunity to use my technique.

I took the first step the next afternoon while I sat in a beer parlor in the city, surrounded by a barricade of empty beer bottles. I lighted a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last one and asked myself the following question: "For what reason, barring Original Sin, is a man most likely to step over the line?"

I answered: "Ambition, love, fear, money."

I asked: "Is the Judge ambitious?"

I answered: No. An ambitious man is a man who wants other people to thing he is great. The Judge knows he is great and doesn't care what other people think."

I asked: "What about love?"

I was perfectly sure that the Judge had had his innings, but I was also perfectly sure that nobody around the Landing had anything on him in that respect. For if anybody in a small town has anything on anybody it isn't long before everybody knows it.

I asked: "Is the Judge a man to scare easy?"

I answered: "He does not scare easy."

That left money.

So I asked: "Does the Judge love money?"

"All the money the Judge wants is just enough money the make the Judge happy."

I asked: "Was there ever a time when the Judge didn't have enough money to make the Judge happy?" But naturally that wouldn't be chicken feed.

I lighted another cigarette and turned that question over in my mind. I did not know the answer. Some voice out of my childhood whispered, but I could not catch what it said. I had the vague sense, rising from a depth of time, and of myself, of being a child, of entering the room where the grown people were, of knowing that they had just that instant stopping talking because I had come into the room and was not supposed to know what they were talking about. Had I overheard what they had been talking about? I listened for the voice whispering out of my childhood, but that voice was a long way off. It could not give me the answer. So I rose from the table, and left the empty beer bottles and the cigarette butts, and went out into the street, which still steamed from the late afternoon shower like a Turkish bath, and where now the tires of automobiles hissed hotly through the film of moisture on the asphalt. If we were lucky there might be a breeze of the Gulf later. If we were lucky.

I got a taxi finally, and said, "Corner South Fifth and Saint-Etienne Street," and fell back on the leather to listen to the tires hiss through the wetness like something frying in a skillet. I was riding to the answer about the Judge. If the man who had the answer would tell me.

The man was the man who had been the Judge's close friend for many a year, his other self, his Damon, his Jonathan, his brother. That man was the man who had been the Scholarly Attorney. He would know.

I stood on the pavement, in front of the Mexican restaurant, where the juke box made the jellylike air palpitate, and paid my taxi and turned to look up at the third floor of the building which vibrated around the juke box. The signs were still up there, hung by wire from the little iron balcony, nailed to the wall, wooden boards painted different colors, some white, some red, some black, some green, with lettering in contrasted colors. A big sign hanging from the balcony said: _God is not mocked__. Another sign said: _Now is the Day of Salvation__.

_Yeah__, I said to myself, _he still lives here__. He lived there above a spick restaurant, and nigger children played naked in the next block among starving cats, and nigger women sat on the steps after the sun got low and fanned right slow with palm-leaf fans. I reached for a cigarette as I prepared to enter the doorway of the stairs, but found I had none. So I went into the restaurant, where the juke box was grinding to a halt.

To the old woman who stood behind the beer bar squatly like a leg and whose eyebrows were very thorny and white against the brown Mexican skin and black _rebozo__, I said, "_Cigarrillos?__"

"_Que tipo?__" she asked.

"Lucky," I said, and as she laid them before me, I pointed upward, and asked, "The old man, is he upstairs?" But she looked blank, so I said, "_Esta arriba el viejo?__" And felt pleased with myself for getting it off.

"_Quien sabe?__" she replied. "_Viene y va__."

So he came and went. Upon the Lord's business.

The a voice said in tolerable English, from the shadows at the end of the bar, "The old man has gone out."

"Thank you," I replied to the old man, a Mexican, who was propped there in a chair. I turned back to the old woman, and said, "Give me a beer," and pointed to the spigot.

While I drank the beer I looked up above the counter and saw another one of the signs, painted on a big slab of plywood, or something of the sort, hanging from a nail. The background of the sign was bright red, there were blue scrolls of flowers in relief in the upper corner, the lettering was in black, high-lighted in white. It said: _Repent ye; for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Matt., iii,2.__

I pointed to the sign. "_De el?__ I asked. "The old man's huh?"

"_Si, seٌor__," the old woman said. Then added irrelevantly, "_Es como un santito__."

"He may be a saint," I agreed, "but he is also nuts."

"Nutz?"

She said nothing to that, and I continued with the beer until the old Mexican at the end of the bar suddenly said, "Look, here comes the old one!"

Turning, I saw the black-clothed figure through the dingy glass of the door; then the door pushed open and he entered, older than I remember, the white patches of hair hanging damply from under the old Panama hat, the steel-rimmed spectacles dangerously loose on the nose and the pale eyes behind, the shoulders stooped and drawn together as though pulled by the obscene, disjunctive, careful weight of the belly, as though it were the heavy tray, or satchel, worn by some hawker on a street corner. The black coat did not button across the belly.

He stood there, blinking gravely to me, apparently not recognizing me, for he had come from the last sunshine into the dimness of the restaurant.

"Good evening, _seٌor__," the old Mexican said to the Scholarly Attorney.

"_Buenas tardes__," the woman said.

The Scholarly Attorney took off his Panama and turned to the woman, and bowed slightly, with a motion of the head which stirred suddenly in my mind the picture of the long room in the white house by the sea, the picture of a man, the same but different, younger, the hair not gray, in that room. "Good evening," he said to the woman, and then turning to the old Mexican, repeated, "Good evening, sir."

The old Mexican pointed at me, and said, "He waits."

At that the Scholarly Attorney first, I believe, really observed me. But he did not recognize me, blinking at me in the dimness. Certainly he had no reason to expect to find me there.

"Hello," I said, "don't you know me?"

"Yes," he said, and continued to peer at me. He offered me his hand, and I took it, It was clammy in my grasp.

"Let's get out of here," I said.

"Do you want the bread?" the old Mexican asked.

The Scholarly Attorney turned to him. "Yes, thank you. If it is convenient."

The Mexican rose, went to the end of the counter, and took a largish brown paper bag full of something, and handed it to the other.

"Thank you," the Scholarly Attorney said, "thank you very much, sir."

"_De nada__," the Mexican said, bowing.

"I wish you a good evening," the Scholarly Attorney said, and bowed to the man, then to the woman, with an inclination of the head which again twitched the old recollection in me of the room in the white house by the sea.

Then I followed him out of the restaurant, into the street. Across the street lay the little park of trampled brown grass, now glistening with moisture, where the bums sat on benches and the pigeons cooed softly like an easy conscience and defecated in delicate little lime-white pinches on the cement around the fountain. I looked at the pigeons, then at the bulged-open bag, which, I observed, was full of bread crusts. "Are you going to feed the pigeons?" I asked.

"No, it is for George," he said, moving toward the doorway that led above.

"You keeping a dog?"

"No," he said, and led the way into the vestibule, and up the wooden stairs.

"What is George, then? A parrot?"

"No," he said, wheezily, for the steps were steep, "George is an unfortunate."

That meant, I remembered, a bum. An unfortunate is a bum who is fortunate enough to get his foot inside a softy's door and stay there. If he gets a good berth he is promoted from bum to unfortunate. The Scholarly Attorney had, on several occasions before, taken in unfortunates. One unfortunate had popped the organist down at the mission where the Scholarly Attorney operated. Another unfortunate had lifted his watch and Phi Beta Kappa key.

So George was another unfortunate. I looked at the bread, and said, "Well, he must be pretty unfortunate if that's what he's got to eat.

"He eats some of it," the Scholarly Attorney said, "but that is almost accidental. He uses it in his work. But some of it slips down, I am sure, and that is why he is never hungry. Except for sweets," he added.

"How in God's name does he use bread crusts in his work and the bread crusts slip down his throat?"

"Do not take the name of the Lord in vain," he said. And added, "George's work, it's very clever. And artistic. You will see."

I saw. We got to the top of the second flight, turned in the narrow hall under cracked skylight, and entered a door. There was what I took to be George, in one corner of the big, sparsely furnished room, sitting tailor-fashion on a piece of old blanket, with a couple of big mixing bowls in front of him., and a big piece of plywood about two feet by four lying on the floor by him.

George looked up when we came in and said, "I ain't got any more bread."

"Here it is," the Scholarly Attorney said, and took the brown bag to him.

George emptied the crusts into one of the bowls, then stuck a piece into his mouth and began to chew, soberly and purposively. He was a fair-sized, muscular man, with a hell of a strong-looking neck, and the tendons in his neck worked and pulled slickly while he chewed. He had yellow hair, almost gone, and a smooth, flat face with blue eyes. While he chewed he just looked straight ahead at a spot cross the room.

"What does he do that for?" I asked.

"He's making an angel."

"Well," I said. And just then George leaned forward over one of the bowls and let the thoroughly masticated bread drop from his mouth into the bowl. The he put another crust into his mouth.

"There is one he has finished," the Scholarly Attorney said, and pointed at another corner of the room, where another piece of plywood was propped up. I went to examine it. At one end, the figure of an angel, with wings and flowing drapery, had been executed in bas-relief in what looked like putty. "That one is just drying," the Scholarly Attorney said. "When it gets good and dry, he'll color it. Then he'll shellac it. Then the board will be painted and a motto put on it."

"Very pretty," I said.

"He makes statues of angels, too. See," and he went to a kitchen safe, and opened it, to expose a shelf of dishes and pots and another with an array of gaudy angels.

I examined the angels. While I did so, the Scholarly Attorney took a can of soup, a loaf of bread, and some soft butter out of the safe, put them on the table in the center of the room, and lighted one of the burners on the two-burner plate in the corner. "Will you join me in my supper?" he asked.

"No, thanks," I said, and continued to stare at the angels.

"He sometimes sells them on the street," he said, pouring out his soup into a stewpan, "but he can't bear to sell the best ones."

"Are these the best ones?" I asked.

"Yes," the Scholarly Attorney replied. And added, "They are pretty good, aren't they?"

I said, "Yes," for there wasn't anything else to say. Then' looking at the artist, asked, "Doesn't he make anything but angels? What about Kewpie dolls and bulldogs?"

"He makes angels. Because of what happened."

"What happened?"

"His wife," the Scholarly Attorney said, stirring the soup in the stewpan. "On account of her he makes angels. They were in a circus, you know."

"No, I didn't know."

"Yes, they were what you call aerialists. She did the angel act. She had large white wings, George said."

"White wings," George said through the bread, but it was a sound like _wite whungs__, and he fluttered his big hands like wings, and smiled.

"She fell down a long way with white wings which fluttered as though she were flying," the Scholarly Attorney continued, explaining patiently.

And one day the rope broke," I affirmed.

"Something went wrong with the apparatus. It affected George very deeply."

"How about the way it affected her?"

The old man ignored my wit, and said, "He got so he could not perform his act."

"What was his act?"

"He was the man who got hanged."

"Oh," I said, and looked at George. That accounted for the big neck, no doubt. Then, "Did the apparatus go wrong with him and choke him or something?"

"No," the Scholarly Attorney said, "the whole matter simply grew distasteful to him."

"Distasteful?" I said.

"Yes, distasteful. Matter came to such a pass that he could not perform happily in his chosen profession. He dreamed of falling every time he went to sleep. And he would wet his bed like a child."

"Falling, falling," George said through the bread, with a sound like _fawing, fawing__, but still smiled brightly in the midst of the chewing.

"One day when he got up on his platform with the loop around his neck, he could not jump. In fact, he could not move at all. He sank down on the platform and crouched there weeping. They had to remove him bodily, and bring him down," the Scholarly Attorney said. "Then for some time he was completely paralyzed."

"It sound," I said, "like that hanging act must have got pretty distasteful to him. As you so quaintly put it."

"He was completely paralyzed," he repeated, ignoring my wit. "Through no physical cause–if–" he pause–"anything ever comes to pass from a physical cause. For the physical world, though it exists and it existence cannot be denied without blasphemy, is never cause, it is only result, only symptom, it is the clay under the thumb of the potter and we–" He stopped, the gleam which has started up fitfully in the pale eyes flickered out, the hands which lifted to gesticulate sank. He leaned above the gas plate and stirred the soup. He resumed, "The trouble was here," and he laid a finger to his own forehead. "It was his spirit. Spirit is always cause–I tell you–" He stopped, shook his head, and peered at me before he said sadly, "But you do not understand."

"I reckon not," I agreed "He recovered from the paralysis," he said. "But George is not exactly a well man. He cannot bear high places. He will not look out the window. He covers his eyes with his hands when I lead him downstairs to go on the street to sell his artistic work. So I take him down only rarely now. He will not sit on a chair or sleep in a bed. He must always be on the floor. He does not like to stand. His legs simply collapse and he begins to cry. It is fortunate he has always had his artistic bent. It helps him to take his mind off thing. And he prays a good deal. I taught him to pray. That helps. I get up and pray and he says the prayers after me. When he wakes at night with the dreams and cannot sleep."

"Does he still wet the bed?" I asked.

"Sometimes," the Scholarly Attorney replied gravely.

I looked at George. He was weeping silently, the tears running down his smooth, flat cheeks, but his jawbone was not missing a beat on the bread. "Look at him," I said.

The Scholarly Attorney looked at him. "Stupid, stupid," he muttered fretfully, shaking his head, so that an additional flake or two of dandruff floated down to the black serge collar, "stupid of me to be talking that way with him listening. Stupid–I'm an old man and I forget–" and clucking and muttering and shaking his head in that same fretful fashion he poured some soup into a bowl, took a spoon, and went to George. "Look, look," he said, leaning, with a spoon of soup thrust toward George's face, "good, it's good soup–soup–take some soup."

But the tears continued to flow out of George's eyes, and he didn't open his mouth. But the jaws weren't working on the bread now. They were just shut tight.

The old man set the bowl on the floor, and with one hand still holding the spoon to George's mouth, with the other he patted George on the back soothingly, all the while clucking with that distraught, henlike, maternal little noise. All of a sudden he looked up at me, the spectacles hanging over, and said, peevishly like a mother, "I just don't know what to do–he just won't take soup–he won't eat much of anything but candy–chocolate candy–I just don't know–" His voice trailed off.

"Maybe you spoil him," I said.

He put the spoon back into the bowl, which was on the floor beside him, then began to fumble in his pockets. He fished out, finally, a bar of chocolate, somewhat wilted form the heat, and began to peel back the sticky tinfoil. The last tears were running down George's cheeks, while he watched the process, with his mouth open in damp and happy expectation. But he did not grab with his chubby little mitts.

Then the old man broke off a piece of chocolate and placed it between the expectant lips, and peered into George's face while taste buds, no doubt, glowed incandescent in the inner dark and gland with a tired, sweet, happy sigh released their juices, and George's face took on an expression of slow, deep, inward, germinal bliss, like that of a saint.

_Well__, I almost said to the old man, _you said the physical was never cause, but a chocolate bar is physical and look what it's causing, for to look at that face you might think it was a bite of Jesus and not a slug of Hershey's had done. And how you going to tell the difference, huh?__

But I didn't say it, for I was looking there at the old man, who was leaning over with his spectacles hanging and his coat hanging and his belly hanging from the leaning, and who was holding out another morsel of chocolate and who was clucking soft, and whose own face was happy, for that was the word for what his face was, and as I looked at him I suddenly saw the man in the long white room by the sea, the same man but a different man, and the rain of the squall driving in off the sea in the early dark lashed the windowpanes but it was a happy sound and safe because the fire danced on the hearth and on the windowpanes where the rain ran down to thread the night-black glass with silver, to mix the silver with the flames caught there, too, and the man leaned and held out something and said, "Here's what Daddy brought tonight, but just one bite now–" and the man broke off a piece and held it out–"just one bite, for your supper's near ready now–but after supper–"

I looked at the old man over there and my guts went warm and a big lump seemed to dissolve in my chest–as though I had carried a big lump around in there for so long I had got used to it and didn't realized it had been there until suddenly it was gone and the breath came easy. "Father," I said, "Father–"

The old man looked up at me and said querulously, "What–what did you say?"

_Oh, father, father!__ but he wasn't in the long white room by the sea any more and never would be, for he had walked out of it–why? why? because he wasn't enough of a man to run his own house, because he was a fool, because–and he had walked a long way and up the steps to this room where an old man leaned with the chocolate in his hand and happiness–if that was what it was–momentarily on his face. Only it wasn't on his face now. There was just the faint peevishness of an old person who hasn't quite understood the faint peevishness of an old person who hasn't quite understood something said.

But I had come a long way, too, from that long white room by the sea, I had got up off that hearthrug before the fire, where I had sat with my tin circus wagon and my colored crayons and paper, listening to the squall-driven rain on the glass, and where Daddy had leaned to say, "Here's what Daddy brought tonight," and I had come to this room where Jack Burden leaned against the wall with a cigarette in his mouth. Nobody was leaning over him to give him chocolate.

So, looking into the old man's face, answering his querulous question, I said, "Oh, nothing." For that was what it was. Whatever it had been was nothing now. For whatever was is not now, and whatever is will not be, and the foam that looks so sun-bright when the wind is kicking up the breakers lies streaked on the hard sand after the tide is out and looks like scum off the dishwater.

But there was something: scum left on the hard sand. So I said, "Yeah, there was something."

"What?"

"Tell me about Judge Irwin," I said.

He straightened up to face me, blinking palely behind the spectacles as he had blinked at me upon coming from light into the darkness of the Mexican restaurant below.

"Judge Irwin," I repeated, "you know–your old bosom pal."

"That was another time," he croaked, staring at me, holding the broken chocolate in his hand.

"Sure, it was," I said, and looking at him now, thought, _It sure-God was__. And said, "Sure, but you remember."

"That time is dead," he said.

"Yeah, but you aren't."

"The sinful man I was who reached for vanity and corruption is dead. If I sin now it is in weakness and not in will. I have put away foulness."

"Listen," I said, "it's just a simple question. Just one question."

"I have put it away, that time," he said, and made a pushing gesture with his hands.

"Just one question," I insisted.

He looked at me without speaking.

"Listen," I said, "was Irwin ever broke, did he ever really need money? Bad?

He stared at me from a long way off, across the distance, beyond the bowl of soup on the floor, over the chocolate in his hand, through time. Then he demanded, "Why–why do you want to know?"

"To tell the truth," I burst out without meaning to, "I don't. But somebody does, and that somebody pays me the first of the month. It is Governor Stark."

"Foulness," he said, staring across whatever it was between us, "foulness."

"Was Irwin ever broke?" I said.

"Foulness," he affirmed.

"Listen," I said, "I don't reckon Governor Stark–if that is what all this foulness stuff is about–takes it to the Lord in prayer, but did you ever stop to think what a mess your fine, God-damned, plug-hatted, church-going, Horace-quoting friends like Stanton and Irwin left this state in? At least the Boss does something, but they–they sat on their asses–they–"

"All foulness!" the old man uttered, and swept his right arm wildly before him, the hand clutching the chocolate hard enough to squash it. A part of the chocolate fell to the floor. Baby got it.

"If you meant to imply," I said, "that politics, including that of erstwhile pals, I not exactly like Easter Week in a nunnery, you are right. But I will beat you to the metaphysical draw this time. Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection on nonbeing. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticism of Thing in its thingness. Then where do you get anything to say? Then where do you get off?"

"Foolishness, foolishness," he said, "foolishness and foulness!"

"I guess you are right," I said. "It is foolishness. But it is no more foolish than all that kind of talk. Always words."

"You speak foulness."

"No, just words," I said, "and all words are alike."

"God is not mocked," he said, and I saw that his head was quivering on his neck.

I stepped quickly toward him, stopping just in front of him. "Was Irwin ever broke?" I demanded.

He seemed about to say something, his lips opening. Then they closed.

"Was he?" I demanded.

"I will not touch the world of foulness again," he said, his pale eyes looking steadily upward into my face, "that my hand shall come away with the stink on my fingers."

I felt like grabbing him and shaking him until his teeth rattled. I felt like shaking it out of him. But you can't grab an old man and do that. I had gone at the thing wrong. I ought to have led up to it and tried to trick him. I ought to have wheedled him. But I always got so keyed up and on edge when I got around him that I couldn't think of anything but getting away from him. And then when I had left I always felt worse until I got him out of my mind. I had muffed it.

That was all I got. As I was going out, I looked back to see Baby, who had finished the piece of chocolate dropped by the old man, meditatively moving his hand about on the floor to locate any stray crumbs. Then the old man leaned slowly and heavily toward him, again.

Going down the stairs, I decided that even id I had tried to wheedle the old man I would probably have learned nothing. It wasn't that I had gone at it wrong. It wasn't that I burst out about Governor Stark. What did he know or care about Governor Stark? It was that I had asked him about the world of the past, which he had walked away from. That world and all the world was foulness, he had said, and he was not going to touch it. He was not going to talk about it, and I couldn't have made him.

But I got one thing. I was sure that he had known something. Which meant that there was something to know. Well, I would know. Sooner or later. So I left the Scholarly Attorney and the world of the past and returned to the world of the present.

Which was: An oblong field where white lines mathematically gridded the turf which was arsenical green under the light from the great batteries of floodlamps fixed high on the parapet of the massive arena. Above the field the swollen palpitating tangle of light frayed and thinned out into hot darkness, but the thirty thousand pair of eyes hanging on the inner slopes of the arena did not look up into the dark but stared down into the pit of light, where men in red silky-glittering shorts and gold helmets and spilled and tumbled on the bright arsenical-green turf like spilled dolls, and a whistle sliced chillingly through the thick air like that scimitar through a sofa cushion.

Which was: The band blaring, the roaring like the sea, the screams like agony, the silence, then one woman-scream, silver and soprano, spangling the silence like the cry of a lost soul, and the roar again so that the hot air seemed to heave. For out of the shock and tangle and glitter on the green a red fragment had exploded outward flung off from the mass tangentially to spin across the green, turn and wheel and race, yet slow in the out-of-timeness of the moment, under the awful responsibility of the roar.

Which was: A man pounding me on the back and screaming–a man with a heavy face and coarse dark hair hanging over his forehead–screaming, "That's my boy! That's Tom–Tom–Tom! That's him–and he's won–they won't have time for a touchdown now–he's won–his first varsity game and it's Tom won–it's my boy!" And the man pounded me on the back and grappled me to him with both arms, powerful arms, and hugged me like his brother, his true love, his son, while tears came into his eyes and tears and sweat ran down the heavy cheeks, and he screamed, "He's my boy–and there's not any like him–he'll be All American–boy, did you see him–fast–fast–he's a fast son-of-a-bitch! Ain't he, ain't he?"

"Yes," I said, and it was true.

He was fast and he was a son-of-a-bitch. At least, if he wasn't a son-of-a-bitch yet, he had shown some very convincing talent in that line. You couldn't much blame Lucy for wanting to stop the football–his name always on the sporting page–the pictures–the Freshman Whiz–the Sophomore Thunderbolt–the cheers–the big fat hands always slapping his shoulder–Tiny Duffy's hand on his shoulder–yeah, Boss, he's a chip off of the old block–the roadhouses–the thin-legged, tight-breasted little girls squealing, Oh Tom, oh, Tom–the bottles and the tourist cabins–the sea-roar of the crowd and always the single woman-scream spangling the sudden silence like damnation.

But Lucy did not have a chance. For he was going to be All American. All American quarterback on anybody's team. If bottle and bed didn't manage to slow down too soon something inside that one hundred and eighty pounds of split-second, hair-trigger, Swiss-watch beautiful mechanism which was Tom Stark, the Boss's boy, the Sophomore Thunderbolt, Daddy's Darling, who stood that night in the middle of a hotel room, with apiece of court plaster across his nose and a cocky grin on his fine, clean, boyish face–for it was fine and clean and boyish–while all the hands of Papa's pals pawed at him and beat his shoulders, while Tiny Duffy slapped him on the shoulder, and Sadie Burke, who sat a little outside the general excitement on her own private fog of cigarette smoke and whisky fumes, a not entirely unambiguous expression on her riddled, handsome face, said, "Yeah, Tom, somebody was telling me you played a football game tonight."

But her irony was not the sort of thing Tom Stark would hear or understand, for he stood there in the midst of his own gleaming golden private fog of just being Tom Stark, who had played in a football game.

Until the Boss said, "Now you go on and get to bed, Son. Get your sleep, Son. Get ready to pour it on 'em next Saturday." And he laid his arm across the boy's shoulder, and said, "We're all mighty proud of you, boy."

And I said to myself: _If he gets his eyes starry with tears again I am going to puke.__

"Go on to bed, Son," the Boss said.

And Tom Stark said, "Sure," almost out of the side of his mouth, and went out the door.

And I stood there in what was the present.

But there was the past. There was the question. There was the dead kitty buried in the ash heap.

So I stood, later, in the embrasure of as big bay window and looked out as the last light ceased to gleam from the metallic leaves of magnolias and the creamy wash of the sea beyond dulled in the thickened dusk. Behind me was a room not very different from that other long white room giving on the sea–where now, at this moment perhaps, my mother would be lifting to the taffy-haired Young Executive that face which was still like a damned expensive present and which he had damned well better admire. But in the room behind me, scarcely lighted by the stub of a candle on the mounted shelf, the furniture was shrouded in white cloth, and the grandfather's clock in the corner was as severely mute as grandfather. But I knew that when I turned around there would also be, in the midst of the sepulchral sheetings and the out-of-time silence, a woman kneeling before the cols blackness of the wide fireplace to put pine cones and bits of light-wood beneath the logs there. She had said, "No, let me do it. It's my house, you know, and I ought to light the fire when I come back like this. You know, a ritual. I went to. Adam always lets me do it. When we come back."

For the woman was Anne Stanton, and this was the house of Governor Stanton, whose face, marmoreal and unperturbed and high, above black square beard and black frock coat, gazed down in the candlelight from the massy gold frame above the fireplace, where his daughter crouched, as though at his feet, rasping a match to light a fire there. Well, I had been in this room when the Governor had not been the marmoreal brow in the massy gold frame but a tall man sitting with his feet on the hearthrug with a little girl, a child, on a hassock at his feet, leaning her head against his knee and gazing into the fire while his large man hand toyed deliciously with the loose, silken hair. But I was here now because Anne Stanton, no longer a little girl, had said, "Come on out to the Landing, we're just going back for Saturday night and Sunday, just to build a fire and eat something out of a can and sleep under the roof again. It's all the time Adam can spare. And he can't spare that much often now." So I had come, carrying my question.

I heard the match rasp, and turned from the sea, which was dark now. The flame had caught the fat of the light-wood and was leaping up and spewing little stars like Christmas sparklers, and the light danced warmly on Anne Stanton's leaning face and then on her throat and cheek as, still crouching, she looked up at me when I approached the hearth. Her eyes were glittering like the eyes of a child when you give a nice surprise, and she laughed in a sudden throaty, tingling way. It is a way a woman laughs for happiness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite or at a joke. A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. It does not matter what kind of a face she has got either. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman's name and address hasn't got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, that laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shoes and with hands on their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that.

So Anne looked up at me with the glittering eyes and laughed that way while the firelight glowed on her cheek. Then I laughed, too, looking down at her. She reached up her hand to me, and I took it and helped her as she rose easy and supple–God, how I hate a woman who scrambles up off things–and I still held her hand as she swayed at the instant of reaching her full height. She was very close to me, with the laughter still on her face–and echoing somehow deep inside me–and I was holding her hand, as I had held her up to stand swaying for an instant in front of me before I could put my arm around her and feel her waist surrender supplely to the cup of my hand. It had been that way. So now I must have leaned toward her and for an instant the trace of the laughter was still on her face, and her head dropped a little back the way a girl's head does when she expects you to put your arm around her and doesn't care if you do.

But all at once the laughter was gone. It was as though someone had pulled a shade in front of her face. I felt as you do when you pass down a dark street and look up to see a lighted window and in the bright room people talking and singing and laughing with the firelight splashing and undulating over them and the sound of the music drifts out to the street while you watch; and then a hand, you will never know whose hand, pulls down the shade. And there you are, outside.

And there I was, outside.

Maybe I should have done it anyway, put my arm around her. But I didn't. She had looked up at me and had laughed that way. But not for me. Because she was happy to be there again in the room which held the past time–of which I had been a part, indeed, but was no longer a part–and to be kneeling on the hearth with the new heat of the fire laid on her face like a hand.

It had not been meant for me. So I dropped her hand which I had been holding and stepped back and asked, "Was Judge Irwin ever broke–bad broke?"

I asked quick and sharp, for if you ask something quick and sharp out of a clear sky you may get an answer you never would get otherwise. If the person you ask has forgotten the thing, the quick, sharp question may spear it up from the deep mud, and if the person has not forgotten but does not want to tell you, the quick, sharp question may surprise the answer out of him before he thinks.

But it didn't work. Either she didn't know or she wasn't to be surprised out of herself. I ought to have guessed that a person like her–a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us–I ought to have guessed that that kind of a person would not be surprised into answering a question she didn't want to answer. Even if she did know the answer. But maybe she didn't.

But she was surprised a little. "What?" she asked.

So I said it again.

She turned her back to me and went to sit on the couch, to light a cigarette and face me again, looking levelly at me. "Why do you want to know?" she asked.

I looked right back at her and said, "I don't want to know. It is a pal wants to know. He is my best pal. He hands it to me on the first of the month."

"Oh, Jack–" she cried, and flung her newly lit cigarette across to the hearth, and stood up from the couch. "Oh, why do you have to spoil everything! We had that time back here. But you want to spoil it. We–"

"We?" I said.

"–had something then and you want to spoil it, you want to help him spoil it–that man–he–"

"We?" I said again.

"–want to do something bad–"

"We," I said, "if we had such a damned fine time why was it you turned me down?"

"That hasn't anything to do with it. What I mean is–"

"What you mean is that is was fine, beautiful time back then, but I mean that if it was such a God-damned fine, beautiful time, why did it turn into this time which is not so damned fine and beautiful if there wasn't something in that time which wasn't fine and beautiful? Answer that one."

"Hush," she said, "hush, Jack!"

"Yeah, answer me that one. For you certainly aren't going to say this time is fine and beautiful. This time came out of that time, and now you're near thirty-five years old and you creep out here as a special treat to yourself and sit in the middle of a lot of sheet-wrapped, dust-catching furniture in a house with the electricity cut off, and Adam–he's got a hell of a life, cutting on people all day till he can's stand up, and him tied up in knots himself inside and–"

"Leave Adam out of it, leave him out–" she said, and thrust her hands, palms out as though to press me off, but I wasn't in ten feet of her–"he does something anyway–something–"

"–and Irwin down there playing with his toys, and my mother up there with that Theodore, and me–"

"Yes, you," she said, "you."

"All right," I said, "me."

"Yes, you. With that man."

"That man, that man," I mimicked, "that's what all the people round here call him, what that Patton calls him, all those people who got pushed out of the trough. Well, he does something. He does as much as Adam. More. He's going to build a medical center will take care of this state. He's–"

"I know," she said, wearily, not looking at me now, and sank down on the couch, which was covered by a sheet.

"You know, but you take the same snobbish attitude all the rest take. You're like the rest."

"All right," she said, still not looking at me. "I'm snobbish, I'm so snobbish I had lunch with him last week."

Well, if grandfather's clock in the corner hadn't been stopped already, that would have stopped it. It stopped me. I heard the flame hum on the logs, gnawing in. Then the hum stopped and there wasn't anything.

Then I said, "For Christ's sake," And the absorbent silence sucked up the words like blotting paper.

"All right," she said, "for Christ's sake."

"My, my," I said, "but the picture of the daughter of Governor Stanton at lunch with Governor Stark would certainly throw the society editor of the _Chronicle__ into a tizzy. Your frock, my dear–what frock did you wear? And flowers? Did you drink champagne cocktails? Did–"

"I drank a Coca Cola, and I ate a cheese sandwich. In the cafeteria in the basement of the Capitol."

"Pardon my curiosity, but–"

"–but you want to know how I got there. I'll tell you. I went to see Governor Stark about getting state money for the Children's Home. And I–"

"Does Adam know?" I asked.

"–and I'm going to get it, too. I'm to prepare a detailed report and–"

"Does Adam know?"

"It doesn't matter whether Adam knows or not–and I'm to take the report back to–"

"I can imagine what Adam would say," I remarked grimly.

"I guess I can manage my own affairs," she said with some heat.

"Gee," I said, and noticed that the blood had mounted a little in her cheeks, "I thought you and Adam were always just like that." And I held my right hand up with forefinger and the next one side by side.

"We are," she said, "but I don't care what–"

"–and you don't care what _he–__" and I jerked a thumb toward the high, unperturbed, marmoreal face which gazed from the massy gold frame in the shadow–"would say about it either, huh?

"Oh, Jack–" and she rose from the couch, almost fretful in her motion, which wasn't like her–"what makes you talk like that? Can't you see? I'm just getting the money for the Home. It's a piece of business. Just business." She jerked her chin up with a look that was supposed to settle the matter, but succeeded in unsettling me.

"Listen," I said, and felt myself getting hot under the collar, "business or not, it's worth your reputation to be caught running round with–"

"Running round, running round!" she exclaimed. "Don't be a fool. I had lunch with him. On business."

"Business or not, it's worth your reputation, and–"

"Reputation," she said. "I'm old enough to take care of my reputation. You just told me I was nearly senile."

"I said you were nearly thirty-five," I said, factually.

"Oh, Jack," she said, "I am, and I haven't done anything. I don't do anything. Not anything worth anything." She wavered there and with a hint of distraction lifted her hands to touch her hair. "Not anything. I don't want to play bridge all the time. And what little I do–that Home, the playground thing–"

"There's always the Junior League," I said. But she ignored it.

"–that's not enough. Why didn't I do something–study something? Be a doctor, a nurse. I could have been Adam's assistant. I could have studied landscape gardening. I could have–"

"You could make lampshades," I said.

"I could have done something–something–"

"You could have got married," I said. "You could have married me."

"Oh, I don't mean just getting married, I mean–"

"You don't know what you mean," I said.

"Oh, Jack," she said, and reached out and took my hand and hung on to it, "maybe I don't. I don't know what's wrong with me tonight. When I come out here sometimes–I'm happy when I come, I truly am, but them–"

She didn't say any more about it. By this time she had sunk her head to my chest, and I had given her a few comforting pats on the shoulder, and she had said in a muffled sort of way that I had to be her friend, and I had said, "Sure," and had caught some good whiffs of the way her hair smelled. It smelled just the way it always had, a good, clean, well-washed, little-girl-ready-for-a-party smell. But she wasn't a little girl and this wasn't a party. It definitely was not a party. With pink ice cream and devil's-food cake and horns to blow and we all played clap-in and clap-out and the game in which you sang about King William being King James's son and down on this carpet you must kneel sure as the grass grows in the field and choose the one you love best.

She stood there for a minute or two with her head on my chest, and you could have seen daylight between her and her friend, if there had been any daylight, while her friend gave her the impersonal and therapeutic pats on the shoulder. Then she walked away from him and stood by the hearth, looking down at the fire, which was doing fine now and making the room look what is called real homey.

Then the front door swung open and the wind off the cold sea whipped into the room like a great dog shaking itself and the fire leaped. It was Adam Stanton coming into that homey atmosphere. He had an armful of packages, for he had been down into the Landing to get our provisions.

"Hello," he said over the packages, and smiled out of that wide, thin, firm mouth which in repose looked like a clean, well-healed surgical wound but which when he smiled–if he smiled–surprised you and made you feel warm.

"Look here," I said quick, "way back yonder, any time, was Judge Irwin ever broke? Bad broke?"

"Why, no–I don't know–" he began, his face shading.

Anne swung around to look at him, and then sharply at me. I thought for an instant she was about to say something. But she didn't.

"Why, yes!" Adam said, standing there, still hugging the parcels. I had speared it up from the deep mud.

"Why, yes," he repeated, with the pleased bright look on his face which people get when they dredge up any lost thing from the past, "yes, let me see–I was just a kid–about 1913 or 1914–I remember father saying something about it to Uncle John or somebody, before he remembered I was in the room–then the Judge was here and he and father–I thought they were having a row, their voices got so high–they were talking about money."

"Thanks," I said.

"Welcome," he said, with a slightly puzzled smile on his face, and moved to the couch to let the parcels cascade to the soft softness.

"Well," Anne said, looking at me, "you might at least have the grace to tell him why you asked the question."

"Sure," I said. And I turned to Adam: "I wanted to find out for Governor Stark."

"Politics," he said, and the jaw closed like a trap.

"Yes, politics," Anne said, smiling a little sourly.

"Well, thank God, I don't have to mess with 'em," Adam said. "Nowadays, anyway." But he said it almost lightly. Which surprised me. Then added, "What the hell if Stark knows about the Judge being broke. It was more than twenty years ago. And there's no la against being broke. What the hell."

"Yeah, what the hell," Anne said, and looking at me, gave that not unsour smile.

"And what the hell are you doing?" Adam demanded laughing, and grabbed her by the arm and shook her. "Standing there when the grub needs cooking. Get the lead out, Sour-puss, and get going!" He shoved her toward the couch, where the packages were heaped.

She bent to scoop up a lot of packages, and he whacked her across the backsides and said, "Get going!" And laughed. And she laughed, too, with pleasure, and everything was forgotten, for it wasn't often that Adam opened up and laughed a lot, and then he could be free and gay, and you knew you would have a wonderful time.

We had a wonderful time. While Anne cooked, and I fixed drinks and set the table, Adam snatched the sheet off the piano (they kept the thing in tune out there and it wasn't a bad one even yet) and beat hell out of it till the house bulged and rocked. He even took three good highballs before dinner instead of one. Then we ate, and he beat on the piano some more, playing stuff like "Roses Are Blooming in Picardy" and "Three O'Clock in the Morning," while Anne and I danced and cavorted, or he would mush it up and Anne would hum in my ear and we would sway sweet and slow like young poplars in the slightest breeze. Then he jump up from the piano bench and whistling "Beautiful Lady," snatched her out of my arms and swung her wide in a barrel-house waltz while she leaned back on his arm with her head back and eyes closed for a swoon, and with right arm outstretched, held delicately the hem of her fluttering skirt.

But Adam was a good dancer, even clowning. It was because he was a natural, for he ever got any practice any more. And never had taken his share. Not of anything except work. And he could have had them crawling to him and asking for it. And once in about five years he would break out in a kind of wild, free, exuberant gaiety like a levee break streaming out to snatch the trees and brush up by the roots, and you would be the trees and brush. You and everybody around him. His eyes would gleam wild and he would gesture wide with an excess of energy bursting from deep inside. You would think of a great turbine or dynamo making a million revs a minute and boiling out the power and about to jump loose from its moorings. When he gestured with those strong, long, supple white hands, it was a mixture of Svengali and an atom-busting machine. You expected to see blue sparks. When he got like that they wouldn't have had the strength to crawl to him and ask for it. They would just be ready to fall back and roll over where they were. Only it didn't do them any good.

But that didn't come often. And didn't last long. The cold would settle down and the lid would go on right quick.

Adam didn't have the power on that night. He was just ready to smile and laugh and joke and beat the piano and swing his sister in the barrel-house waltz while the fire leaped on the big hearth and the high face gazed down from the massy gold frame and the wind moved in off the sea and in the dark outside clashed the magnolia leaves.

Not that in that room, with the fire crackling and the music, we heard the tiny clashing of the magnolia leaves the wind made. I heard it later, in bed upstairs in the dark, through the open window, the tiny dry clashing of the leaves, and thought, _Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time back, we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far away? __I turned that notion around in my head and tried to make a nice tidy little metaphor out of it, but the metaphor wouldn't work out, for you have to be the cold, dead, wandering moon, and you have to have been the sum, too, way back, and how the hell can you be both the sun and the moon? It was not consistent. It was not tidy. _To hell with it__, I though, listening to the leaves.

Then thought, _Well, anyway, I know now Irwin was broke__.

I had dug that much up out of the past, and tomorrow I would leave Burden's Landing and the past, and go back to the present. So I went back to the present.

Which was: Tiny Duffy sitting in a great soft leather chair with his great soft hams flowing over the leather, and his great soft belly flowing over his great soft hams, and a long cigarette holder with a burning cigarette stuck jauntily out from one side of his face (the cigarette holder was a recent innovation, imitated from a gentleman who was the most prominent member of the political party to which Tiny Duffy gave his allegiance) and his great soft face flowing down over his collar, an a diamond ring on his finger, big as a walnut–for all of that was Tiny Duffy, who was not credible but true and who had obviously consulted the cartoons by _Harper's Weekly__ in the files of the 'nineties to discover exactly what the successful politician should be, do, and wear.

Which was: Tiny Duffy saying, "Jesus, and the Boss gonna put six million bucks in a hospital–six million bucks." And lying back in the chair, eyes dreamily on the coffered ceiling, head wreathed in the baby-blue smoke from the cigarette, murmuring dreamily, "Six million bucks."

And Sadie Burke saying, "Yeah, six million bucks, and he ain't planning for you to get your fingers on a penny of it."

"I could fix it up for him in the Fourth District. MacMurfee still got it sewed up down there. Him and Gummy Larson. But throw that hospital contract to Gummy and–"

"And Gummy would sell out MacMurfee. Is that it?"

"Well, now–I wouldn't put it that way. Gummy'd sort of talk reason into MacMurfee, you might say."

"And would sort of slip you a slice. Is that it, Tiny?"

"I ain't talking about me. I'm talking about Gummy. He'd handle MacMurfee for the Boss."

"The Boss don't need anybody to handle MacMurfee. He'll handle MacMurfee when the time comes and it will be permanent. For God's sake, Tiny, you known the Boss as long as you have and you still don't know him. Don't you know he'd rather bust a man than buy him? Wouldn't he, Jack?"

"How do I know?" I said. But I did know.

At least, I knew that the Boss was out to bust a man named Judge Irwin. And I was elected to do the digging.

So I went back to the digging.

But the next day, before I got back at the digging, a call came from Anne Stanton, "Smarty," she said, smarty, you thought you were so smart!"

I heard he laughing, way off somewhere at the end of the line, but the tingling came over the wire, and I thought of her face laughing.

"Yes, smarty! you found from Adam how Judge Irwin was broke a long time ago, but I've found out something too!"

"Yeah?" I said.

"Yeah, smarty! I went to see old Cousin Mathilde, who knows everything about everybody for a hundred years back. I just got to talking about Judge Irwin and she began to talk. You just mention something and it is like putting a nickel in a music box. Yes, Judge Irwin was broke, or near it, then, but–and the joke's on you, Jackie-boy, it's on you, smarty-boy! And on your Boss!" And there was the laughter again, coming from far away, coming out of the little black tube in my hand.

"Yeah?" I said.

"Then he got married!" she said.

"Who?" I asked.

"Who are we talking about, smarty? Judge Irwin got married."

"Sure, he was married. Everybody knew he was married, but what the hell has that–"

"He married money. Cousin Mathilde says so, and she knows everything. He was broke but he married money. Now, smarty, put that on your pipe and smoke it!"

"Thanks," I said. But before it was out of my mouth, I heard a clicking sound and she had hung up.

I lighted a cigarette and leaned back in the swivel chair, and swung my feet up to the desk. Sure, everybody knew, or had known, that Judge Irwin was married. Judge Irwin, in fact, had been married twice. The first woman, the woman he was married to when I was a little boy, had been thrown from a horse and couldn't do more than lie up in bed and stare at the ceiling or, on her good days, out the window. But she had died when I was just a kid, and I scarcely remembered her. But you almost forgot the other wife, too. She was from far away–I tried to remember how she looked. I had seen her several times, all right. But a kid of fifteen or so doesn't pay much attention to a grown woman. I called up an image of a dark, thin woman, with big dark eyes, wearing a long white dress and carrying a white parasol. Maybe it wasn't the right image, at all. Maybe it was somebody else who had been married to Judge Irwin, and had come to Burden's Landing, and had received all the curious, smiling ladies in Judge Irwin's long white house, and had been aware of the eyes and the sudden silence for attention and then the new sibilance as she walked down the aisle in St. Matthew's just before the services began, and had fallen sick and had lived with a Negro nurse in an upstairs room for so long that people forgot about her very existence and were surprised when the funeral came to remind them of the fact that she had existed. But after the funeral there was nothing to remind them, for the body had gone back to whatever place it was she came from, and not even a chiseled name was left in the Irwin plot in St. Matthew's graveyard, under the oaks and the sad poetic festoons of Spanish moss, which were garlanded on the boughs as though to prepare for the festivities of ghosts.

The Judge had had bad luck with his wives, and people felt sorry for him. Both of them sickly for a long time and then had died on his hands. He got a lot of sympathy for that.

But this second wife, I was told, was rich. That explained why the face I called up was not pretty–not the kind of face you would expect to find on Judge Irwin's wife–but a sallowish, thin face, not even young, with only the big dark eyes to recommend it.

So she had been rich, and that disposed of my notion that back in 1913 or 1914 the Judge had been broke and had stepped over the line. And that made Anne Stanton Happy. Happy because now Adam hadn't played, even unwittingly, stool pigeon to the Boss. Well, if it made her happy, it made me happy too, I reckoned. And maybe she was happy to think, too, that Judge Irwin was innocent. Well, that would have made me happy too. All I was doing was trying to prove Judge Irwin innocent. I would be able, sooner or later, to go to the Boss and say, "No sale, Boss. He is washed in the Blood."

"The son-of-a-bitch is washed in whitewash," the Boss would say. But he'd have to take my word. For he knew I was thorough. I was a very thorough and well-trained research student. And truth was what I sought, without fear or favor. And let the chips fly.

Anyway, I could cross 1913 off the ticket. Anne Stanton had settled that.

Or has she?

When you are looking for the lost will in the old mansion, you tap, inch by inch, along the beautiful mahogany wainscoting, or along the massive stonework of the cellarage, and listen for the hollow sound. Then upon hearing it, you seek the secret button or insert the crowbar. I had tapped and had heard something hollow. Judge Irwin had been broke. "But, oh, no," Anne Stanton had said, "there is no secret hiding place there, that's just where the dumb-waiter goes."

But I tapped again. Just to listen to that hollow sound, even if it was just the place where the dumb-waiter went.

I asked myself: If a man needs money, where does he get it? And the answer is easy: He borrows it. And if he borrows it, he has to give security. What would Judge Irwin have given as security? Most likely his house in Burden's Landing or his plantation up the river.

If it was big dough he needed, it would be the plantation. So I got in my car and headed up the river for Mortonville, which is the county seat of La Salle County, a big chunk of which is the old Irwin plantation where the cotton grows white as whipped cream and the happy darkies sing all day, like Al Jolson.

In the courthouse at Mortonville, I got hold of the abstract on the Irwin place. There it was, from the eighteenth-century Spanish grant to the present moment. And in 1907, there was the entry: _Mortgage, Montague Irwin to Mortonville Mercantile Bank, $42,000, due January 1, 1910__. Late in January, 1910, a chunk had been paid, about $12,000 and the mortgage redrawn. By the middle of 1912, interest payments were being passed. In March, 1914, foreclosure proceedings had been instituted. But the Judge had been saved by the bell. In early May there was an entry for the satisfaction of the mortgage in full. No further entries were on the abstract.

I had tapped again, and there was the hollow sound. When a man is broke there is always a hollow sound, like the tomb.

But he had married a rich wife.

But was she rich?

I had only the word of old Cousin Mathilde for that. And the evidence of Mrs. Irwin's sallow face. I decided to put in the crowbar.

I would check the date of marriage with the dates on the abstract. That might tell something. But whatever that said, I would put in the crowbar.

I knew nothing about Mrs. Irwin, not the date of her marriage, not even her name or where she came from. But that was easy. An hour in the newspaper files of the public library back in the city, looking at the society pages, which after more than twenty years were yellow and crumbling and somewhat less than gay or grand and I came out again into the light of day with my collar wilted and my hands begrimed but with the words scribbled on the back of an envelope in my inside coat pocket: _Mabel Carruthers, only child of Le Moyne Carruthers, Savannah, Georgia. Married, January 12, 1914.__

The date of marriage didn't tell me much. True, the foreclosure proceedings had been instituted after the marriage, but that didn't prove that Mabel wasn't rich: it might have taken the Judge all the honeymoon to work around to the gross subject of the long green. The Judge would not have been crude. So she might have been rich as goose grease. But nevertheless, that night I was on the train for Savannah.

Twenty-five years is not a long time in the eye of God, but it damned near takes the eye of God to spy much about the inside story of even a leading citizen like Le Moyne Carruthers who has been dead twenty-five years. I didn't have the eye of God. I had to poke and pry and work newspaper files and pump the broken-down old bird who was city editor and cultivate the society of a fellow I had once known who was now a local hot-shot in the insurance game and get to know his friends. I ate roast duck stuffed with oysters and yams and that wonderful curry they make in Savannah, which tastes good even to a man like me who loathes food, and drank rye whisky, and walked down those beautiful streets General Oglethorpe laid out, and stared at the beautiful severe fronts of the houses, which were more severe than ever now, for the last leaves were off the arching trees of the streets and it was the season when the wind blows great chunks of gray sky in off the Atlantic which come dragging in so low their bellies brush the masts and chimney pots, like gravid sows crossing a stubble field.

I saw the Le Moyne Carruthers house. The old boy must have been rich, all right, all right. And when he died in 1904 he had been rich, according to the probate of the will. But it was nine years between 1904 and 1913, and a lot can happen. Mabel Carruthers had lived high. That was the story. But they all said she could afford it. And, according to what I could pick up, there was no reason to believe that the uncle in New York, who was the executor of the will, hadn't known his business about handling Mabel's investments.

It looked absolutely level. But there is one thing you must never forget: the judgment docket book in the courthouse.

I did not forget it. And there I found the name of Mabel Carruthers. People had had some trouble getting money out of Mabel. But this didn't prove anything. Lots of rich girls are so rich they are just above paying bills and you have to pinch them to make them disgorge. But I noticed one thing. Mabel didn't get the bad habit until 1911. In other words, she had paid her bills all right for the first seven years she had had her money. Now, I argued, if this amiable failing had been merely the result of temperament and not of necessity, why did it come on her all at once? It had come on her all at once, and in a flock. Not that it was the corner grocer by himself. He had some fast company, for Mabel didn't like to pay Le Clerc in New York for a diamond pendant, and didn't like to pay her dress maker, and didn't like to pay a local vintner for some pretty impressive stuff. Mabel had lived high, all right.

The last judgment was to the Seaboard Bank for a loan, amounting to $750. Small change for Mabel. Now there was no Seaboard Bank in Savannah. The telephone directory told me that. But an old fellow sitting in a split-bottom chair in the courthouse told me that the Seaboard Bank had been bought out by the Georgia Fidelity back about 1920. Down at the Georgia Fidelity, they told me, Yes, back in 1920. Who was president of the Seaboard then? Why, just a minute, and they'd find out. Mr. Percy Poindexter had been. Was he in Savannah? Well, they couldn't say for sure, times changed so fast. But Mr. Pettis would know, Mr. Charles Pettis, who was his son-in-law. Oh, you are welcome, sir. Quite welcome.

Mr. Percy Poindexter was not in Savannah now, and scarcely in this world, for after the exhalation of each breath you waited and waited for that delicate little contraption of matchwood and transparent parchment and filigree of blue veins to gather strength enough for one more effort. Mr. Poindexter reclined in his wheel chair, his transparent hands lying on the wine-colored silk of his dressing gown, his pale-blue eyes fixed on the metaphysical distance, and breathed each breath, saying, "Yes, young man–you have lied to me, of course–but I do not care–care why you want to know–it could not matter now–not to anyone–for they are all dead–Le Moyne Carruthers is dead–he was my friend–my dearest friend–but that was very long ago and I do not clearly recollect his face–and his daughter Mabel–I did what I could for her–even after her financial reverse she would have had enough to live decently–even in modest luxury–but no, she threw money away–always more–I loaned her a great deal at the bank–some of it I shamed her into paying–two or three notes I paid myself–for the memory of Le Moyne–and sent them canceled to her to shame her to discretion–but no–but she would come back to me without shame and stare at me out of her big eyes–they were dark and sullen and hot looking like a fever–and would say, I want money–and at last I brought a note to judgment–to shame her–to frighten her–for her own good–for she spent money like water–she spent in a fever to give balls and parties–to adorn herself, and she was plain–to get a husband–but men gave her no mind beyond courtesy–but she got a husband–from the West somewhere, a wealthy man, they said–he married her quickly and took her away–she died and was brought back here–the burial–it was a bad day and few came–not even in respect to Le Moyne–not even his friends, some of them–dead twelve years and they had forgotten him–people forget–"

The breath gave out, and for a long moment I thought there would not be any more. But some more came, and he said, "But–that–doesn't matter–either."

I thanked him and shook his hand, which was like cold wax and left a chill in my palm, and went out and got into my rented car and drove back to the city, where I got a drink, not to celebrate but to take the ice out of my marrow, which not the weather but the old man had put there.

I had found out that Mabel Carruthers had been broken, but had married a rich man from the West. Or rather what in Savannah they called "the West." Well, that was a joke. Not doubt the rich man from the West had married her for the money, too. There must have been some gay times as the truth emerged. I left Savannah the next day, but not before I had gone out to the cemetery to look at the Carruthers vault, where moss encroached upon the great name and the angel lacked one arm. But that didn't matter, for all the Carruthers were inside now.

I had knocked and the sound had been very, very hollow. I sunk the crowbar in deeper. Judge Irwin had not paid off his mortgage in 1914 with his wife's money. What had he been doing in 1914 to get the money? He had been running a plantation, and he had been, under Governor Stanton, the state's Attorney General. Well, you don't clear $44,000 a season off a cotton plantation (it was that amount he had paid, for the $12,000 he had paid in 1910 had come from a mortgage on the house in the Landing, I discovered, which he cleared at the same time as the plantation). And his salary as Attorney General had been $3,400. You don't get rich being an Attorney General in a Southern state. At least, you aren't supposed to.

But in March of 1915 the Judge had a good job, a very good job. He resigned as Attorney general to become counsel and vice-president for the American Electric Power Company, at a very good figure of $20,000 a year. There was no reason why they shouldn't have hire a lot of good lawyers for a lot less than $20,000 a year. But a job in 1915 doesn't pay off the bailiff in 1914. When I knocked, it still sounded hollow.

So I took my one plunge in the stock market. One share of common stock of the American Electric Power Company, and it was cheap as dirt in the middle of the Depression. But it turned out to be a very expensive piece of paper. For a lot of people.

It was a coupon-clipper now, and I wanted to know how they were going to take care of my investment. So I took advantage of the stockholder's right. I went down to look at the stock records of the American Electric Power Company. From the literal dust of time, I dug up certain facts: In May, 1914, Montague M. Irwin had sold five hundred shares of common stock, at par, to Wilbur Satterfield and Alex Cantor, who were, I was to discover later, officials of the company. That meant that Irwin had plenty in his pocket in late May to pay off the mortgages and have some change left over. But when had he got hold of the stock? That was easy. In March, 1914, the company had been reorganized and a big chunk of new stock issued. Irwin's stock was part of the new chunk. The boys had passed it to Irwin (or has he bought it?) and some of the other boys had bought it back. (Irwin must have kicked himself about selling it, for it began to climb shortly and kept on climbing for quite a spell. Had Messrs. Satterfield and Cantor taken Irwin? They were old hands, on the inside. But Irwin had had to sell, and quick. There was the mortgage.)

Irwin had had the stock, and had sold it to Messrs. Satterfield and Cantor. So far, so good. But how had Irwin got the stock? Had they just given it to him out of the blue? Not likely. But why do people give you great big chunks of nice new stock issues with gold seals? The answer is simple: Because you are nice to them.

The job, then, was to find out if Judge Irwin–then state's Attorney General–had been nice to the American Electric Power Company. And that meant a long dig. With exactly nothing in the bottom of the hole. For the entire period when Judge Irwin was Attorney General, the American Electric Power Company had been an exemplary citizen. It had looked every man in the eye and had asked no favors. There was nothing in the hole.

Well, how had Judge Irwin spent his time as Attorney General?

The usual odds and ends, it developed. But there had almost been a case. The suit to recover royalties from the Southern Belle Fuel Company, which had operated, under lease, the state coal lands. There had been some hullabaloo about it, a little stir in the Legislature, and some editorials, and some speechmaking, but it was only the ghost of a whisper now. It was probably the only person in the state who knew about it now.

Unless Judge Irwin knew, and woke up in the night and lay in the dark.

It was all about the interpretation of a royalty contract between the state and the company. It was a very ambiguous contract. Perhaps it had been designed to be that way. In any case, by one reading, the state stood to gain about $150,000 in back royalties and God knew how much before the end of the contract period. But it was a very ambiguous contract. It was so ambiguous that, just as the shooting was about to start, the Attorney General decided that there was no case. "We feel, however," he said in his public statement, "that it is most reprehensible that those responsible for this agreement should have been so lax in their protection of the public interest as to accept the figures of this contract by which the state has sold for a song one of her richest assets. But we also feel that, since the contract exists and is susceptible of only one reasonable interpretation, this state, which wished to encourage industry and enterprise within her borders, cannot do otherwise than bow to an arrangement which, though obviously unjust in its working, is binding in the law. And we must remember, even in circumstances such as this, that it is by law that justice herself lives."

I read that in the old _Times-Chronicle__ of February 26, 1914, which was dated a couple of weeks before the foreclosure proceedings were instituted against the Irwin plantation. And about three weeks before the final reorganization of the American Electric and the issue of the new stock. The relationship was a relationship in time.

But is any relationship a relationship in time and only in time? I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge. The flower-in-the-crannied-wall theory. We have to accept it because so often our teeth are on edge from persimmons we didn't eat. So I plucked the flower out of its cranny and discovered an astonishing botanical fact. I discovered that its delicate little root, with many loops and kinks, ran all the way to New York City, where it tapped the lush dung heap called the Madison Corporation. The flower in the cranny was the Southern Belle Fuel Company. So I plucked another little flower called the American Electric Power Company, and discovered that its delicate little root tapped the same dung heap.

I was not prepared to say that I knew what God and men are, but I was getting ready to make a shrewd guess about a particular man. But just a guess.

It was just a guess for a long time. For I had reached the stage in my problem where there was nothing to do but pray. That stage always comes. You do all you can, and you pray till you can't pray, and then you go to sleep and hope to see it all in the dream, by grace. "Kubla Khan," the benzine ring, Caedmon's song–they all came in the dream.

It came to me. Just as I fell asleep one night. It was only a name. A funny name. _Mortimer L. Littlepaugh__. The name drifted around inside my head, and I thought how funny it was and went to sleep. But when I woke up in the morning, my first thought was: _Mortimer L. Littlepaugh__. Then walking down the street that day, I bought a newspaper and as I looked at it I saw the name _Mortimer L. Littlepaugh__. Only it was not in the newspaper I had just bought. It was on a yellow, crumbling, old-cheese-smelling sheet, which I saw, suddenly, in my mind's eye. _Mortimer L. Littlepaugh's Death Accident, Coroner's Jury Decides__. That was it. Then, wavering slowly up, like a chunk of waterlogged wood stirred loose from the depth, the phrase came: _Counsel for the American Electric Power Company. __That was it.

I went back to the files, and found the story. Mortimer had fallen out of a hotel window, or rather, off the little iron-railed balcony outside the window. He had fallen from the fifth floor, and that was the end of Mortimer. At the inquest her sister, who lived with him, said he had recently been in ill health and had complained of fits of dizziness. There had been some theory of suicide, for Mortimer's affairs were in a tangled condition, it developed, and the railing was high for an accidental fall. And there was a little mystery about a letter a bellhop swore Mortimer had given him the evening before his death, with a four-bit tip and instructions to go out and mail it immediately. The bellhop swore it had been addressed to Miss Littlepaugh. Miss Littlepaugh swore that she had received no letter. Well, Mortimer had been dizzy.

He had also been a lawyer for the American Electric. He had, I learned, been let out not long before Irwin came in. It did not sound too promising, but one more dead end wouldn't matter. There had been plenty of dead ends in the six or eight months I had been on the job.

But this was not a dead end. There was Miss Lily Mae Littlepaugh, whom, after five weeks, I tracked down to a dark, foul, fox-smelling lair in a rooming house on the edge of the slums, in Memphis. She was a gaunt old woman, wearing black spotted and stained with old food, almost past the pretense of gentility, blinking slowly at me from weak red eyes set in the age-crusted face, sitting there in the near-dark room, exuding her old-fox smell, which mixed with the smell of oriental incense and candle wax. There were holy pictures on the walls on every spare space, and in one corner of the room, on a little table, a sort of shrine, with a curtain of faded wine-colored velvet hanging above it, and inside not a Madonna or crucifix as you would expect from the other pictures, but a big image made of felt and mounted on a board which I at first took to be a sunflower pincushion swollen to an impractical size, but then realized was an image of the sun and its rays, The Life-Giver. And in that room. Before it, on the table, a candle burned fatly as though fed not merely from wax but from the substance of the greasy air.

In the middle of the room was a table with a wine-colored velvet cover, and on the table a dish of poisonously colored hard candies, a glass of water, and a couple of long narrow horns or trumpets apparently made of pewter. I sat well back from the table. On the other side, Miss Littlepaugh studied me from the red eyes, then said, in a voice surprisingly strong, "Shall we begin?"

She continued to study me, then said, half as though to herself. "If Mrs. Dalzell sent you, I reckon–"

"She sent me." She had sent me. It had cost me twenty-five dollars.

"I reckon it's all right."

"It's all right," I said.

She got up and went to the candle on the little table, watching me all the while as tough, in the last flicker of the light before she blew it out, I might turn out to be distinctly not all right. Then she blew out the candle and made her way back to the chair.

After that, there were wheezings and moaning for a bit, the chink of metal which I took to be from one of the trumpets, some conversation, not very enlightening or edifying, from Princess Spotted Deer, who was Miss Littlepaugh's control, and some even more unenlightening remarks, given in a husky guttural, from somebody on the Other Side who claimed to be named Jimmy and to have been a friend of my youth. Meanwhile, the radiator against the wall at my back thumped and churned, and I inhaled the pitch darkness and sweated. Jimmy was saying that I was going to take a trip.

I leaned forward in the dark and said, "Ask for Mortimer. I want to ask Mortimer a question."

One of the trumpets chinked softly again, and the Princess made a remark I didn't catch.

"It's Mortimer L. I want," I said.

There was some huskiness in the trumpet, very indistinct.

"He is trying to come through," Miss Littlepaugh's voice said, "but the vibrations are bad."

"I want to ask him a question," I said. "Get Mortimer. You know, Mortimer L. The L. is for Lonzo."

The vibrations were still bad.

"I want to ask him about the suicide."

The vibrations must have been very bad, for there wasn't a sound now.

"Get Mortimer," I said. "I want to ask him about the insurance. I want to ask him about the last letter he wrote."

The vibrations must have been terrific, for a trumpet banged on the table and bounced off to the floor, and there was a racket and rustling across the table, and when the electric light came suddenly on, there was Miss Littlepaugh standing by the door with her hand on the switch, staring at me out of the red eyes, while her breath hissed quite audible over old teeth.

"You lied," she said, "you lied to me!"

"No, I didn't lie to you," I said. "My name is jack Burden, and Mrs. Dalzell sent me."

"She's a fool," she hissed, "a fool to send you–you–"

"She thought I was all right. And she wasn't a fool to want twenty-five dollars."

I took out my wallet, removed some bills, and held them in my hand. "I may not be all right," I said, "but this stuff always is."

"What do you want?" she demanded, her eyes snatching from my face to the green sheaf and back to my face.

"What I said," I said. "I want to talk to Mortimer Lonzo Littlepaugh. If you can get him on the wire."

"What do you want from him?"

"What I said I wanted. I want to ask him about the suicide."

"It was an accident," she said dully.

I detached a bill and held it up. "See that," I said. "That is one hundred bucks." I laid it on the table, at the end toward her. "Look at it good," I said. "It is yours. Pick it up."

She looked fearfully at the bill.

I held up two more bills. "Two more," I said, "just like it. Three hundred dollars. If you could put me in touch with Mortimer, the money would be yours."

"The vibrations," she murmured, "sometimes the vibrations–"

"Yeah," I said, "the vibrations. But a hundred buck will do a lot for the vibrations. Pick up that bill. It is yours."

"No," she said quickly and huskily, "no."

I took one of the two bills in my hand and laid it on top of the other one on the table.

"Pick it up," I said, "and to hell with the vibrations. Don't you like money? Don't you need money? When did you get a square meal? Pick it up and start talking."

"No," she whispered, cringing back against the wall, with a hand now on the doorknob as though she might flee, staring at the money. The she stared at me, thrusting her head out suddenly, saying, "I know–I know you–you're trying to trick me–you're from the insurance company!"

"Wrong number," I said. "But I know about Mortimer's insurance policy. Suicide clause. That's why you–"

"He–" she hissed, and her gaunt face gathered itself into a contortion which might have been grief, or rage, or despair, you couldn't tell for sure–"he borrowed on his insurance–nearly all–and didn't tell me–he–"

"So you lied for almost nothing," I said. "You collected the insurance, all right, but there wasn't much left to collect."

"No," she said, "there wasn't. He left me–that way–he didn't tell me–he left me with nothing–and this–this–" She looked about the room, the broken furniture, the foulness, and seemed to shudder and shrink from it as tough she had just entered and perceived it. "This–" she said, "this."

"Three hundred would help," I said, and nodded toward the two bills on the velvet.

"This–this–" she said, "he left me–he was a coward–oh, it was easy for him–easy–all he had to do was–"

"Was to jump," I finished.

That quieted her. She looked at me heavily for a long moment, then said, "He didn't jump."

"My dear Miss Littlepaugh," I said in the tone usually described as "not unkindly,"

"Why don't you admit it? Your brother has been dead a long time and it will do him no harm. The insurance company has forgotten about the business. Nobody would blame you for lying–you had to live. And–"

"It wasn't the money," she said. "It was the disgrace. I wanted him buried from the church. I wanted–" She stopped suddenly.

"Ah," I said, and glanced at the holy pictures around the wall.

"I was a believer then," she said, paused, corrected herself, "I believe now in God, but it is different."

"Yes, yes," I said soothingly, and looked at the one trumpet left on the table. "And, of course, it is stupid to think of it as a disgrace. When your brother did it–"

"It was an accident," she said.

"Now, Miss Littlepaugh, you just admitted the fact a second ago."

"It was an accident," she repeated, drawing back into herself.

"No," I said, "he did it, but it was not his fault. He was driven to it." I watched her face. "He had given years to that company, then they threw him out. To make room for a man who had done a wicked thing. Who drove your brother to his death. Isn't that true?" I got up, and took a step toward her. "Isn't that true?"

She looked at me steadily, then broke. "He did! He drove him to it, he killed him, he was hired because it was a bribe–my brother knew that–he told them he knew it–but they threw him out–they said he couldn't prove it, and threw him out–"

"Could he prove it?" I said.

"Oh, he knew, all right. He knew all about that coal business–he knew long before but he didn't know what they were going to do to him–they treated him fine then and knew all the time they would throw him out–but he went to the Governor and said–"

"What," I demanded, "what did you say?" And stepped toward her.

"To the Governor, he–"

"Who?"

"To Governor Stanton, and the Governor wouldn't listen, he just–"

I grasped the old woman's arm and held it tight. "Listen," I said, "you are telling me that your brother went to Governor Stanton and told him?"

"Yes, and Governor Stanton wouldn't listen. He told him he couldn't prove anything, he wouldn't investigate, and that–"

"Are you lying?" I demanded, and shook the matchwood arm.

"It's true, true to God!" she exclaimed quivering in my grasp. "And that killed my brother. The Governor killed him. He went to the hotel and wrote the letter to me and told me, and that night–"

"The letter," I said, "what happened to the letter?"

"–that night–just before day–but waiting all night in that room–and just before day–"

"The letter," I demanded, "what happened to the letter?"

I shook her again, as she repeated, whispering, "Just before day–" But she came up out of the depth of the thought she was in, looked at me, and answered, "I have it."

I released my grip on her arm, thrust a bill into her clammy hand, and crushed her fingers upon it. "It's a hundred dollars," I said. "Give me the letter, and you can have the rest–three hundred dollars!"

"No," she said, "no, you want to get rid of the letter. Because it tells the truth. You're that man's friend." She stared into my face, prying into it, blinking, like an old person prying with feeble fingers to open a box. She gave up, and asked helplessly, "Are you his friend?"

"If he could see me right now," I said, "I don't imagine he would think so."

"You aren't his friend?"

"No," I said. She looked at me dubiously. "No," I said, "I'm not his friend. Give me the letter. If it is ever used it will be used against him. I swear it."

"I'm afraid," she said, but I could feel her fingers under my arm slowly working the bill I had thrust there.

"Don't be afraid of the insurance company. That was long back."

"When I went to the Governor–" she began.

"Did you go to the Governor, too?

"After it happened–after everything–I wanted to hurt that man–I went to the Governor–"

"My God," I said.

"–and ask him to punish him–because he had taken a bribe–because he had killed my brother–but he said I had no proof, that the man was his friend and I had no proof."

"The letter, did you show him the letter?"

"Yes, I had the letter."

"Did you show Governor Stanton the letter?"

"Yes–yes–and he stood there and said, 'Miss Littlepaugh, you have sworn that you did not receive that letter, you have sworn to a lie, and that is perjury and the penalty for perjury is severe, and if that letter becomes known you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.' "

"What did you do?" I asked.

The head, which was nothing but gray hair and yellow skin stuck on bone, and old memories, wavered on its thin stalk of a neck, lightly and dryly as though touched by a breeze. "Do," she echoed, "do," shaking her head. "I was a poor woman, alone. My brother, he had gone away. What could I do?"

"You kept the letter," I affirmed, and she nodded.

"Get it," I said, "get it. Nobody will bother you now. I swear it."

She got it. She clawed into the mass of yellow and acid-smelling papers and old ribbons and crumpled cloths in a tin trunk in the corner, while I leaned over her and fretted at the palsied incompetence of the fingers. Then she had it.

I snatched the envelope from her hand and shook the paper out. It was a sheet of hotel stationery–the Hotel Moncastello–dated August 3, 1915. It read: Dear Sister, I have been this afternoon to see Governor Stanton and told him How I have been thrown out of my job like a dog after all these years because than man Irwin was bribed to let up on the suit against the Southern Belle Fuel people and how he now has my place at a salary they never paid me and I gave them my heart's blood all these years. And they call him vice-president, too. They lied to me and they cheated me and they make him vice-president for taking a bribe. But Governor Stanton would not listen to me. He asked me for my proof and I told him what Mr. Satterfield told me months ago how the case had been fixed and how in our company they'd take care of Irwin. Now Satterfield denies it. He denies he ever told me, and looks me in the eye. So I have no proof, and Governor Stanton will not investigate.

I can do no more. I went as you know to the people who are against Governor Stanton in politics but they would not listen to me. Because that blackguard and infidel McCall who is their kingpin is tied up with Southern Belle. At first they were interested but now they laugh at me. What can I do? I am old and not well. I will never be any good again. I will be a drag on you and not a help. What can I do, Sister?

You have been good to me. I thank you. Forgive me for what I am going to do, but I am going to join our sainted Mother and our dear Father who were kind and good to us and who will greet me on the Other Shore, and dry every tear.

Good-bye until the happy day when we shall meet again in Light.

MORTIMER

P. S. I have borrowed against my insurance a good bit. On account of bad investments. But there is something left and if they know I have done what I am going to do they will no pay you.

P. S. Give my watch which was Father's to Julian, who will respect it even if he is only a cousin.

P. S. I could do what I am going to do easier if I were not trying to get the insurance for you. I have paid for the insurance and you ought to have it.

So the poor bastard had gone to the Other Shore, where Mother and Father would dry away every tear, immediately after having instructed his sister how to defraud the insurance company. There it all was–all of Mortimer Lonzo–the confusion, weakness, piety, self-pity, small-time sharpness, vindictiveness, all of it in the neat, spidery, old-fashioned bookkeeper's sort of hand, a little shakier than ordinary perhaps, but with all the t's crossed and the i's dotted.

I replaced it in the envelope and put it in my pocket. "I am going to have it photostated," I said, "and you may have it back. I'll have the photostat certified. But you must make a statement before a notary about you visit to Governor Stanton. And–" I went over to the table and picked up the two bills and handed them to her–"there will be another one coming to you after you make your statement. Get you hat."

So I had it after all the months. For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us.

That is what all of us historical researchers believe.

And we love truth.