All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [135]
“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