All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [14]
It looked like those farmhouses you ride by in the country in the middle of the afternoon, with the chickens under the trees and the dog asleep, and you know the only person in the house is the woman who has finished washing up the dishes and has swept the kitchen and has gone upstairs to lie down for half an hour and has pulled off her dress and kicked off her shoes and is lying there on her back on the bed in the shadowy room with her eyes closed and a strand of her hair still matted down on her forehead with the perspiration. She listens to the flies cruising around the room, then she listens to your motor getting big out on the road, then it shrinks off into the distance and she listens to the flies. That was the kind of house it was.
One time I had wondered why the Boss never had the house painted after he got his front feet in the trough and a dollar wasn’t the reason you got up in the morning any more. Then I figured the Boss knew best. Suppose he had painted it up, then the next fellow down the road would be saying to the next one, “Seen Old man Stark got his house painted? Yeah, putten on airs. Hit looks lak hit wuz good enuff fer him to live in all his life lak hit wuz, and his boy gits up thar in the cappy-tell, and hit ain’t good enuff no more. Fust thing you know and Old Man Stark’ll be going to be privy in the house and maken ’em cook cabbige out behind the barn.” (As a matter of fact, Old Man Stark was going to the privy in the house, for the Boss had put in running water and a bathroom. Water pumped by a little automatic electric pump. But you can’t see a commode from the road when you pass by. It doesn’t hit you in the eye or run out and bite you in the leg. And what the voter doesn’t know doesn’t prey on his mind.)
Anyway, if he had painted the house it wouldn’t have made half as good picture as it was going to make that day with Willie and his Old Man on the front steps, with Lucy Starks and the boy and the old white dog.
The old man was on the front steps now. By the time we got through the front gate, which had a couple of old plow points hung on a wire to pull it shut and clank to announce the visitor, and had started up the path, the old man had come out of the door. He stopped on the steps and waited, a not very tall old man, and thin, wearing blue jean pants and a blue shirt washed so much that it had a powdery pastel shade to it and a black bow tie, the kind that comes ready-tied on an elastic band. We got up close and could see his face, brown and tooled-looking, with the skin and flesh thin on the bone and hanging down from the bone to give that patient look old men’s faces have, and his gray hair plastered down on his narrow, egg-thin old skull–the hair still wet as though he had given it a dab with the wet brush when he heard the car, just to be looking right at the last minute—and slow blue eyes in the middle of the brown folded skin. The blue of the eyes was pale and washed out like the blue of the shirt. He didn’t have any whiskers or mustache, and you could see that he had shaved pretty recently, for there were two or three little nicks, with the little crusts of blood on them, where the razor had got tangled in the folds of the brown dry skin.
He stood on the steps, and for any sign he gave we might as well have been back in the city.
Then the Boss went up to him, and put out his hand, and said, “Hello, Pappy. How you making it?”
“Gitten along,” the old man said, and shook hands, or rather putting out his hand with that same motion from the elbow which Old Leather-Face had had in the drugstore back in Mason City, he let the Boss shake it.
Lucy Stark went up to him, not saying anything, and kissed him on his left cheek. He didn’t say anything either when she did it. He just reached his right arm a little around her shoulder, not quite a hug, just putting his arm there, and you could see his knobby, crooked, brown old hand, which looked too big for the wristbone,