All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [19]
I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn’t look around. If I didn’t look around it would not be true that somebody opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of. I had got hold of the principle out of a book when I was in college, and I had hung on to it for grim death. I owed my success in life to that principle. It had put me where I was. What you don’t know don’t hurt you, for it ain’t real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist. I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days. If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn’t real anyway.
The steps came closer and closer, padded in the soft dust. I didn’t look up. Then I felt the wire of the fence creak and give because somebody else was leaning against it and admiring the sunset. Mr. X and I admired the sunset together for a couple of minutes, and nothing said. Except for the sound of his breathing I wouldn’t have known he was there.
Then there was a moment and the wire shifted when Mr. X took his weight off it. Then the hand patted my left hip, and the voice said, “Gimme a slug.” It was the Boss’s voice.
“Take it,” I said. “You know where it lives.”
He lifted up my coattail and pulled out the bottle. I could hear the gurgle as he did the damage. The wire shifted again as he leaned against it.
“I figured you’d come down here,” he said.
“And you wanted a drink,” I replied without bitterness.
“Yeah,” he said, “and Pappy doesn’t favor drinking. Never did.” I looked up at him. He was leaning on the fence, bearing down on the wire in a way not to do it any good, with the bottle held in both hands, corked, and his forearms propped over the wire.
“It used to be Lucy didn’t favor it either,” I said.
“Things change,” he said. He uncorked the bottle and took another pull, and corked it again. “But Lucy,” he said, “I don’t know whether she changed or not. I don’t know whether she favors it or not now. She never touches it herself. Maybe she sees it eases a man’s nerves.”
I laughed. “You haven’t any nerves,” I told him.
“I’m a bundle of nerves,” he said, and grinned.
We kept leaning against the fence, watching the light lying across the country and hitting the clump of trees down the rise. The Boss leaned his head a little forward and let a big globule of spit form at his lips and let it fall through the space between his forearms down to the board hog through just over the fence from us. The trough was dry, with a few odd red grains of corn and a few shreds of shucks lying in it and on the ground by it.
“Things don’t change much around here, though,” the Boss said.
That didn’t seem to demand any response, and so I didn’t give it any.
“I bet I dumped ten thousand gallons of swill into that trough,” he said, “one time and another.” He let another glob of spit fall into the trough. “I bet I slopped five hundred head of hogs out of this trough,” he said. “And,” he said, “by God, I’m still doing it. Pouring swill.”
“Well,” I said, “swill is what they live on, isn’t it?”
He didn’t say anything to that.
The hinges of the gate up the lot creaked again, and I looked around. There wasn’t any reason not to now. It was Sadie Burke. She was plowing her white oxfords through the dust as though she meant business, and every time she took a stride it looked as though she were going to pop the skirt of her blue-striped seersucker suit, she was in such a rush. The Boss turned around, looked at the bottle in his hand, then passed it to me. “What’s up?” he asked her when she got within ten feet.
She didn’t answer right away, but came up close. She was breathing hard from the rush. The light hit her on her slightly