All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [253]
For a minute he didn’t speak, but his eyes looked up at me, with the light still flickering in them. Then he spoke: “Why did he do it to me?”
“Oh, God damn it,” I burst out, very loud, “I don’t know.”
The nurse looked warningly at me.
“I never did anything to him,” he said.
“No, you never did.”
He was silent again, and the flicker went down in his eyes. Then, “He was all right. The Doc.”
I nodded
I waited, but it began to seem that he wasn’t going to say any more. His eyes were on the ceiling and I could scarcely tell that he was breathing. Finally, the eyes turned toward me again, very slowly, and I almost thought that I could hear the tiny painful creak of the balls in their sockets. But the light flickered up again. He said, “It might have been all different, Jack.”
I nodded again
He roused himself more. He even seemed to be straining to lift his head from the pillow. “You got to believe that,” he said hoarsely.
The nurse stepped forward and looked significantly at me.
“Yes,” I said to the man on the bed.
“You got to,” he said again. “You got to believe that.”
“All right.”
He looked at me, and for a moment it was the old strong, probing, demanding glance. But when the words this time, they were very weak. “And it might even been different yet he whispered. “If it hadn’t happened, it might–have been different–even yet.”
He barely got the last words out, he was so weak.
The nurse was making signals to me.
I reached down and took the hand on the sheet. It felt like a piece of jelly.
“So long, Boss,” I said. “I’ll be seeing you.”
He didn’t answer, and I wasn’t even sure that there was recognition in the eyes now. I turned away and went out.
He died the next morning, just about day. There was a hell of a big funeral. The city was jam-packed with people, all kinds of people, county-courthouse slickers and red-necks and wool-hat boys and people who had never been on pavement before. And they had their women with them. They filled all the space around the Capitol and spilled and eddied back into the streets beyond, while the drizzle came down and the loud-speakers placed on the trees and poles blared out the words which made you want to puke.
Then after the coffin had been brought down the great steps of the Capitol and loaded into the hearse and after the state patrolmen and the mounted cops had fought out a passage, the procession rolled slowly away to the cemetery. The crowd seethed after it. At the cemetery they surged and swayed over the grass, trampling the graves, breaking down shrubbery. A couple of gravestones were overturned and broken. It was two hours after the burial before the police managed to clear the place.
That was my second funeral within a week. The first one had been very different. It had been the funeral of Adam Stanton, down at Burden’s Landing.
Chapter Ten
After the Boss was safe underground, and the pussel-gutted city cops sweating in their blue and the lean, natty boys of the State Patrol and the mounted police on glossy, dancing horses whose hoofs sank fetlock deep in the flower beds had driven the crowd sullenly out of the cemetery–but long before the tramped grass began to lift itself or the caretakers came to repair the knocked-over tombstones–I left town and took out for the Landing. There were two reasons. First, I couldn’t stand to stay in town. Second, Anne Stanton was at the Landing.
She had been there since Adam’s funeral. She had gone down with the body, trailing the sun-glittering, expensive hearse in an undertaker’s limousine with a nurse, who proved to be superfluous, and Katy Maynard, an old friend who proved, no doubt to be superfluous, too. I didn’t see her as she sat in the rented limousine which moved at its decorous torturer’s pace the near-hundred miles, lifting the miles slowly off the concrete slab, slowly and fastidiously as though you were peeling and endless strip of skin off the live flesh. I didn’t see her, but I know how she had been: erect, white in the face, the beautiful bones of her face showing under the taut flesh, her hands