All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [85]
“Send him in,” the Boss ordered, and I could tell that, no matter what he had had on his mind to say to me a second before, he had something else on it now. He had Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, Attorney General, on his mind.
“He won’t like it,” I said.
“No,” he said, “he won’t.”
And then in the doorway stood the tall, lean, somewhat stooped man, with swarthy face and unkempt dark hair and sad eyes under black brows, and with a Phi Beta Kappa key slung across his untidy blue serge. He stood there for a second, blinking the sad eyes, as though he had come out of darkness into a sudden light, or had stumbled into the wrong room. He looked like the wrong thing to be coming through that door, all right.
The Boss had stood up and padded across in his sock-feet, holding out his hand, saying, “Hello, Hugh.”
Hugh Miller shook hands, and stepped into the room, and I started to edge out the door. Then I caught the Boss’s eye, and he nodded, quick, toward my chair. So I shook hands with Hugh Miller, too, and sat back down.
“Have a seat,” the Boss said to Hugh Miller.
“No, thanks, Willie,” Hugh Miller replied in his slow solemn way. “But you sit down, Willie.”
The Boss dropped back into his chair, cocked his feet up again, and demanded, “What’s on your mind?”
“I reckon you know,” Hugh Miller said.
“I reckon I do,” the Boss said.
“You are saving White’s hide, aren’t you?”
“I don’t give a damn about White’s hide,” the Boss said. “I’m saving something else.”
“He’s guilty.”
“As hell,” the Boss agreed cheerfully. “If the category of guilt and innocence can be said to have any relevance to something like Byram B. White.”
“He’s guilty,” Hugh Miller said.
“My God, you talk like Byram was human! He’s a thing! You don’t prosecute an adding machine if a spring goes bust and makes a mistake. You fix it. Well, I fixed Byram. I fixed him so his unborn great-grandchildren will wet their pants on this anniversary and not know why. Boy, it will be the shock in the genes. Hell, Byram is just something you use, and he’ll sure be useful from now on.”
“That sounds fine, Willie, but it just boils down to the fact you’re saving White’s hide.”
“White’s hide be damned,” the Boss said, “I’, saving something else. You let that gang of MacMurfee’s boys in the Legislature get the notion they can pull something like this and there’s no telling where they’d stop. Do you think they like anything that’s been done? The extraction tax? Raising the royalty rate on state land? The income tax? The highway program? The Public Health Bill?”
“No, they don’t,” Hugh Miller admitted. “Or rather, the people behind MacMurfee don’t like it.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yes,” Hugh Miller said, “I like it. But I can’t say I like some of the stuff around it.”
“Hugh,” the Boss said, and grinned, “the trouble with you is you are a lawyer. You are a damned fine lawyer.”
“You’re a lawyer,” Hugh Miller said.
“No,” the Boss corrected, “I’m not a lawyer. I know some law. In fact, I know a lot of law. And I made me some money out of law. But I’m not a lawyer. That’s why I can see what the law is like. It’s like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbones to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different. Do you think half the things I’ve done were clear, distinct, and simple in the constitution