Free All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren Page B

and if I learned anything from studying history that was what I learned. Or to be more exact, that was what I thought I had learned.
    We would go down the Row–the line of houses facing the bay–and that was the place where all my pals had been. Anne, who was an old maid, or damned near it. Adam, who was a famous surgeon and who was nice to me but didn’t go fishing with me any more. And Judge Irwin, who lived in the last house, and who had been a friend of my family and who used to take me hunting with him and taught me to shoot and taught me to ride and read history to me from leather-bound books in the big study in his house. After Ellis Burden went away he was more of a father to me than those men who had married my mother and come to live in Ellis Burden’s house. And the Judge was a man.
    So I told Sugar-Boy how to get through town and to the Row where all my pals lived or had lived. We pulled through the town, where the lights were out except for the bulbs hanging from the telephone poles, and on out the Bay Road where the houses were bone-white back among the magnolias and live oaks.
    At night you pass through a little town where you once lived, and you expect to see yourself wearing knee pants, standing all alone on the street corner under the hanging bulbs, where the bugs bang on the tin reflectors and splatter to the pavement to lie stunned. You expect to see that boy standing there under the street lamp, out too late, and you feel like telling he ought to go on home to bed or there will be hell to pay. But maybe you are home in bed and sound asleep and not dreaming and nothing has ever happened that seem to have happened. But, then, who the hell is this in the back seat of the big black Cadillac that comes ghosting through the town? Why, this is Jack Burden. Don’t you remember little Jack Burden? He used to go out in his boat in the afternoon on the bay to fish, and come home and eat his supper and kiss his beautiful mother good night and say his prayers and go to bed at nine-thirty. Oh, you mean old Ellis Burden’s boy? Yeah, and that woman he married out of Texas–or was it Arkansas?–that big-eyed thin-faced woman who lives up there in that old Burden place now with that man she got herself. What ever happened to Ellis Burden? Hell, I don’t know, nobody around here had any word going on years. He was a queer ‘un. Damn if he wasn’t queer, going off and leaving a real looker like that woman out of Arkansas. Maybe he couldn’t give her what she craved. Well, he give her that boy, that Jack Burden. Yeah.
    You come into the town at night and there are the voices.
    We had got to the end of the Row, and I saw the house bone-white back among the dark oak boughs.
    “Here it is,” I said.
    “Park out here,” the Boss said. And then to me, “There’s a light. The bugger ain’t in bed. You go on and knock on the door and tell him I want to see him.”
    “Suppose he won’t open up?”
    “He will,” the Boss said. “But if he won’t you make him. What the hell do I pay you for?”
    I got out of the car and went in the gate and started up the shell walk under the black trees. Then I heard the Boss coming after me. We went up the walk, with him just behind me, and up the gallery steps.
    The Boss stood to one side, and I pulled open the screen and knocked on the door. I knocked again; then looking in through the glass by the door I saw a door open off the hall–where the library was, I remembered–then a side light come on in the hall. He was coming to the door. I could see him through the glass while he fumbled with the lock.
    “Yes?” he asked.
    “Good evening, Judge,” I said.
    He stood there blinking into the dark outside, trying to make out my face.
    “It’s Jack Burden,” I said.
    “Well, well, Jack–well I’ll be jiggered!” And he put out his hand. “Come in.” He even looked glad to see me.
    I shook hands and stepped inside, where the mirrors in the peeling gold frames