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, and the hand gave her shoulder two or three little tired, apologetic pats. Then the hand dropped away and hung at his side beside the blue jean pants leg, and Lucy Stark stepped back. The he said, not very loud, "Howdy, Lucy."
"Howdy, Papa," she said, and the hand hanging beside the jean pants jerked as though it were getting ready to reach out and pat her again, but it didn't.
I suppose it didn't have to, anyway. Not to tell Lucy Stark what Lucy Stark already knew, and had known without words ever since the days when she had married Willie Stark and had come out here and had sat by the fire at night with the old man, whose wife had been dead a long time then and who hadn't had a woman in the house for a long time. That they had something in common, Old Man Stark and Lucy Stark, who had loved and married Willie Stark, the Willie Stark who at that moment when she and the old man sat wordlessly before the fire was upstairs in his room with his face bent down over a law book, his face puzzled and earnest and the tousle of hair hanging, and who was not with them by the fire, but was up there in that room, but not even in that room, either, but in a room, a world, inside himself where something was swelling and growing painfully and dully and imperceptibly like a great potato in a dark, damp cellar. What they had in common was a word of wordless silence by the fire, a world which could absorb effortlessly and perfectly the movements of their day and their occupations, and of all the days they had lived, and of the days that were to come for them to move about in and do the thing which were the life for which they were made. So they sat there in their common knowledge, while the chunk on the hearth stewed and hissed and crumbled, and were together in the down beat and pause of the rhythm of their lives. That was what they had in common now, and nothing could take that away. But they had something else in common; they had in common the knowledge that they did not have what they had.
The Boss was introducing Mr. Duffy, who was delighted to meet Mr. Stark, yes, sir, and introducing the gang who had just come up in the second car. Then the Boss jerked a thumb at me, and said to his father, "You recollect Jack Burden, don't you?"
"I recollect," the old man said, and we shook hands.
We all went into the parlor, and sat around on a few pieces of stuffed horsehair furniture, which had an acid, mummy smell in your parched-out nostrils, or on straight split-bottom chairs, which Old man Stark and the Boss had fetched in from the kitchen, and the motes of dust swam on the rays of light striking in under the shades of the western windows of the room through the one-time white but now yellowish lace curtains, which looped uncertainly from their rods like fish nets hung up to wait for mending. The gang of us sat around, and moved our thighs on the horsehair or on the split-bottom and stared down at the unpainted boards of the floor or at the design on the linoleum mat in the middle of the floor as though we were still bright-reds and tans and blues slick and varnished-looking–a kind of glib, impertinent geometrical island floating there in the midst of the cornerless shadows and the acid mummy smell and the slow swell of Time which had fed into this room, day by day since long back, as into a landlocked sea where the fish were dead and the taste was brackish on your tongue. You had the feeling that if the Boss and Mr. Duffy and Sadie Burke and the photographer and the reporters and you and the rest got cuddled up together on that linoleum mat it would lift off the floor by magic and scoop you all up together and make a lazy preliminary circuit of the room and whisk right out of the door or out the roof like the floating island of Gulliver or the carpet in the Arabian Nights and carry you off where you and it belonged and leave Old Man Stark sitting there as though nothing had happened, very clean and razor-nicked, with his gray hair plastered down damp, sitting there by the table where the big Bible and the lamp and the plush-bound album were under the blank, devouring gaze of the whiskered face in the big crayon portrait above the mantel shelf.
Then the nigger woman brought in a pitcher of water on a tray, with three glasses, slipping her feet in old tennis shoes dryly along the board. Lucy Stark took one glass and Sadie Burke another, and the rest of us just passed around the third glass.
Then the photographer took a secret look at his watch, and cleared his throat, and said, "Governor–"
"Yeah?" the Boss answered.
"I just reckoned–if you and Mrs. Stark is rested and all–" he made a sitting-down bow in the direction of Lucy Stark, a bow from the waist that was quite a feat and gave the impression he had had a couple too many for the heat and was passing out in the chair–"if you all–"
The Boss stood up. "All right," he said, grinning. "I just reckon I get you." Then he looked at his wife questioningly.
Lucy Stark stood up, too.
"All set, Pappy," the Boss said to the old man, and the old man stood up, too.
The Boss led the way out to the front porch. We all tailed him out like a procession. The photographer went to the second car and unpacked a tripod and the rest of his plunder and got it rigged up facing the steps. The Boss was standing on the steps, blinking and grinning, as though he were half asleep and knew what kind of a dream he was going to have.
"We'll just take you first, Governor," the photographer said, and the rest of us eased off the porch and out of range.
The photographer hid his head under the black cloth, then he popped out again agog with an idea. "The dog," he said, "get the dog in there with you, Governor. You be petting the dog or something. Right there on the steps. It'll be swell. It will be the nuts. You be petting that dog, he's pawing up on you like he was glad to see you when you come home. See? It will be nuts."
"Sure, the nuts," the Boss said.
Then he turned toward the old white dog, which hadn't moved a muscle since the Cadillac pulled up at the gate and was lying over to one side of the porch like a worn-out fur rug. "Here, Buck," the Boss said, and snapped his fingers.
But the dog didn't show a thing.
"Here, Buck," the Boss called.
Tom Stark prodded the dog with his toe for a little encouragement, but he might just as well have been prodding a bolster.
"Buck is gitten on," Old Man Stark said. "He ain't right spry any more." Then the old man went to the steps and stooped down with a motion which made you expect to hear the sound of old rusty hinges on a barn door. "Hi, Buck, hi, Buck," the old man wheedled without optimism. He gave up, and lifted his gaze to the Boss. "If s hongry now," he said, and shook hid head. "If he was hongry we could guile him. But he ain't hongry. His teeth gone bad."
The Boss looked at me, and I knew what I was paid to do.
"Jack," the Boss said, "get the hairy bastard up here and make him look like he was glad to see me."
I was supposed to do a lot of different things, and one of them was to lift up fifteen-year-old, hundred-and-thirty-five pound hairy white dogs on summer afternoons and paint an expression of unutterable bliss upon their faithful features as they gaze deep, deep into the Boss's eyes. I got hold of Buck's forelegs, as though I were girding myself to shove a wheelbarrow, and heaved. It didn't work. I got his front end up for a second, but just as I got him up, he breathed out and I breathed in. One gust of Buck was enough. It was like a gust from a buzzard's nest. I was paralyzed. Buck hit the porch boards and lay there like the old polar-bear rug he resembled.