Then Tom Stark and one of the reporters shoved on the tail end and I heaved on the front end and held my breath and we got Buck the seven feet to the Boss. The Boss braced himself, and we heaved up the front end, and the Boss got a gust of Buck.
That gust was enough.
"God's sake, Pappy," the Boss demanded as soon as he had mastered his spasm, "what you been feeding this dog?"
"He ain't any appetite," Old man Stark said.
"He ain't any appetite for violets," the Boss said, and spat on the ground.
"The reason he fell," the photographer observed, "was because his hind legs gave down. Once we get him propped we got to work fast."
"We?" the Boss said. We! What the hell you mean _we__. You come kiss him. One whiff would curdle milk and strip pine tree. _We__, hell!"
The Boss took a deep breath, and we heaved again. It didn't work. Buck didn't have any starch in him. We tried six or seven times, but it was no sale. Finally the Boss had to sit down on the steps, and we dragged Buck up and laid the faithful head on the Boss's knee. The Boss put his hand on Buck's head and looked at the photographer's birdie. The photographer shot it, and said, "It is the nuts," and the Boss said, "Yeah, the nuts."
The Boss sat there a few seconds with his hand on Buck's head. "A dog," the Boss said, "is man's best friend. Old Buck, he's the best friend I ever had." He scratched the brute's head. "Yeah, good old Buck," the Boss said, "the best friend I ever had. But God damn it," he said, and stood up so quick that Buck's head slid off his knee, "he don't smell a bit better'n the rest of 'em."
"Is that for the record, Boss?" one of the reporters asked.
"Sure," the Boss said. "He smells just like the rest of 'em."
Then we cleared Buck's carcass off the steps, and the photographer settled into the grind. He took the Boss and the family in every possible combination. Then he got his rig together, and said: "Governor, you know we want a picture of you upstairs. In the room you used to have when you were a kid. It will be nuts."
"Yeah," the Boss said, "the nuts."
That was my idea. It would be nuts all right. The Boss sitting there with an old schoolbook in his hands. A good example for the tots. So we went upstairs.
It was a little room, with bare board floor and tongue-and groove beaded walls, which had been painted yellow one time, but had the paint crazing off the wood now in sections where any paint was left. There was a big wooden bed with a high head and foot standing somewhat off the perpendicular, and a white counterpane on the bed. There was a table–a pine table–and a couple of straight chairs, and a stove–the kind of tin stove they call a trash-burner, pretty rusty now–and against the wall beyond the stove a couple of home-made bookcases, crammed with books. Third readers and geographies and algebras and such in one of them, and a lot of crummy old law books in the other.
The Boss stood in the middle of the floor and took a good look, all around, while the rests of us hung around the door bunched up like sheep and waited. "Jesus," the Boss said, "put the old white thunder-mug under the bed and it'll look just like home."
I looked over at the bed, and the crockery wasn't there. It was the only prop missing. That and a kid with a pudgy face and freckles on his face and sandy hair falling down on his forehead, bending down at the table by a coal-oil lamp–it must have been a coal-oil lamp then–and a pencil in his hand, tooth marks on the pencil where he'd been gnawing at it, and the fire in the trash-burner getting low, and the wind pounding on the north side of the house, pounding down off the Dakotas a thousand miles away and across the plains which were icy and pearl-blind with the snow polished hard under the wind and glimmering in the dark, and across the river bottoms, and across the hills where the pine trees had stood once and moaned in the wind but where wasn't anything to break the wind now. The sash in the window on the north wall of the room would rattle under the wind, and the flame in the coal-oil lamp would bend and shiver in what current of air sneaked in, but the kid wouldn't look up. He would gnaw his pencil, and hunch down. Then after a while he would blow out the lamp and pull off his clothes and get into bed, wearing his underwear. The sheets would be cold to the skin and stiff-feeling. He would lie there and shiver in the dark. The wind would come down a thousand miles and pound on the house and the sash would rattle and inside him something would be big and coiling slow and clotting till he would hold his breath and the blood would beat in his head with s hollow sound as though his head were a cave as big as the dark outside. He wouldn't have any name for what was big inside him. Maybe there isn't any name.
That was all there was missing from the room, the kid and the thunder-mug. Otherwise it was perfect.
"Yeah," the Boss was saying, "it's sure gone. But it's O. K. by me. Maybe sitting over running water puts phlegm on your gut like the old folks say, but it would sure have made learning law a hell of a lot more comfortable. And you wouldn't have to waste so much time."
The boss was a slow mover. Many's the time we've settled affairs of state through a bathroom door, the Boss on the inside and me on the outside on a chair with my little black notebook on my knee and the telephone ringing to beat the hell.
But now the photographer started arranging things. He got the Boss to sit at the table and pore over a dog-eared reader, and he fired off his flash bulb and got that. And he got a half dozen more, the Boss sitting in a chair by the trash-burner, holding an old law book on his knees, and God knows what else.
I wandered off downstairs and left them preparing the documents for posterity.
When I got to the bottom of the stairs I could hear voices in the parlor, and I figured it was the old man and Lucy Stark and Sadie Burke and the kid. I went out the back way to the back porch. I could hear the nigger woman puttering around in the kitchen, humming to herself about her and Jesus. I walked across the back yard, where there wasn't any grass. When the falls rain came there wouldn't be anything here but a loblolly with the crazy marks made in it by hens' feet. But it was dust now. There was a chinaberry tree beside the gate letting you into the back lot, and as I went through the gate the berries scattered on the ground crunched under my feet like bugs.
I went on down the lot, past a row of gable-shaped chicken coops made of wood which had been split out like shingles, and set on cypress chunks to keep them out of the wet. I went on down to the barn and stable lot, where a couple of able-bodied but moth-eaten mules hung their heads in the unflagging shame of their species beside a big iron pot, the kind they use for cooking up molasses. The pot was a water trough now. There was a pipe sticking up beside it with a faucet on it. One of the Boss's modern improvements you couldn't see from the road.
I went on past the stables, which were built of log, but with a good tin roof, and leaned on the fence, looking off down the rise. Back of the barn the ground was washed and gullied somewhat, with piles of brush chucked into the washes here and there to stop the process. As though it ever would. A hundred yards off, at the foot of the rise, there was a patch of woods, scrub oak and such. The ground must have been swampy down there, for the grass and weeds at the edge of the trees were lush and tropical green. Against the bare ground beyond it looked too green to be natural. I could see a couple of hogs lounging down there on their sides, like big gray blisters popped up out of the ground.
It was getting toward sunset now. I leaned on the fence and looked off west across the country where the light was stretching out, and breathed in that dry, clean, ammoniac smell you get around stables at sunset on a summer day. I figured they would find me when they wanted me. I didn't have the slightest notion when that would be. The Boss and his family, I reckoned, would spend the night at his pappy's place. The reporters and the photographer and Sadie would get on back to the city. Mr. Duffy–maybe he was supposed to put up in Mason City at the hotel. Or maybe he and I were supposed to stay at Pappy's place too. If they put us in the same bed though, I was just going to start walking in to Mason City. Then there was Sugar-Boy. But I quit thinking about it. I didn't give a damn what they did.