Chapter Two

The last time I saw Mason City I went up there in that big black Cadillac with the Boss and the gang, and we burned up that new concrete slab, and it was a long time ago–nearly three years, for it is now into 1939, but it seems like forever. But the first time I went up there it was a lot longer time ago, back in 1922, and I went there in my Model-T, hanging on to the steering post to stay in the saddle when I sideslipped in the gray dust, which plumed out behind for a mile and settled on the cotton leaves to make them gray too, or when I hit a section of gravel, holding my jaws clamped tight to keep the vibration from the washboard from chipping the enamel off my teeth. You'll have to say this for the Boss: when he got through you could drive out for a breath of air and still keep your bridgework in place. But you couldn't that first time I went to Mason City.

The managing editor of the _Chronicle__ called me in and said, "Jack, get in your car and go up to Mason City and see who the hell that fellow Stark is who thinks he is Jesus Christ scourging the money-changers out of that shinplaster courthouse up there."

"He married a school-teacher," I said.

"Well, it must have gone to his head," Jim Madison, who was managing editor of the _Chronicle__, said. "Does he think he is the first one ever popped a school-teacher?"

"The bond issue was for building a schoolhouse," I said, "and it looks like Lucy figures they might keep some of it for that purpose."

"Who the hell is Lucy?"

"Lucy is the school-teacher," I said.

"She won't be a school-teacher long," he said. "Not on the Mason County payroll if she keeps that up. Not if I know Mason County."

"Lucy don't favor drinking either," I said.

"Was it you or the other guy popped Lucy?" he demanded. "You know so much about Lucy."

"I just know what Willie told me."

"Who the hell is Willie?"

"Willie is the fellow with the Christmas tie," I said. "He is Cousin Willie from the country. He is Willie Stark, the teacher's pet, and I met him in the back room of Slade's place a couple of months ago and he told me Lucy didn't favor drinking. I'm just guessing about her not favoring stealing."

"She don't favor Willie being County Treasurer either," Jim Madison allowed, "if she is the one putting him up to what he is doing. Doesn't she know they run things up in Mason County?"

"They run 'em up there just like they run 'em down here," I said.

"Yeah," Jim Madison said, and took the foul, chewed, and spit-bright butt of what had been a two-bit cigar out of the corner of his mouth and inspected it and reached out at arm's length and let it fall into the big brass spittoon which stood on the clover-deep, Kelly-green carpet which bloomed like an oasis of elegance in the four floors of squalor of the Chronicle Building. He watched it fall, and said again, "Yeah, but you leave down here and go on up there."

So I went up to Mason City in the Model-T, and kept my jaws clamped tight when I went over the washboard and hung to the steering post when I went over the sideslipping dust, and that was a very long time ago.

I got to Mason City early in the afternoon and went to the Mason City Café, Home-Cooked Meals for Ladies and Gents, facing the square, and sampled the mashed potatoes and fried ham and greens with pot-likker with one hand while with the other I competed with seven or eight flies for the possession of a piece of custard pie.

I went out into the street, where the dogs lay on the shady side under the corrugated iron awnings, and walked down the block till I came to the harness shop. There was one vacant seat out front, so I said howdy-do, and joined the club. I was the junior member by forty years, but I thought I was going to have liver spots on my swollen old hands crooked on the head of the hickory stick like the rest of them before anybody was going to say anything. In a town like Mason City the bench in front of the harness shop is–or was twenty years ago before the concrete slab got laid down–the place where Time gets tangled in its own feet and lies down like an old hound and gives up the struggle. It is a place where you sit down and wait for night to come and arteriosclerosis. It is the place the local undertaker looks at with confidence and thinks he is not going to starve as long as that much work is cut out for him. But if you are sitting on the bench in the middle of the afternoon in late August with the old ones, it does not seem that anything will ever come, not even your funeral, and the sun beats down and the shadows don't move across the bright dust, which, if you stare at it long enough, seems to be full of glittering speck like quartz. The old ones sit there with their liver-spotted hands crooked on the hickory sticks, and they emit a kind of metaphysical effluvium by virtue of which your categories are altered. Time and motion cease to be. It is like sniffing ether, and everything is sweet and sad and far away. You sit there among the elder gods, disturbed by no sound except the slight _râle__ of the one who has asthma, and wait for them to lean from the Olympian and sunlight detachment and comment, with their unenvious and foreknowing irony, on the goings-on of the folks who are still snared in the toils of mortal compulsions. _I seen Sim Saunders done built him a new barn. __Then, _Yeah, some folks thinks they is made of money.__ And, _Yeah.__

So I sat there and waited. And one of them said it, and another one leaned and shifted the quid and answered, and the last one said, "Yeah." Then I waited again for a spell, for I knew my place in the picture, and then I said, "They tell me there's gonna be a new schoolhouse." Then I waited another spell while the words died away and it was as though I hadn't said anything. Then one of them let the ambeer drop to the dry ground, and touched the spot with the end of the hickory stick, and said, "Yeah, and steam heat, hear tell."

And Number Two: "Give them young 'uns pneumony, steam heat."

And Number Three: "Yeah."

And Number Four: "If'n they git hit built."

 I looked across the square at the painted clock face on the courthouse tower, which was the clock the old ones kept time by, and waited. Then I said, "What's stopping 'em?"

And Number One: "Stark. Thet Stark."

And Number Two: "Yeah, thet Willie Starl."

And Number Three: "Too big fer his britches. Gits in the courthouse and gits his front feet in the through, and gits too big fer his britches."

And Number Four: Yeah."

I waited, then I said, "Wants 'em to take the low bid, they tell me."

And Number One: "Yeah, wants 'em to take the low bid and git a passel of niggers in here."

And Number Two: "To put white folks out of work. Builden hit."

And Number Three: "You want to work longside a nigger? And specially him a strange nigger? Builden schoolhouse or backhouse, how so be hit?

And Number Four: "And white folk needen work."

And Number One: "Yeah."

_Yeah, __I said to myself, _so that is the tale__, for Mason County is red-neck country and they don't like niggers, not strange niggers anyway, and they haven't got many of their own. "How much could they save," I asked, "taking the low bid?"

And Number One: Couldn't save enuff to pay fer bringen no passel of niggers in here."

"Putten white folks out of work," Number Two said.

I waited till it was decent, then I got up and said, "Got to be moving. Good afternoon, gentlemen."

One of the old ones looked up at me as though I had just come, and said, "What you work at, boy?"

"I don't," I said.

"Porely?" he asked.

"Not porely," I said. "It is just I lack ambition."

Which was God's truth, I reckoned, as I walked on down the street.