But by the time I was standing in front of a door at one end of the cross hall and was looking up at another tin sign, and knew from it that I had arrived at the one-man leper colony of Mason City.
The leper was sitting in the room, not doing anything, all by himself. There wasn’t anybody to sit and spit and jaw with him under his electric fan.
“Hello,” I said, and he looked up at me as though I were a spook and the word I had used were in a foreign language. He didn’t answer me right off, and I figured he was like one of those fellows who gets marooned on a desert island for twenty years and when the longboat is beached and the jolly tars leap out on the sand and ask him who the hell he is, he can’t say a word because his tongue is so rusty.
Well, Willie wasn’t that bad off, for he finally managed to say hello, and that he remembered me from our meeting in Slade’s place a few months back, and to ask me what I wanted. I told him, and he grinned a grin more wistful than happy and asked me why I wanted to know.
“The editor told me to find out,” I said, “and why he wants me to find out only God knows. Maybe it is because it is news.”
That seemed to be enough to satisfy him. So I didn’t tell him that beyond my boss the managing editor there was a great high world of reasons but to a fellow like me down in the ditch it was a world of flickering diaphanous spirit wings and faint angel voices I didn’t always savvy and stellar influences.
“I reckon it is news,” Willie allowed.
“What’s been going on around here?”
“I don’t mind telling you,” he said. He began telling me and he finished telling me about eleven o’clock that night that Lucy Stark, after she had put the kid to bed, and me sitting with him in the parlor out at his pappy’s place, where he had asked me to spend the night, and where he and Lucy ordinarily lived in the summer and where they were going to live that winter too instead of in a room in town because Lucy had just been fired from her teaching job for the coming year and there wasn’t any reason to be in town and be spending good money for rent. And there was very likely to be another reason for there not being any reason to stay in town, for Willie was coming up for re-election and his chances looked about as good as the chances of a flea making a living of a carved marble lion on a monument. He had only got the job in the first place, he told me, because Dolph Pillsbury, the Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, was a sort of secondhand relative of old Mr. Stark, by marriage or something, and Pillsbury had had a falling-out with the other fellow who wanted to be Treasurer. Pillsbury about ran the county, he and the Sheriff, and he was sick of Willie. So Willie was on his way out, and Lucy was already out.
“And I don’t care if I am,” Lucy Stark said, sitting there in the parlor, sewing by the lamp on the table where the big Bible and the plush-bound album were. “I don’t care a bit if they won’t let me teach any more. I taught six years, counting that term I was out and having little Tommie, and nobody ever said I wasn’t all right, but now they write me a letter and say there’re complaints about my work and I don’t show a spirit of co-operation.”
She lifted her sewing and bit off the thread in the way women do to make your flesh crawl. When she leaned over, the light hit her hair to show up the auburn luster lurking in the brown which the operator of the recently established Mason City Beauty Shoppe hadn’t been entirely able to burn out with the curling tongs when she gave the marcel treatment. It was too bad about Lucy’s hair even if the luster was still there. She was still girlish then, about twenty-five but not looking it, with a nice little waist coming straight up out of the satisfactory and unmeager hips and a nice little pair of ankles crossed in front of the chair, and her face was girlish, with soft, soothing contours and large deep-brown eyes, the kind that makes you think of telling secrets in the gloaming over a garden gate when the lilacs are in bloom along the picket fence of the old homestead. But her hair was cut off at about neck level and marcelled the way they did it back then, which was a shame because the face she had was the kind that demanded to be framed by a wealth of long and lustrous-dusky tresses tangled on the snow-white pillow. She must have had plenty of hair, too, before the massacre.
“But I don’t care,” she said, and lifted her head out of the light. I don’t want to teach in a schoolhouse they build just so somebody can steal some money. And Willie doesn’t want to be Treasurer either, if he has to associate with those dishonest people.”
“I’m going to run,” Willie said glumly. “They can’t keep me from running.”
“You can give a lot more time to studying your law books,” she said to him, “when you aren’t in town all the time.”
“I’m going to run,” he repeated, and jerked his head with that sharp motion he had to get the lock of hair out of his eyes. “I’m going to run,” he repeated again, as though he weren’t talking to Lucy, or to me, but to the wide sweet air or God-Almighty, “if I don’t get a single God-damned vote.”
Well, he did run when the time came, and he got more than one vote, but not many more, and Mr. Dolph Pillsbury and his pals won that round. The fellow who was elected against Willie that fall didn’t hang his hat up in the office before he had signed the check for the advance payment to J. H. Moore, and J. H. Moore built the schoolhouse. But that is getting ahead of the story.
The story, as Willie told it, was this: The Jeffers Construction Company had low bid at one hundred and forty-two thousand. But there were two more bids in between the Jeffers bid and the Moore bid, which was one hundred and sixty-five thousand and a lot of nickels and dimes. But when Willie kicked about the Moore business, Pillsbury started the nigger business. Jeffers was a big-time contractor, from the south of the state, and he used a lot of Negro bricklayers and plasterers and carpenters in some of his crews. Pillsbury started howling that Jeffers would bring in a lot of Negroes–and Mason County, as I said, is red-neck country–and worse, some of the Negroes would be getting better pay, being skilled laborers, than the men he would pick up around Manson City for some of the work. Pillsbury kept the pot boiling.
He kept it boiling so well that the public overlooked the fact that there were two bids in between Jeffers and Moore and the fact that Pillsbury had a brother-in-law who had a brickkiln in which Moore had an interest and that in the not distant past a lot of the bricks had been declared rotten by the building inspector on a state job and had been refused and there had been a lawsuit and that as sure as God made little green apples with worms in them, bricks from that same kiln would be used in the schoolhouse. The kiln owned by Moore and Pillsbury’s brother-in-law used convict labor from the state pen and got it cheap, for the brother-in-law had some tie well up in the system. In fact, as I picked up later, the tie was so good that that building inspector who squawked about the bricks on the state job got thrown out, but I never knew whether he was honest or just ill-informed.
Willie didn’t have any luck bucking Pillsbury and the Sheriff. There was an anti-Pillsbury faction, but it didn’t amount to much, and Willie didn’t add to its numbers. Willie went out and buttonholed folks on the street and tried to explain things to them. You could see Willie standing on a street corner, sweating through his seersucker suit, with his hair down in his eyes, holding an old envelope in one hand and a pencil in the other, working out figures to explain what he was squawking about, but folks don’t listen to you when your voice is low and patient and you stop them in the hot sun and make them do arithmetic. Willie tried to get the Mason County Messenger_ to print something, but they wouldn’t. Then he wrote up a long statement of the case as he saw it about the bids, and tried to get the Messenger_ to print it on handbills in their job printing shop, paid for, but they wouldn’t do it. So Willie had to go to the city to get the work done. He came back with his handbills and hired a couple of kids to tote them from house to house in town. But the folks of one of the kids made him stop as soon as they found out, and when the other kid didn’t stop, some big boys beat him up.
So Willie tot
ed them around himself, over town, from house to house, carrying them in an old satchel, the kind school kids use, and knocked on the door and then tipped his hat when the lady of the house came. But most of the time she didn’t come. There’d be a rustle of a window shade inside, but nobody would come. So Willie would stick a handbill under the door and go to the next place. When he had worked out Mason City, he went over to Tyree, the other town in the county, and passed out his bills the same way, and then he called on the crossroads settlements.
He didn’t dent the constituency. The other fellow was elected. J. H. Moore built the schoolhouse, which began to need repairs before the paint was dry. Willie was out of a job. Pillsbury and his friends, no doubt, picked up some nice change as kickback from J. H. Moore, and forgot about the whole business. At least they forgot about it for about three years, when their bad luck started.
Meanwhile Willie was back on Pappy’s farm, helping with the chores, and peddling a patent Fix-It Household Kit around the country to pick up a little change, working from door to door again, going from settlement to settlement in his old car, and stopping at the farmhouses in between, knocking on the door and tipping his hat and then showing the woman how to fix a pot. And at night he was plugging away at his books, getting ready for the bar examination. But before that came to pass Willie and Lucy and I sat there that night in the parlor, and Willie said: “They tried to run it over me. They just figured I’d do anything they told me, and they tried to run it over me like I was dirt.”
And laying her sewing down in her lap, Lucy said, “Now, honey, you didn’t want to be mixed up with them anyway. Not after you found out they were dishonest and crooked.”
“They tried to run it over me,” he repeated, sullenly, twisting his heavy body in the chair. “Like I was dirt.”
“Willie,” she said, leaning toward him a little, “they would have been crooks even if they didn’t try to run it over you.”
He wasn’t paying her much mind.
“They’d be crooks, wouldn’t they?” she asked in a tone which was a little bit like the patient, leading-them-on tone she must have used in the schoolroom. She kept watching his face, which seemed to be pulling back from her and from me and the room, as tough he weren’t really hearing her voice but were listening to another voice, a signal maybe, outside the house, in the dark beyond the screen of the open window.
“Wouldn’t they?” she asked him, pulling him back into the room, into the circle of soft light from the lamp on the table, where the big Bible and the plush-bound album lay. The bowl of the lamp was china and had a spray of violets painted on it.
“Wouldn’t they?” she asked him, and before he answered I caught myself listening to the dry, compulsive, half-witted sound of the crickets were making out in the grass in the dark.
Then he said, “Yeah, yeah, they’d be crooks, all right,” and heaved himself in the chair with the motion of one who is irritated a having a train of thought interrupted. Then he sank back into whatever he was brooding over.
Lucy looked at me with a confident birdlike lift of her head, as though she had proved something to me. The secondary glow of the light above the circle of light was on her face, and if I had wanted to I could have guessed that some of that glow was given off softly by her face as though the flesh had a delicate and unflagging and serene phosphorescence from its own inwardness.
Well, Lucy was a woman, and therefore she must have been wonderful in the way women are wonderful. She turned her face to me with that expression which seemed to say, “See, I told you, that’s the way it is,” and meanwhile Willie sat there. But his own face seemed to be pulling off again into the distance which was not distance but which was, shall I say, simply himself.
Lucy was sewing now, and talking to me while looking down at the cloth, and after a little Willie got up and started to walk up and down the room, with his forelock coming down over his eyes. He kept on pacing back and forth while Lucy and I talked.
It wasn’t very soothing to have that going on across one end of the room.
Finally, Lucy looked up from her sewing, and said, “Honey–”
Willie stopped pacing and swung his head at her with the forelock down over his eyes to give him the look of a mean horse then he’s cornered in the angle of the pasture fence with his head down a little and the mane shagged forward between the ears, and the eyes both wild and shrewd, watching you step up with the bridle, and getting ready to bolt.
“Sit down, honey,” Lucy said, “you make me nervous. You’re just like Tommie, you can’t ever sit still.” Then she laughed, and with a sort of shamefaced grin on his face he came over and sat down.
She was a fine woman, and he was lucky to have her.
But he was also lucky to have the Sheriff and Dolph Pillsbury, for they were doing him a favor and not knowing it. He didn’t seem to know it either at the time, that they were his luck. But perhaps the essential part of him was knowing it all the time, only word hadn’t quite got around to the other and accidental parts of him. Or it is possible that fellows like Willie Stark are born outside of luck, good or bad, and luck, which is what about makes you and me what we are, doesn’t have anything to do with them, for they are what they are from the time they first kick in the womb until the end. And if this is the case, then their life history is a process of discovering that they really are, and not, as for you and me, sons of luck, a process of becoming what luck makes us. And if that is the case, then Lucy wasn’t Willie’s luck. Or his unluck either. She was part of the climate in which the process of discovering the real Willie was taking place.
But, speaking vulgarly, the Sheriff and Pillsbury were part of Willie’s luck. I didn’t know it that night in pappy’s parlor, and I didn’t know it when I got back to town and gave Jim Madison my tale. Well, Willie began to appear in the Chronicle_ in the role of the boy upon the burning deck and the boy who put his finger in the dike and the boy who replies “I can” when Duty whispers low “Thou must.” The Chronicle_ was turning up more and more tales about finagling in county courthouses around the state. It pointed the finger of fine scorn and reprobation all over the map. Then I began to grasp the significance of what was going on in that world of reasons high above the desk of Jim Madison, and caught the glint of those diaphanous spirit wings and the fluting whispers of faint angel voices up there. In brief, this: The happy harmony in the state machine was a thing of the past, and the Chronicle_ was lined up with the soreheads, and was hacking away at the county substructure of the machine. It was starting there, feeling its way, setting the stage and preparing the backdrop for the real show. It wasn’t as hard as it might have been. Ordinarily the country boys in the county courthouses have plenty of savvy and know all the tricks and are plenty hard to pin anything on, but the machine had been operating so long now without serious opposition that ease had corrupted them. They just didn’t bother to be careful. So the Chronicle_ was making a good show.
But Mason County was Exhibit Number One. On account of Willie. He gave the touch of drama to the sordid tale. He became symbolically the spokesman for the tonguetied population of honest men. And when Willie was licked at the polls of Mason County, the Chronicle_ ran his picture, and under it the lines KEEPS HIS FAITH. And under that they printed the statement which Willie had given to me when I went back up to Mason City after the election and after Willie was out. The statement went like this: “Sure, they did it and it was a clean job which I admire. I am going back to Pappy’s farmer and milk the cows and study some more law for it looks like I am going to need it. But I have kept my faith in the people of Mason County. Time will bring all things to light.”
I had gone up there to see what he had to say, but didn’t have to go out to the farm. I ran into Willie on the street. He had been building some fence and had busted his wire stretcher and had come in to town to get a new one. He was wearing and old black felt hat and overalls which hung down around his can as though he were little Droopy-Drawers smiling up from
the play pen.
He went to the drugstore and had a coke. He stood in front of the soda fountain and I put may pad in front of Willie by his old hat and gave him a pencil. He licked the point and his eyes glazed as though he were getting ready to do sums on his slate, and then leaning up against the marble, with his overall drooping, he wrote out the statement in his big round, scrawly hand.
“How’s Lucy making out?” I asked him.
“Fine,” he said. “She likes it out there and she’s company for Pappy. It suits her all right.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“It suits me, too,” he said, not looking at me but across the fountain at his own face in the big mirror. “The way it is it all suits me just fine,” he said, and looked at the face in the mirror, which was freckled and thin-skinned over the full flesh but under the saggy forelock was untroubled and pure like the face of a man who tops the last rise and looks down at the road running along and straight to the place where he is going.
As I said, if a man like Willie can be said to live in the world of luck, Dolph Pillsbury and the Sheriff were his luck. They ran it over Willie and got the new schoolhouse built by J. H. Moore. J. H. Moore used the brick out of the kiln owned by the distant relative of Pillsbury. It was just another big box of a schoolhouse with a fire escape at each end. The fire escapes weren’t the kind which looks like a silo and which has corkscrew-shape chute inside for the kiddies to slide down. They were iron stairs attached to the outside of the building.
All the King's Men Page 9