All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [37]
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