All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [39]
“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.
There wasn’t any fire at the schoolhouse. There was just a fire drill.
About two years after the place was built, it happened. There was a fire drill, and all the kids on the top floors started to use the fire escapes. The first kids to start down on the fire escape at the west end were little kids and they couldn’t get down the steps very fast. Right after them came a batch of big kids, seventh and eighth graders. Because the little kids held up the traffic, the fire escape and the iron platform at the top got packed with kids. Well, some of the brickwork gave and the bolts and bars holding the contraption to the wall pulled loose and the whole thing fell away, spraying kids in all directions.
Three kids were killed outright. They were the ones that hit the concrete walk. About a dozen were crippled up pretty seriously and several of those never were much good afterward.
It was a piece of luck for Willie.
Willie didn’t try to cash in on the luck. He didn’t have to try. People got the point. Willie went to the triple funeral the town had for the kids who got killed, and stood modestly in the background. But old Mr. Sandeen, who was the father of one of the dead kids, saw him back in the crowd and while the clods were still bouncing off the coffin lids Mr. Sandeen pushed back to him and grabbed him by the hand and lifted up one arm above his head and said, loud, “Oh, God, I am punish for accepting iniquity and voting against an honest man!”
It brought down the house. Some women began to cry. The other people began to come up and grab Willie by the hand. Pretty soon there was scarcely a dry eye in the crowd. Willie’s weren’t dry, either.
It was Willie’s luck. But the best luck always happens to people who don’t need it.
He had Mason County in the palm of his hand. And in the city his picture was in all the papers. But he didn’t run for anything. He kept on working on his father’s farm and studying his law books at night. The only thing he did about politics was to get out and make some speeches for a fellow who was running in the primary against the Congressman who had always been a pal of Pillsbury. Willie’s speeches weren’t any good, at least the one I heard wasn’t any good. But they didn’t have to be good. People didn’t bother to listen to them. They just came to look at Willie and clap and then go vote against the Pillsbury man.
Then one day Willie woke up and found himself running for Governor. Or rather, he was running in the Democratic primary, which in our state is the same as running for governor.
Now it wasn’t any particular achievement to be running in the primary. Anybody who can scrape together a few dollars for the qualifying fee can offer for election and have the pleasure of seeing his name printed on the ballot. But Willie’s case was a little different.
There were then two major factions in the Democratic party in the state, the Joe Harrison outfit and the MacMurfee outfit. Harrison had been Governor some time back, and MacMurfee was in then and was going to try to hold the job. Harrison was a city man and practically all of his backing was city backing. MacMurfee wasn