All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [40]
Somebody in the Harrison outfit got the idea, which God knows he didn’t invent, of putting in a dummy who might split the MacMurfee vote. This has to be somebody who had a strong appeal in the country. So that was Willie, who could throw some weight up in the north end of the state. There wasn’t any deal with Willie, it developed Some gentlemen form the city called on him up in Mason City, driving up there in a fine car and striped pants. One of them was Mr. Duffy, Tiny Duffy, who was a lot grander now that he had been back that day when he and Willie had first met in the back room of Slade’s beer parlor. The gentlemen from the city persuaded Willie that he was the savior of the state. I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and cageyness, but hose things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear. Also there was the small matter of God. People said that God had taken a hand in the schoolhouse business. That God had stepped in on Willie’s side. The Lord had justified him. Willie was not religious by any ordinary standards, but the schoolhouse business very probably gave him the notion–which was shared by a lot of to local citizenry–that he stood in a special relation to God. Destiny, or plain Luck. And it doesn’t matter what you call it or if you go to church. And since the Lord moves in a mysterious way, it should not have surprised Willie that He was using some fat men in striped pants and a big car to work His will. The Lord was calling Willie, and Tiny Duffy was just an expensively dressed Western Union boy in a Cadillac instead of on a bicycle. So Willie signed the receipt.
Willie was ready to ride. He was a lawyer now. He had been for some little time, for after he ad lost out as County Treasurer, he had buckled down to his books pretty seriously, in what time he could spare from farming and peddling his Fix-It Household Kit. He had sat up there in his room late at night in summer, dog sleepy but grinding his eyes into the page, while the moths tapped and blurred at the window screen and tried to get onto the flame of the oil lamp which sizzled softly on his table. Or he had sat up there on winter night while the fire died out in the rusty-burner stove and the wind beat on the north side of the house, coming down a thousand miles through the night to shake the room where Willie sat hunched over the book. Long back, he had spent a year at the Baptist College over at Marston, in the next county, long back before he had met Lucy. The college wasn’t much more than a glorified grade school, but there he had heard the big named written in the big books. He had left the college with the big names in his head, because he didn’t have any money. Then the war had come and he had been in it, stuck off somewhere in Oklahoma in a camp, feeling cheated, somehow, and feeling that he had missed his chance. Then after the war there had been the working on his father’s place and reading books at night, not law books, just what books he could get hold of. He wanted to know the history of the country. He had a college textbook, a big thick one. Years later, showing it to me, he prodded it with his finger, and said, “I durn near memorized every durn word in it. I could name you every name. I could name you every date.” Then he prodded it again, this time contemptuously, and said, “And the fellow that wrote didn’t know a God-damned thing. About how thing were. He didn’t know a thing. I bet things were just like they are now. A lot of folks wrassling around.” But there had been the great names, too. There had been a notebook, a big cloth-bound ledger, in which he wrote the fine sayings and the fine ideas he got out of the books. A long time later he showed me that, too, and as I thumbed idly through it, noticing the quotations from Emerson and Macaulay and Benjamin Franklin and Shakespeare copied out in a ragged boyish hand, he said with that same tone of amiable contempt,