All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [41]
He had been going to get a chunk of all there was. But in the end it was a chunk of law. Lucy came into the picture, and then the kid Tom, and there was working, and later the courthouse, but in the end he got a chunk of law. An old lawyer over at Tyree helped him, lending him books and answering questions. There had been about three years of that. If he had just been trying to squeeze by the bar with as little as possible he could have done it a lot sooner, for back in those days, or now for that matter, it didn’t take any master mind to pass the bar examination. “I sure was a fool,” Willie said to me once, talking about those times, “I though you had really to learn all that stuff. I thought they meant for you to learn law. Hell, I got down to that bar examination and I looked at the questions and I nearly busted out laughing. Me sitting up there bearing down on those books, and then they gave me those little crappy questions. A corn-field nigger could have answered them if he’s been able to spell. I ought to have looked twice at some of the lawyers I’d seen and I’d known a half-with could pass it. But, oh, no, I was hell-bent on learning me some law.” The he laughed, stopped laughing, and said with a touch of the grimness which must have belong to the long night up there in his room when he bent over the trash-burner or heard the moths batting soft at the screen in the August dark: “Well, I learned me some law, I could wait.” He could wait. He had read the books the old lawyer over at Tyree had, and then he bought new books, sending away for them with the money he grubbed out of the ground or got with his patented Fix-It Household Kit. The time came in the end, and he put on his good suit, blue serge and slick in the seat, and caught the train down to the city to take the examination. He had waited, and now he really knew what was in the books.
He was a lawyer now. He could hang the overalls on a nail and let them stiffen with the last sweat he had sweated in them. He could rent himself a room over the dry-goods store in Mason City and call it its office, and wait for somebody to come up the stairs where it was so dark you had to feel your way and where it smelled like the inside of an old trunk that’s been in the attic twenty years. He was a lawyer now and it had taking him a long time. It had taken him a long time because he had had to be a lawyer on his terms and in his own way. But that was over. But maybe it had taken him too long. If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting. In the end they just ask you those crappy little questions.
But the wanting and the waiting were over now, and Willie had a haircut and a new hat and a new brief case with the copy of his speech in it (which he had written out in longhand and had said to Lucy with gestures, as tough he were getting ready for the high-school oratorical contest) and a lot of new friends, with drooping blue jowls or sharp pale noses, who slapped him on the back, and a campaign manager, Tiny Duffy, who would introduce him to you and say with a tin-glittering heartiness, “Meet Willie Stark, the next Governor of this state!” And Willie would put out his hand to you with the gravity of a bishop. For he never tumbled to a thing.
I used to wonder how he got that way. If he had been running for something back in Mason City he never in God’s world would have been that way. He would have taken a perfectly realistic view of things and counted up his chances. Or if he had got into the gubernatorial primary on his own hook, he would have taken a realistic view. But this was different. He had been called. He had been touched. He had been summoned. And he was a little bit awestruck by the fact. It seemed incredible that he hadn