All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [57]
I leaned to Sadie. “Listen,” I said, “I’ve got to get on a telephone. I’m starting to town or the first telephone I hit. I got to telephone this in. You stay here and for God’s sake remember what happens.”
“All right,” she said, not paying much mind to me.
“And nab Willie when it’s over and bring him to town. It’s a sure thing Duffy won’t ask you to ride with him. You nab the sap, and–”
“Sap, hell,” she said. And added, “You go on.”
I went. I worked around the edge of the grandstand, through the crowd, with the sound of Willie’s voice hammering on the eardrums and shaking dead leaves off the oak trees. As I rounded the end of the grandstand, I looked back and there was Willie flinging the sheets of his manuscript from him so the swirled about his feet and beating on his chest and shouting how the truth was there and didn’t need writing down. There he was, with the papers about his feet and one arm up, the coat sleeve jammed elbow high, face red as a bruised beet and the sweat sluicing, hair over his forehead, eyes bugged out and shining, drunk as a hoot owl, and behind him the bunting, red-white-and-blue, and over him God’s bright, brassy, incandescent sky.
I walked down the gravel road a piece and hitched a ride on a truck to town.
That night when all was still and the train bearing Duffy back to the city (to report, no doubt, to Joe Harrison) was puffing across the sage country under the stars and Willie had been in bed for hours sleeping off the fumes, I reached for the bottle on the writing table of my room at the hotel in Upton and said to Sadie, “How about a little more of the stuff that let the bars down and kicked the boards loose?”
“What?” she asked.
“You would not understand that to which I so grammatically refer,” I said, and poured the drink for her.
“Oh, I forgot,” she said, “you’re the fellow who went to college.”
Yes, I was the fellow who had gone so grammatically to college, where I had not learned, I decided, all there was to know.
Willie kept his word. He stumped the state for MacMurfee. He didn’t ride the rods or buy him a mule or steal him one. But he drove the pants off his pretty good secondhand car over the washboard and through the hub-deep dust and got mired in the black gumbo when a rain came and sat in his car waiting for the span of mules to come and pull him out. He stood on schoolhouse steps, and on the top of boxes borrowed from the dry-goods stores, and talked. “Friends, red-necks, suckers, and fellow hicks,” he would say, leaning forward, leaning at them, looking at them. And he would pause, letting the words sink in. And in the quiet the crowd would be restless and resentful under these words, the words they knew people called them but the words nobody ever got up and called them on their face. “Yeah,” he would say, “yeah,” and twist his mouth on the word, “that’s what you are, and you needn’t get mad at me for telling you. Well, get mad, but I’m telling you. That’s what you are. And me–I’m one, too. Oh, I’m a red-neck, for the sun has beat down on me. Oh, I’m a sucker, for I fell for that sweet-talking fellow in the fine automobile. Oh, I took the sugar tit and hushed my crying. Oh, I’m a hick and I am the hick they were going to try to use and split the hick vote. But I’m standing here on my own hind legs, for even a dog can learn, and here I am on my own hind legs.” And he would lean at them. And demand, “Are you, are you on your hind legs? Have you learned that much yet? You think you can learn that much?”
He told them things they didn’t like. He called them the names they didn’t like to be called, but always, almost always, the restlessness and resentment died and he leaned at them with his eyes bugging and his face glistening in the hot sunlight or the red light of a gasoline flare. They listened while he told them to stand on their own hind legs. Go and vote, he told them. Vote for MacMurfee this time, he told them, for he is all you have to vote for. But vote strong, strong enough to show what you can do. Vote him in and then if he doesn