All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [58]
He leaned at them and said, “Listen to me, you hick. Listen here and lift up your eyes and looked on the God’s blessed and unfly-blown truth. If you’ve got the brain of a sapsucker left and can recognize the truth when you see it. This is the truth: you are a hick and nobody ever helped a hick but the hick himself. Up there in town they won’t help you. It is up to you and God, and God helps those who help themselves!”
He gave them that, and they stood there in front of him, with a thumb hooked on the overall strap, and the eyes under the pulled-down fat brim squinting at him as though he were something spied across a valley or cove, something they weren’t quite easy in the mind about, too far away to make out good, or a sudden movement in the brush seen way off yonder across the valley or across the field and something might pop out of the brush, and under the eyes the jaw revolving worked the quid with a slow, punctilious, immitigable motion, like historical process. And Time is nothing to a hog, or to History, either. They watched him, and if you watched close you might be able to see something beginning to happen. They stand so quiet, they don’t even shift from one foot to the other–they’ve got a talent for being quiet, you can see then stand on the street corner when they come to town, not moving or talking, or see one of them squatting on his heels by the road, just looking off where the road drops over the hill–and their squinched eyes don’t flicker off the man up there in front of them. They’ve got a talent for being quiet. But sometimes the quietness stops. It snaps all of a sudden, like a piece of string pulled tight. One of them sit quiet on the bench, at the brush-arbor revival, listening, and all of a sudden he jumps up and lifts up his arms and yells, “Oh Jesus! I have seen His name!” One of them presses his finger on the trigger, and the sound of the gun surprises even him
Willie is up there. In the sun, or in the red light of the gasoline flare. “You ask me what my program is. Here it is, you hicks. And don’t you forget it. Nail ’em up! Nail up Joe Harrison. Nail up anybody who stands on your way. Nail up MacMurfee if he don’t deliver. Nail anybody who stands on your way. You hand me the hammer and I’ll do it with my own hand. Nail ’em up on the barn door! And don’t fan away the bluebottles with any turkey wings!”
It was Willie, all right. It was the fellow with the same name.
MacMurfee was elected. Willie had something to do with it, for the biggest vote was polled in the sections Willie had worked that they had any record of. But all the time MacMurfee didn’t quite know what to make of Willie. He shied off him at first, for Willie had said some pretty hard things about him, and then when it did look as though Willie would make an impression, he shilly-shallied. And in the end Willie got up on his hind legs and said how the MacMurfee people were offering to pay his expenses but he was on his own, he wasn’t MacMurfee’s man, even if he was saying to vote for MacMurfee. He was paying his way, he said, even if he had to put another mortgage on his pappy’s farm and the last one it would hold. Yes, and if there was anybody who couldn’t afford two dollars to pay his poll tax and came to him and said it straight out, he, Willie Stark, would pay the tax out of the money he had got by mortgaging his pappy’s farm. That was how much he believed in what he was saying.
MacMurfee was in, and Willie went back to Mason City and practiced law. He must have dragged on for a year or so, handling chicken-stealing cases and stray-hog cases and cutting scrapes (which are part of the entertainment at Saturday-night square dances in Mason County). Then a gang of workmen got hurt when some of the rig collapsed on a bridge the state was building over the Ackamulgee River, and two or three got killed. A lot of the workmen were from Mason County and they got Willie for their lawyer. He got all over the papers for that. And he won the case. Then they struck oil just west of mason County over in Ackamulgee County, and in that section Willie got mixed up in the litigation between an oil company and some independent leaseholders. Willie