All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [6]
He was lounging back on himself now, and his head was cocked a little to one side, and his eyes blinked. The he grinned, and said, “If they had politicians back in those days, they said, Gimme, just like all of us politician do. Gimme, gimme, my name’s Jimmie. But I’m not a politician today. I’m taking the day off. I’m not even going to ask you to vote for me. To tell the God’s unvarnished and unbuckled truth, I don’t have to ask you. Not today. I still got quite a little hitch up there in the big house with the white columns two stories high on the front porch and peach ice cream for breakfast. Not that a passel of those statesmen wouldn’t like to throw me out. You know–” and he leaned forward a little now, as if to tell them a secret–“it’s funny how I just can’t make friend with some folks. No matter how hard I try. I been just as polite. I said, Please. But please didn’t do any good. But it looks like they got to put up with me a spell longer. And you have. Before you get shet of me. So you better just grin and bear it. It’s not any worse’n boils. Now, is it?
He stopped, and looked all around, right down at them, moving his head slow, so that he seemed to look right in a face here and stop for just a split second, and then to move on to another one a little further. Then he grinned, and his eyes blinked, and he said, “Huh? What’s the matter? Can got yore tongue?”
“Boils on the tail!” somebody yelled back in the crowd.
“Dammit,” Willie yelled back, “lie on yore stummick and go to sleep!”
Somebody laughed.
“And,” yelled Willie, “thank the good Lord who in his everlasting mercy saw fit to make something with a back side and a front side to it out of the skimpy little piece of material provided in your case!”
“You tell em, Willie!” somebody yelled back in the crowd. Then they started to laugh.
The Boss lifted up his right hand about as high as his head, out in front of him, palm down, and waited till they stopped laughing and whistling. Then he said: “No, I’m not here to ask you for anything. A vote or anything else. I reckon I’ll be back later for that. If I keep on relishing that peach ice cream for breakfast in the big house. But I don’t expect all of you to vote for me. My God, if all of you went and voted for Willie, what the hell would you find to argue about? There wouldn’t be anything left but the weather, and you can’t vote on that.
“No,” he said, and it was another voice, quiet and easy and coming slow and from a distance, “I’m not here to ask for anything today. I’m taking the day off, and I’ve come home. A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the street and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. The voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The voices he hears are loud. They are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. But there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back.”
His voice just stopped. It didn’t trail off like a voice coming to a stop. One second it was there, going on, word by word, in the stillness which filled the square and the crowd in front of the courthouse and was stiller for the grinding of the July flies in the two catalpas rising above the heads of the people who had crowded up on the patch of grass roots. The voice was going there, word by word, then suddenly it was not there. There was only the sound of the July flies, which seems to be inside your head as though it were the grind and whir of the springs and cogs which are you and which will not stop no matter what you say until they are good and ready.