"And I don't care if I am," Lucy Stark said, sitting there in the parlor, sewing by the lamp on the table where the big Bible and the plush-bound album were. "I don't care a bit if they won't let me teach any more. I taught six years, counting that term I was out and having little Tommie, and nobody ever said I wasn't all right, but now they write me a letter and say there're complaints about my work and I don't show a spirit of co-operation."
She lifted her sewing and bit off the thread in the way women do to make your flesh crawl. When she leaned over, the light hit her hair to show up the auburn luster lurking in the brown which the operator of the recently established Mason City Beauty Shoppe hadn't been entirely able to burn out with the curling tongs when she gave the marcel treatment. It was too bad about Lucy's hair even if the luster was still there. She was still girlish then, about twenty-five but not looking it, with a nice little waist coming straight up out of the satisfactory and unmeager hips and a nice little pair of ankles crossed in front of the chair, and her face was girlish, with soft, soothing contours and large deep-brown eyes, the kind that makes you think of telling secrets in the gloaming over a garden gate when the lilacs are in bloom along the picket fence of the old homestead. But her hair was cut off at about neck level and marcelled the way they did it back then, which was a shame because the face she had was the kind that demanded to be framed by a wealth of long and lustrous-dusky tresses tangled on the snow-white pillow. She must have had plenty of hair, too, before the massacre.
"But I don't care," she said, and lifted her head out of the light. I don't want to teach in a schoolhouse they build just so somebody can steal some money. And Willie doesn't want to be Treasurer either, if he has to associate with those dishonest people."
"I'm going to run," Willie said glumly. "They can't keep me from running."
"You can give a lot more time to studying your law books," she said to him, "when you aren't in town all the time."
"I'm going to run," he repeated, and jerked his head with that sharp motion he had to get the lock of hair out of his eyes. "I'm going to run," he repeated again, as though he weren't talking to Lucy, or to me, but to the wide sweet air or God-Almighty, "if I don't get a single God-damned vote."
Well, he did run when the time came, and he got more than one vote, but not many more, and Mr. Dolph Pillsbury and his pals won that round. The fellow who was elected against Willie that fall didn't hang his hat up in the office before he had signed the check for the advance payment to J. H. Moore, and J. H. Moore built the schoolhouse. But that is getting ahead of the story.
The story, as Willie told it, was this: The Jeffers Construction Company had low bid at one hundred and forty-two thousand. But there were two more bids in between the Jeffers bid and the Moore bid, which was one hundred and sixty-five thousand and a lot of nickels and dimes. But when Willie kicked about the Moore business, Pillsbury started the nigger business. Jeffers was a big-time contractor, from the south of the state, and he used a lot of Negro bricklayers and plasterers and carpenters in some of his crews. Pillsbury started howling that Jeffers would bring in a lot of Negroes–and Mason County, as I said, is red-neck country–and worse, some of the Negroes would be getting better pay, being skilled laborers, than the men he would pick up around Manson City for some of the work. Pillsbury kept the pot boiling.
He kept it boiling so well that the public overlooked the fact that there were two bids in between Jeffers and Moore and the fact that Pillsbury had a brother-in-law who had a brickkiln in which Moore had an interest and that in the not distant past a lot of the bricks had been declared rotten by the building inspector on a state job and had been refused and there had been a lawsuit and that as sure as God made little green apples with worms in them, bricks from that same kiln would be used in the schoolhouse. The kiln owned by Moore and Pillsbury's brother-in-law used convict labor from the state pen and got it cheap, for the brother-in-law had some tie well up in the system. In fact, as I picked up later, the tie was so good that that building inspector who squawked about the bricks on the state job got thrown out, but I never knew whether he was honest or just ill-informed.
Willie didn't have any luck bucking Pillsbury and the Sheriff. There was an anti-Pillsbury faction, but it didn't amount to much, and Willie didn't add to its numbers. Willie went out and buttonholed folks on the street and tried to explain things to them. You could see Willie standing on a street corner, sweating through his seersucker suit, with his hair down in his eyes, holding an old envelope in one hand and a pencil in the other, working out figures to explain what he was squawking about, but folks don't listen to you when your voice is low and patient and you stop them in the hot sun and make them do arithmetic. Willie tried to get the _Mason County Messenger__ to print something, but they wouldn't. Then he wrote up a long statement of the case as he saw it about the bids, and tried to get the _Messenger__ to print it on handbills in their job printing shop, paid for, but they wouldn't do it. So Willie had to go to the city to get the work done. He came back with his handbills and hired a couple of kids to tote them from house to house in town. But the folks of one of the kids made him stop as soon as they found out, and when the other kid didn't stop, some big boys beat him up.
So Willie toted them around himself, over town, from house to house, carrying them in an old satchel, the kind school kids use, and knocked on the door and then tipped his hat when the lady of the house came. But most of the time she didn't come. There'd be a rustle of a window shade inside, but nobody would come. So Willie would stick a handbill under the door and go to the next place. When he had worked out Mason City, he went over to Tyree, the other town in the county, and passed out his bills the same way, and then he called on the crossroads settlements.
He didn't dent the constituency. The other fellow was elected. J. H. Moore built the schoolhouse, which began to need repairs before the paint was dry. Willie was out of a job. Pillsbury and his friends, no doubt, picked up some nice change as kickback from J. H. Moore, and forgot about the whole business. At least they forgot about it for about three years, when their bad luck started.
Meanwhile Willie was back on Pappy's farm, helping with the chores, and peddling a patent Fix-It Household Kit around the country to pick up a little change, working from door to door again, going from settlement to settlement in his old car, and stopping at the farmhouses in between, knocking on the door and tipping his hat and then showing the woman how to fix a pot. And at night he was plugging away at his books, getting ready for the bar examination. But before that came to pass Willie and Lucy and I sat there that night in the parlor, and Willie said: "They tried to run it over me. They just figured I'd do anything they told me, and they tried to run it over me like I was dirt."