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's side won, and he saw folding money for the first time in his life. He saw quite a lot of it.
During all that time I didn't see Willie. I didn't see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey's saloon rolled into one, and when the smoke cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn't any Democratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood. In the background of the picture, under a purplish tumbled sky flecked with sinister white like driven foam, flanking Willie, one on each side, were two figures, Sadie Burke and a tallish, stooped, slow-spoken man with a sad, tanned face and what they call the eyes of a dreamer. The man was Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, and no political past. He was a fellow who had sat still for years, and then somebody (Willie Stark) handed him a baseball bat and he felt his fingers close on the tape. He was a man and was Attorney General. And Sadie Burke was just Sadie Burke.
Over the brow of the hill, there were, of course, some other people. There were, for instance, certain gentlemen who had once been devoted to Joe Harrison, but who, when they discovered that there wasn't going to be any more Joe Harrison politically speaking, had had to hunt up a new friend. The new friend happened to be Willie. He was the only place for them to go. They figured they would sign on with Willie and grow up with the country. Willie signed them on, all right, and as a result got quiet a few votes not of the wool-hat and cocklebur variety. After a while, Willie even signed on Tiny Duffy, who became Highway Commissioner and, later Lieutenant Governor in Willie's last term. I used to wonder why Willie kept him around. Sometimes I used to ask the Boss, "What do you keep that lunk-head for?" Sometimes he would just laugh and say nothing. Sometimes he would say, "Hell, somebody's got to be Lieutenant Governor, and they all look alike." But once he said: "I keep him because he reminds me of something."
"What?"
"Something I don't ever want to forget," he said.
"What's that?"
"That when they come to you sweet talking you better not listen to anything they say. I don't aim to forget that."
So that was it. Tiny was the fellow who had come in a big automobile and had talked sweet to Willie back when Willie was a little country lawyer.
But was that it? Or rather, was that all of it? I figured there was another reason. The Boss must have taken a kind pride in the fact that he could make Tiny Duffy a success, He had busted Tiny Duffy and then he had picked up the pieces and put him back together again as his own creation. He must have taken a lot of pleasure in looking at Tiny's glittering rig and diamond ring, and thinking that it was all hollow, that it was a sham, that if he should crook his little finger Tiny Duffy would disappear like a whiff of smoke. In a way, the very success which the Boss laid on Tiny was his revenge on Tiny, for every time the Boss put his meditative, sleepy, distant gaze on Tiny, Tiny would know, with a cold clutch at his fat heart, that if the Boss should crook a finger there wouldn't be anything but the whiff of smoke. In a way, Tiny's success was a final index of the Boss's own success.
But was that it? In the end, I decided that there was one more reason behind the other reasons. This: Tiny Duffy became, in a crazy kind of way, the other self of Willie Stark, and all the contempt and insult which Willie Stark was to heap on Tiny Duffy was nothing but what one self of Willie Stark did to the other self because of a blind, in ward necessity. But I came to that conclusion only at the very end, a long time afterwards.
But now Willie had just become Governor and nobody knew what would come afterwards.
And meanwhile–while the campaign was on–I was out of a job.
My job had been political reporting for the _Chronicle__. I had a column, too. I was a pundit.
One day Jim Madison had me in to stand on the Kelly-green carpet which surrounded his desk like a pasture. "Jack," he said, "you know what the _Chronicle__ line is in this election."
"Sure," I replied, "it wants to elect Sam MacMurfee again because of his brilliant record as an administrator and his high integrity as a statesman."
He grinned a little sourly and said, "It wants to elect Sam MacMurfee."
"I'm sorry I forgot we were in the bosom of the family. I thought I was writing my column."
The grin went off his face. He played with a pencil on his desk. "It's about the column I wanted to see you," he said.
"O. K.," I replied.
"Can't you put some more steam in it? This is an election and not a meeting of the Epworth League."
"It is an election, all right."
"Can't you give it a little more?"
"When what you got to work with is Sam MacMurfee," I said, "you haven't even got a sow's ear to make a silk purse out of. I'm doing what I can."
He brooded over that for a minute. Then he began, "Now just because the Stark happens to be a friend of yours, you–"
"He's no friend of mine," I snapped. "I didn't even see him between last election and this one. Personally, I don't care who is ever Governor of this state or how big a son-of-a-bitch he is. But I am a hired hand, and I do my best to suppress in my column my burning conviction that Sam MacMurfee is one of the fanciest sons-of–"
"You know the _Chronicle__ line," Jim Madison said heavily and studied the spit-slick, chewed butt of his cigar.
It was a hot day, and the breeze from the electric fan was on Jim Madison and not on me, and there was a little thread of acid, yellow-feeling saliva down in my throat, the kind you get when your stomach is sour, and my head felt like a dried gourd with a couple of seeds rattling around in it. So I looked at Jim Madison, and said, "All right."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I mean in the way I said it," I said, and started for the door.
"Look here, Jack, I'm–" he began, and laid the cigar butt down on the ash tray.