he had buckled down to his books pretty seriously, in what time he could spare from farming and peddling his Fix-It Household Kit. He had sat up there in his room late at night in summer, dog sleepy but grinding his eyes into the page, while the moths tapped and blurred at the window screen and tried to get onto the flame of the oil lamp which sizzled softly on his table. Or he had sat up there on winter night while the fire died out in the rusty-burner stove and the wind beat on the north side of the house, coming down a thousand miles through the night to shake the room where Willie sat hunched over the book. Long back, he had spent a year at the Baptist College over at Marston, in the next county, long back before he had met Lucy. The college wasn’t much more than a glorified grade school, but there he had heard the big named written in the big books. He had left the college with the big names in his head, because he didn’t have any money. Then the war had come and he had been in it, stuck off somewhere in Oklahoma in a camp, feeling cheated, somehow, and feeling that he had missed his chance. Then after the war there had been the working on his father’s place and reading books at night, not law books, just what books he could get hold of. He wanted to know the history of the country. He had a college textbook, a big thick one. Years later, showing it to me, he prodded it with his finger, and said, “I durn near memorized every durn word in it. I could name you every name. I could name you every date.” Then he prodded it again, this time contemptuously, and said, “And the fellow that wrote didn’t know a God-damned thing. About how thing were. He didn’t know a thing. I bet things were just like they are now. A lot of folks wrassling around.” But there had been the great names, too. There had been a notebook, a big cloth-bound ledger, in which he wrote the fine sayings and the fine ideas he got out of the books. A long time later he showed me that, too, and as I thumbed idly through it, noticing the quotations from Emerson and Macaulay and Benjamin Franklin and Shakespeare copied out in a ragged boyish hand, he said with that same tone of amiable contempt, “Gee, back in those days I figured those fellows who wrote the books knew all there was. And I figured I was going to get me a chunk of it. Yeah, I figured I would sweat for me a chunk of it.” He laughed. And added, “Yeah, I thought I was the nuts.”
He had been going to get a chunk of all there was. But in the end it was a chunk of law. Lucy came into the picture, and then the kid Tom, and there was working, and later the courthouse, but in the end he got a chunk of law. An old lawyer over at Tyree helped him, lending him books and answering questions. There had been about three years of that. If he had just been trying to squeeze by the bar with as little as possible he could have done it a lot sooner, for back in those days, or now for that matter, it didn’t take any master mind to pass the bar examination. “I sure was a fool,” Willie said to me once, talking about those times, “I though you had really to learn all that stuff. I thought they meant for you to learn law. Hell, I got down to that bar examination and I looked at the questions and I nearly busted out laughing. Me sitting up there bearing down on those books, and then they gave me those little crappy questions. A corn-field nigger could have answered them if he’s been able to spell. I ought to have looked twice at some of the lawyers I’d seen and I’d known a half-with could pass it. But, oh, no, I was hell-bent on learning me some law.” The he laughed, stopped laughing, and said with a touch of the grimness which must have belong to the long night up there in his room when he bent over the trash-burner or heard the moths batting soft at the screen in the August dark: “Well, I learned me some law, I could wait.” He could wait. He had read the books the old lawyer over at Tyree had, and then he bought new books, sending away for them with the money he grubbed out of the ground or got with his patented Fix-It