The Governor's Lady (35 page)

With Allison, it was quick. She sat stoically while Cooper told her. Cooper didn’t mention Jesse.
It wouldn’t register
, she thought. So she came to the point, gave the essentials.

“Is that all?” Allison said.

“I guess that pretty much is.”

“Have you talked to Carter?”

“Yes.”

“And knowing Carter, he agrees.”

“I told Carter that if either of you doesn’t think I should, I won’t. I mean it.”

“Well,” Allison said, “don’t let me stop you. It’s another good reason for me to get the hell out of here.”

She left Cooper sitting there with the sad disappointment that had been at the heart of their relationship for so long. What could she do?

And then the thought occurred to her:
Me and Mickey. There came a point when we just couldn’t connect anymore. Too much damage done. I won’t let it come to that with Allison. But right now, I don’t know how. So I’ll get on with things. She didn’t say no
.

It was almost nine. She was at the dining-room table, finishing her dinner alone, when Pickett came in. He had eaten with his legislative leaders, he said. He sat with her, chair edged back a ways, legs crossed, waiting.

“All right,” she said. “How?”

When he had finished telling her, she said, “I have one absolutely nonnegotiable condition: My mother stays out of it. Completely, no excuses, no exceptions.”

It took a moment, but then he said without reservation, “Done.”

At first, they faced a barrage of criticism. It came from all angles—political rivals, pundits, civic groups, newspapers. Especially newspapers, and most especially the
Dispatch
. Felicia Withers foamed at the mouth on her editorial page, calling it “the most blatant, inexcusable, craven power grab in the state’s history. Cleve Spainhour would be ashamed of his daughter and the man she was unfortunate enough to marry.”

That truly stung. Cleve would have blessed her, no doubt. He would have said, “Be your own person.” He would not have been ashamed.

“Pay no attention,” Pickett said.

“Easy for you to say.”

“At least consider the source. Felicia is so mean, her urine could etch glass. She hates me, and therefore she hates you. And she can’t stand the thought of another woman with real clout in the capital. So forget about Felicia and the other whiners. Concentrate on what matters.”

What mattered first, she came to realize, was that the odds were in her favor. Pickett had seen to that. Woodrow had been the prohibitive favorite for so long that he had effectively kept several other prospects out of the race, and now, with him suddenly dropping out and Pickett’s machine sewing up money and endorsements, it was very late in a game that demanded months, even years of preparation. An influential state senator would be on the ballot, along with the mayor of the state’s largest city, but the rest of the primary field was a motley collection of minor figures. Pickett’s polls showed that Cooper was being cautiously appraised by voters who were keeping an open mind, who remembered Cleve Spainhour with admiration and affection. What Cooper had to do was get out there among them and convince them she was legitimate.

So she did. Pickett’s people gave her a crash course on issues, the back-room machinations of the political process, the hot buttons. She absorbed it, drawing on her days as a journalist, when she had to size up a situation, make sense of it, ask tough questions, be persistent. The more she learned, the more she began to stake out her own positions.

“I don’t agree with you on some things,” she told Pickett, “and I’m not going to parrot the party line.”

“My God,” he said, “have I created a monster?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s okay. In fact, it’s good. You have to convince people you’ll be your own person, not just keep the chair warm. Just go easy on me, okay?”

“Then don’t cross me.”

She had her own ideas about how to campaign, too. For the past few elections, Pickett’s focus had been mostly on civic clubs, photo opportunities,
TV and radio interviews, advertising.

“It’s not enough,” she said, her instincts taking over. “I’m going to do it Daddy’s way.”

Cleve’s way had been to hire a band and a truck with a flatbed trailer and travel to every town and crossroads in the state. Set up the trailer on a town square or empty lot, then the band, thirty minutes of music to help draw the crowd, then Cleve. A speech, not too long, then into the crowd, shaking every hand, listening to everybody who had something to say, while the trailer and the band went on to the next stop. Pickett’s Posse thought it was corny, amateurish, useless. They balked. She went to Pickett, who listened and then said, “Try it your way. See if it works.” And he set his people to making it happen.

They talked more than at any time in years. She felt glimmers of their old life returning, back when each thought the other was so special. It was warm and comfortable. She felt truly needed.

She was ready, on a brisk day in early March, to go do it.

She had chosen the early stops on the tour herself. She asked for county-by-county voting results from Cleve’s campaigns. He was solid in the upstate, his home country, less so at the other end. She remembered Cleve’s quoting a wise political consultant years ago: “ ‘If you want to pick cherries, go where the cherries is. Find your people, ask ’em to help, get ’em to the polls, and hope all the other folks forget there’s an election.’ ”

So she began in the town a few miles from the Big House, in the parking lot of the courthouse where she had driven with Jesse those eons ago.

The band, a soft-rock group—Cleve had favored hillbillies, but that was then—was finishing a number when her car pulled up at the back of the trailer. She climbed nimbly up the steps, took the microphone from the lead singer, and stepped to the front. No podium, just Cooper and the people. Polite applause. A good crowd—not big, but good. She
saw some familiar faces. The old sheriff, Joe Banks, long retired, feeble in a wheelchair. She waved. He gave her a wobbly thumbs-up. No sign of Mickey.

“Thank you for welcoming me home,” she said, the loudspeakers at either end of the trailer booming her voice across the lot. “I grew up here among plain-spoken folks, and I want to be plain-spoken right off the bat. I am not a stand-in. I am my own person, and that’s the kind of governor I intend to be. I don’t owe anything to anybody except my daddy, who taught me what it is to be a governor who cares. And here are some of the things I care about….”

When she finished ten minutes later—after plain-spoken words about education, jobs, clean air and water, clean politics, honesty, accessibility—the applause was more spirited. She climbed down from the platform and waded into the crowd, talking and hugging and listening until the last person had been attended to. In the car as she started for the next town—an hour late but flushed with adrenaline—she thought suddenly of Woodrow. The faculty picnic, Woodrow politicking everybody he could get his hands on, so earnest about making everyone feel special for a moment. He was, even back then, a master at it.

Maybe she had learned something from him.

She campaigned without Pickett. The governor’s race was just hers, and she had to convince people of that. Besides, he was already diving into his own campaign—and taking criticism for spending so much time out of state. She made reference to that, gigging him a little. “I will be a full-time governor,” she told the crowds. They liked it. Pickett bitched, but she didn’t back down, and he dropped it.

She was good at campaigning, and got better. She listened and learned. Pickett’s people grudgingly admitted she was on to something—the give and take, the time-honored laying on of hands—and she sensed that people were finding something both ambitious and genuine in her. The crowds grew in size and warmth. She didn’t need
Pickett’s polls to tell her she was gaining ground. She felt it, felt the momentum, the growing acceptance, the way she was sure Cleve had years ago. There was more to the pedigree than she ever imagined. Her opponents’ radio and television ads were slick and artful, full of the language of attack. They weren’t talking about themselves, they were talking about her. Fine. Her own TV ads were full of images of her out among the folks—brief sound bites not of her speeches but from the questions she got from people, the way she answered.

By the middle of May, two weeks from the primary, Pickett brought polls that showed her a hair below fifty percent and climbing. Toward the end, she got the grudging endorsement of most of the state’s major newspapers. Not the
Dispatch
, of course, but that was fine, too. Felicia was beginning to sound hysterical. Let her.

She won without a runoff.

Then there was Micah Gladstone.

He was a dumpy, bug-eyed, young minister with thinning hair and no chin, pastor of a mega-church in the southern part of the state, idolized by a huge congregation captivated by his ringing nasal voice and strident fundamentalism—a Bible-thumping Ross Perot, as one columnist put it. He had enjoyed a meteoric rise among the religious right. Now, he crisscrossed the state holding revivals that attracted thousands. His Sunday sermons were televised live.

What brought him to political prominence was Highway 69, a brand-new, four-lane, limited-access ribbon of concrete connecting the state’s two interstates. Pickett pushed the funding through the legislature and had it unofficially named the “Progress Parkway.”

Just after the primary was finished, so was the road, millions of dollars over budget and mired in controversy after a big contractor and
a minor functionary in the Highway Department were indicted by a grand jury on bribery charges. In June, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was to be held at the north end of the road. It was one of the few times during the election that Cooper and Pickett appeared together.

It was a beautiful day—eighty-five degrees, cloudless sky, large, festive crowd. And Gladstone. He drove up in an aging, rust-encrusted sedan thirty minutes before the ceremony, took a large placard out of the trunk, and placed himself squarely in front of the platform. The placard read, “PICKETT LANIER STOLE THIS ROAD.”

Two uniformed state troopers politely invited the Reverend Gladstone to remove himself. He politely agreed, then planted himself again a few yards away, followed by the troopers, who now not-so-politely told him to get his ass back in his car and go home. He not-so-politely called them “Pickett’s Gestapo” and moved to the rear of the crowd, where he was surrounded by reporters and cameras.

“This road is paved with evil,” Gladstone said. “Decent folks’ land was summarily taken from them by the state, the project has been a boondoggle for greedy contractors and corrupt officials of the Lanier administration, and”—he took a deep breath and arched his eyebrows—“the name is a vile abomination.”

The reporters looked at each other.
What?

“Highway 69. It’s a perversion.”

The reporters began to snicker. “You want to explain that, Reverend?” one of them asked.

“People know what I’m talking about. A perversion that Governor Pickett Lanier and his wife are throwing in the faces of the good people of this state, to go along with all the waste and fraud and invasion of property rights.”