The Redhunter (5 page)

“I think it’s
terrific
,” Joe said. “Maybe I should get one just like it. Though I’d change a couple of things. …”

Richie smiled and went to the driver’s door. “Come on around, get in.”

On the way, Richie listened to his companion’s story of his triumphant chicken farm. Joe was cheerful as ever and confessed
that the two nights in Chicago had been the first he had ever spent away from home, indeed, the first night away from his
chickens. He asked about Richie’s RU-Farm, as it was known. Richie too had begun with nothing but a few dollars. “But I had
the advantage of my dad, who
was retired when I started in. He knew the business and gave me leads. I’m eager to see your layout,” he said to Joe.

It was just after eleven when they arrived in Appleton, driving directly to Joe’s farm. Richie stopped the truck opposite
the chicken shed, got out, and went with Joe into the largest coop.

Inside, he looked about and registered some concern. It was the smell that had got his attention.

“You mind, Joe?” Richie leaned over, grabbed a chicken by the neck, and brought the cleaver from the tool table down sharply,
severing the chicken’s head. He grabbed the neck and let the blood pour into a glass, throwing the chicken carcass to one
side.

“Hang on, Joe, I’ll be right back.”

Richie returned from his trailer with a foot-wide wooden box. He opened it. There were eight tubes with liquids of different
colors, a chart fastened to the length of the box, and a cavity with a dozen cotton swabs. He took an eyedropper and squeezed
a few drops of the chemical from the third tube into what looked like a shallow glass ashtray. Now he dipped a cotton swab
into the chicken blood and touched it down on the chemical.

The blood, in seconds, turned amber. Richie turned to him. “It’s coccidiosis. They’ll all die.”

Bid hadn’t seen him that way, not ever. After hearing the news his father did an unprecedented thing. He drew from the padlocked
cupboard his bottle of applejack, measured two ounces into the kitchen cup, poured them into a glass, and offered them to
his son.

“Thanks, Dad.”

He stared at the glass, then looked up at his father.

“You may as well know I went broke at poker yesterday. Sold my car to Jerry.”

Tim McCarthy poured himself a shot glass, and Bid wiped her eyes with the hanging towel. The next morning Joe told them at
breakfast that he was going back to school.

Under Wisconsin law, high schools were not obliged to admit any student older than nineteen. Joe was twenty. He sighed on
hearing the rule
for the first time, this from Miss Hawthorne, tall, stately, her gray-white hair neatly tied in a bun; after thirty-eight
years’ service, the senior teacher. But the rule was simply one more little obstacle in the life of Joseph Raymond McCarthy.
It wasn’t as if Joe had caught coccidiosis, he said to himself. He asked for an appointment with the principal.

His encounter with Mr. Hershberger was facilitated by a recent ruling that authorized promotion in Wisconsin high schools
for students who showed passing grades on the appropriate exams. Joe would have to take a general test in reading, writing,
and arithmetic before being admitted into freshman year. This was obligatory because so much time had passed since Joe had
completed eighth grade. He should report at three the following afternoon at Little Wolf High School, Miss Hawthorne informed
him.

He thought quickly. “You know, I work, Miss Hawthorne. Work every day at the Cash-Way. They wouldn’t like it if I pulled out
in the middle of the afternoon. Is there any way I could take the test later in the day—maybe seven, eight o’clock?”

Prudence Hawthorne was impressed by the lanky twenty-year-old’s determination to return to school. She felt it only right
to encourage him.

“All right, Joe. I’ll tell Miss Mackay at the library. It stays open until nine. Complete the test, after you’re through seal
it in the envelope she’ll give you, and we’ll get the results.”

“My problem,” Joe explained to Jerry, who had agreed to give him a ride to the movie house, “is that I’m not so sure I could
pass that test. Been a long time since I did grammar and multiplication and that kind of thing. What I
do
know is that when I get instruction I’ll whiz along. So, buddy, what I want you to do for me—this is very important to me,
Jerry—is to go to Miss Mackay at the Little Wolf library at seven tomorrow and take the test—sign my name.”

Jerry was, for a moment, taken aback. He wound a curl from his red hair around his index finger, steering the car with his
left hand. He understood about going late in life to school—he would be going to the University of Illinois as a freshman
at the advanced age of twenty-two. What the hell. Yes. He’d drive to Little Wolf in his car,
Joe’s old car—“I’ll drive with you,” Joe said. “I’ll sit in the car while you take the exam and say a rosary that you do well!”

Miss Mackay was not surprised that it was a young man, not a child, who asked for the sealed envelope. She handed it to him
and pointed to an empty desk. “Good luck, McCarthy.” She corrected herself. “Good luck, Joe.”

Joe’s confidence in himself was well placed. He sat down in September with thirty-nine boys and girls aged fourteen; nine
months later he was ready to graduate alongside forty seniors whose ages averaged eighteen. Prudence Hawthorne, who administered
progressive exams to Joe what seemed every few weeks as he skidded upward to ninth, tenth, eleventh, and now twelfth grade,
was deliriously proud of his record, but not happy at the prospect of his leaving, because she loved it when Joe was at school.
He was always playing with the younger children, offering to do odd jobs that needed doing, and unintrusively flirting with
the younger teachers, and with some not so young. He seemed utterly untroubled by a schedule that had had him working at the
Cash-Way from three until eleven and all day on Saturday. But now only graduation lay ahead.

Joe told Miss Hawthorne, passing by her office on Tuesday morning of the big week, that he wanted to have a “date” with her
after the school graduation lunch.

“Doing what?” she asked sharply.

“Never mind. Do you promise?”

She promised. And when the time came, after he had kissed his mother and shaken hands with four siblings, Joe guided her to
his new car, telling her to hush up.

Twenty minutes later, Prudence Hawthorne was being coaxed into a little Piper biplane. Joe’s graduation present to her would
be a flight in an airplane—her first. Joe had never himself been up, but promised himself he’d do it soon, after saving money
to hire “High-Fly Jim” for a second ride. Meanwhile, he would just watch Miss Hawthorne.

She looked pale when she stepped onto the boarding ladder and into the tiny cockpit. She had no reason to suspect what was
in store
for her: Joe had arranged with Jim to take her up—and then to do a loop-the-loop.

The whole trip took only five minutes, but when she was helped out of the plane by High-Fly Jim, Prudence Hawthorne was a
pale and very irate lady. She said to Joe that she would never speak to him again and would certainly not recommend him to
any college. The tirade gave out just about the time Joe’s car pulled up at her little cottage. She let Joe take her by the
arm to the front door. He took her door key from her, put it in the keyhole, and turned the lock.

“You are a
scoundrel,
Joe.”

Suddenly she turned, pecked him on his cheek, closed the door, and rushed to the telephone to call all her friends, one after
another, into the early hours of the evening, to tell them about her incredible afternoon, just like Lindbergh.

It didn’t surprise the family and friends of Joe McCarthy that the momentum he had built up would take him on, past high school.
In the fall of 1930 he matriculated at Marquette, the large and busy Jesuit-run university in Milwaukee, celebrating, the
year Joe entered, its fiftieth anniversary.

He lost no time entering into college life, though his primary concern was the money needed to see him through. His boardinghouse,
shared with a dozen other students, was four blocks from the campus and charged eight dollars a week for room and board. Joe
did everything, including dish washing (“It’s okay. Just think about something else”), construction work, and janitorial duties
(“I’m going to be nice to janitors for the rest of my life”). He sold flypaper and did short-order cooking in a beanery (“I
have become a
very
good cook,” he wrote to his mother. And he would volunteer to do the cooking when he visited his girlfriends). Every few
months he sold blood, his blood. After a while he fastened on two service stations to which he gave as much as eighty hours
of his time during the week (“In a perfect world, everybody would run out of gas once a day”).

He paid his way and became something of a money broker. He continued, as ever, to be a gift giver, and anyone who needed a
dollar went to Joe, who gave the loan without any regard to whether he would be repaid. As regularly, he borrowed money. At
one point he
borrowed from his father and brothers. What seemed moments after, he bought another car.

He had a very early disappointment. Applying to the football coach, he was asked, Had he played football in high school?

To the astonishment of his friend Charles Curran (“I’d have expected Joe to say he was captain of the school team”), he admitted
that he had not. In that case, the coach said, he could not apply. Joe talked back. “So I haven’t played before, how do you
know I won’t be the best football player in Wisconsin after a couple of months?” The coach told him he’d run that risk, and
turned to the next applicant.

He decided to box. He worked at it diligently, and the great day came: He saw his name in print in the
Marquette Tribune,
which recorded that “McCarthy is a husky, hard-hitting middleweight who promises an evening’s work for any foe.” He worked
hard at the sport, and in his second year, when he learned that Marquette’s coach had resigned, he applied for the job and
held it down for a few weeks, in charge of seventy student boxers. Joe was much taken with his new responsibility and befriended
a boxing instructor at a Milwaukee gymnasium. He would stand by at coaching sessions and learn from the points stressed by
Coach Fred Saddy. He took these lessons to heart, and toward the end of the year faced a rematch with a heavier competitor
who had trounced him the first time out. Joe practiced determinedly, stressing the points Saddy had taught him. He fought
now hard as ever, but with finesse, winning the fight. He was so transported by his success that he went early the next day
to the gym to find Saddy.

“I want to talk to you about becoming a professional boxer.”

The deflation was quick. Saddy sat him down and ended his little lecture by telling him he, Saddy, would rather have a college
degree than be heavyweight champion.

Joe signed up to join the Delta Theta Phi fraternity. He was warned by his sponsor that when examined by the admissions board
he would be expected to give a five-minute speech. “I’ve never given a speech,” Joe said deferentially to the senior. “Could
we just skip that one? I’ll do a boxing exhibition if you want. Or maybe milk a cow?”

Dutifully, Joe reported to the debate coach, Hank Razzoli. His first experience was humiliating. When his turn came, Joe stood,
looked down at the other dozen applicants, seated, and over at Razzoli,
at his desk at the end of the room. Joe stood there, mouth open, but no word was framed.

After a half minute the coach snapped, “Say something, McCarthy.
Anything.
But don’t just
stand
there.”

Joe stepped away. “Sorry, coach. I’ll be back.”

Day after day he practiced. He memorized (always easy for Joe McCarthy) Brutus’s oration over the dead Caesar and spoke it
in whispers when on the bus, and in a loud, declamatory voice in the park at night. He would imagine huge crowds listening
to him.

“Is he any good?” Joe’s brother Howard asked the debate coach, seated next to him at a football game.

“He’s pretty fluent now,” Razzoli said to the chatty younger McCarthy, convivial like all the McCarthys, except for father
Tim. “But there’s a monotone problem. Your brother speaks almost always in the same tone of voice.”

“What can you do about that?”

The coach jolted up on his feet to cheer a touchdown. And then replied, “Joe’s quick to learn. He’s no orator. But anyway,
who really cares?”

Joe cared. He cared a great deal. As a freshman he had registered as a prospective engineer. By the end of his second year
he had decided that the law was better suited for him: Now he imagined a lifetime of oral arguments and pleadings before juries
and judges.

He’d be good at it, he knew. He was persuasive, and everybody liked him. Soon he was a member of the Franklin Debating Club,
debating every week. In his final year at law school, five years after his matriculation under the amalgamated curriculum,
he resolved to run for president of the Franklin club. This proved painful when, at lunch in the cafeteria with his closest
friend, Charlie Curran, he learned that Curran had already filed for the same post. They agreed, in high bonhomie, to vote
for each other. The vote was a tie. A fresh vote was scheduled, which Joe won by two votes.