The Boy Orator (11 page)

“He's a fist-waver, Lester, I'm telling you, he—”

“I think my partner's afraid of you.” Fawkes laughed again. “Come on, there's nothing this boy can do to hurt us.” He tugged Dugan's arm. “Let him sleep. It's all right, boy. You can stick your thumb back in your mouth.”

It was all Harry could do to keep from hitting him. He wasn't able to help the miners but at least they took him seriously. They cheered him and sang him a song. These men, Dugan and Fawkes, these
capitalists
, wouldn't know character from the big fat bunions on their feet.

Fawkes swung the lantern to light his path, sending dizzy shadows up the walls—men kneeling, scratching, rubbing their arms. Phantoms again, as they'd been in the hole: present in an instant of weak illumination, then gone. Harry smelled the lantern's bitter trace in the air, the sweet straw at his feet, the frailty of flesh all around him.

Andrew patted Harry's back. “Get some rest,” he said. Rats
scritch
ed in the dark.

Laughter, faint singing outside. Through the window Harry saw a couple of fires, miners clapping and dancing with their wives. Their capacity for joy at the end of a day like this amazed him. People were strong; they could survive almost anything. That didn't bode well for the union either, he realized. One way or another, folks always learned to live with their limits.

A man on horseback rode through the miners' camp. He barked something Harry couldn't hear. The songs stopped, the fires went out. So many ways to be silenced. Beatings, threats. Coal dust. Comet tails. Earth and air. Shaken by the miners' harsh lives, the company's strength, the invisibility of being a kid, he promised himself, as he curled up to sleep, he'd speak and speak and speak.

W
henever a speaker came around, the farmers built a brush arbor. They'd go into muddy bottomland forests near East Cache Creek where oaks and elms and mighty pecan trees twisted out of black waxy clay. They'd cut about twenty poles—chinquapin oak, usually, or Shumard—and haul them back to the field where the meeting was set to take place. They'd sand and hew the wood, hammer the poles into the ground five or six feet apart, and cover the top with honeysuckle, sumac, mesquite. Torches tied to crossbeams cast late evening light. At Baptist revivals women placed ironweed and goldenrod around the arbor in pots, to brighten the space and attest to the glory of God.

In a vacant Baptist arbor, Annie Mae, Mahalie, and their friends organized a dinner for Andrew and Harry the day they returned from the mines. The arbor was handy. Beet greens and spinach had come into season; yellow squash was ripe. Andrew had bought a slab of salt pork in town, along with flour and syrup. Annie Mae made biscuits and gravy, and slow-cooked a pot of molasses.

Harry's shoulder had swelled and he was running a slight fever. Annie Mae spoon-fed him a new product Avram had sold her—Greene's Chill Tonic, carbonated water and cherry-flavored quinine. A hellfire-and-brimstone meeting would occupy the arbor a week from now but tonight it was quiet and pleasantly cool, even to Harry in his fevered state. He watched salmon-colored scissortails chase insects through the limbs of a rusty viburnum. The white blossoms of Chickasaw plums flashed in the evening light; the woody smell of bluestem mixed with the scent of his mother's lemon meringue.

Annie Mae asked him to watch for people on the road. She didn't want the Baptists to catch them on their property. Usually in early summer Andrew built a tiny arbor in their yard for outdoor meals but he was too weak to work on one this year.

He hadn't seen a paper since he'd left. When he learned from Annie Mae that Governor Haskell had moved the state capital from Guthrie to Oklahoma City he cursed the state's “new money.” “Damn railroad men,” he said. “They've been lobbying all along to steal the governor's seal—God knows what kind of deal they made with him.” He was fond of Guthrie's old Masonic Lodge, he said, whose chambers had housed a number of legislative offices. “It's a respectable place—for a Protestant outfit—full of grand old tradition. Now, the judiciary might as well move into the bank that bought it.”

“Honey, please, can we just enjoy our supper?” Annie Mae asked, placing her hand on his. “I've missed you.”

He touched Mahalie's arm. “I'll tell you what. If I were of the darker persuasion, Indian or black, I wouldn't be sitting here. I'd rush to the city and try to put a stop to this. If they get away with it, you know what'll happen two months from now. With the special election?”

Mahalie stared at her beets.

“They'll pass that Grandfather Clause, that's what—the literacy requirement. That'll keep a lot of your people from voting. City's bragged for years it has fewer ‘dark' officials than any other town in the state. If
that's
the kind of attitude loose now in the House and Senate—”

“I can't vote anyway,” Mahalie muttered.

“Politics! Politics! I'm sick of it,” Annie Mae said, shielding her ears. She looked at Harry as if she'd just watched him vanish. Andrew reached for her.

“Excuse me?” someone yelled from the trees at the edge of the field. “Excuse me, but I believe you good folks are trespassing on church property.”

“Uh-oh,” Mahalie said. “Bab-tists.”

Two men approached them through the thick understory, scaring up grasshoppers and flies. Their clothes were damp with sweat. “It's the Shaughnessy family,” one said. “They're Papists.”

“I'm afraid we'll have to ask you to leave,” said the other.

Andrew protested, “My family's having a nice, simple meal here.” Harry heard more anger in his father's voice than the situation deserved. Andrew was fuming about the capital still, looking for a fight. “We'll clean the place. We know how persnickety your grouchy old God is.”

“Andrew!” Annie Mae gasped.

One of the men whipped off his hat. “Listen here, you sorry, genuflecting son of a—”

“Gentlemen, please,” said Annie Mae. “Let's not be un-Christian. We're leaving now.” Mahalie was crouching, ready to run. Annie Mae asked her to gather the dishes.

“You're welcome back on Sunday,” said the man with the hat. “Might do your miserable soul some good.”

Annie Mae hushed Andrew before he could answer.

The rest of the week, when he'd finished his chores, Harry walked to the field and watched the preparations for the meeting. Several young men built a stage and a series of pews to add to the dozen they already had. They brought a mahogany podium, highly polished, slick and smooth, from their little country church. The top was gently angled with a thick, ridged lip to hold a written speech. Harry watched two men position it under the arbor; he envied them, touching it, putting their weight on its frame. He'd never spoken from behind a podium. Its severe lines and deep, swirling color conveyed a strict authority, a gravity of purpose. He pictured himself onstage, grasping its edges, rocking to the rhythm of his words. Breath caught in his throat when the men rammed it clumsily against the corner of a bench, nicking it. He couldn't believe they were going to leave it here in the open for the next few days, protected only by a light gray tarpaulin. Clearly, they didn't recognize its beauty the way he did.

At home he practiced his speeches in the mule pen, straddling the slats of the fence. “Friends, with the Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the capitalist class is in the saddle,” he shouted at the peak of the barn, “riding the backs of workers!” His mother hadn't mentioned Kate O'Hare or Warren Stargell or the speakers' circuit, but she looked worried each time she glanced Harry's way. She made a point of complimenting him on the work he did around the farm—he'd caught three gophers since his first fiasco with the trap. She even listened to him speak, clapping when he finished. “Did you really like it?” he'd say. “Of course,” she answered automatically as though he'd done a simple cartwheel. She may have told Avram he had a gift, but to Harry she seemed unimpressed, indulgent, at best merely polite.

Patrick Nagle was a better listener, patiently swatting horseflies with his tail, but even the old mule's loyalty wasn't enough now to inspire Harry. In the dining hall with the miners his words had had consequence, he thought, however small. He couldn't change people's lives, but for a few minutes that night some men thought he might. And for a few minutes he believed it too.

He'd wanted to lead them out of the hole. Oh, how he'd wanted that power!

Remembering the excitement, he lost his balance on the fence, scraped his arm on a spike. His mother dressed the cut, checked his swollen shoulder, and told him not to play so hard.

S
HE WAS SNORING GENTLY
the night Harry slipped out of bed, dressed quietly in the dark, and made his way to the brush arbor. The podium was there, wrapped in its tarp. Dew glazed the grass and pews; the honeysuckle thatch smelled fertile and rich. Now and then on the western horizon, above the slopes of the Wichita Mountains, flash-lightning darkled, damp and smudgy, like palm prints on a pane of glass.

Halley had followed Harry from the house. He sat on the stage, head cocked, while Harry lifted the tarp. The past few nights Harry had seen the podium in his sleep; in his dreams it was as tall as a lighthouse, imposing but safe, a steady source of clarity and wisdom.

He touched the dark wood, lightly, as if combing Patrick Nagle. The cover had kept it shiny and warm. He felt its solidity and weight, the dignity of its reddish-brown burls … local lumber cut and shaped by workers to hold the peoples' desires. From it, expressions of charity, freedom, and hope might ring—promises a man in a mine or on someone else's land needed to keep himself going.

Rake. Straighten. Hammer. Plow
. Farm-words.
Plant. Water. Scrub
. Noble terms, Harry thought, but he longed to fill his mouth again with sounds of greater resonance.
Pride
and
unite
and “Follow me!”

These last words he'd said aloud, lifting his arm above the podium (he was too short for it, and stood on his toes). Lightning burst overhead; a sudden wind stirred the leaves, and several drops of rain, spitting through gaps in the arbor-vines, sprinkled the pews. “Why?” someone called from a stand of trees beside the field.

Harry, startled, backed away from the podium and nearly fell off the stage. He squinted, expecting to spot a giant Baptist waving a Bible and a gun.

“Why should I follow you?” the voice insisted. It belonged to a girl. Harry could see a patch of white among the trees; dark, flowing hair. Then she disappeared in a shadowy swirl of leaves. Halley crouched and growled at the edge of the stage.

“Hello?” Harry said, circling the podium. “Who's there?” Rain and dust scented the air. The storm was gaining strength. Against the stage's steps a breeze swept tangled duff. He began to wonder if he'd imagined the figure but Halley had seen something too—yes, and there she was again! Brown-skinned, tiny in a long white dress. Small, sandaled feet. Now he
knew
he was conjuring things.

“Sue-Sue?” he whispered.

“If I follow you, where will you lead me?” she said. Challenging? Teasing? Beside her, a dark animal growled at Halley.

This wasn't Sue-Sue, of course. He could see her better now that she'd stepped from the trees: an Indian girl about his age, carrying a wicker basket. “Who are you?” he asked. His shoulder ached. His forehead was hot.

“Mollie. Are you the preacher?”

“No, I'm … a Socialist,” he said. “Practicing.”

“What's a Socialist?”

Halley had crept from the stage and slowly approached her dog, sniffing vigorously.

“A Socialist … well, a Socialist believes workers should own factories and farms and all the means of production. We believe in equality, even for Indians.” Except for Mahalie and her friends, though (who were usually too busy talking among themselves to pay Harry much attention), he hadn't stood close to many Indians. Now, as with Avram, he felt a little wary, curious but self-protective.

Mollie laughed. “Oh. A dreamer. That's why you're out here in the middle of the night talking to no one.”

The dogs were whimpering amiably now and wagging their tails. “Are you a Baptist?” Harry asked, stepping closer. “I mean—”

She shrugged. “I come sometimes to listen to the preaching.”

Her cheeks were as wide as copper pennies flattened on a railroad trestle. Odd, but attractive. Harry felt shy but he was compelled to try to engage her—in part, to overcome his fear of people different from himself. How could he be a good Socialist—how could he say the word—if he recoiled from anyone, even those with dissimilar customs? His father would be disappointed in him if he didn't make an effort.

He pointed at Mollie's basket. “What're those?”

“Wax myrtle leaves. They're just beginning to thicken on the trees.” She lifted one from the basket, a tiny olive-green spear, crushed it between her forefinger and thumb. “Smell.” She opened her hand beneath his nose. A dusky, spicy scent. The warmth of her skin. “They make a good air freshener,” she said.

“You pick them in the middle of the night?”

“Lil and I couldn't sleep. The coming storm.” She looked at her golden dog, muzzle to muzzle with Halley. “They like each other.” She glanced back up. “Isn't the lightning beautiful?”

“I think maybe you're a dreamer too,” Harry said.

Mollie smiled. “You better practice some more, Socialist. You're going to have to be real good to convince people.” She made a kissing sound at Lil, who turned and followed her across the field.

“Wait!” Harry said. “Mollie
who?
Will you be here on Sunday?”

She waved without turning and disappeared into the trees by the road, as quietly as she'd arrived. Halley followed Lil a few steps until Harry whistled him to stop. Halley sat forlornly.