The Boy Orator (12 page)

The raindrops increased. Harry rushed to pull the tarp across the podium. Stupid Baptists, he thought. The wood would rot out here. Didn't they know that? He supposed, to them, the podium was a simple prop to help the preacher deliver his message. But a message needed presence; it had to be embodied. A skillful speaker would use this wood as a badge, a
wedge
to drive into the crowd.

He'd return on Sunday, not because he cared to hear a sermon (especially after sitting through Mass) but because he wanted to see the podium perform.

And because Mollie might be here. The strange encounter had unsettled him. He didn't understand his powerful response to her, a pleasure that had escalated after his initial fears—the surprise of being overheard, perhaps; the delight of her features; the echo of Sue-Sue (such dark, sharp
beauty
—so much livelier than the pale little girls Harry knew at school, who teased him, anyway, about his speeches).

By the time he reached the yard his skin was hot. He crawled through his window, swallowing a cough so as not to wake his folks. Halley ran to the mule pen, stirring Patrick Nagle. Harry hushed them, then drew his curtains against the searing lightning. Wind flung grit against the wood and glass of the house. He dried his hair with the thin cotton blanket on his bed, tiptoed to the kitchen for water. The floorboards creaked. The chicks in their pen peeped groggily, hungrily.

The following morning he was too sick to leave his bed. Annie Mae fed him chicken soup and Greene's Chill Tonic. She kept a damp washcloth on his forehead, chipped a block of ice, and wrapped the shards in a towel on his shoulder. He shivered. “I swear, it's like you spent the night in the barn,” Annie Mae said. Harry sneezed. “You were feeling poorly after your trip to the mines. I shouldn't have worked you so hard around here.”

Forced to stay indoors all day, he was more aware than ever of the changes in his father since their trip to Anadarko. Andrew had left unfilled the timber orders from Osage. He'd never been an indecisive man but he hesitated now before starting any chore. Constantly, he asked Annie Mae's advice, even on tasks as simple as lighting the kerosene stove. He demanded coffee, tea, food—not harshly, but often. Harry saw how weary his mother had become.

One morning she said, “Andrew, will you fix Harry some oatmeal while I run down the road to Mrs. Smithers's and get us some fresh brown eggs?”

“Oatmeal?” Andrew said.

“I'll be right back.”

“Can't he make it himself?”

Annie Mae stopped and turned in the middle of the kitchen. “No he can't, Andrew. I asked
you.”

Harry was sitting at the table. He gripped his glass of milk. The scorn in his mother's voice, a swipe like a rusty blade, frightened him. “It's all right,” he said. “I'm not really hungry.”

“Yes, you are. And your father's going to feed you.”

Harry glanced sheepishly at Andrew, who still hadn't moved.

“Aren't you, Andrew?” Her words seemed to draw the air from the room. Harry's chest hurt.

“Hand me that box of matches,” Andrew told Harry.

“Thank you,” Annie Mae said softly, then walked out the door.

As he watched his father at the stove, Harry wondered what he could do to make things right again around the house. When I'm well, he thought, maybe I should cut some trees. But he knew the hand briar saw needed more strength than he'd developed in his arms. The simpler crosscut he could manage with a partner, but he didn't know how to use his father's gauge for setting the length of the raker teeth, or the steel spider for setting the cutters' angles.

“Here's your oatmeal,” Andrew said. He sounded angry.

“Thank you,” Harry said, staring at the table.

W
ARREN
S
TARGELL CAME BY
early one afternoon and asked to speak to Andrew. Annie Mae let him in but she was silent and brusque. He wouldn't look at her. He fiddled with his hat.

From his bedroom Harry heard the men talk. He didn't catch every word, but he understood that Warren Stargell was arranging the Socialist speakers' circuit. Andrew mentioned “tagging along.” His friend discouraged him. “With your leg and all,” he said, “you need your strength.” Harry felt certain his father couldn't survive the road right now. He'd been worn to a nubbin by the mines; he seemed befuddled in his very own home.

Before he left, Warren Stargell popped his head into Harry's room. “Get healthy, Harry boy. Rest your voice,” he said. “Soon you'll be spreading the word.” He winked with his lazy left eye.

Throughout the day Harry slept. In fever-dreams he saw Mollie and Sue-Sue. Bob Cochran hit Mollie with a rubber mask. Something stung Harry's ear. A man with scars on his face tried to smother him with a pillowcase. Then he was naked onstage. The crowd booed and wouldn't let him speak. Voices closed all around him, drilled his head. He woke with a buzzing in his ears. His bladder ached. The ice in the towel had melted and soaked his pajama top. His parents' voices were loud and angry in the kitchen.

“—bad enough you expose him to the dangers of a mine shaft—a
mine shaft
, Andrew—”

“I was with him every step of the way.”

“Yes, and look what it did to you.”

“Annie, this is just a speaking tour. He's done it dozens of times.” “He's never traveled for a month. Unsupervised.”

“Warren'll be there—”

“Warren. Oh,
now
I'm relieved—”

“With other adults.”

“You know what I mean, Andrew. He's never been anywhere without one of us—except that day in Walters.”

The floor chilled Harry's bare feet. He rubbed his eyes and smacked into the back of a kitchen chair.

“Harry, honey, what're you doing up?” said Annie Mae.

“I have to go outside.”

“Oh. Here, then, let me help you with your shoes. How's your fever?” She felt his forehead. His future had been tabled for the day.

The next morning his vigor had returned and he wasn't burning up. He fed Patrick Nagle but ignored the rest of his jobs. He helped his mother measure flour for a cake. “Mama?”

“Yes, Harry.”

“Is it true I have a gift?”

She lowered a spoon into a bowl of sugar and stared at him.

“The Jew Peddler—Avram—told me you'd said so.”

“He did, did he? When did you talk to him?”

Harry blushed. “The day I went to town.”

“I see.” She cracked an egg. Squares of muslin, cut to fit the windows, covered the kitchen table; pots of sumac berries, roots, and bark, mixed with old iron shavings, sat near the stove. Boiled, they'd make a dark violet dye in which to dip the muslin: for days now, Annie Mae had been making new curtains. “What else did he say?” she asked, nudging the pots away from Harry with her foot.

“He said you worried whenever I was gone. But if I have a gift … isn't it my duty to use it? Wouldn't God be mad if I wasted it?”

Annie Mae wiped her hands on her apron and touched Harry's shoulder. She
was
proud of him. He saw it in her eyes. Still, he knew, she couldn't help but fret. The world outside her window she didn't understand very well—Andrew had said so, on his trips with Harry. “What about those men, the kind who hurt your father?” she said.

“I'll be careful, Mama.” He grinned. “I'm younger than them. I can outrun anyone.” “Not always.”

He realized how much he loved her face. Patient. Soft. He knew from the gentle set of her mouth—frowning, but not harshly—that, behind her fears, she wanted him to have whatever he needed. “Please.”

“This is important to you, isn't it?”

She had to hear it. “Yes, Mama.”

She turned and looked at the chicks in their pen as if she could fix them where they stood, young and helpless, forever needing her care. “Harry, Harry, Harry.” “Mama—”

“Go on, then. I can't stop you.”

“I'll be all right.”

She brushed a tear from her face. Harry wrapped his arms around her waist. The road! Kate O'Hare! A breeze from one of the windows lifted the sheer corners of the muslin. The odors of the berries and the bark, of the moist balls of flour on the counter, dizzied Harry. I'll never again feel this safe, he thought, even as pleasure whipped through him, raising the hair on his neck. He tightened his grip on his mother's small hips until she said, with a knot in her voice, “Here now, let me finish this cake.”

O
N
S
UNDAY AFTER
M
ASS
he ran to the brush arbor. The Baptist women were setting plates of potato salad and platters of fried chicken on benches in the middle of the field. Whenever a preacher passed through—Baptist, Methodist, whatever—all the chickens in the county were killed, cooked, and served to the reverend and his crew; the Holy Spirit had quite an appetite, always cleaned His plates. Harry was ten years old before he knew there was anything more to a chicken than feet and a beak.

Kids in their Sunday suits played catch with rubber balls in tall grass by the road. Harry looked for Mollie but didn't see her. He'd spent two hours before church polishing his shoes, mixing chimney soot with molasses to make a thick black paste. The shoes looked great, but a couple of horseflies had lighted on them before the paste had dried. The flies were stuck fast. Still, his mother was pleased to see him taking such care with his appearance.

When the preacher took the arbor stage Harry laughed. The man was as thin as a crusty old railroad spike, hook-nosed and bald. The podium seemed to shrink beneath his gangly arms. “Friends! Have you met Jee-sus?” he called, his voice a high, whiny chirp. “Brothers, sisters, I'm here to tell you I was lost, oh yes I confess it to you today, before I knew Jee-sus was my friend, I scoured these valleys and hills and the filthy back alleys of our cities looking for any comfort I could find.” It's not about comfort, Harry thought. God wants you to rise from your chairs and strike a blow against the banks. “My burdens weighed me down,
ground me down
something fierce, my friends, a miserable beggar, that was me, Lord, lonesome and low—” His head shone like a peeled turnip in the arbor's dappled sunlight. “Sound familiar, my friends? You know it does. I'm talking to
you!”

Often, Harry's father had taught him, “The speaker doesn't matter. He's just a vessel for the message. The minute you start feeling good about yourself, the minute you start strutting, the message is a goner.” But Harry couldn't help but feel cocky, standing here in his well-polished shoes, knowing he could outtalk this fellow up the road and back. It disgusted him to watch a man with so little talent for rousing a crowd pound and sweat on the podium. Someone should save it, he thought.

“Let's steal it,” Mollie said.

He whirled to see her in her long white dress. Lil panted at her feet.

“You have that look in your eye, same as the other night,” she said. “You want that thing, don't you, Socialist?”

His cockiness vanished. He coughed. He wasn't completely well. His mouth was dry; he tasted his mother's chill tonic. “My name's Harry,” he said. “And no, I don't want it. It wouldn't be proper for me to covet—” Her beauty confounded him. It
was
beauty, despite the width of her cheeks, the slightly flat nose. In part, it was the strangeness of her features that drew him. Her eyes were dark and her long hair smelled of the fresh wax myrtle leaves she'd picked. “Property should be shared—”

“Tools should be used by those who know how to handle them.”

Even God's tools? Harry thought. Once again, he found himself retreating from her surprising aggressiveness. Were all Indians this blunt?

“You didn't bring your dog,” Molly said.

“No.”

“Lil's lonely.”

“Friends! Since Jee-sus stepped from His cloud of glory and took me by the hand, I've walked the paths of righteousness in His loving shadow, a brand-new man. That's right, brothers and sisters, I stand before you today, chastened—”

Harry and Mollie walked down the road, away from the arbor, in the direction of the sun. Lil chased butterflies from the shrubs' stiff limbs. Harry's body tingled, but not like it had with the fever; this was a liquid sensation, warm and smooth and pleasantly scary. He could feel Mollie without touching her: she was vibrant and warm. She set the air around her humming. She lived about a mile from here near Cookietown, she said, in a shotgun house her mother and father shared with seven other Kiowa families. She was two years older than Harry; she didn't go to school. Her days were spent in the kitchen or the yard, stirring beans or baking bread for the men and younger children.

Harry told her about the speeches he gave, Kate O'Hare and the upcoming circuit. “The other night,” he said. “You shouldn't walk alone so late. It isn't safe.”

“Of course it is. What do you mean?”

“There are men … the Klan … a pretty girl like you …”

Mollie stopped and looked at him. “What did you mean when you said you believe in equality for Indians?” she asked.

“I meant Indians shouldn't be treated any differently than anyone else.” The words came easily, from old speeches he'd given, but he felt ashamed of his own doubts, his hesitation. He knew she saw him blush.

“Does that mean you'd just as soon kiss an Indian as a white girl?”

Harry stopped in the shade of a stately pecan tree. He didn't know what he felt, or what to do. Sunlight made confusing patterns on the road, through the shadows of the leaves. He ground his toe in the dirt, flattening one of the flies stuck to his polish. “I guess so,” he said.

Her stare was intense. “Well?”

He looked around. A quail rose from a holly bush. A strip of cloud blew across the sun. No one. He bent forward and pressed his lips to the slight copper rise of her cheek.