The Boy Orator (2 page)

Now, she was less confident than ever about their decision to move. What kind of men rushed into unmapped territory? Men like Lee, fleeing family trouble, men like Andrew, nursing foolish dreams. And Parker. He was just the first, she thought, imagining whole towns swarming with soggy drunks, scrambling to snatch a glimpse of any young woman. Parker was her future.

She prayed for the strength her family had always found in challenging times. As usual, in moments of stress, the face of her late Aunt Jenny fashioned itself in her mind. “Buck up, Annie,” her aunt used to tell her, “you come from hardy stock.” The old woman would always tuck her in at night, when Annie Mae was a girl, and tell her stories of their ancestors who'd emigrated from Belfast, surviving scurvy and smallpox on a leaky cargo boat. They had fought in the Revolutionary War, leaving buckets of blood and an arm or two in the chilly fields of New England; had moved to Texas on the promise of cheap farmland, the same promise her husband was following now.

And her? What promise was she following? None, she had to admit, beyond the desire to keep her family together, beyond the dim conviction that, somehow, she'd find strategies to shield her boy from men like Parker, from drunkenness and irresponsibility, from sudden, silly dreams.

In the morning, the water was three feet deeper, Andrew estimated, than it had been the evening before. Waves swirled. Tree limbs, fallen in the night, and small, broken bushes vanished swiftly into angry brown whirlpools. Parker stood casually by his raft, a rag-tag of two-by-fours snugged together with dark, wet ropes. Annie Mae ignored him. “I'm not about to get on that ferry with my baby,” she told Andrew.

“Honey, I agree the water's a little squirrelly, but it might get worse in the next day or so. This may be our best chance.”

“No.” Holding Harry, she backed away from the raft and bumped one of the horses. Harry reached out to touch the moist, warm flank, and laughed.

Andrew watched his wife, scratching his head. Parker asked him, “You want I should tie her arms and legs and th'ow her on board?”

Andrew glanced at him sharply. “No!”

Disappointed, the old man skulked away.

Annie Mae sat on the bank, hugging her baby in the blanket, for two whole days until the river receded enough to pass. Each night, she fed Harry in the moonlit darkness, sticking close to the tent, keeping watch for the grizzled vet. She didn't see him, but she always felt him near, crouched among the rocks. During the day, he grinned at her—not a leering grin, Annie Mae realized now. She'd been observing him carefully. He smiled the same way at Andrew. The man was simply lonely, hungry for human contact,
any
contact. He no longer scared Annie Mae, but she saw in him the end result of crazy dreams. A man heads for the edge of the world, seeking pleasure and fortune, she thought, and winds up a parched old ghost. She saw in him Andrew's brother, Lee. She saw a possible future for her husband. For these reasons, she didn't like being near him. Harry kicked and blubbered whenever he came close, as if warning the man to stay away from his mother, and Annie Mae was grateful for her son's frightful noise.

Finally, she agreed to cross the river, not because the water seemed significantly safer to her, but because she couldn't abide the ferry captain any longer—the reminder, in his dusty, sad dishevelment, of false expectations. Better to move on and know your own troubles firsthand, rather than pace the banks anticipating them.

“Promise me,” she told Andrew, “wherever we settle, you'll keep men like him away from us.”

“I promise.”

She shook her head, crying.

“I do, honey.”

“You can't. He'll be everywhere. Who else travels where we're going, except lost old souls like him?” She tightened her grip on her baby.

“Now, Annie—”

“Promise me Harry won't be a slave to the land all his life.”

“Of course not. That's why we're moving. Harry'll get whatever he wants.”

“Promise me you won't drag him into politics.”

“Honey—”

“Promise me.”

He looked at her, then slid his gaze toward the water. “Now's the time,” he said softly. “It won't get calmer than this. Not for a while.”

“Andrew—”

“We're leaving. Get your stuff, now.”

He guided the team onto the raft. The wagon's wooden wheels rumbled like echoes in a tunnel on the smooth, floating planks. Annie Mae, lanced with pain in the lower part of her back, stepped aboard with Harry, and the ferry captain shoved off with a long oak pole. “Don't know why you want to go,” Parker muttered to Andrew, watching Annie Mae. “It's nothing but savage country, up north.”

Precisely, she thought.

Andrew only nodded. The ferry dipped slightly at the edge of a rowdy whirlpool—Annie Mae, tipped upward, saw clouds like rags plugging scattershot holes in the sky—then straightened out, heading for a line of tender elms on the opposite shore. Andrew reached for her hand. She grasped it, reluctantly at first, then gratefully as the raft's rocking increased. Clinging tightly to each other, they slipped into the Indian Territory, Harry yammering, all the while, at cottonwood, bluestem, mistletoe.

PART ONE

Cotton County, 1910

L
ater this evening, Harry knew, he'd celebrate his twelfth birthday with his father, just the two of them, in the restaurant of the Palmer Hotel, where all the waiters wore bow ties and jackets, and all the windows, spread before the wide, dusty streets, showed knots of huddled strangers who'd come to trade their goods—Comanches hawking jewelry and skins, cotton farmers stacking hoes on wooden walks in front of the millinery shop and the pharmacy. Harry's father would tell him to order anything he wanted from the menu: steak and Irish potatoes, chicken and dumplings, hot apple pie. He'd claim, as he always did on these trips, he was proud of his son, and maybe as a treat back in the room he'd offer Harry a sip of warm choc beer. The bottle, Andrew's “after-dinner blessing,” was stuffed in the leather grip they shared that didn't shut all the way. But before any meals Harry had to give his speech.

Anadarko, Oklahoma, a townsite of two thousand folks or so, was hot and humid this early May afternoon. The tradesmen rubbed their eyes with dirty plaid bandannas. It wasn't likely they'd stop to hear a serious talk, Andrew had warned Harry. They'd want to get their business done and go home.

Besides the market, Harry had to compete with the comet. Any hour now Earth would pass through its tail. The experts Andrew had seen quoted in the papers didn't know if this would harm the atmosphere. Two years ago they'd detected toxic gas in Comet Morehouse; this new visitor, speeding much closer to the planet, might trigger influenza outbreaks. On the other hand, comet tails were exceedingly thin: a change in the wind, nothing more.

A young man in a green tweed suit set a cardboard box in the street next to a sweaty team of horses near the makeshift platform Harry and Andrew planned to use. He wiped his face with a long yellow kerchief. His companion, a small Indian woman in a white dress, helped him open the box. From its depths he pulled a rubber mask. “Don't let the first decade of the twentieth century be your last!” he shouted above the din of sales, the tool prices, the buggy rattles, and whip-cracks. “Protect yourself from Heaven's hellish messenger! I hold in my hand here a one-hundred-percent authentic breathing mask—guaranteed to help you survive Halley's Comet! Six bits for the breath of life, step on up, that's it sir, step right ahead!”

Andrew grumbled then said to Harry, “Come on now, before he draws all the crowd.” He lifted his lanky boy onto the platform, a series of chicken crates stacked and wired together, fashioned this morning by an industrious cattle auctioneer. On a street-pole behind the crates, Harry's thin face, sketched in pencil, beamed from a poster:

17 May 1910
Come Hear Harry Shaughnessy
THE BOY ORATOR
Main Street, Anadarko (Weather Permitting)
Endorsed by the Farm Labor Progressive League
GOOD LOUD SPEAKER

He wasn't the only “baby” orator in the state; Andrew had stolen that idea. The Baptists every politician hoped to reach—a powerful bloc of voters—literally believed the Bible's promise that “a little child shall lead them.” At rallies, brush arbor revivals, even in the halls of the state capitol, parents and party bosses taught any kid with volume a patriotic nugget or two, urged him onto stages, and hailed him as a prophet of Oklahoma's coming economic miracle.

Harry, though—Harry was the genuine article. Andrew had recognized his talent instantly when, in a school Christmas pageant, at the age of six, he'd overcome his stage fright long enough to blurt, “Welcome ladies and gentlemen, and bless us all on this holy night of our Lord.” The cadence and timbre of his voice were steady as oak, strong enough to fill the auditorium. Afterwards the other fathers told Andrew, “Sounds like you've got a young firebrand there” or “Dress him up, take him on the road.”

Andrew saved for months, scoring a timely timber sale to the mines, to buy his boy a nice cotton suit, dark blue. He bought pomade for Harry's curly red hair, taught him to stand up straight and slap color into his flat, freckled cheeks right before each speech. At seven, with his daddy's eager help, Harry began learning the Socialist gospel. Late most afternoons, they'd practice together in the windy barn behind their house near East Cache Creek. The Cache, just north of the Red River in Cotton County, was a muddy burble, and a former Kiowa homestead (before white settlers drove the Indians out “long ahead of us,” Andrew's neighbors had told him when he'd moved there years ago).

Harry was tall and awkward for his age; his arms poked like kindling from the sleeves of his wrinkled suit. Andrew would stand him on a hay bale, prompt him from the shadows, while barn cats scurried through the horse stalls, and a horned owl aired its wings, creaky and expansive, in the broad walnut rafters. “American farmers are stragglers of rooted armies—,” Harry would begin.

“
Routed
armies,” Andrew corrected, “scattered by the money men.”

“—routed armies, always hoping that somewhere in this great land of ours, there's a piece of dirt for them.”

The way his voice thickened in recitation, the way his face flushed dark crimson the first few times they worked on a speech, reminded Andrew of his own father, gentle Michael Roy, resting now seven years in the ground, the hard Texas ground he'd plowed until the strain of loving it, and paying all its costs, burst his heart.

“And who do the money men serve?” Andrew would shout at his boy, eyes salty with tears, thinking, Father, listen, your dream hasn't died.

“The forces of greed!” Harry yelled back.

For you, Father. Listen. “Greed?”

“The smasher.” Sunlight burst through slats in the barn. Harry's face flushed with excitement and a swelling desire to please: Father, watch me, listen, for you. “The smasher of souls!”

“Louder!”

“Of souls!”

“What?”

Harry planted his feet, shaking with energy, love (Andrew saw it in the lurching tilt of the boy's whole body), fear of letting his father down. He closed his eyes.
“Souls
!”

T
HIS AFTERNOON IN
A
NADARKO
, Andrew felt anxious for the first time in weeks. The crowd was tired, overheated, close to fury over bad deals, inflated prices. These were just the poor wretches Harry could aid if they were willing to listen but Andrew feared they weren't. Farmers weren't the only ones tending to business. Men in ties—bankers, lawyers, owners of the farmers' rocky lands—strolled among saddles, plows, and furs, counting the county's wealth, their kingdom's gold. Klansmen, Andrew thought, spitting into the dirt. Most of these bastards were night-riders. They wouldn't welcome Harry's message.

Three or four fellows approached the platform. They didn't look friendly. Andrew preferred camp meetings in the country, addressing honest, hardworking folks with their simple hand-stitched clothes and coal-oil lamps, to these market-day affairs. In the country, people hungered for the word; they'd come to a rally dragging water in big tin buckets, hauling firewood and bedding. Fiddlers played reels and boisterous jigs, tunes the farmers' ancestors danced to in Ireland or Scotland, generations ago. For the oratory, the stirring advice, crowds straggled in for miles, slatternly, weary, but full of vinegar. Here, in county seats like Anadarko, where most people ate three full squares a day, sympathy for the poor was hard to scare up. Andrew had said as much to the Socialist League, who sponsored Harry's trips, but the party was after converts, it didn't matter where. Andrew didn't trust anyone in the electric light towns.

“The standard beginning,” he whispered to his son. Harry cleared his throat, straightened his black string tie. “Live to see the coming century!” called the breathing mask man. “Don't let this evil apparition rob you of your dearest years!” Down the street a strained buyer argued the cost of a scythe: “You thieving son of a bitch, I'm not blind. Who do you think you're talking to?” Harry said softly, “The rent you pay your landlord—what is it now, twenty-five dollars a bale?—would buy a lot of biscuits for your wife.”

One of the men who'd faced the platform stepped forward, removed his hat, and said, “What's that, son?” His teeth were brown and his skin, beneath his whiskers, was a dark, mottled red, relieved here and there by hooklike scars.

“I said”—Harry raised his voice, gestured crisply at the crowd—“your landlord's wife wears silks and gets to ride in an automobile, while
your
wife walks!” His words rained like straw on the bent shoulders of all the men, or so Andrew imagined, startling them lightly at first, then itching, working down beneath their shirts and into their skin. They turned, two at a time, three at a time, to see the source of this storm, and were shocked to find a skinny kid.