The Boy Orator (24 page)

“Tricking the simpleton—”

Harry flung the water dipper at him, leaped off the wagon, and grabbed Olin's shirt. Olin's sack slipped from his shoulders; ragged tufts of cotton sprayed the scale. “Take it back!” Harry shouted, shoving Olin to the ground.

“Or what?” Olin spat, gasping for breath.

“Or I'll—” Harry stiffened. A glimmer of white. A faint, familiar scent. Pungent. Sweet. Wax myrtle leaves?

He released the boy's dirty shirt. Olin, lying on his side, scrambled past him, kicking at Harry's shins. “Damn fool Irishman!”

Harry slapped away Olin's feet. All of a sudden he felt no trace of physical pain—not from the grueling hours of stooping in the fields, not from sunburn or Olin's flimsy kicks. The numbness he felt spread quickly from the center of his chest, from his heart.

She was walking down the road in the same white dress she'd always worn. Her hair was longer; she wasn't as skinny as before. Calm, unsmiling, she held her husband's hand.

Take it back, Harry thought. Oh God, take it back.

Olin, the weighers, the women weaving croker sacks, including Annie Mae, all stared at the Indian couple as they passed. Harry ran to catch them. “Mollie,” he said, ashamed of the dirt and sweat on his clothes. He tried to smile but the effort was just too much. “How are you?” he asked.

Anko, wearing a dark hat and a striped vest, frowned and tried to move past him. Harry stood his ground. He had plenty of anger left from his collision with Olin. “I'd like to know how Mollie is,” he said in a low voice. Mollie stared at the pebbles in the road.

“She's fine,” Anko said. “Now get out of our way.”

“I want to speak to your wife for a moment,” Harry said. “Excuse us.” He touched Mollie's arm, nodded toward the edge of the field.

“You have no right to touch her!” Anko said. From his faded khaki pants he pulled a gleaming silver object. He held it close to his body so only Harry and Mollie could see it: a thumb-sized knife.

“Look around,” Harry said evenly, disguising his fear. “You're surrounded by my people. You harm me in any way, they'll be all over you. You won't stand a chance. Now. All I want to do is speak with Mollie for a moment. That's all.” He walked her down the road a few yards. He was keenly aware of his mother's stare, of Olin's taunting face, of Anko's cold and obstinate fury. He didn't care. He asked Mollie again how she was.

At first she wouldn't look at him. She folded her arms at her waist. “I'm pregnant,” she said softly.

Harry couldn't speak. Flies circled his sweaty hair. His fingers ached.

“The Elder says it's a boy.” She smiled faintly, as if to herself. “In some ways, my father's a very modern man. He trusts the keepers of medicine, but he also insists I get up-to-date care, so Anko's taking me to the doctor in Walters. We have an appointment. We shouldn't be late.”

Harry wanted to touch her hair; he closed and opened his hands at his sides. “Are you happy?” he whispered.

She smiled again—sadly, he thought. “I'm Anko's wife,” she said. “That's all.”

He nodded. His neck, his whole body, hurt. “How's Tawha?”

“Cured. I told you, the Elder's never wrong.” She turned away from him and took her husband's hand.

“I love you,” Harry said. He didn't care if Anko heard.

“Good-bye, Socialist,” Mollie answered. Anko glared at him, then led her away. As Harry watched them shrink with distance, he was aware of Olin shouting, “Shaughnessy loves an Injun!” and laughing. He turned to see his mother. Annie Mae pretended to concentrate on her weaving, ignoring the other women's stares, Olin's chant. “Shaughnessy loves an Injun, Shaughnessy loves an Injun!” Olin was rude enough to say the awful things that occurred to everyone, Harry thought. Most people had the good sense to deplore base impulses in themselves, but that didn't change the fact that we're all Olin inside. He saw the faces of the weighers, the other pickers. Every last one of them felt the shock, the disgust with him for touching an Indian girl, the sneering superiority to which Olin gave voice. They wouldn't look at Harry.

He turned to see the couple round a bend in the road and wink out of sight. He felt a twinge, a hard spasm in his chest; he hated Kiowa customs, all Indian laws.

A fourteen-year-old, pregnant! His Mollie!

“Shaughnessy loves—”

Embarrassed, ashamed, heartbroken, and revolted by his own harsh thoughts, Harry pushed Olin into the dirt. “I
hate
Indians,” he said. “I hate them, you understand?”

C
OTTON FILLED THE WAGONS
. Harry and Jimmie lay atop a swollen mound. Their arms and legs sank into soft white clouds. They'd go into town with the weighers and the foreman, to help them unload.

No one had said anything after Olin had picked himself up, walked quietly away from the fields. Harry thought the men might shun him, but they accepted his offer of help. Work came first.

He told Annie Mae he'd be home late. A silky strand of cotton floated in a breeze, wrapped his mother's hair as she stood in the road.

“I'm sorry if I embarrassed you, Ma,” he said.

“Didn't I tell you to stay away from that girl?”

“You did.”

“Then why didn't you listen to me?”

“I love her, Mama.”

“Oh Harry. You're twelve years old. How can you—?”

Tears blurred his eyes. “I want to be with her. I want to see her every day.”

“That's not the same as love.”

“How is it different?”

Annie Mae softened, reached up and gently tugged his hair. “Your father's pushed and pushed you, ever since you were knee-high to a cotton stalk. You've grown up far too fast.”

“How old were you when you fell in love with Dad?”

“A lot older than you are now.” Her hand left his hair and cupped his moist, gritty cheek. “I'm sorry, Harry. I know the kind of hurt you're feeling, love or no love. It doesn't help to hear this, but it'll pass. I promise.”

Harry smiled weakly. “Thanks, Ma.”

“I'll save you some supper.”

The wagon pulled away. Jimmie held one of the tiny rabbits in his hand. He laughed and stroked it all the way into town. Grasshoppers ticked across the cotton, past Harry's face. He watched a praying mantis cling to a boll, bobbing up and down, swiveling its vigilant head. It looked deeply intelligent, bored.

“Harry, do you want to pet my rabbit?” Jimmie asked.

“No, Jimmie, thank you.”

“I love my rabbit, Harry.”

“I know. Be careful with it.”

Fireworks soon, and dances and a big market to celebrate the end of the season. The joy in finishing and the relief on everyone's faces drove Harry's sadness even deeper, so deep he couldn't loose it with a scythe.

Jimmie cradled the rabbit close to his chest.

“Careful,” Harry said. “Be very, very careful, okay?”

A
LWAYS, AFTER THE FALL
harvest was in, the remainder of the year seemed quick and uneventful to Harry. Classes droned on until the Thanksgiving break. His father asked him if he wanted to go with Warren Stargell to the river, to hunt a torn for the feast. At first Harry wasn't sure; he feared he'd encounter Anko, but then he decided that wasn't likely. The river was cold this time of year. There wasn't much reason to go near it unless you were looking for a turkey, and Kiowas wouldn't eat the birds. It was one of their laws, their damned, silly laws. He didn't know how he knew that, but he did. Had Mollie told him? He'd thought he'd never forget a single word she had uttered, a single twist of her mouth. Now, memory's bitter betrayals dismayed him daily.

Annie Mae and Mahalie cleaned, stuffed, and basted the bird; Andrew and Warren Stargell toasted each other with cider (a concession to the ladies), bemoaned the Socialist League's sorry luck. “We'll get ‘em next year,” Warren Stargell said.

He was still saying it at Christmas. “Just wait. Next year the people's revolution will sprout like a weed.”

A poor figure of speech, Harry thought.

And a poor Christmas it was. His parents didn't talk about it when he was around, but Harry knew the family was in danger of losing the farm. He saw the stack of bills on the kitchen table each night. It had mounted as the months passed and Andrew had remained idle. Harry's income from the harvest had already dried up and blown away.

On Christmas morning, Annie Mae took his face in her hands, warmed by the fire, and kissed him on the cheek. “I wish I had more to give you than that,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, Ma.”

That afternoon, Jimmie Blaine dropped by with a baby rabbit.
“My
baby grew up to be a mother and now
thee'th
having babieth,” he said. “Happy ‘olidath, Harry.” He said he couldn't stay; he had dozens of sweet bunnies to deliver to friends. Rabbits had replaced snakes in Jimmie's confessions to Father McCartney. Jimmie told him this, and Harry laughed.

Annie Mae wrapped the rabbit in a blanket and kept it in a box by the kerosene stove so Halley wouldn't bother it. This is where she'd kept her chicks, and Harry couldn't look at the box or the mule pen without a melancholy pressure settling in his stomach and his legs.

Andrew spent much of the holiday season standing by the barn, watching the swirling gray skies behind the silos, which moaned and creaked with each new frost. Harry knew not to bother him. He stood with Annie Mae at the kitchen window, studying Andrew's silent struggle with the losses they all knew were coming. The house was falling away, familiar no longer.

On New Year's Eve, Annie Mae surprised Harry by arranging three nice glasses on the table and pouring wine from a jug. “We need to put 1910 behind us,” she said. “It's been a hard one. Call your daddy in.”

“Is this real?”

“Of course it's real.”

“Where'd it come from?”

Annie Mae grinned. “The night we made the deal with the railroad man, we opened up that barrel of sacramental wine and set aside about three jugs' worth—just in case the county stood firm.”

“Mama!”

“I can't think of a better use for the surplus. Now call your daddy.”

Andrew was even more shocked than Harry. “Liquor, Annie? You?”

“It's been blessed, Andrew.” She smiled and winked at Harry. “‘Wine maketh glad the heart of man'? Don't tell Father McCartney.”

“You'll have to do penance, Ma.”

“You let me worry about that.” She raised her glass. “To a better year.”

“To the people's revolution!” Harry said.

Andrew simply nodded and swallowed his wine. At midnight, the winter's first snow brought the new year cascading gently into their yard.

PART FOUR

Battlefields, 1917

T
he year had begun with bombs in Europe. Ever since the sinking of the
Lusitania
, Americans had been outraged and confused. President Wilson urged “friendly feeling” toward the poor German people, and toward German Americans in general, but each new talk he'd given had moved the country closer to intervention overseas.

Finally, in April, he called a special session of Congress and declared, stirringly—reluctandy, it seemed to Harry—that it was a “distressing and oppressive duty,” a “fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war.”

Harry read the text of Wilson's speech in a week-old copy of the
New York Times
he'd found scattered in a chair in the lobby of the St. Nicholas Hotel. Since the first of the year he'd stayed in Oklahoma City, on a stipend from the league, helping plan antiwar rallies.

He sipped his tepid coffee, smoothed the page. Some of the war news appeared next to a long feature on the rope tricks and cowboy jokes Will Rogers performed on Broadway, in the
Ziegfeld Follies
. While he was making people laugh and forget their troubles, Wilson was swearing to Congress that “we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy … for the rights and liberties of small nations …”

Harry tossed the paper aside. That's it, he thought. America's first step into this vile and bloated carnage. Saddened, angry, he pushed past the lobby's glass doors, onto the street. Spontaneously, he shouted, “Shall our boys become cannon meat? My fellow Americans, the blood-stained currency of war is sorry business, sorry business indeed!” Women and men scurried by him, staring. “Let's demand of our leaders an embargo on the exportation of war munitions, demand mediation rather than struggle—and, like dew from the heavens above, peace shall blanket the earth!”

A man with a briefcase and a wide felt hat spat at his feet. Through tears Harry watched pigeons strut precariously across roofs of dirty brick buildings, dodging paper and flecks of ash in the air. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, ducked back inside the hotel.

His small room felt cold and harsh, as if the planet's thin atmosphere had suddenly soured, spoiling all of Earth's goods. He looked at his frightened face in a wall mirror. One month shy of his nineteenth birthday, he still had a pert, childlike appearance, freckles, and thick wavy hair. The league's posters still proclaimed him the “dynamic” Boy Orator.

Restive, he paced the room, tugged at the curtains of his second-story window, gazing at people on the streets. There were far fewer horses and buggies, many more cars, now than he'd seen only a few years ago when he'd come here with the speakers' circuit. Merchants, shoppers, children moved with much greater speed than they used to, with a confident recklessness that fragmented the city. The avenue itself seemed to roll and spill like a cresting ocean, but going nowhere—or everywhere at once. Prosperous, preoccupied, this looked too busy to be a nation at war.