The Boy Orator (6 page)

He fed Halley some day-old bread then went to check on his dad. Andrew was sleeping with the shades pulled. He always slept these days.

Annie Mae ran inside, her arms full, hoping to reach her kitchen shelves before she dropped all the powders, thimbles, creams. She didn't make it. Jars rolled across the wooden floor, frightening the chicks, who fluttered brainlessly against the twisted wire of their pen. Their thrashing excited Halley; he flitted around the table, barking, kicking jars out of Annie Mae's grasp. “Harry! Get this infernal creature out of here!” She'd been short-tempered ever since Andrew came home hurt. Harry stepped carefully around her. “That old Jew,” she murmured, gathering her stuff. “I swear, he jacks his prices every month.”

She put up her jars. Harry waited until she'd calmed herself, brewing dark tea. “Mama?” he said.

“What is it?”

He looked at the floor. “Is Daddy going to get better?”

“Oh, honey.” Annie Mae swept a curl off her forehead. “You know what I think? I think he's saving his strength for—Harry, your shirt's soaked.” She lifted the ragged tail, discovered the bruise. “How on earth—?”

He told her about school.

Her face went gray. She knelt beside him. Her long skirt bunched at her knees; he caught a rare glimpse of her ankles, milky in her stockings. “What am I going to do with you? What's all this fighting?”

“I didn't start it.”

She patted his cheek. “It's those rough towns your daddy's been taking you to. Lord knows what you've seen.”

“It's not that, Mama. No one likes me at school.”

“Well, you won't be taking any trips for a while.” She primped his shirt. “Maybe if you spend regular time here, you'll make some real friends. Will you try?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Meanwhile, you have to help me out, okay? With your daddy down, I'm counting on you to stay out of trouble. I need you.”

“All right.” He smiled. He liked his mother's trust.

That night Andrew sat up for supper. He hadn't spoken in days. He slumped in his chair over steaming porridge, staring at his family with the startled expression he'd had when the Klansmen cornered him. He'd lost weight. Suspenders slipped off his shoulders, brushed the floor, where Halley playfully pawed them. “Honey, would you like some tea?” asked Annie Mae, lifting the cup. She talked to him gently, the way she talked to the chicks in her kitchen.

He smacked his dry lips. Black circles rimmed his eyes. “I need a blessing,” he wheezed.

“Of course, Andrew, I pray for you every day. And Father McCartney asked the whole congregation to speak to God on your behalf.”

Harry knew what he really meant. After supper, while Annie Mae scraped the dishes, Andrew grabbed Harry's arm and told him to walk into town on Saturday, get in touch with Warren Stargell, a buddy of his in the Socialist League. He knew Zeke Cash. “Tell him to tell Zeke it's an emergency.”

The rest of the week Harry swelled with quiet anticipation of his mission. His mother trusted him, his father needed him. He wouldn't let them down, though what he really wanted was for them to agree he needn't do his chores, that he could talk and talk and talk to his dog and his mule.

At school he volunteered for games, trying to make friends. The boys played cops and robbers. Randy Olin was always the sheriff. Harry was his prisoner, in a cardboard box at the edge of the school lot. The box had once held textbooks and Harry could still smell in it fresh paper and ink—small consolation for the humiliation of crouching in the dark while Olin scuffed dirt at him and called him a killer. “You're going to pay for your crimes now, Shaughnessy. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Nothing.” In a Socialist world, would he have to be
everyone's
brother?

“What's that?”

Showy bully. “Put me out of my misery.” Harry felt his cheeks burn and wondered if friendship was worth it.

Or they got into rock fights, teams of six or seven squaring off on either side of the school wagon, parked behind the outhouse. The rocks raised welts on the boys' bare arms, wounds they wore with pride. In these more active games Harry enjoyed himself, though he was always the last boy picked for a team. He wished summer vacation were months, not days, away. With a little more time the boys might start to like him.

At home he did his chores distractedly. He walked around the mule pen with Patrick Nagle, imagining ways to approach Warren Stargell. Each dusk, to call him in, his mother tapped the kitchen window with her thimble, a brisk cracking that carried clear across the yard. He kissed the mule good-night, scattered chickens as he ran through orange evening light. Breezes stirred the loose steel bins of the grain elevators; they groaned in the growing dark like old Apache warriors back from the dead, Harry thought, howling in loss and pain. Crows veered above sweet-scented columns of wheat.

Annie Mae lighted the coal-oil lamps, shading green the blond pine wood of the house. Over the stove she heated her curling iron. When it was hot enough to brown a page of newsprint she ran it slowly through her hair. Afterwards she figured the family's finances. The local coal companies were calling for timber to prop up their mines, but Andrew was in no shape to accommodate them. Harry could see she was worried about the bills.

He cleared dishes from the table, opened his books on the oilcloth mat, and finished figuring the sums his teacher had assigned. Andrew slumped in his chair, nodding at his son: their little secret.

On Saturday morning Annie Mae set out on her weekly visits to the neighbors, to relax and gossip with her friends. She filled a basket with fresh brown bread. “Back this afternoon.” She kissed Harry's cheek. “Watch your dad for me.”

As soon as she left, Harry packed a turkey sandwich in a knapsack, promised his dad he'd hurry, and headed down the dirt-and-gravel highway to Walters.

Grasshoppers ticked against the cuffs of Harry's long denim pants. A violet sky, peppered with blue and gray clouds.

A shouting man in a Model T nearly ran him off the road. “Damn clanky things,” Andrew always said of cars. “I swear, Model T's have shook more hell out of people than all the preachers in the county.”

Eight years ago, spring rains and river floods had wiped out most of the roads. Harry didn't remember, but he'd heard his father's stories. The Oklahoma Territory passed a “road tax,” requiring residents to spend four days a year grading and raising beds for proper drainage. “‘Course, we all squawked like Thanksgiving turkeys running from the ax,” Andrew said. “Fellows failed to show for work, the Territory fined ‘em five bucks. Finally, they changed the law but we all wound up on the road gangs, anyway, otherwise we'd never have had clear paths into town.”

Harry had asked him once, when they'd first started practicing speeches, “If you want to change a law, you squawk like a turkey?”

Andrew laughed so hard he popped a button. Since Anadarko, Harry missed his father's laughter. “No. It's better to
sell
a bunch of turkeys, then pass the jack along to your friendly congressman.”

This was Harry's first political lesson. Recalling it now, he ached for his father's health. Maybe the whiskey would help.

Two shirtless young men with shovels cleared packed mud and stones from ruts where the automobile had passed. They nodded hello.

On the edge of town he saw other young men centering poles in a row in the ground, uncoiling rigid wire from giant wooden spools in a field. One of the workers winked at him. “What are you doing?” Harry asked.

“Gonna set some houses ablaze,” the man said.

Harry unwrapped his sandwich, sat and watched awhile, recalling Bob Cochran's prediction: “Electric lights are just the beginning.”

Shouldn't dawdle, he thought, rousing himself, shaking crumbs from his shirt and rolling up his knapsack. His ma would be back in just a few hours. The men strung wires like webs, crosshatching a section of sky. Harry tried to imagine pulsing light inside the lines waiting to explode in someone's home.

Walters, just west of the Shaughnessy farm, was a little smaller than Anadarko. In its ongoing bid to become the county seat, it called itself the “New Jerusalem,” a farmers' paradise in the center of fertile bottomland. Harry had heard his father discuss the governance issue with his friends at political gatherings—he even understood most of what they said—and he was eager to poke around the place on his own.

This wasn't a market day, but Walters stores were blocked by heavy plows, farmers buying tools for next fall's harvest. Men with dark, rich soil on their hands sat talking in wagons or in shadows by the livery stable. Horseflies dived at the split carcass of a quail, shoved against the base of an empty water trough in front of the jail.

A leathery man on a mule strummed a guitar and sang:

On a nearly vacant side street Harry noticed the Jew Peddler's fiery red hack. The right front wheel had cratered, pitching the wagon forward at an abrupt and dangerous angle. Harry approached it cautiously, peering through the canvas curtain in back of the rolling store, inspecting the boxes and jars and paper-wrapped objects for sale. Red, yellow, and purple gleamed in a blade of sunlight through the narrow part in the curtain; he was dazzled by a blurry impression of crystals and soft, waxy edges. He knew these were simply the things his mother always bought—soaps and lotions and candles—but here in the dim wagon they appeared to be strange elixirs from a distant continent. An exotic scent—a mixture of greens and earth and musk—dizzied him. He turned aside to swallow air and ran into a looming black shirt. A huge hat hid the sun. Harry blinked. A fleshy animal rose in front of his face. Then he saw it was just a man's hand. “Hello. My name is Avram,” said a low voice.

Reluctantly, Harry shook the hand and introduced himself. He didn't know why, but he was afraid to touch the man. Up close, Avram was younger than Harry would have guessed, probably in his late twenties or thirties, though it was hard to tell beneath the bramble of his thick black beard. Harry's father had told him, many times, not to judge people by their appearances, but no one else hereabouts looked as strange as Avram did, and Harry flinched from him, involuntarily. Besides, though his mother seemed to like the peddler, she always complained about his prices, as though he couldn't be wholly trusted.

“Yes. Young Harry. Your mother's told me all about you,” Avram said. “Your speeches. Her sleeplessness when you travel.”

Harry's face burned. He felt exposed. He wouldn't look up. “I won't be going anymore,” he mumbled.

“Oh? I'm surprised. I thought you were much in demand.”

“I don't know.” Harry shrugged. “Accident?”

Avram thumped the shattered wheel. He wore a big ruby ring. “A stone in the street. I didn't see it until it was too late. Do you think you could help me move the wagon into that alley, out of the way? I'd appreciate it.”

Harry really wanted to go, but no one else was coming by to help.

“It won't take a minute,” Avram said.

The man's heavy, hooded eyelids reminded Harry of looks he'd seen on the faces of lizards—a kind of cold and brooding amusement.

Was that the peddler's true manner? Harry fought his fear and revulsion; after all, Avram was what his father would call a “fellow worker.” “Okay,” he said.

Avram unhooked his mule from the hack, secured it to a post. Then, while Harry pushed from behind, he steered the wagon into a shadow, carrying it on his back where the wheel had disengaged. Afterwards, sweat trickled like dew through the rings of his beard. “Let me see,” he said, crawling through the curtain. “Perhaps I have—” He combed through fallen bottles. “Yes.” He popped back out and handed Harry a tall, curved flask. “Homemade lemonade,” Avram said. “For a job well done. Thank you. It's a little warm, I'm afraid.” He grabbed the broken wheel and walked with Harry through town. A woman with a shady parasol, crossing the street, gave them a curious glance.

“Tell me, are you leaving the road because of what happened in Anadarko?” Avram asked.

“My mother told you?”

“Yes.”

Harry felt shy again, to be so
revealed
to a stranger, especially one as odd as Avram. “My dad was badly hurt. He may not get well.”

“I heard. I'm sorry.” Avram studied the boy. “Forgive me, it's none of my business,” he said, “but if you let those men silence you, you're doing just what they want, you know? They've won. You realize that?” He grunted, shifted the wheel to his other arm.

Harry blew into the flask. “So?” His voice sank, trapped in the glass.

“So …don't you believe in what you say?”

“Of course.” He didn't like being challenged this way.

Avram laid a hand on his shoulder, stopped him too roughly in the street. “Then you must keep saying it.”

Harry glanced up. The man wasn't tall but the sunlight above and behind him swelled his frame.

“You're right,” Harry said. “It's none of your business.”

Avram nodded but wouldn't let go. “I know you're afraid. There's reason to be.”

“I'm not afraid,” Harry said. Who was this man to judge him, this funny-looking man? “They hate me at school. It's getting better—” He caught himself. Now
he
was baring his secrets. He wanted to run away.

“You're special, that's why.”

Harry cocked his head.

“Your mother's convinced. I trust her. A smart, solid woman, your mother. A prudent buyer.”

“She said that? About me?”

“She says you have a gift.”