The Boy Orator Read online

  The Boy Orator

  Tracy Daugherty

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1999 Tracy Daugherty

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938604-71-3

  eBook Cover designed by Steven Seighman

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For my mother and father

  and for my sister Debra,

  with love

  I am deeply indebted to House Speaker Glen D. Johnson and to Larry Warden, Chief Clerk-Administrator of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, for their time and generosity. Thanks also to Joe Ray Blough for his exhaustive search through House records. The folks at the Oklahoma Historical Society, Division of Library Resources, were extremely helpful in expediting my research, as were several articles in their publication, The Chronicles of Oklahoma. For background information I have also drawn upon James R. Green’s Grass-Roots Socialism, Garin Burbank’s When Farmers Voted Red, James R. Scales’s and Danney Goble’s Oklahoma Politics: A History, Sally M. Miller’s From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O’Hare, The Selected Writings and Speeches of Kate Richards O’Hare edited by Philip S. Foner and Sally M. Miller, and An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before, edited by Davis D. Joyce.

  J. C. Daugherty opened doors at the state capitol that I could not have opened on my own. Gene and JoAnne Daugherty and Fern Stone reintroduced me to the Oklahoma countryside. Edwin and Anita Low shared with me their memories of the cotton fields.

  Oregon State University granted me a sabbatical leave to begin this novel; Molly Brown provided a computer at a crucial time. Brandon Brown, Elizabeth Campbell, Jennifer C Cornell, Richard and Kristina Daniels, Ehud Havazelet, Ted Leeson, George Manner, Marjorie Sandor, and Marshall Terry offered encouragement and advice. Grace Low had to live with my distractedness during much of the early writing; Jake the cat kept my lap warm as I typed.

  To Kathryn M. Lang, who stuck with me, and who provided shrewd editorial suggestions when I needed them most, and to Keith Gregory, Freddie Jane Goff, and Michelle Vardeman at SMU Press, I am most thankful.

  A portion of this novel appeared in Southwest Review. I am grateful to Elizabeth Mills and Willard Spiegelman for their support, and for their permission to reprint.

  Finally, my greatest debt is to my grandfather, Tracy, who lived the life behind this book.

  The Boy Orator

  Politics is the art of extracting money from the rich and votes from the poor on the pretext of protecting each from the other.

  OSCAR AMFRINGER

  We spoiled the best territory in the world to make a state.

  WILL ROGERS

  PROLOGUE

  Wichita County, Texas, August 1898

  Their first night out, Andrew and Annie Mae camped on the south side of the Red River near a tributary called Prairie Dog Fork. The river was high from recent rains; driftwood splintered on rocks and tore at thorny brambles on the banks: loud, scratching noises that kept their infant, Harry, awake and crying. The ferry captain told them he’d try to cross at dawn, but if the water rose while they slept, they might have to wait a couple of days until the stream calmed. He was a Civil War veteran, name of Parker, he said. He wouldn’t stop staring at Annie Mae.

  “He’s making me nervous,” she told Andrew just after dusk, dropping a handful of dry twigs near the spot, in a clearing ringed by bluestem and saddle-high switchgrass, he’d picked to pitch their tent. He smiled at her, stopped and rubbed her shoulders. “You’re radiant,” he said. He told her she still had the glow of pregnancy in her cheeks. Her skin was as bright as moonlight on the river.

  “You hush this sentimental nonsense, now, and build us a fire. I don’t know how you talked me into this, anyway.” She brushed the blowing auburn hair from her face and wiped her hands on her thin yellow dress.

  Andrew grinned. The whiskers on his jaw, dark brown, seemed to scurry toward the hollows of his cheeks. “Would you rather have stayed in Bonham and faced that dust storm? I hear the sky was so full of sand, out west, gophers popped out of big fat holes in the air.”

  “I’ve chewed on my share of dust storms,” Annie Mae said, twisting her hair in a bun around a scrub oak twig and staking it up off her neck, which was misted by a fine sprinkling of sweat. Her back ached—she’d pinched a nerve during labor, she feared, but these days Andrew couldn’t hear her complaints, no matter how often she raised them. For him, all their troubles would cease across the river.

  “We’ll do good, Annie,” he repeated for her now, wrapping her hands in his rough, meaty palms. “More than that. We’ll prosper. It’s wide open in the Territory.”

  Annie Mae laughed. “I wouldn’t trust Lee’s word on that any more’n I could hurl a stone across this water.”

  When she’d married him, Andrew’s sentimental streak had pleased her: feelings of any sort were hard to tug out of most of the men she knew, taciturn farmers and ranchers. But now that Harry was here, Andrew’s faith in new places and ideas—as though happy endings were foreordained—seemed reckless, even dangerous, to her. Their boy needed solid footing, not the constant uprooting that accompanied a life of dreams.

  “Don’t fret,” Andrew told her. “Your new life’ll be a garden of blessings.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” But really, what choice did she have? He’d made up his mind. She loved him. And she knew he couldn’t return to the world he’d had. For seven years now, he’d strung barbed wire for wealthy ranchers south of Bonham, Texas. His brother, Lee, thirty, six years older than Andrew, had fled Bonham eighteen months before for the Indian Territory. It had a reputation for liberal divorce laws, he’d told them: its residency requirement was only ninety days; a man could sue his wife with a public notice instead of a personal subpoena.

  Lee had married young—a bitter Baptist girl—and from the first he’d looked for an easy way out. He wrote Andrew regularly from the Territory, praising it as a “wide open place where a man can find—and stand—his ground. Lehigh, especially, is an ideal divorce resort. Warm climate, lots of attorneys, plenty of folks willing to hire out cheap as character witnesses.” His letters always ended with the warning, “Don’t tell anyone where I am.” This troubled Andrew, but after his boy was born, joining his brother appealed to him. His family’s politics gave him a mighty distaste for the men who employed him, Annie Mae knew; besides, he didn’t earn enough to feed an extra mouth.

  Andrew’s father, Michael Roy Shaughnessy, a tenant farmer scraping by near Bonham, had been for a dozen years or more an ardent Populist, a follower of a Dallas newspaper publisher named Harry Tracy. When he was courting Annie Mae, Andrew talked often about this fellow Tracy, with unshakable conviction. The man’s editorials in the Southern Mercury blamed capitalism for ruining farmers, who depended on the time frame of the seasons, not on the speed of investment, Andrew said. To please him, Annie Mae had tried to read the old Mercury articles (Andrew still saved them, yellowing now, in a box), but never understood them.

  Relishing his boyhood memories, Andrew told Annie Mae how every night at the supper table Michael Roy would open up the paper and read to his sons. “Tracy favors paying farmers for what they actually produce, heedless of the market’s fickle needs,” Michael Roy explained, h
is normally reedy voice bolstered by pride. “The gold standard’s an ‘absolute wrong,’ he says here, ‘threatening the stability of modern civilization.’”

  Andrew absorbed his father’s pride, and his anger at bankers and lawyers. In May, when Annie Mae had given birth after a long and arduous labor, Andrew named his son Harry Tracy.

  Now she sat by the fire, cradling their boy in a faded gingham blanket. As soon as she and the baby had been strong enough to travel, Andrew had thrown their clothes in an old buckboard and driven them north, toward opportunity and dignity in the Indian Territory.

  What choice? she thought again. What else could I have done?

  Parker approached from out of the dark, his face slick and ruddy in the popping light of the flames. He smelled of the earth—of worms in the earth, Annie Mae thought. Muddy, reeking of cheap, killing alcohol, licking long, tobacco-blackened teeth. Quickly, she tucked the wet breast Harry had been suckling back inside her dress. The baby began to make low, liquid noises in his throat, as if muttering to himself.

  “Storm’s a-comin’,” Parker said, sniffing the air. “Might be you’ll have to stay on here a tad longer’n you figured.” He grinned.

  “Yes,” Annie Mae said quietly.

  Andrew emerged from the tent in a fresh cotton shirt and a clean pair of denim britches. He was tall and fair, with a graceful stride. Parker stiffened and glanced away from Annie Mae. He cleared his throat. “Y’all come up the Wichita?” he asked.

  “Followed the north fork of the Little Wichita,” Andrew said, folding his soiled clothes.

  “Fellow told me once the old-time Spanish explorers called the Wichita ‘Rio del Fierro—River of Iron.’” He laughed—a nervous bark. “I’ve always liked that, always liked that.” His hands fluttered around the pockets of his dirty khaki pants. “Didn’t pass through Whiskeytaw Falls by any chance, did you? I sure could use me some Red Draw. It’d just about make my miserable week if you’s to let on you had a bottle or two nestled inside your wagon there.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well. Beer and ‘mater juice.” He shook his doughy head. “Sure would hit the spot this evening, eh partner?”

  Andrew didn’t answer. He’d raised his ears to the wind. A brackishness weighted the breeze; thunder murmured in the east. Cottonwood blossoms, soggy white medallions, drifted across the river’s choppy current.

  “It’s a-brewin’, all right. Big one. Hit about midnight, I expect.”

  Harry gushed a stream of high-pitched gibberish. He plucked at his mother’s black buttons.

  “That baby of your’n. Sure is a noisy little feller, ain’t he, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” said Annie Mae. “He’s going to be a talker.”

  “Keeps you wide-eyed most the time, I s’pose.” He wiped his nose, his mouth. “I stay wakeful, myself, most nights, wishing for company.”

  Annie Mae went rigid, and wouldn’t look at the man. Harry squirmed in her arms.

  “All right. Well then, I hope you folks have a pleasant eve,” Parker said, and moved away, out of the circle of light.

  Andrew watered the horses, an old Arab and a roan he’d bought with the last of his wages, then rubbed them down with hay. He currycombed their coats, mixed for them a couple of quarts of sweet feed, corn, linseed meal. Annie Mae couldn’t watch him for long. She blamed him for Parker, she realized, turning her face toward the water—for bringing her to the edge of the world, whose rocky rim was paced by such grimy, god-awful men.

  Later, in the darkness of the tent, she wouldn’t answer Andrew’s quiet “Good night.” She heard him sit up. “Annie?”

  “Hush and go to sleep.”

  “Things’ll get better, I promise.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you’re with me.”

  “Don’t start.” Durn his sentimentality, she thought.

  “I mean it, honey.”

  Though she knew better, she never could fight his sweet optimism, and he knew it. Tears came to her eyes, but she couldn’t help smiling. “Hush.”

  “Annie—”

  “Go to sleep, I say.”

  Harry did keep her awake, howling at the curtain of rain lashing their tent. In a short lull in the downpour, she picked her baby up and carried him outside, into a wave of throbbing thunder, shielding his head with the blanket. Andrew needed his rest; if they made it across tomorrow, he’d have long, hard hours guiding the horses. She stood on the riverbank, ankle-deep in grama grass, and gave her baby a breast. Lightning prickled above her; in the brief flash she saw Parker straddling a rock, not ten feet away. She jumped. Harry’s lips slipped her nipple, and he started to bawl. Parker, sour and soaked, smiled at her broadly. She stumbled back to the tent.

  All night she shivered, cold and scared, listening to switchgrass buzz in gusting breezes. She imagined zippers sounded like this, a hundred of them opening in unison. Andrew had sworn to buy her fancy leggings, or gaiters, with the new metal hasps, once they got settled. She’d read about zippers, sitting in a soda fountain in downtown Bonham one day, flipping through a magazine—the writer had called them “wondrous,” guaranteed they’d revolutionize women’s clothing. A few years back, the zipper had been a curiosity at the Chicago World’s Fair, but it had its believers, and Annie Mae was eager to see a dress fastened with one. Andrew had promised her this, and much more, in their new life.

  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.”