The Boy Orator Page 13

  Fred Warren picked his bottom teeth with the tip of a stubby knife. “The seeds of the Civil War were planted in the very womb of this nation,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “How d’you figure?” Chester said.

  “Some folks trust majority rule, nothing else. They don’t believe in specialists. Or politicians. Others say the voters think with their hearts, not their heads—you need strong leaders to push the national will. Finally, there’s the localists, who’ll swear to you our representatives in Washington are blind as one-eyed moles to whatever’s happening back home—”

  “They all sound smart to me,” said Chester.

  “Exactly,” Fred Warren said. “That’s what I mean. The Civil War was inevitable. And the tensions behind it, they’ll never go away.”

  Harry’s head was cobwebbed with the horrors he’d seen that afternoon. He couldn’t eat his dinner; the scent of sickness, of decay, lingered in his nostrils. What did Fred Warren’s flat words have to do with the mutilations or the anger he’d witnessed today at the home? He couldn’t sit and listen any longer to the talk. He jumped up and asked Sally where her medicine was. “What’s the matter, sweetie?” she asked.

  “Female troubles,” Harry murmured, turning to hide his tears.

  PATRICK NAGLE WAS A GENTLE man, generous and kind, ardent, full of conviction, but a poor public speaker. He stood onstage with Harry just long enough to mumble, “If present economic conditions persist, years from now we won’t be asking this boy, ‘What business are you in?’ but ‘Who do you work for now?’”

  He was more comfortable behind the scenes, he admitted, writing articles, drafting speeches for others. “I don’t really have what it takes to be a hand-shaker or a baby-kisser,” he said. Harry liked his presence, his striped suit and slick, black mustache. He was disappointed when Nagle rushed off “to other party business.”

  As he stepped into his jitney he winked at Harry. “You’re a good Irish lad,” he said. Harry was glad his father had named their mule for him.

  Dora Mertz and Stanley Clark were charismatic leaders, but around the supper fires at night they were loud and a little too friendly with the bottle. “It’s always a shock to learn your heroes are human,” Warren Stargell whispered to Harry one night, registering the boy’s reaction to the pair.

  But Oscar Ameringer, the great Oscar—he exceeded his billing. He knew so much! He’d read all the primary Socialist works, both European and American. He was a fine speaker but he didn’t try to whip the crowd into a frenzy. He was more of a teacher, Harry saw, patiently explaining political principles. Some of the party faithful thought he wasn’t fiery enough—he didn’t support an all-out revolution. He believed capitalism would inevitably fail, and that democratic Socialists would gradually take the reins. Harry believed him. It thrilled the boy when Ameringer told a crowd one day, “The word Socialism indicates association, organization, and cooperation.” After that, Harry would have followed him anywhere. He was just plain good.

  One afternoon, while Warren Stargell and others were watering the horses, J. T. Cumbie complained to Ameringer about the “religion nuts” gnawing steadily away at the party.

  “Who do you mean, J. T.?” Ameringer swept a lick of thick brown hair off the tops of his ears. His eyes were steady and gray.

  “This boy, for one.” Cumbie pointed at Harry, who was kneeling by a stream, washing the dust from his face. “He’s been telling the crowds it’s okay to be a Catholic or a Jew and still be a Socialist.”

  “I agree with him,” Ameringer said with a precision, Harry heard, that dramatically thickened his heavy German accent. “The party considers religion an individual matter. You know that.”

  “And you know, Oscar, that preachers are the spiritual cops of the capitalists. If they gave a damn about the working class, they’d back our strikes instead of fretting about sinners.”

  “You don’t need to orate, J. T. It’s me you’re talking to. And I think the boy’s okay. Leave him alone, all right?”

  Cumbie glared at Harry. It was best to let the moment pass. Cumbie had wronged him, but the old goat was a revered party elder.

  To be a good Socialist, did you really have to like everyone? Or was it enough to pretend to like some folks?

  Harry dried his face and climbed back in the wagon.

  “TREASURES?” HE SAID.

  “Oh yes,” said Kate O’Hare. They were sitting by the embers of the supper fire. Warm night; slats of purple clouds ribbed the sky, as if the dome had been condemned, and the stars were flakes of falling plaster. Kate O’Hare was drying her hair with a gray cotton towel. The soap she’d used smelled honeyed, fresh.

  “The French. The Spaniards. Even outlaws—-Jesse James, Belle Starr. Anyone who’s ever passed through this country is said to have buried silver and gold in it.” She draped the towel around her knee. Her damp red hair curled like a cap of leaves. “As I’ve traveled over the years, I’ve heard several stories about a cave in the Wichita Mountains blocked by a locked iron door.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Some say it was a storage vault for gold, and a prison for Indian slaves working Spanish mines in the eighteenth century. Others swear the James gang left over two hundred thousand dollars there after a Kansas bank heist. Frank James went back to find the booty after Jesse died,” she said, “but the oak tree he’d marked with a railroad spike had disappeared, scorched by lightning one night in a wild thunderstorm.”

  “Are these stories true?” Harry asked, watching the gentle ridges of her face. Her small mouth glistened in the firelight.

  “Who knows?” She leaned over, close to the flames, scruffed her hair. Her fingers were long, white as the early moon. “I met a man in Cooperton once who swore to me he’d ridden into the Wichitas from Cutthroat Gap early one morning, and somewhere north of Elk Mountain, he ran across the door. It was rusted and warped. With an oak limb he managed to smash the lock and pry his way inside. Gold ingots had been stacked like cordwood at the back of the cave, he said. Doubloons bubbled out of shredded baskets, surrounded by a dozen or so skeletons—Indian slaves, he supposed. He couldn’t carry the gold—he only had a mule—so he hurried down the slopes to Indiahoma for some help. But the next day, when his little party wound into the mountains, the arroyos all looked alike to him, and he couldn’t locate the spot. To this day, he’s still searching.”

  Harry stared at her, fascinated by her disheveled beauty as much as by her story.

  She looked at him, her elbows on her knees. “And what would you do if you found a treasure like that?” she asked him.

  He chewed his bottom lip, then grinned. “I’d give it to you, to help you print the Appeal.”

  Her laughter sounded rhythmic, like prayer. She tossed the moist towel so it covered the top of his head.

  “You’re a sweet boy,” she said. “And you know what?” She reached across the flames, touched his wrinkled shirt above his heart. “Your strength’s right there,” she said. “Don’t forget it.”

  IN A COTTON FIELD a few miles north of Sulphur, over thirteen thousand people showed up to be near the health resorts and to hear Oscar Ameringer, Kate O’Hare, and Eugene V. Debs. It was the biggest audience Harry had ever seen.

  “I gave my standard speech—the one Cumbie doesn’t like,” Harry wrote his father afterwards. “And I got a standing ovation. Shoot, they would have saluted a sagging old milk cow, they were so worked up for Debs. He’s a sweet dreamer, Dad. He truly loves the people, and they love him back. They know he’s going to be the first Socialist President of the United States. When he speaks, you feel you’re hearing a prophet. It’s like Oklahoma shimmers, then fades, and we’re standing in the land of Palestine, listening to the carpenter of Nazareth.”

  That afternoon, Harry watched Debs’s every gesture, every move. The man, reedlike, tall and tan, took the stage at the end of the day, when the crowd’s anticipation was at its height. He leaned toward his hearers, opened his swaying
arms as if to embrace them all. “When you wend your way homeward, I want you to feel you’ve refreshed yourselves at the fountain of enthusiasm,” he told them, using the setting, with its many hot springs, to illustrate his points. “And when you get there, deliver to your neighbors the glad tidings of the coming day! No one—not even the most class conscious industrial workers in our largest cities—is more keenly alive to the social revolution taking place in this nation than the farmers of Texas and Oklahoma. You, my dear friends, are the standard-bearers of the future!”

  He unbuttoned his coat after about twenty minutes, loosened his tie, which gave him a more down-to-earth, yet intense, look than he’d started with. Harry glanced at Warren Stargell, to see if he’d noticed the effect.

  After Debs talked for a while, he endorsed J. T. Cumbie’s candidacy for governor, then quietly stepped aside, letting the old man bask in the glow he’d fanned. Cumbie didn’t have the temperament or the discipline to maintain the good feeling Debs had built among their constituents. He launched into an attack on Governor Haskell, citing a recent land fraud investigation in which the governor had been implicated. The content was effective, but the tone of certainty and hope had been lost.

  Harry took note: stress the positive. A bright clarity, like the edge of a morning cloud, followed Debs wherever he went.

  Like Nagle and Ameringer, he was a busy man, and had to “rush off”; Harry experienced his absence, the loss of his energy keenly, and for days afterwards, he lolled around his tent, nibbling only fruit. He felt lonely, homesick again. The tension with Warren Stargell returned.

  “Stop acting spoiled,” the man snapped at him one afternoon. “We’ve been through this. I thought you said you weren’t a baby.”

  “I’m not a baby. Leave me alone!”

  “I’ll tell you what you are. You’re a foot soldier—”

  “No.”

  “—in a righteous cause.”

  “No!”

  Warren Stargell rolled a cigarette. “This sets you apart from other boys your age.” He licked the dusky paper. “You have a responsibility to nurture your talent, son, share it with others. All right? You have to hold steady—”

  Harry curled up in his sleeping bag.

  “I know how it is. Most days you love to talk. Sometimes, like now, it’s a burden, right? You get tired. You want to run and play.”

  Or lie down with Mollie. Harry didn’t know what he wanted. Sometimes he felt like two different people, a kid and a man. The kid wanted to go home, eat his mother’s food, chase his dog through a bright, blooming field, flirt with a girl. The man wanted to hold a stage as powerfully as the speakers he’d seen.

  “Don’t you think it’s the same for Mr. Debs? Even now?” Warren Stargell said.

  “He wants to run and play?”

  “I reckon he does, sometimes. Here.” He held the cigarette out. Harry took it between his fingers. “What say we rustle us up some frogs’ legs?”

  “I’m not hungry.” Harry’s knees ached, from many hours pacing a stage. His body felt stretched and twisted, as if the man inside him were trying to burst through the skin of the boy.

  “Next town we’re in? Maybe we can buy you some marbles,” Warren Stargell said. “Or a drawing pad and some pencils. Would you like that?”

  “I don’t care,” Harry said.

  “All right then, suit yourself.”

  “Mr. Stargell?”

  “Yep?”

  Harry straightened his shoulders. Marbles, he thought. Yes, marbles might be nice. “Got a match?”

  ONE HOT AFTERNOON, A week after Debs’s departure, Cumbie was struggling to win a crowd’s blessings. People liked his ideas but it was clear to Harry and to everyone else that his attacks on Governor Haskell were wearing thin; he sounded foolish and mean.

  “Alfalfa Bill” Murray had joined the race for governor that year, as an “exponent of the militant progressive democracy of Oklahoma.” “Alfalfa Bill,” a farmer from Tishomingo, was one of the best-known politicians in the state. He had been one of the leaders of the Constitutional Convention, and a strong supporter of farmers’ rights. A virulent anti-Socialist, he took to following the caravan that summer, dogging and harassing the speakers.

  That day, as Cumbie sought to win the people’s favor, Murray appeared in the field in a Ford touring car. He leaned past his driver and squeezed the horn. The audience craned to see. Cumbie sputtered. Murray rose in his seat, tried vainly to straighten his wrinkled tie. He fingered his walrus mustache. The driver wheeled the car slowly toward the stage. Families jumped up from where they’d been sitting and made way for it to pass. As it moved, Murray shouted at the top of his lungs, “Don’t listen to these troublemakers! They’ll steal your land away. They’ll reduce you to the level of nigger hands on giant farm collectives!”

  Cumbie was so angry he couldn’t speak. He paced the stage tugging his grizzled beard, glowering at his opponent. Harry knew about Murray; many times, he’d heard his father talk about the man. Apparently, no one was going to challenge him. Harry listened to as much as he could take, then, guessing what Andrew would do, leaped onstage next to Cumbie. “And tell us about your platform, Mr. Alfalfa Bill!” he yelled. “Isn’t it true you support the disenfranchisement of blacks?”

  Murray looked amused. “Just exactly what do you mean by ‘disenfranchisement,’ young fellow?” he said.

  “I mean the Grandfather Clause.”

  “That I do.”

  “So why should we believe you when you say you’re on the side of the common man?” Bull Durham had coarsened his voice. “If you won’t support blacks, you won’t support us. We’re all wage workers together.”

  “That’s a distortion of economic reality—”

  “Isn’t it true you’re against child labor laws?”

  The crowd began to grumble. A smattering of boos.

  “And safety for miners and other workers?”

  “Too many regulations hamper the flow of capital. You’re too young to understand these concepts, boy, go back to school—”

  “J. T. Cumbie understands a racist when he sees one!” Harry shouted. He skipped Cumbie’s own ideas. “J. T. Cumbie knows who’s on the side of the worker and who isn’t! And that’s why J. T. Cumbie will be the next governor of the great state of Oklahoma!”

  Thunderous agreement from the crowd. Cumbie smiled at Harry, took his hand and raised it in his own. Murray signaled his driver, and the Ford pulled quickly out of the field to shouts and laughter and jeers.

  “I owe you one, kid,” Cumbie said to Harry. He squeezed Harry’s hand.

  After that encounter, Kate O’Hare convinced Cumbie he should oppose the Grandfather Clause. “You ought to seek Negro support, J. T. Everyone else in the race is ignoring them. Murray, Lee Cruce … it’s a waste of vital potential. Publicity—”

  “Yes. The kind I don’t want.”

  “On the contrary.”

  Kate O’Hare admitted to a fear of “nigger bucks,” but she tried, always, to overcome her prejudice, and she knew what was good for the party. She talked the caravan into heading for Taft, an all-black town near the confluence of the Arkansas and Verdigris Rivers in the northeast part of the state. On the way, she and Cumbie drew steady crowds. Harry handed out the Appeal, Chester filled the balloon. One afternoon he gave Harry a ride. Heavy brown ropes tethered the passengers’ basket to stakes in the ground (Harry thought of the ropes he’d seen on the mining platform, the day he’d worked the hole); hemp lines rose from the rim of the basket, attached to the red and yellow fabric filled with illuminating gas. Chester loosened the ropes; the basket jerked and swayed. He and Harry drifted, bobbed above maples. Harry laughed in delight. Oklahoma spread beneath him like one of his mother’s quilts, rivers like ribbons of thread. He opened his arms to gather it all: gypsum, pecans, straw, and mesquite. Hills and plains collided in a quiet drama of textures and hues. A patchwork of farms. Crops in even rows, patterns of labor and love…


  “You and me, Harry, we’re the damn future, you know it?” Chester said. “Fred’s right: we’re the best hope this ol’ country has. Look at it. So much land. So many people just waiting for something good in their lives …”

  Harry spotted a tiny community, wagons and fences, ragged log cabins. “Is that the town we’re going to?” he said.

  “I s’pose it is.”

  “People live in those buildings.”

  Chester nodded.

  “They look so small.”

  “The folks inside them, they’ll grow and grow and grow once they hear Kate and J. T.” Chester nudged his shoulder. “Once they hear the mighty Boy Orator.”

  Harry smiled. “Thanks for showing me, Chester.”

  Chester glanced at him as if to say It’s a gift, look after it. “S’pose we better fold our wings,” he said. “There’s work to be done.”

  FREEDMEN HAD FOUNDED TAFT with the land allotments they’d earned at the end of the Civil War. Harry had studied all this in school; his lessons came back to him now.

  In the Territories, the Indian tribes had all owned slaves. After emancipation, black leaders proposed that the area enter the Union as a series of “Negro states,” and inspired a significant westward migration. Harry had once read how a large black exodus from the South helped populate Taft and other towns like it in tangled bottomlands, dense piney woods.

  The Socialist caravan entered the town one rainy day on a dirt road paralleling tracks for the Midland Valley Railroad and the MK & T. Sagging shingled roofs, wild mushrooms poking through broken wooden walks, doorless, mildewed outhouses. Small black faces peered at the wagons from open windows in log cabins set back from the road several yards.