The Boy Orator Page 17

  “Yes,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d come back to me.”

  “I did. I’m here now. I missed you.”

  “Socialist?” Tears, milky in the moonlight, streaked her cheeks. “They’ve killed my dog.”

  “I’m sorry, Mollie. I’m so sorry.” He brushed the wetness from her face. “Where’s your cousin?” he asked.

  “With my father.” She grasped his hand. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the Elder.”

  “I want to hold you.”

  “Later. We have to hurry.” She led him downriver. “The Elder is the only woman of our tribe who’s allowed to be a keeper of medicine,” she explained. “It’s a very rare honor. Her family has always been gifted with the secrets of healing.”

  In a tarpaper shack by the water an old woman sat on a bed beneath a dim kerosene lantern. Moths attacked the glass around the flame. Frogs bellowed in the high grass just beneath her window. Her eyes were hard, white as limestone deposits. Harry couldn’t tell if she saw anything. She never moved her head, not even to nod hello. She sniffed the air. “You know the taboo against guests,” she told Mollie.

  Mollie bowed her head. “Yes, Elder. I’m sorry. We were in a rush. I—”

  “The healing may not work now. I cannot guarantee it.”

  “I understand.”

  “Who was bitten?” she said, her voice faint and hollow: wind inside a cave. Harry stood rigid, quiet.

  “My cousin Anko’s little brother. On the hand, when he tried to capture the dog.”

  The old woman pointed to a worn pouch, a skin of some kind, on the floor beside the door. Mollie opened it and pulled out a round shiny stone about the size of a silver dollar, but thicker and coated with light gray fuzz.

  “I have treasured this madstone since I was a little girl,” the Elder explained. “Do you know the story?”

  “No, Elder.”

  “When I was six, I was bitten in the woods one morning by a skunk. That night my father hiked into the Arbuckle Mountains and shot an arrow into the heart of a small white deer. From its belly he pulled this powerful gem. He came home, pricked my wound to make it bleed, and applied the stone to my broken skin. It stuck, which meant the poison was in me. I shook my arm, but the stone wouldn’t move. All night it sucked the death from my veins—I could feel it drawing. In the morning it fell to the floor and I was cured.”

  Harry shook his head and started to say something, but Mollie silenced him with a sober look. The frogs stopped for a while, then started up again, a deep bass chorus in the grass. He looked around the shack: a shield, the kind a warrior might raise in battle; three small, faceless dolls, tall as ears of corn.

  “The boy who was bitten,” said the Elder. “What is his name?”

  “Tawha,” Mollie said.

  “If his bite is not still bleeding, open it with a razor blade or a knife. Sprinkle corn starch on the cut and apply the stone. If it doesn’t stick, there is no poison in Tawha’s blood. If it does, leave it until it falls to the ground on its own.”

  “Yes, Elder. Thank you,” Mollie said.

  “Return the stone to me when it has done its work. There are fewer white deer in the mountains now than there used to be—hunting is too easy with guns.” The old woman grimaced; her face collapsed into fleshy crags. “Madstones are getting harder to find.”

  Mollie paused in the doorway.

  “You have another question for me?”

  “Yes.” Mollie touched Harry’s shoulder.

  The Elder’s lip twitched. “You know the answer already.”

  “Yes.” She pulled Harry’s hand and led him outside. “She’s crazy,” he puffed, running behind her through bull thistle and tall, silver goatsbeard. “Your friend needs a doctor.”

  “She’s a very wise woman,” Mollie said. “She’s saved several lives.”

  Harry snatched her arm. They both nearly fell. “Mollie, superstitions may be fine with cuts and colds, but—” His chest heaved; he could barely catch his breath. “If that boy was really bitten—”

  Mollie frowned at him. “Is that what we are to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Superstitious children?” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Maybe Anko was right.”

  “I didn’t say … what? What did Anko tell you?”

  She looked at him fiercely. “He said I shouldn’t go outside my people. He said white boys …”

  “White boys what? What about us?”

  “He said you’d use me, Socialist, that I’m nothing more than a child to you, someone you’ll play with then throw aside when you’re bored.”

  Harry ran his hands down her arms. “Mollie, Mollie, is that what you think?”

  She lowered her head. “I don’t know. Am I a child to you if I say I believe the Elder?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You heard what she said about you.”

  “Me?”

  “Usually, when someone’s old, especially a woman, the tribe abandons her. It isn’t cruelty, it’s just… the proper thing to do. Blankets, food—they’re all limited. They’re needed for the young, the healthy and strong. We all understand this. But the Elder is an exception. She’s a very powerful woman. She’s never wrong.”

  “All right, all right, maybe I don’t understand your laws,” Harry said. “I’m worried about this boy, that’s all. I didn’t mean you were—”

  Gently, she raised a hand to his lips. “It doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “It doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t see you anymore.”

  He tightened his grip on her arms. “Mollie, that old lady doesn’t know anything about me.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Don’t you know I do? Yes. Yes.”

  She shook her head. “I love you too,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter, Socialist. It’s too late. You shouldn’t have left me when you did.”

  She wouldn’t tell him anything more as they headed uphill away from the river, holding hands through brambles and the weeds of the fields. She stared at the ground. When they came in view of the shacks Harry had spotted the other day, Mollie stopped him, her body tight against his. She pointed at four slender sorrels grazing in a square of light near one of the houses’ dingy windows. “See those animals?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “A gift from Anko’s family to my father.”

  “So?”

  She squeezed his fingers. “A dowry.”

  Harry’s feet and hands went cold. “You don’t mean—?”

  Mollie nodded.

  He touched her chin, turned her face toward his. “You’re too young to marry.”

  “Am I?”

  He shrugged.

  “Usually, girls in my family wed at sixteen. I’m a little early, but Anko says he loves me, and my father likes him.”

  “Marry me!” Harry said.

  She kissed his cheek. “I have to go now. My father and Anko and Tawha are waiting for the madstone.” She leaned her head, briefly, on his shoulder. “I’m glad I got to see you once more. Don’t forget me, Socialist.”

  “Mollie, don’t marry him.”

  “My father has already given his approval. So has the Elder.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s already been arranged. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “You can run away with me.”

  Mollie smiled. “How can you save the world if you’re hiding in shame with an Indian girl?” She kissed him again then wriggled free of his grasp. He watched her run across the field toward the dirty windows, the hem of her skirt stirring poppies. He stood for a long time without moving, cursing Anko, cursing himself, wishing he had a madstone to stick on his skin, to suck the bitter blood from his heart.

  THE FIRST DAY OF school in the fall was always confusing and loud. Mrs. Altus, the teacher, a big, imperturbable woman i
n her early forties, had to divide a roomful of children of various ages and accomplishments into compatible groups, check their grooming (head lice, sores), get them started, often without pencils or paper. The day went smoothly if only half the kids were punished for shoving or shouting.

  This year Harry had even less patience than usual with the opening rituals. His classmates, even those his age, seemed silly. Since he’d seen them last, he’d campaigned with Kate O’Hare, grappled with his father’s injuries, his mother’s arrest, their mounting debts; he’d got his heart broken. The other kids were scrawny and young. And the subjects! Algebra, geography—they had nothing to do with the worlds he’d discovered. Sitting in the classroom, he felt he’d dropped into a hole.

  He’d tried to read The Jungle, the novel Kate O’Hare had given him in the city, but the prose was tortured and dense. He asked Mrs. Altus if she’d explain the author’s references, the workings of the stockyards and the meat-packing plants in Chicago, a place he could barely imagine. She looked suspiciously at the book, frowned at Kate O’Hare’s inscription: “For Harry, who can make a difference.” “We can’t engage in special projects,” she told him. “We must stay within our age group and stick to our assignments.” He asked her if she’d ever heard of madstones, if she’d seen any medical reports on the healing properties of deer. “Harry, you’re wasting my time,” she said. “Don’t get sidetracked with novelties. You do want to grow up and be a productive citizen, don’t you?”

  At recess, Randy Olin told Harry to crawl into the new textbook box, as his prisoner. In the spirit of friendship (his mother had stressed this again!) he got on his hands and knees, opened the cardboard flaps. He paused. He remembered the summer crowds near Guthrie, near Sulphur, the shy hope on the faces of hardworking women and men. He had sparked that hope. Harry Shaughnessy, the Boy Orator. “No,” he said, standing up, brushing the grass from his pants. “I won’t. This year I’m the sheriff.”

  “Says who?” said Olin.

  “Get in that cell,” Harry said. “You’re under arrest.”

  Eddie McGarrah stared at the two of them as if a cosmic calamity had suddenly knocked the world off its axis. Randy Olin always got his way.

  “The charges are as follows: immaturity, predictability, lack of ambition.” Harry squeezed Olin’s neck and heaved him into the box. Olin struggled and kicked; Harry rolled the box over and over to keep him off-balance. Their classmates laughed, even Eddie McGarrah when he saw and heard the others. “You know what a real jail’s like?” Harry said. “Small and filthy and cold. It’s even more humiliating than being tossed in a box.” He stepped back and clapped the dirt off his hands. Olin scurried free of his confinement, started to stand, but stopped when he saw Harry’s face. “This is a stupid game for stupid kids,” Harry said, glaring. No one bothered, or even approached, him the rest of the day.

  The next morning, he brought his bag of marbles to school and gave it away to a gleeful little boy.

  Harry longed to see Mollie but knew he wouldn’t be welcome by the Kiowa shacks. She was probably married. Whenever he thought of her, he felt like crying.

  Before cotton-picking, the Baptists staged one last revival south of town. On Saturday Harry went to hear the preaching, hoping to spot Mollie in the arbor, just to see how she was. After the sermon, the crowd wound through a field toward a muddy diving hole. The preacher waded into the swirling brown water (he could afford plenty of dry clothes, Harry thought, after passing the collection plate). He dunked several people, also fully dressed. Harry didn’t find Mollie. He started to leave when he heard a commotion in the pond. The preacher was leading Jimmie Blaine into the water. Everyone knew Jimmie, a man of thirty or so whose head was too big for his body, and who spoke with a lisp. People said he was “slow,” but he was friendly, a good worker on his father’s farm, and a good hand in the cotton patch. At least once each year he reaffirmed his Christian faith by getting baptized again. He was frightened now by a long, sleek water moccasin gliding toward the preacher and him. He flapped his arms, splashing the preacher’s face. Clearly, this annoyed the man, who tightened his grip on Jimmie’s neck and forced him deeper into the pond. “Ain’t you thee ‘at thnake?” Jimmie said. The preacher started to immerse him. Jimmie shouted, “Ain’t you thee ‘at ‘oddamn thnake?”

  Now everyone saw it. “Reverend, reverend!” someone called. The preacher lunged for the shore. Muddy arms helped him out of the water. The crowd huddled around him, protectively. Jimmie still stood in the middle of the pond, shivering and bawling as the snake circled, flicking its head and tail. Harry picked up an old oak twig and plunged into the ripples. With the stick he flipped the moccasin onto the bank, next to the preacher and his flock. They screamed and scattered.

  The rest of that month, in the cotton fields, Jimmie stuck by Harry, doing a good deal of Harry’s work as well as his own. A bumper crop this year: over thirty inches of rain had fed the ground, and the plants were healthy and rich, three to four feet tall. The creamy white blossoms had quickly turned pink and decayed, leaving a sweet scent in the air that intoxicated the bees, giving way to soft green bolls that hardened then burst into five-spiked burrs. They were dark brown and brittle, filled with airy cotton.

  Mrs. Altus canceled classes at the height of the picking. She did this every year, under pressure from the children’s parents. Every hand in southern Oklahoma, old and young, large and small, was needed in the fields. Harry helped clear his father’s acres, then hired himself out to other tenant farmers. No one worked for himself. The bank owned it all. Black men and women, invisible the rest of the year, always appeared at cotton time, ready for labor. Sheriff Stephens strictly enforced the “vagrancy law”: anyone caught loitering on the streets of Walters was arrested, no excuses, and forced to pick for the county.

  Harry liked to start early each morning—he competed with Randy Olin and Eddie McGarrah to see who could harvest the most—but the weighers wouldn’t take wet cotton. “Ain’t paying for dew,” they’d say. “You wait’ll that’s dry, so we can get an accurate measure.” They paid the boys thirteen cents a pound; on a good day, when his back wasn’t screaming and he could still bend and stretch at sunset, Harry averaged two hundred pounds in just under twelve hours.

  The first day school was out, Randy Olin appeared in the fields wearing a white mask beneath his battered straw hat. To avoid sun-burn, everyone wore long sleeves and hats, though fall temperatures still topped ninety degrees. As Olin approached, Harry saw it wasn’t a mask at all, but a whorled cream spread liberally across his cheeks and the back of his neck. “Buttermilk and cornmeal,” Olin explained. “So’s I don’t freckle and end up looking like a damn ol’ Irishman.”

  “You look like an ass,” Harry said. “Careful, or they’ll hitch you to that wagon over there.”

  “Shaughnessy, is it true all Catholics are drunks?”

  Harry ignored him; he adjusted the straps of his croker sack so they wouldn’t nip his shoulders. Eddie McGarrah, trailing Olin, giggled and spat in the air.

  “I heard they had to pass a law so’s the Catholics wouldn’t fall over tipsy in church.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Harry said. “You might learn something if you read the papers.”

  “Damn papers write about the damn Irish all the time. Mr. Boy Orator. So what?”

  “So what?” Jimmie Blaine echoed, approaching Harry, dragging his long empty sack.

  “Oh look, it’s Shaughnessy’s friend, the simpleton,” Olin said. McGarrah laughed. “Finally, there’s someone on Shaughnessy’s level.”

  Jimmie tried to smile but he only looked confused.

  “Olin, you’re pathetic,” Harry said.

  “I hear your daddy got so soused in church one day he ran outside and tried to fuck a cow, thinking it was the Virgin Mary.”

  Harry nearly swung at him, and would have if his arm hadn’t snagged in his sack as he turned. Jimmie saw Harry’s anger and, apparently try
ing to help, reached for Olin’s arm. Olin jumped back—“Stay away from me, simpleton!”—bumping McGarrah, who fell against a sharp cotton stalk. Its limbs stuck out at right angles to the ground, and ripped his long checkered sleeve.

  “You boys!” yelled a foreman from the road. “Time’s a-wasting. Snap to it!”

  Harry looked darkly at Olin, then turned and began to pluck at the bolls. He didn’t have gloves. The family’s bills and Annie Mae’s bail had eaten up the supply-money. At thirteen cents a pound, he wasn’t going to relieve his parents’ debts anytime soon.

  It was impossible to avoid being jabbed by the bolls’ prickly edges, even when he was careful, and he wasn’t careful today: he was furious at Olin, more than ever determined to outpick him. He told himself Olin wasn’t worth the energy it took to be mad at him, he was just a baby; he understood, then, that this loudmouthed kid wasn’t the only fellow troubling him. The “drunk Catholic” talk brought him right back to Father McCartney.

  As Harry had warned Commissioner Boyd, the local courts were now reviewing the “bone-dry” statute, questioning its efficacy in light of the Catholics’ anger. Last Sunday, Father McCartney had told his congregation he was “sure this abominable law was going to be repealed, with the Lord’s generous help.” What did the Lord have to do with it? Harry thought. Did the Lord speak to Boyd, the Herald? Immediately, he was ashamed of his immodesty, but the priest had annoyed him just before Mass. He had thanked Harry for “staying out of the fray” while he, Father McCartney, in agreement with Chancellor de Hasque and Bishop Meerschaert, negotiated with the county leaders. Harry hadn’t stepped back on purpose. No one had come to him; for all his big talk when the reporter had asked him his plans, he didn’t know how to take the next step. He was still just a kid. A powerless little boy.

  His helplessness infuriated him; county laws, tribal laws, marriage customs. He wanted the knowledge and the ability to change them all. Irritably, he pulled at the bolls. They punctured his hands until he bled. By noon, his spine and his knees ached. He reeked of sweat, a deep, earthy musk. Boll-needles and thin, nuggety seeds pinched his skin beneath his nails. His fingers throbbed, swollen and red. His throat crackled, deep inside, like wallpaper ripped from sticky boards.