The Boy Orator Read online

  Precisely, she thought.

  Andrew only nodded. The ferry dipped slightly at the edge of a rowdy whirlpool—Annie Mae, tipped upward, saw clouds like rags plugging scattershot holes in the sky—then straightened out, heading for a line of tender elms on the opposite shore. Andrew reached for her hand. She grasped it, reluctantly at first, then gratefully as the raft’s rocking increased. Clinging tightly to each other, they slipped into the Indian Territory, Harry yammering, all the while, at cottonwood, bluestem, mistletoe.

  PART ONE

  Cotton County, 1910

  1

  Later this evening, Harry knew, he’d celebrate his twelfth birthday with his father, just the two of them, in the restaurant of the Palmer Hotel, where all the waiters wore bow ties and jackets, and all the windows, spread before the wide, dusty streets, showed knots of huddled strangers who’d come to trade their goods—Comanches hawking jewelry and skins, cotton farmers stacking hoes on wooden walks in front of the millinery shop and the pharmacy. Harry’s father would tell him to order anything he wanted from the menu: steak and Irish potatoes, chicken and dumplings, hot apple pie. He’d claim, as he always did on these trips, he was proud of his son, and maybe as a treat back in the room he’d offer Harry a sip of warm choc beer. The bottle, Andrew’s “after-dinner blessing,” was stuffed in the leather grip they shared that didn’t shut all the way. But before any meals Harry had to give his speech.

  Anadarko, Oklahoma, a townsite of two thousand folks or so, was hot and humid this early May afternoon. The tradesmen rubbed their eyes with dirty plaid bandannas. It wasn’t likely they’d stop to hear a serious talk, Andrew had warned Harry. They’d want to get their business done and go home.

  Besides the market, Harry had to compete with the comet. Any hour now Earth would pass through its tail. The experts Andrew had seen quoted in the papers didn’t know if this would harm the atmosphere. Two years ago they’d detected toxic gas in Comet Morehouse; this new visitor, speeding much closer to the planet, might trigger influenza outbreaks. On the other hand, comet tails were exceedingly thin: a change in the wind, nothing more.

  A young man in a green tweed suit set a cardboard box in the street next to a sweaty team of horses near the makeshift platform Harry and Andrew planned to use. He wiped his face with a long yellow kerchief. His companion, a small Indian woman in a white dress, helped him open the box. From its depths he pulled a rubber mask. “Don’t let the first decade of the twentieth century be your last!” he shouted above the din of sales, the tool prices, the buggy rattles, and whip-cracks. “Protect yourself from Heaven’s hellish messenger! I hold in my hand here a one-hundred-percent authentic breathing mask—guaranteed to help you survive Halley’s Comet! Six bits for the breath of life, step on up, that’s it sir, step right ahead!”

  Andrew grumbled then said to Harry, “Come on now, before he draws all the crowd.” He lifted his lanky boy onto the platform, a series of chicken crates stacked and wired together, fashioned this morning by an industrious cattle auctioneer. On a street-pole behind the crates, Harry’s thin face, sketched in pencil, beamed from a poster:

  17 May 1910

  Come Hear Harry Shaughnessy

  THE BOY ORATOR

  Main Street, Anadarko (Weather Permitting)

  Endorsed by the Farm Labor Progressive League

  GOOD LOUD SPEAKER

  He wasn’t the only “baby” orator in the state; Andrew had stolen that idea. The Baptists every politician hoped to reach—a powerful bloc of voters—literally believed the Bible’s promise that “a little child shall lead them.” At rallies, brush arbor revivals, even in the halls of the state capitol, parents and party bosses taught any kid with volume a patriotic nugget or two, urged him onto stages, and hailed him as a prophet of Oklahoma’s coming economic miracle.

  Harry, though—Harry was the genuine article. Andrew had recognized his talent instantly when, in a school Christmas pageant, at the age of six, he’d overcome his stage fright long enough to blurt, “Welcome ladies and gentlemen, and bless us all on this holy night of our Lord.” The cadence and timbre of his voice were steady as oak, strong enough to fill the auditorium. Afterwards the other fathers told Andrew, “Sounds like you’ve got a young firebrand there” or “Dress him up, take him on the road.”

  Andrew saved for months, scoring a timely timber sale to the mines, to buy his boy a nice cotton suit, dark blue. He bought pomade for Harry’s curly red hair, taught him to stand up straight and slap color into his flat, freckled cheeks right before each speech. At seven, with his daddy’s eager help, Harry began learning the Socialist gospel. Late most afternoons, they’d practice together in the windy barn behind their house near East Cache Creek. The Cache, just north of the Red River in Cotton County, was a muddy burble, and a former Kiowa homestead (before white settlers drove the Indians out “long ahead of us,” Andrew’s neighbors had told him when he’d moved there years ago).

  Harry was tall and awkward for his age; his arms poked like kindling from the sleeves of his wrinkled suit. Andrew would stand him on a hay bale, prompt him from the shadows, while barn cats scurried through the horse stalls, and a horned owl aired its wings, creaky and expansive, in the broad walnut rafters. “American farmers are stragglers of rooted armies—,” Harry would begin.

  “Routed armies,” Andrew corrected, “scattered by the money men.”

  “—routed armies, always hoping that somewhere in this great land of ours, there’s a piece of dirt for them.”

  The way his voice thickened in recitation, the way his face flushed dark crimson the first few times they worked on a speech, reminded Andrew of his own father, gentle Michael Roy, resting now seven years in the ground, the hard Texas ground he’d plowed until the strain of loving it, and paying all its costs, burst his heart.

  “And who do the money men serve?” Andrew would shout at his boy, eyes salty with tears, thinking, Father, listen, your dream hasn’t died.

  “The forces of greed!” Harry yelled back.

  For you, Father. Listen. “Greed?”

  “The smasher.” Sunlight burst through slats in the barn. Harry’s face flushed with excitement and a swelling desire to please: Father, watch me, listen, for you. “The smasher of souls!”

  “Louder!”

  “Of souls!”

  “What?”

  Harry planted his feet, shaking with energy, love (Andrew saw it in the lurching tilt of the boy’s whole body), fear of letting his father down. He closed his eyes. “Souls!”

  THIS AFTERNOON IN ANADARKO, Andrew felt anxious for the first time in weeks. The crowd was tired, overheated, close to fury over bad deals, inflated prices. These were just the poor wretches Harry could aid if they were willing to listen but Andrew feared they weren’t. Farmers weren’t the only ones tending to business. Men in ties—bankers, lawyers, owners of the farmers’ rocky lands—strolled among saddles, plows, and furs, counting the county’s wealth, their kingdom’s gold. Klansmen, Andrew thought, spitting into the dirt. Most of these bastards were night-riders. They wouldn’t welcome Harry’s message.

  Three or four fellows approached the platform. They didn’t look friendly. Andrew preferred camp meetings in the country, addressing honest, hardworking folks with their simple hand-stitched clothes and coal-oil lamps, to these market-day affairs. In the country, people hungered for the word; they’d come to a rally dragging water in big tin buckets, hauling firewood and bedding. Fiddlers played reels and boisterous jigs, tunes the farmers’ ancestors danced to in Ireland or Scotland, generations ago. For the oratory, the stirring advice, crowds straggled in for miles, slatternly, weary, but full of vinegar. Here, in county seats like Anadarko, where most people ate three full squares a day, sympathy for the poor was hard to scare up. Andrew had said as much to the Socialist League, who sponsored Harry’s trips, but the party was after converts, it didn’t matter where. Andrew didn’t trust anyone in the electric light towns.

  “The standard beginnin
g,” he whispered to his son. Harry cleared his throat, straightened his black string tie. “Live to see the coming century!” called the breathing mask man. “Don’t let this evil apparition rob you of your dearest years!” Down the street a strained buyer argued the cost of a scythe: “You thieving son of a bitch, I’m not blind. Who do you think you’re talking to?” Harry said softly, “The rent you pay your landlord—what is it now, twenty-five dollars a bale?—would buy a lot of biscuits for your wife.”

  One of the men who’d faced the platform stepped forward, removed his hat, and said, “What’s that, son?” His teeth were brown and his skin, beneath his whiskers, was a dark, mottled red, relieved here and there by hooklike scars.

  “I said”—Harry raised his voice, gestured crisply at the crowd—“your landlord’s wife wears silks and gets to ride in an automobile, while your wife walks!” His words rained like straw on the bent shoulders of all the men, or so Andrew imagined, startling them lightly at first, then itching, working down beneath their shirts and into their skin. They turned, two at a time, three at a time, to see the source of this storm, and were shocked to find a skinny kid.

  “While your sons and daughters labor in the fields, the children of the men who own you bask in the finest educational facilities this country has to offer,” Harry went on. “You’ve paid for these schools but can your family get near them?”

  Farmers flocked together as Harry spoke; the men in suits had vanished. The fellows Andrew had noticed before—the unfriendly ones—stood by the platform and glowered.

  The mask salesman had lost his audience. He shook his rubber headgear. “You won’t even have any fields, don’t you understand me? All will be destroyed. This wayward star is a divine plague from the Lord. Rescue yourselves!”

  For a couple more minutes Harry, the salesman, the tradesmen competed—

  “Two dollars a yard—”

  “—angered the Lord Almighty—”

  “—no farther than this town’s steel vaults to discover the cause of your woes—”

  “Two dollars my ass!”

  —but Harry soon held sway. He paced the platform, shaking his fists. Sweat spread along his sleeves, his dark red hair sprang forth. With every other breath he swallowed a darting mosquito, but he’d learned to do this without choking or even pausing in his speech. “Gangs of parasites infest the towns of this county, and they fatten their hides at your expense, my friends, your expense! You do the work of the world yet nothing but crumbs come your way!”

  Andrew stood behind his boy watching the streets. He’d taught Harry well, those days in the barn, whispering, “Louder. Okay, softer now, make them strain to hear you.” The listeners were rapt, but a bad pulse beat in this town—Andrew could feel it. He noticed keen eyes studying him like a sum, the harsh scrutiny of older, meaner men: solid citizens with much to lose and no intention of doing so. At the camp meetings, Harry spoke mostly to friends, liquored up and happy. These were impatient strangers at the end of an aching day. The event was not well-timed (he’d told the league!). He waited. Then it came.

  “Lousy Reds,” said the man with the scars. He turned to size up the crowd. Waved his hat. “Rotten Reds!” he yelled. His voice seemed to die in the air. For a second, Harry lost the rhythm of his speech, became aware of his circumstances, conscious of his movements, and in that second he saw the mask salesman slap the Indian woman. She’d tried to lift the box, lost her grip and spilled the masks in the dust. The salesman whacked her head, stamped her feet with his boots. Harry looked away and saw in the sky a massive thunder-head, angry, cumulus plumes, yellow and green. A moment ago the land was still. Now, without warning, wind sucked dust from the road, shading the sky brick-red, ripping handbills and his very own posters from their nails, filling his nose with a dry rain-smell and stinging his skin ice-cold. The comet, he thought, it’s here. He imagined bank roofs sailing off into fields, crushing empty wagons, dollars snowing into pockets, horses somersaulting over the town. He looked around. He wanted one of those masks. He wanted his birthday dinner; it might be his last.

  The swift change in air pressure roused the mob even more. Men blinked grit from their eyes. Andrew felt the blood-rush rise. The scarred man hit the platform with his hat, raising a head-shaped ball of dust. “These Reds want women to vote!” he barked. “They want to give niggers your land!”

  The crowd shook. Andrew, unthinking, shoved Harry aside. The boy nearly tripped off the platform. “You don’t have any land, that’s the point!” Andrew shouted. The wind seemed to flatten all sound, like a heavy iron lid clamped on the town. “You’re the niggers here!” As soon as he said this he regretted it. Men swarmed the front of the platform. “It’s the devil’s work they do!” someone yelled. “Drag them down from there. This is a Christian town, with good Christian morals!”

  Andrew grabbed Harry, smoothed the small, padded shoulders of his coat. “God,” he whispered—a signal for a different kind of speech. Harry lifted his right arm, magically stilling the crowd. “I pray for the Kingdom on Earth,” he said, his voice trembling with conviction. As he spoke, he kept an eye on the salesman, who was dragging the woman and the box down the street, past the bakery, the Good Luck Cafe, the Palmer Hotel. Horses reared in the stiffening breeze. “While men are underpaid, women overworked, and children underfed, the Kingdom of Heaven will never appear in Oklahoma. Socialism can remove these unhealthy conditions. Socialism can relieve you of your animal existence. Brothers, I pray we see Socialism in our time!”

  The clouds were frothing now. Harry’s tie whipped his face. The listeners, stunned by this boy’s endless breath, the great power rising from his belly like a pipe organ, shivered.

  “Okay, that’s it, let’s get,” said Andrew, tugging Harry from the platform, down a gas-lighted alley smelling of orange rinds and coffee, rose perfume, piss, and the sweet cedar wood of nearby buildings. The crowd still hadn’t moved. Harry choked on dust, wondered if the comet had poisoned him already. “Anadarko,” Andrew said, nearly breathless. “Fellow told me once it’s Caddo for ‘People of the Bee.’” He wheezed. “Good place to get stung, all right. When we get back to the hotel, I want you to put your suit in the bag right away—”

  “Aren’t we staying for dinner?” Harry asked, torn between his terror of the sky and his hunger for ice cream and cobbler.

  “No, I think we better get on back to your mother tonight.”

  “But you promised—”

  “Harry, hush up and do as I say now. We got a long ride ahead of us.” Andrew was always amazed at how quickly Harry slipped from the wise little adult who’d paced the stage into a nagging kid again. An only child, he was used to attention; Andrew was usually glad to give it—an extra helping of mashed potatoes and gravy at supper, one last game of checkers just before bed—but not when Harry acted stubborn like this against good advice. How many times had Andrew told his son, believing it, “You have to straighten up. The eyes of the world’ll be on you.”

  “I don’t care,” Harry would reply, angling to stay up later than usual, or to wriggle out of his chores.

  “You will.”

  “Won’t!” the boy used to shout—but lately, Harry hadn’t protested quite so much, even when he was grumpy and exhausted, Andrew had noticed, grateful for this new sign of maturity.

  A fat raindrop hit the ground like a bullet. “Hurry up, son. Maybe we can beat the storm.”

  Back in their room Andrew pulled a wool sock from under the mattress, reached in and emptied the league’s money. All there, still. Good. He’d settle up downstairs and they’d be on their way. Harry stuffed his coat and tie into the bag, around the smooth, hot bottle of beer.

  By the time they left the lobby it was just after five. Lights were snuffing out in the stores, flaring up in noisy coffee shops and inns. The sky had a midnight pallor. “You don’t suppose there’s something to that comet nonsense, do you?” Andrew said.

  Harry didn’t hear. He was pouting. His father
seemed to hate this town but he didn’t see what was so bad about it. The crowd had turned a little sour but this wasn’t the first time he’d faced a restless group. The women wore bright dresses and the food smelled good. Three years ago, when President Roosevelt signed Oklahoma into statehood, Andrew brought the family here for a fireworks celebration. Harry still remembered the egg-yolk bursts among the stars, the dying-flower smell of the gunpowder as it drifted past the cemetery they’d found with a marvelous view. He liked this place. He wanted sparklers for his birthday.

  Andrew led him down back streets toward the smithy’s barn where, this morning, they’d boarded their wagon and team. As they rounded a corner by a small barbershop they were blocked by five big men. “Oh shit,” Andrew whispered. Their arm hair, Harry saw, was as thick and matted as the sleeves of wool sweaters. They all wore overalls and veils on their heads—bandannas or soiled-looking pillowcases with needled edges. One man hid his features behind a dark green rubber mask. “Well well well,” he said, his voice as muffled and watery as a frog’s.

  “Wait now, gents, we don’t want any trouble,” Andrew said, setting down the leather grip, raising his calloused hands.

  “Then what’d you come here for, talking your devil talk, huh? Damn Reds.” The man lifted the bottom of his mask to spit. Harry saw hooked scars beneath his stubble.

  “Say, boy.” A man in a pillowcase stung Harry’s ear with a hard, muddy finger. His spooky eye-holes were the size of silver dollars. “You suck niggers’ dicks? I’ll bet you suck niggers’ dicks, am I right?”

  “Please. The boy doesn’t know anything,” Andrew said. His voice shook. “I write his speeches. Honest. He doesn’t understand a word of them. Whatever you’re going to do, leave him out of it.”

  A second hooded man knelt to inspect Harry’s face. He smelled of onions, sweat, wet animal hair. “Your pappy doesn’t think you’re too smart, now does he? Are you a Red, boy? Do you know what that means?”