The Boy Orator Read online

  This news unsettled Stephens. He twisted his hat in his hands. He sniffed the dusky air. “Trouble last night in the oil fields. Don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, of course not. Seen Warren Stargell today?”

  “I presume he’s at home.” He kept his hand on Halley’s head.

  The sheriff nodded grimly. “You tell Andrew I’m going to want to talk to him.”

  “I think you should speak to Jimmie Blaine,” Harry said. “He might help you put a stop to all this violence in town. I know for a fact he can identify—”

  Sheriff Stephens leaned forward on the first porch step and shoved his hat in Harry’s face. “Jimmie Blaine is a simple-minded son of a bitch,” he said. “That boy’s got nothing to tell me.” He turned to leave. “Besides, what violence are you referring to? There’s no violence in town. The only problem here is Red agitators.” He punched at the tincture of smoke. “But we’re going to put a stop to that mighty quick, I guarantee it. I’ll be back real soon to see your daddy, hear?”

  Shortly after he left, Andrew emerged from the bedroom and went to the kitchen to spoon himself some onion soup. Mahalie had made it the day before. Harry told him about the sheriff.

  “Yeah, I heard him through the window.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He didn’t answer. He was haggard and his face was tight, like a man who’d slept in a blizzard.

  “How’s Ma?” Harry said.

  Andrew shook his head and carried his bowl into the bedroom. Mahalie barred Harry’s way. “She’s resting now,” she said.

  “How come everybody else can see her but I can’t?” “You will, you will. Later. I promise.”

  The tone of her voice, his father’s wasted look, the sheriff’s angry warning … his shoulders and hands began to shake. He felt both chilled and slightly scorched. He paced the front porch. Halley watched him, half-heartedly thumping his tail. In the past several years, Harry had talked farmers into resisting their landlords. He’d talked miners into a joyful state of hope. He’d talked working men and women into believing they could better the nation. Now, with his mama gravely ill, with the memory of death in the field, he needed to talk himself into calming down. It would have to be the greatest speech of his life.

  He cleared his throat, pointed at the flowers in the yard. “Listen to me,” he muttered under his breath. “You roses, you poppies! Perk up! The rain is coming soon to ease your thirst. A cloudburst of recovery and redemption. I feel it! Raise your heads! Sniff the breeze! That freshness you smell,” though in fact the air was even more full of smoke than before, wrapping the trees like brood mare’s tails, “it’ll wash the sorrow from this parched and bitter land!”

  Halley got lazily to his feet, roused by Harry’s rhythmic pacing. He seemed to feel the promise. The speech was working.

  “Son? Harry, excuse me?” Father McCartney.

  Startled, Harry nearly slipped off the edge of the porch. Halley rushed over and licked his hand. “Yes?” he said, embarrassed.

  “Your mother would like to see you now.”

  Harry brushed his hair.

  “You know, it’s a great comfort at times like this to realize a greater world lies beyond this one,” said the priest.

  Harry felt annoyed. What was he talking about?

  “We’re all here for a short time, under God’s watchful care—”

  “Last night? Last night I saw something I don’t think God noticed,” Harry told him. “If He was watching, I’m pretty sure He wouldn’t have let it happen. I’m pretty sure He’d stop the war. He wouldn’t let my mother be sick.” He scuffed at a splinter sticking out of the porch. “In fact, Father, I’m beginning to believe He isn’t there at all.”

  “You mustn’t talk that way, Harry.”

  “If God’s watching, then why doesn’t He—what’s it called?—smite the capitalists who’re sending boys to Europe? He does a lot of smiting in the Bible, doesn’t He? Where is He now, when we really need a good smite? Huh?”

  “Harry. Please. Your mother.” Father McCartney held out his hand but Harry wouldn’t take it. He pushed by him into the house.

  In the bedroom, the creamy lace curtains were drawn. Annie Mae lay still in quivering shadows, under a thick pile of covers. Andrew sat on the bed, holding her hand. Mahalie stood in a corner over a basket of bloody sheets. Tears brightened her eyes.

  Harry had always thought of his parents’ room as his mother’s place, mainly; a part of the world of women. Today it was no one’s room. A presence he could feel but not see crouched here in the dark, a presence neither female nor male, exhaling a foul, earthen smell. It filled each corner. Harry shivered.

  Annie Mae’s arm rose, brittle. Her lips were dry; they crackled like blistered paint when she smiled. Andrew filled a glass from a pitcher on the night table, but she waved him away.

  “Hi, Ma,” Harry whispered.

  “Son.” She closed her eyes. “I want you to know …” Each word was like a stone, it seemed, passing brutally through her skin. “I’m proud of your speeches.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re going to be … a fine leader someday. I know it.”

  Harry could hardly talk. She was too pale. “Is the baby coming soon?”

  She shook her head briefly; her matted hair scratched the moist folds in her pillow. “Give me a kiss,” she sighed.

  Harry leaned over and pressed his lips to her forehead. The salt of her sweat…ever afterwards, it was the taste, to him, of pain.

  Mahalie walked up behind him and pulled him from the bed. He squatted by the door, on a red throw rug, stroking Halley’s ears.

  The priest dabbed holy oil on Annie Mae’s skin, blessing, with signs of the cross, her hands and feet, her eyes and ears, finally her lips—all the sinful senses. “Through this holy anointing and His most loving mercy, may the Lord assist you by the grace of the Holy Spirit,” he said, “so that, when you have been freed from your sins, He may save you and in His goodness raise you up.”

  Andrew crumpled forward, sobbing, onto Annie Mae’s chest. Her final gesture was to wrap her arms around him. “Shhh, shhh,” Harry heard her whisper—her final breaths—as though her husband was the one who was dying.

  Harry turned from the bed, patted Halley once on the head, and walked from the house, down the porch and through the little gate, out into the fields east of his street. He heard the grinding of car motors, the wheezing of trucks, from the center of town. Smoke sailed through the tops of maples and elms at the edges of the fields. He recalled the days, in years past, when his face had appeared on posters nailed to trees like these: “Come Hear the Boy Orator! Come Find Your Hope for the Future!” Bitterness rose in his throat.

  For almost an hour Harry walked, thinking of his mother, with nothing to say to himself. Finally, when he’d cried himself to exhaustion, and he noticed that the sun had burnt off all the smoke, he paused, wiped his eyes, caught his breath, then headed back home.

  EPILOGUE

  Cotton County, Oklahoma, November 1918

  Soon after the oil field uprisings, and all the shattered glass, Avram decided he’d had enough. He sold his store to Andrew, who’d done well with the livery stable and hankered to give retail a try (“Man wants to feed his family, he’s got no choice but to throw his lot in with the capitalists, though he don’t have to like it. I’m still a Socialist at heart, by God”).

  “They’ve won?” Harry asked Avram the day he placed his bags in the back of his dusty pine wagon.

  “I’m too old to be a fighter. It’s up to you young fellows now.” “Most of the other young fellows here …well, they’re wearing white sheets,” Harry said.

  Avram shook his head. “All I wanted was to settle. A simple thing.”

  “Do you have family close by?”

  “No.”

  “There are a lot of opportunities in the city, I think.”

  Avra
m looked at him. “Oklahoma,” he said, “is not the Promised Land. For anyone.” He snapped the reins; his mule took off.

  Sheriff Stephens questioned Andrew, as he’d threatened (the very morning of Annie Mae’s funeral), but got no satisfaction. He couldn’t produce witnesses who’d place Andrew, or Harry, in the oil fields the night of the blasts. “You’re lucky, the both of you,” he told them. They stood in the hot sun in their suits and ties, ready to ride with Father McCartney and Mahalie to the gravesite. “‘Cause I know damn well you’re mixed up in this. I swear to you, if I ever hear of you attending meetings—any meetings whatsoever, outside of church—I’ll haul you in for sedition. It’s finished, you hear me?”

  And it was—throughout the state, across the nation. Warren Stargell was eventually traced to Anadarko, and sentenced to ten years in the pen. Stanley Clark was indicted in Chicago. J. T. Cumbie was handed a stiff sentence at Leavenworth for—as “Alfalfa Bill” Murray said in the papers—“misleading ignorant farmers” into rejecting the “loving bosom of their country.”

  On August 3, 1917, a band of sharecroppers and Indians, led by a relative of the Creek renegade Crazy Snake, gathered on the banks of the Canadian River, near the Chisholm Trail in central-western Oklahoma, to begin a march on Washington in defiance of the draft. They planned to survive on beef and ripe corn (hence their name in the press, the “Green Corn Rebels”), linking up along the way with others who hated federal “revernooers.”

  Before they could even cross the river, they were routed by a posse of seventy men. The newspapers branded the rebels “cowards,” but one of them said, “It was our neighbors in that posse. We didn’t want to shoot them in cold blood, any more than we wanted to go to Europe and shoot at Germans.”

  In the next week, 450 men were arrested for participating in the rebellion (far more than were actually involved); about half of them wound up serving time in the state pen at McAlester. The “Reds” had been crushed in Oklahoma.

  Meanwhile, the Knights of Liberty prospered. No one was ever convicted of killing the young Socialist in the oil field. Jimmie Blaine told Harry the names of all his comrades—most of them came from prominent families in the county (though there were a few working class miscreants like Eddie McGarrah). Harry made a list and sent it anonymously to the sheriff’s office, but Stephens never touched the county’s leaders. Four months later, in Tulsa, a Knights of Liberty chapter lashed seventeen Wobblies to elm trees, stripped them all to the waist, and beat them nearly to death with wet hemp ropes. A carload of cops watched without interfering. The following morning, an editorial in the Tulsa World said the Knights were made of that “sterling element of citizenship, that class of taxpaying and orderly people who are most of all committed to the observance of the law.”

  JIMMIE BLAINE WENT TO work for Andrew in the Emporium. In his off hours, he sold rabbits in a lot behind the store.

  Eddie McGarrah wasn’t seen again in town.

  Harry waited out the war with the MK & T as a station clerk. In November, 1918, he read that Eugene Debs had been arrested for violating the Espionage Act. “They tell us that we live in a great free republic,” Debs had said, in the speech that finally hurled him into trouble he couldn’t escape, “that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke.”

  At his trial, he refused to take the stand or to call any witnesses on his behalf. In his own closing argument he told the jury, “I have been accused of obstructing the war. I admit it. Gendemen, I abhor war. I would oppose war if I stood alone … I have sympathy with the suffering, struggling people everywhere. It does not make any difference under what flag they were born, or where they live.” He castigated the national press for flooding the public with patriotic slogans, images of the flag; harassing citizens with constant, stupefying ads into spending their hard-earned money on war bonds.

  He was locked away in the West Virginia state pen, and later in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

  Kate O’Hare was incarcerated at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, where she befriended the anarchist Emma Goldman. Goldman said O’Hare had been imprisoned for trying to feed her fellow citizens, the way a child throws bread to needy birds.

  One day, O’Hare refused her weekly bath; the woman who’d preceded her into the communal tub suffered open syphilitic sores. O’Hare demanded a sanitary cell block, better care. Her fellow prisoners began to rely on her for reforms; soon, she was beloved even by the prison guards.

  Harry kept a newspaper picture of her and Oscar Ameringer tacked to an oak pole near a woodstove in the back of his father’s store, when he came to work at the Emporium after the war. Andrew put him in charge of the outdoor equipment: fishing poles, catfish bait, waders, and lanterns. He watched over each of these items as though it were a bar of gold. Occasionally, he gave a kid lemonade from Avram’s old cooler.

  Sometimes an Indian couple would pass on the street in front of the clear, sturdy windows; copper-colored kids would scurry up the walk, laughing and chasing each other, and Harry thought of Mollie. Once or twice, he considered strolling over toward the river, trying to find her just to say hello, but he never did. Like his mother, like the movement, his first love was gone. He concentrated on the tasks at hand.

  According to the papers, Bob Cochran turned out to be a pretty fair representative of his county, paving several roads and lowering taxes for the elderly: his record was the only political news Harry bothered to note.

  Now and then, though, a customer would follow him to the back of the store while he searched for a particular fishing lure, or a new cork handle for a pole, and ask him who were the people in the pictures. In those moments, Harry felt his face flush with pride. “Oscar Ameringer,” he’d say. “A saint.” And the woman? “The woman.” He’d reach up to straighten the curled edges of the slowly yellowing photo, crusty, rough: a farmer’s calloused hand, stretching high above a crowd, yearning for salvation; a ragged meeting hall table, poorly hewn at the corners; a splintery patch on a makeshift stage; a papery cornstalk sheath, peeling back like the pages of the Southern Mercury, or a call for justice in an old Appeal to Reason, or a story by Upton Sinclair, or the edge of a tattered fan waved, with lagging energy, by a malnourished woman or man straining to hear. “A good, loud speaker,” he’d say.

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