The Boy Orator Read online

  Annie Mae wasn’t about to worship in secret. She proudly joined a Catholic temperance league, and was one of the few women who attended town meetings of the Friends of Irish Freedom. Each week she cheered speakers who disdained the British Empire. “Sinn Fein!” she shouted with her fellows, celebrating a hopeful new movement in Belfast. “Rehabilitate Ireland from within!”

  She liked her new life, her Indian friends, and the church. She liked sitting with her family in the sanctuary. Her only regret these days was letting Andrew take Harry on the road. Irish politics, an ocean away, was one thing. Local wrangles, seething with high tern pers and swift retribution, were a different matter entirely. Just last month, a Socialist organizer had been hanged in Panther Run, south of Walters. She hadn’t slept for days after that.

  Her men were home now, though, regaining their strength. She kissed Andrew’s cheek, adjusted the quilt on his arms. “I’m so happy to see you improving,” she said.

  He held her hand. “Maybe tomorrow I can ride into town, talk to the fellows from the Osage mines, set up a sale.”

  “Let’s not rush things,” she said, but she felt the stress in her back unwind for the first time in weeks. She watched Harry gesture and declaim in the shadows of the mule pen. Usually he was her shy little boy, quiet and polite, she thought, but when it came to politics he’d talk to any waking creature. Durn him, she told herself. Along with his father’s ideas, he’d inherited Andrew’s sentimental streak. Both her men thought the planet was theirs for the changing. “Harry, time to wash up for bed!”

  Later, as she blew out the lamps, raising a drifting, dusky smell in the house, she heard him whisper through his window to the yard, “Good night, brothers! Stay brave!”

  A FEW DAYS AFTER Harry’s trip into Walters, Warren Stargell showed up with Zeke Cash and a case of corn liquor.

  Before Annie Mae could object to anything, Zeke told Harry, “Run get your mama’s Bible. Psalms 104—”

  “The Good Book says nothing about mash whiskey, Mr. Cash.”

  “If Jesus was born in Oklahoma, Miz Shaughnessy, his daddy would’ve been a bootlegger ‘stead of a carpenter, and that’s a natural fact.”

  Warren Stargell shook Andrew’s hand. “I promised your boy here I’d rescue you.”

  Annie Mae frowned at Harry. He blushed. She turned to go inside; Andrew, from his seat on the porch, grasped her arm. “A few drops, honey. For fortitude. I know it’ll help.”

  “You know how I feel about that stuff.”

  “Honestly—”

  “Annie Mae, I hear you want to retire the Boy Orator here,” Warren Stargell said. He patted Harry’s back. “I’m afraid we can’t let you do that. We need him on the circuit, starting next month. School’ll be out—”

  “Please excuse me,” said Annie Mae. She strode into her house, slammed the door behind her. Zeke laughed. Warren Stargell popped the cork on a dark, smoky bottle. “Zeke’s best,” he said. “Hops, tobacco, fishberries, barley…”

  Harry ran inside. His mother was feeding the chicks in their pen. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.

  “You should be.” She wouldn’t look at him. “I take it you’ve not only become a whiskey distributor, you’ve planned your summer as well.”

  “Mama—”

  “Go outside, Harry.” Her cheeks had flared a spotty red, the color of late-season raspberries, Harry thought. “I want to be alone now.”

  Her tears made him shiver. Her kitchen was the warmest room in the house; she’d never let him in it again. He rushed into the yard, toward Patrick Nagle’s pen. His father and his friends were shouting with laughter. He heard a cork pop. Yesterday he’d buried Bob Cochran’s yellow kerchief and Avram’s lemonade flask in a bed of straw just inside the barn; he went to them now as to a treasure, a life of his own apart from his mother and father, the worlds of women and men. Sunbeams filled the holes in the barn’s split slats; he inhaled the straw’s damp smell, a scent that would always, after this day—as it did to him now—bring a wistful sting of sorrow to his eyes.

  The kerchief and the flask, souvenirs of the road, made him ache again for travel. Their textures, much smoother than the ragged hoe he held every day, the splintery spine of the rake, sailed his thoughts to the east, the west, the north, leagues away from the farm, Andrew’s injury, Annie Mae’s anger.

  But his mother’s face wouldn’t leave him in peace. It followed him now in his mind. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. His father had needed him. He’d tried to do his best for them both.

  He secured his treasures again in a little hill of hay, then went to find a spring and a chain, in a bin in the back of the barn. He’d make a gopher trap. Yes, that was the thing to do. He remembered Annie Mae complaining about her ravaged garden just this morning: tomato vines shredded, radish plants crushed. If he could catch one of the critters, she might forgive him.

  Gonna get you, gonna get you.

  For the rest of the day he whittled blunt notches in a pine stake to fit into the lip of a wooden pan. It was always best to set a trap after a good hard rain, Andrew had told him once: gophers dug fresh mounds then, plugging their burrows with dirt to equalize the barometric pressure. Harry wondered how they knew about barometric pressure. Anyway, he couldn’t control the weather, but he could follow the rest of his father’s advice. The plan was to slide the pan with its spring lid inside the narrow entrance to a gopher’s hole; when the animal wriggled in, the lid would close, and you’d pull the whole thing out with the chain.

  Town Hall in Walters paid a penny apiece for gopher paws, to encourage the pests’ capture.

  All afternoon, as he worked in the sweet-smelling barn, cooled by the frequent flapping of the horned owl in the rafters, Harry glanced past the heavy red door to his mother’s kitchen window, watching her shadow.

  THAT NIGHT ANNIE MAE helped Andrew out of his clothes and tucked him into bed, careful not to bump his swollen leg. His snores reminded her of ice in early spring, thawing on ponds, crackling and heaving, sounds she’d heard the April afternoon he kissed her first, twenty years ago.

  She folded his pants over the mahogany quilt rack, and remembered her handsome young beau. On her fifteenth birthday he’d come calling first thing in the morning; he had his daddy’s wagon, drawn by a drooling old mare. They’d headed east out of Bonham, toward the honeysuckle groves west of Paris. He’d been courting her for six months then, ever since they’d met, sweating and filthy, in a cotton field at harvest time. He was lanky and tan, with sandy hair and a big, easy smile. From the first, she’d fancied his manner, respectful and kind.

  Annie Mae’s parents had both died in an influenza epidemic when she was five; she’d been raised by her father’s sister, Jenny Dodderer. Jenny, big as a rain barrel, had a pair of boys, always fistfighting and cursing. She only relaxed when Andrew dropped by. “The Shaugh-nessys are good people,” she told Annie Mae when Andrew had first come calling. “Tireless workers, thoughtful neighbors. You be nice to that boy.” Jenny gussied up for him in her best cotton dress, and loved to bake him oatmeal cookies.

  That morning, when he’d arrived to celebrate Annie Mae’s birthday, he’d stood on Jenny’s back porch praising her “do” (she’d cut her gray hair short in front of her bedroom mirror). He snatched a handful of cookies. “I swear, I could live on your sweets, ma’am,” he said. “Sometimes at night, I dream I’m swimming in your chocolate, a big old backstroke.” Jenny blushed.

  “You’re shameless,” Annie Mae told him in the wagon, on their way to the spicy groves. “Flattering an old woman so you can steal her niece.” She sat beside him on the rickety buckboard seat, fiercely gripping his arm.

  “I can turn around and take you back.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  The white and yellow honeysuckle buds, bursting with sugary dew, trembled as Andrew parked the wagon in their midst. He helped

  her down. Sunlight was beginning to unlock the ice on the ponds. Steam rose through the oaks’ finger
ed leaves. Andrew pulled her close. She could feel her aunt’s cookies on his hands, the grit of the crumbs when he smoothed her cheeks. His lips were cold, brushing her skin. “I love you,” he whispered once, between a flurry of birdlike kisses, and she knew right then she’d marry this boy, this decent young man, if he asked.

  Now, the liquor on his breath burned her nose. The house smelled bitter and scorched, from all the blown-out lamps. She pooled the sheet loosely around the heat of his tender leg, leaned over, touched her fingers to his lips. This impossible man. This life of hers. Well. She was luckier than most women she knew. He was a foolish dreamer, like his father, stubborn and sometimes naive, but he never raised a hand to her. She didn’t have to sew or take in laundry for a living, as Jenny did for years. Annie Mae even knew a woman near Temple whose husband had forced her to do the family washing, drawing water from a cold cistern, a day after birthing a set of twins. “God bless you,” she whispered to Andrew, though even as she said it, she felt annoyed again at the way he pushed their son. She was just as proud as Andrew of Harry’s talents, his ability to carry himself well among adults, but she feared—she knew—he was growing too fast. Buying whiskey for his father!

  Tonight, she chained the front door, a precaution she didn’t normally take, since the family lived so far from other folks. But Zeke and Warren Stargell had passed out in the barn. Annie Mae was in no mood to entertain a groggy drunk who might wake and take a notion to go poking around in the dark. She remembered the ferry captain, that awful fellow on the river, all those years ago. What was his name? Peters? Parker? She’d known, even then, what the future looked like. She shook her head bitterly. Men like Parker—like Andrew since the beating—everywhere she turned. She checked the chain again.

  SHE MADE THE MEN hotcakes and bacon the next day and the day after that. They seemed in no hurry to leave. At Andrew’s request, they borrowed his wagon and fetched the coal boys. For two days they all sat in her yard, Andrew and his friends, Mr. Lechman and Mr. Gibson from the Osage mines, passing bottles, making deals. She didn’t understand why men needed whiskey to talk to each other freely.

  While the men got drunker and drunker, she and Mahalie soaped shirts, darned socks, dug a rose bed. Mahalie’s sudden appearances by the house had always startled Annie Mae—at first, she never knocked or said hello. She waited for someone to come outside and find her. “Why do you do this?” Annie Mae asked her one day. “It scares me when you sneak up on me like that.”

  “I’m still unsure of white people’s ways. You scare me too.”

  “Mahalie, you’re my friend. I’m always glad to see you. Please knock on my door.”

  From then on, Mahalie pounded hard enough to shake the sugar from the shelves.

  Even now, after all their time together, she was usually quiet at the beginnings of their visits, then, in the midst of laundering or cooking, she’d start a story as though Annie Mae had asked her a question. This was how Annie Mae learned of the march Mahalie’s people had made from Mississippi, a generation ago, forced by the government to leave their home. Wolves and buzzards tracked their every move, Mahalie’s father had told her. There wasn’t time to bury anyone who died of exhaustion or hunger. Her grandmother’s body had been abandoned by the side of a road, covered loosely with willow limbs.

  When she was two her mother died. Following Choctaw custom, her father gave her away to an aunt and uncle. This couple didn’t really like children; she’d spent many years living in silence, working like an animal in the fields.

  Annie Mae didn’t know how to react when Mahalie told her these things. Her friend had great dignity and pride. She might consider sympathy an insult. Annie Mae decided to honor her by sharing her own confidences, and this seemed the proper thing to do. She’d always wanted more children, she admitted now, but she’d miscarried twice since Harry, fueling the pains in her back. Soon she’d be too old to have another chance. “Nowadays I don’t even know my own boy. It’s not like him to sneak off without telling me.”

  They watched Harry play with Halley, dangling the yellow kerchief like a bullfighter’s cape, urging the dog to charge him. Harry had apologized to her again, and this morning she’d baked him some oatmeal cookies, using her aunt’s old recipe. He’d tried to catch a gopher for her. “I set the trap in a tunnel by your garden, and this big old monster tripped the pan just like he was supposed to,” he’d told her, breathless, both excited and embarrassed by his morning’s adventure. “But then, when I tugged the chain, he started hissing something fierce, and it scared me. I hesitated just a bit, and I’m sorry, but he got away.”

  “That’s okay, son.” She’d rubbed his thick red hair. “I appreciate you giving it a shot for me. I really do.”

  “The world is calling to him,” Mahalie told her now. “If you try too much to tie him down, he may leave and not return.”

  “I know.” Annie Mae swallowed hard.

  She saw Warren Stargell toss a bottle into the yard. He ambled up the porch steps. Always, a mischievous squint lighted his lazy left eye, shinning in the corner like a wicked little tear. It unsettled her.

  “Annie Mae, we need to chat,” he said. He smelled damp, pickled, ripe.

  “Oh?”

  “Now listen to me, ‘cause I’m only going to say this once.” He swayed a little, talked to the shirts at her feet. “I want your boy on the road next month, spreading the truth. Whether you’re aware of it or not, he’s one of the finest speakers in this great state of ours, a downright progidy—”

  “I think you mean prodigy, Mr. Stargell, and I’ll thank you to call me Mrs. Shaughnessy. And to give me credit for knowing my own son’s abilities. Furthermore, I want you to leave my property and take your brutish friends with you!” Immediately, she hoped the other men hadn’t heard her; after all, two of them were Andrew’s business partners.

  Warren Stargell tried to tip his hat then apparently realized he wasn’t wearing one. “Thanks for your hospitality, ma’am.” He walked carefully down the porch steps then turned to face her again. “He wants it,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Harry. The road. He wants it real bad. You know he does.” He smiled. “Zeke, my boy, let’s get!” he called across the yard.

  “The gall!” said Annie Mae, but Mahalie wasn’t there to hear. She’d fled at the first sound of raised voices. Later, she told Annie Mae, “White folks angry always means trouble for people like me.”

  As she watched her husband stumble with his cane, Annie Mae knew, as firmly as she knew how much the family owed and couldn’t pay, her troubles were just beginning.

  PART TWO

  The Heart of the Planet

  3

  The mules plodded in the direction of the sun wherever it moved in the sky. Harry had to keep a tight grip on the reins to hold the wagon straight.

  Snakeweed and creamy yellow sumac lined the road under scruffy junipers, the kind his mama called “alligator trees” because of their rough gray bark.

  His dad was sleeping off his binge on the buckboard seat beside him. Yesterday he’d taken Harry and Annie Mae for a picnic in a bright green meadow near the house. He’d prepared all the food. He picked a bouquet of widow’s tears and asked Annie Mae to forgive him for the whiskey. “Anadarko threw me but I’m over it now. I promise,” he’d said. “It’s time to be a family again.”

  Annie Mae smiled and seemed to relax but her face fell when Harry mentioned he might get to share a stage with Kate O’Hare. Warren Stargell had told him so. She wouldn’t talk at all when Andrew said he and Harry had to rent a couple of mules, leave in the morning for the mines. He’d promised Lechman and Gibson he’d visit a few sites and assess their timber needs.

  Earlier, Harry had ridden to school and turned in his final homework assignment, a series of algebraic equations. Randy Olin gave him a hateful glance but he didn’t care now. The sun was on his face, he was free for the summer—cotton-picking season was three months away—and he might get
to speak again soon. He wasn’t going to let anything ruin his pleasant mood.

  He’d never been to the mines with his dad. Andrew needed him this time because his leg was still sore and his back was stiff. He couldn’t drive the wagon and he wasn’t sure he could manage underground in some of the narrow shafts. Before he’d fallen asleep he’d told Harry that, where they were headed today, coal lay so near the surface of the ground, the veins had once been mined by plow. “Lots of Italians working there now. Friendly fellows—and good free thinkers. With the proper push they might even build a union someday.”

  Harry stopped and watered the mules, ate a dry ham sandwich he’d packed. By nightfall he’d steered the wagon into the hills. Tuckahoe leaves shaped like little spades brushed the wheels, purple pickerelweed trembled on the banks of a shallow, dusky pond. Harry heard a fish jump. Andrew guided him toward an irregular row of tents where the air smelled of sulphur: the evening’s first lanterns. Crickets trilled in the ferns.

  Andrew leaned on Harry’s shoulders, hopped to the ground on his good leg, dragged the cane behind him. “Let’s see if they’ve got some grub,” he said, limping toward a large, lighted tent with a sign that said “Supplies.” Inside, wooden shelves held dozens of Vaseline jars, hordes of battles iodoform labeled “Burn Relief.” Raw linseed oil filled a barrel by the cash register. A man stood behind it, rolling cigarettes next to a candle. “Looks like they’re ready for anything,” Andrew said.

  “Except supper,” Harry mumbled. Behind him, moths tapped the tent’s loose flaps.