The Boy Orator Page 8

  Andrew interrupted them. “Have you asked—?”

  The men all laughed. “Oh yeah,” said one. “It’s not a ‘productive use of company funds.’”

  “In other words, our lives ain’t worth protecting.”

  “For God’s sakes, you’re entitled to basic safety. If not, it’s a violation—”

  “Of what? Company policy?”

  “State law.”

  “Shit, Andrew, the company is the state. You know that.”

  “And it can’t move without you. I’ve told you all before, if you sit down and say we’re not working till things change, they’ve got no choice but to listen. Roberto over there’s the only one who was with me, right, Roberto?”

  Kit sat up on his stretcher. “Mister, you wasn’t here last year when the Wobblies come through, blabbing eight-hour workdays—”

  “You don’t need the IWW to—”

  “We did what they said. Went out on strike. Asked for decent wages, eight-hour shifts, an age limit for working the drifts. This was before the company store was up and running.”

  “I know,” Andrew said. “I was here.”

  Kit groaned and seized his swollen knee.

  “Then you remember what happened,” another man said. “Osage threatened the grocers, and good old Frank, so they wouldn’t trade with us regular. That’s how they got us all on company scrip in the first place. End of sit-down.”

  Andrew rubbed his eyes. “All I’m saying is—”

  “Fuck it. Here’s to Kit!”

  “Hear, hear!”

  Someone blew into a harmonica with what sounded like his last good breath, and the singer, in the same red dress as before, hugged herself and hummed. A man danced up to her, whispered in her ear. “Scrip’s no good,” she said. “Cash only.”

  “Company took my cash!”

  “And your passion with it, sugar.”

  His mouth dropped. She put her arms around him and swayed. “That’s nothing,” she said. “See what the bastards’ve done to me? Since Billy died in the Number Three I’ve …well, I’ve got to have cash. I have two little girls to raise.”

  The man lowered his head on her shoulder and they danced.

  Harry watched them instead of his plate. He was sick of eggs. He could still taste the musty air of the mine; he couldn’t swallow enough water to quell the dust-itch in his throat.

  Dugan appeared in the doorway in a pressed green suit. Same bowler hat he’d worn last night. “Anderson!” he yelled.

  Kit looked up from his stretcher, on the floor by the bar. “Yo!”

  People stopped talking. Someone dropped a bottle. It rolled several feet across the grainy wooden floor, a lonely, imperfect sound from a flaw in the glass. Everyone, including Dugan, Harry saw, pretended not to hear it. To acknowledge it, he realized, would be to snap a delicate understanding between management and labor—words he’d learned studying the speeches of Oscar Ameringer.

  “Collect your pay in the morning and go,” Dugan ordered.

  “Why?” Kit said.

  “The company can’t afford incompetence.” He stressed the word “company” the way some preachers said “God” as if it were the only sound in the language. Harry, still thinking of Ameringer, heard other words in it: companions working for a common good. That wasn’t what he’d seen today in the mine.

  “Damn right! So fire that kid Fawkes brought in,” Kit said. “He’s the one who—”

  “Ewing’s fine. Fawkes has confidence in him.”

  “Fawkes doesn’t know his ass from a wet powder charge.”

  “You shouldn’t have been down there.”

  “The hole boss said our shift wasn’t over!”

  “It’s over now, boy. Your check’ll be waiting—four weeks’ worth minus eighteen bucks for the equipment you lost.”

  “I lost?” The shock on Kit’s face shook Harry; his throat tightened and he started to cough. Like the soiled men around him, he was full of the earth.

  The singer said to Dugan, “I’ll bet it excites you so much to kick a man, you don’t have nothing left for a woman.”

  “Shut up, Sherrie,” Dugan said. “What’s a whore know about the drifts?” He looked angry enough to hit her. Andrew waved his cane to get his attention. “Mr. Dugan, your safety codes—”

  “Shaughnessy, we had this talk last night, didn’t we? I thought we’d reached an agreement.”

  Andrew stood there, silenced by the man’s pointing finger. Harry coughed again; his chest heaved. Everyone turned to see if he was all right. Adrenaline shot through his body. His instinct, honed by years of practice, was to hold the attention he’d grabbed, to cast a net of words across the crowd. It was a feeling akin to the danger and excitement he’d experienced in the mine. He swallowed his cough. “Sir, you say this man’s shift was done.” He walked over and placed his hand like a blessing on Kit’s tousled hair. His father had always taught him the value of “specific examples to make a point—use people from the crowd if you can.” “Yet your company has failed to define shifts, legally speaking. Last year the workers asked for an eight-hour day. They were denied.”

  “Shaughnessy, is this your kid?” Dugan said, tapping his foot. “You tell him to can it.”

  Andrew didn’t move.

  “Therefore, this man cannot be held responsible for any infraction. He was simply doing his job,” Harry said. “Your contention that his shift was up, when in fact shifts do not officially exist, would be laughed out of every court in this state.”

  “That’s right!” Kit said. “Hell yes!”

  “The way to prevent future misunderstandings, of course, is to set a daily work limit. Say, eight hours?”

  The miners erupted in laughter and shouts. “Go get him!” someone said. His father’s smile encouraged him. He felt again an intense physical intimacy with the men around him—a far cry from the embarrassment he’d known with Zeke Cash and his friends in the hills, from the humiliation that surrounded him at school, from the shame he felt at home whenever he let his mother down. He felt right, and in control—speaking, he could shape the world his way. “I was in the hole today,” Harry said, raising his voice. “I saw, myself, the dangerous and unsanitary conditions.” The words flooded past the tickle in his throat. “To be blunt, Mr. Dugan, I witnessed a shameless operation. A farmer treats his mules better than Osage handles its men.” He squeezed Kit’s shoulder. “I think the local newspapers would be very interested in that fact.”

  Dugan shook his hat in Harry’s face. “I better not hear any more talk like this,” he said. He looked around the room. “Nor any union talk, either! As for you, little man …I’ve seen you before …”

  “In the papers,” Harry said. “They dote on me.” This wasn’t true, but it had the intended effect. Dugan’s knuckles turned white around the brim of his hat. He glared at Harry but didn’t say another word. When he left, the miners cheered. Sherrie put her arm on Harry’s shoulder. “You are old enough,” she said. “For anything you want. Twice the man these others are.” She kissed his cheek. “Don’t weaken.”

  Roberto and the other Italians doused him with beer. They stood in a line and saluted him. “A song!” Roberto said. “We’ll sing you a song. What would you like?”

  Harry glanced at his father, who smiled and shrugged.

  “A love melody?” Roberto teased. “An Irish lullaby?”

  “How about ‘Happy Birthday’?” Harry said. Weeks had passed without a proper celebration; Andrew’s wounds had demanded the family’s full attention. He glanced at his father again. Andrew’s head was bowed.

  “Is this your birthday?” Roberto asked.

  “No,” Harry admitted.

  “A real song, then!” Roberto led his friends in an up-tempo drinking number. The Italians whirled Harry around the room. He remembered his father telling him one night, not long ago, that “character” always mattered more than a fellow’s background or age.

  Later in the boardinghouse h
e couldn’t sleep. He felt he’d just run a race. His heart rushed; he shook with pride. He’d delivered these men from their worries, at least for tonight, and he’d done it with no set speeches, no memorized lines, just his breath and his mind and the need of the moment. The faces of the miners! The fear and the hope! The thrill of seizing the room! Now he knew more than ever what his words, words with the force of a freight train, meant.

  “I’m glad you came,” Andrew said, propping his cane against the wall. All day Harry had been aware that his father didn’t actually need him here. The young miners who’d gone with them into the hole could easily have managed Harry’s tasks. Warren Stargell or one of Andrew’s other friends could have driven the wagon for him.

  His gift to me, Harry thought, is the world around us.

  “Me too,” he said. In the field behind the dining hall the married miners stoked fires beneath small pots, bathed their kids with rough cloth rags. Their wives’ dresses were faded and torn at the seams. The pregnant girl he’d seen earlier stood in line again in front of the outhouse, behind nine or ten dirty men. She cupped her belly with her arms, bit her lip. As he watched through the window, Harry felt his stomach drop. He hadn’t delivered these people from anything. He sagged against the wall. Even if the company agreed to an eight-hour shift, this girl would still be pregnant, still be waiting in line. She’d probably end up like Sherrie, in a bar, he thought.

  Songs and beer could give a single man a kind of courage, but parents didn’t have any choice. They had to feed their kids. How could you ask them to join a union? Telling them to sacrifice their pay and defy the company, even for a day or a week, was like telling them to kill their babies.

  This thought kept him tossing all night. He heard his father snore. To his left a man trembled with fever. Another was sick in the corner—too much whiskey. The building creaked in a chilly wind, like a battered old barge in a river-gale.

  He’d just begun to doze when a hot light scared him awake. Someone had shoved a lantern at his face. A boot poked his ribs. “Get up, damn it!”

  “Who—? What time is it?” Andrew mumbled.

  “Never mind,” Dugan said. “Just get your ass up.”

  Andrew couldn’t find his cane in the blinding spot of light. The rest of the room was dark. Men groaned awake, then hushed when they saw what was happening. Harry helped his father stand.

  “I’m Lester Fawkes. I hear you caused quite a stir this evening,” said a man next to Dugan. He wore a heavy gray coat and a tie. His mouth was lost inside a bristling white mustache.

  “No, Lester, this one,” Dugan said. He jabbed Harry’s chest. “He’s the one who made the speech.”

  “Him? He’s just a kid.”

  Dugan fished inside his coat for a torn piece of paper. When he unfolded it Harry saw his own round face. “I was there in Anadarko that day,” Dugan said. “I knew I’d seen you somewhere before. It finally struck me. He was soapboxing, Lester, cursing the mines—”

  Harry shook his head. “That’s a bald lie,” he said. “I had an audience of farmers. No respectable speaker would talk mines to a bunch of farmers.”

  Fawkes chuckled, raised the lantern in a swelter of moths. Harry heard whispers all around him in the dark. “Hell, Dugan, I’m not afraid of kids. Are you afraid of kids?”

  “He’s a fist-waver, Lester, I’m telling you, he—”

  “I think my partner’s afraid of you.” Fawkes laughed again. “Come on, there’s nothing this boy can do to hurt us.” He tugged Dugan’s arm. “Let him sleep. It’s all right, boy. You can stick your thumb back in your mouth.”

  It was all Harry could do to keep from hitting him. He wasn’t able to help the miners but at least they took him seriously. They cheered him and sang him a song. These men, Dugan and Fawkes, these capitalists, wouldn’t know character from the big fat bunions on their feet.

  Fawkes swung the lantern to light his path, sending dizzy shadows up the walls—men kneeling, scratching, rubbing their arms. Phantoms again, as they’d been in the hole: present in an instant of weak illumination, then gone. Harry smelled the lantern’s bitter trace in the air, the sweet straw at his feet, the frailty of flesh all around him.

  Andrew patted Harry’s back. “Get some rest,” he said. Rats scritched in the dark.

  Laughter, faint singing outside. Through the window Harry saw a couple of fires, miners clapping and dancing with their wives. Their capacity for joy at the end of a day like this amazed him. People were strong; they could survive almost anything. That didn’t bode well for the union either, he realized. One way or another, folks always learned to live with their limits.

  A man on horseback rode through the miners’ camp. He barked something Harry couldn’t hear. The songs stopped, the fires went out. So many ways to be silenced. Beatings, threats. Coal dust. Comet tails. Earth and air. Shaken by the miners’ harsh lives, the company’s strength, the invisibility of being a kid, he promised himself, as he curled up to sleep, he’d speak and speak and speak.

  4

  Whenever a speaker came around, the farmers built a brush arbor. They’d go into muddy bottomland forests near East Cache Creek where oaks and elms and mighty pecan trees twisted out of black waxy clay. They’d cut about twenty poles—chinquapin oak, usually, or Shumard—and haul them back to the field where the meeting was set to take place. They’d sand and hew the wood, hammer the poles into the ground five or six feet apart, and cover the top with honeysuckle, sumac, mesquite. Torches tied to crossbeams cast late evening light. At Baptist revivals women placed ironweed and goldenrod around the arbor in pots, to brighten the space and attest to the glory of God.

  In a vacant Baptist arbor, Annie Mae, Mahalie, and their friends organized a dinner for Andrew and Harry the day they returned from the mines. The arbor was handy. Beet greens and spinach had come into season; yellow squash was ripe. Andrew had bought a slab of salt pork in town, along with flour and syrup. Annie Mae made biscuits and gravy, and slow-cooked a pot of molasses.

  Harry’s shoulder had swelled and he was running a slight fever. Annie Mae spoon-fed him a new product Avram had sold her—Greene’s Chill Tonic, carbonated water and cherry-flavored quinine. A hellfire-and-brimstone meeting would occupy the arbor a week from now but tonight it was quiet and pleasantly cool, even to Harry in his fevered state. He watched salmon-colored scissortails chase insects through the limbs of a rusty viburnum. The white blossoms of Chickasaw plums flashed in the evening light; the woody smell of bluestem mixed with the scent of his mother’s lemon meringue.

  Annie Mae asked him to watch for people on the road. She didn’t want the Baptists to catch them on their property. Usually in early summer Andrew built a tiny arbor in their yard for outdoor meals but he was too weak to work on one this year.

  He hadn’t seen a paper since he’d left. When he learned from Annie Mae that Governor Haskell had moved the state capital from Guthrie to Oklahoma City he cursed the state’s “new money.” “Damn railroad men,” he said. “They’ve been lobbying all along to steal the governor’s seal—God knows what kind of deal they made with him.” He was fond of Guthrie’s old Masonic Lodge, he said, whose chambers had housed a number of legislative offices. “It’s a respectable place—for a Protestant outfit—full of grand old tradition. Now, the judiciary might as well move into the bank that bought it.”

  “Honey, please, can we just enjoy our supper?” Annie Mae asked, placing her hand on his. “I’ve missed you.”

  He touched Mahalie’s arm. “I’ll tell you what. If I were of the darker persuasion, Indian or black, I wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d rush to the city and try to put a stop to this. If they get away with it, you know what’ll happen two months from now. With the special election?”

  Mahalie stared at her beets.

  “They’ll pass that Grandfather Clause, that’s what—the literacy requirement. That’ll keep a lot of your people from voting. City’s bragged for years it has fewer ‘dark’ officials than an
y other town in the state. If that’s the kind of attitude loose now in the House and Senate—”

  “I can’t vote anyway,” Mahalie muttered.

  “Politics! Politics! I’m sick of it,” Annie Mae said, shielding her ears. She looked at Harry as if she’d just watched him vanish. Andrew reached for her.

  “Excuse me?” someone yelled from the trees at the edge of the field. “Excuse me, but I believe you good folks are trespassing on church property.”

  “Uh-oh,” Mahalie said. “Bab-tists.”

  Two men approached them through the thick understory, scaring up grasshoppers and flies. Their clothes were damp with sweat. “It’s the Shaughnessy family,” one said. “They’re Papists.”

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to leave,” said the other.

  Andrew protested, “My family’s having a nice, simple meal here.” Harry heard more anger in his father’s voice than the situation deserved. Andrew was fuming about the capital still, looking for a fight. “We’ll clean the place. We know how persnickety your grouchy old God is.”

  “Andrew!” Annie Mae gasped.

  One of the men whipped off his hat. “Listen here, you sorry, genuflecting son of a—”

  “Gentlemen, please,” said Annie Mae. “Let’s not be un-Christian. We’re leaving now.” Mahalie was crouching, ready to run. Annie Mae asked her to gather the dishes.

  “You’re welcome back on Sunday,” said the man with the hat. “Might do your miserable soul some good.”

  Annie Mae hushed Andrew before he could answer.

  The rest of the week, when he’d finished his chores, Harry walked to the field and watched the preparations for the meeting. Several young men built a stage and a series of pews to add to the dozen they already had. They brought a mahogany podium, highly polished, slick and smooth, from their little country church. The top was gently angled with a thick, ridged lip to hold a written speech. Harry watched two men position it under the arbor; he envied them, touching it, putting their weight on its frame. He’d never spoken from behind a podium. Its severe lines and deep, swirling color conveyed a strict authority, a gravity of purpose. He pictured himself onstage, grasping its edges, rocking to the rhythm of his words. Breath caught in his throat when the men rammed it clumsily against the corner of a bench, nicking it. He couldn’t believe they were going to leave it here in the open for the next few days, protected only by a light gray tarpaulin. Clearly, they didn’t recognize its beauty the way he did.