The Boy Orator (27 page)

“We'll see,” Harry said glumly.

“Yes we will, we will.” He laughed. “Well. Take a last look around.”

Harry did.

Outside, on the capitol steps, Bob Cochran warned him, “Remember what I told you about the governor.”

A fresh drizzle had started to fall. Harry, missing the chamber's warmth, raised the collar of his damp white shirt. “This isn't just your way of running the competition out of town, is it?” he asked.

Bob Cochran grinned. “That's what politics is all about, kid.” He offered his hand. “Good luck to you. Maybe I'll see you again.”

I
N THE MORNING
H
ARRY
packed, then cleared his room bill. As usual, someone had left a
Times
on a couch in the lobby. This would be his last chance, at least for a while, to see a New York paper. He thumbed through it, looking for news of Kate O'Hare. Sure enough, her picture appeared on page three. The tone of the accompanying article convinced him she wouldn't stand a chance at her trial. She was described as an “active seditionist” interfering with the war effort. Bowman, North Dakota, she said, was a “little sordid, wind-blown, sun-blistered, frost-scarred town on the plains.” Jurors would love that, Harry thought.

He read that the
Masses
, under pressure from the Postmaster General, had ceased publication; Art Young, an artist whose work Harry had admired, had been called on, in court, to justify his political cartoon in which a newspaper editor, a minister, a politician, and a capitalist whirled in a gleeful war dance, flinging handfuls of silver coins, while the devil led a cannon-playing orchestra behind them. Young explained, glibly, “I‘m simply illustrating the fact that war is hell.”

Harry left the city with a mighty sense of failure. The world seemed determined to bloody its own face; no amount of talk could save it from itself.

He hitched a ride with a traveling salesman: pots and pans, mostly, a few garden supplies. The man, about Andrew's age, Harry guessed, with startling blue eyes and a thick black beard, asked him what had brought him here.

Harry hesitated. The word “Socialist” could get a man killed these days. “Just looking for work,” he said. “No luck, so I'm going home.”

The wagon bumped over dusty, rutted roads. “There's a salesman where I'm from, man named Avram,” Harry said. “Nice fellow, same goods as yours.”

“Sure, I know Avram. Greenbaum, right? Jewish?”

“Yeah. Must be him.”

“Tough bargainer. But he's fair. I hear he's off the road now.”

“Really? Doing what?”

“Got hisself a store. Saved rent money for ages. Lord, how he used to dream about it, ever' time I saw him! Finally got hisself a stake.”

This was the first pleasant news Harry had heard in months. “Good for him,” he said. He began to relax a little. The beauty of the rivers and trees astonished him after so much time in the city. The sky was free of soot. He felt he was learning
blue
again. With no movies or rope tricks to distract them, men understood, right away, that life was tied to the soil, Harry thought. Cars and signs and eastern newspapers had nothing to do with it. They were all just entertainment. Real life was here. In the woods, on the farms.

Stop it, he told himself. What was he doing? Convincing himself he'd never take to town. But he
had
to give it a chance: that's where his family was now. That's where the future was.

The land was lovely, though, and he felt he'd lost it when his father gave up the farm. He watched a purple martin flit from the arm of a southern magnolia into the thick, protective canopy of a sugar maple. Wild orchids ringed its trunk. Pitcher plants trembled in the breeze, waving their long red skirts.

The pots-and-pans man dropped him just west of Ardmore—“End of my line,” he said. Harry thanked him, leaped from the wagon's seat with his bundle, washed his face in a thin, forceful stream. East of here lay the Osage mines. He thought of Sherrie, the dancer in the “Beaver Trap.” He thought of the pregnant girl, always standing in line in front of the outhouse. What had become of them? The mines had been closed for two years now, after a series of violent strikes. The company had tried to hire Mexican labor; migrants from the south worked cheaper than Anglos, Negroes, even the Italians who'd come to stay. The veteran miners wouldn't work with them; their presence, they felt, would lower all their wages. Early one morning, when a hole boss discovered, stabbed to death in the bunkhouse, two young “pepper-bellies” (as the local papers put it), state investigators
pulled the plug
on the whole operation. Osage had plenty of other mines in northern Oklahoma, up into Kansas and Missouri. The company could afford a few idle holes here until trouble blew over—especially during wartime, when demand for its product was high.

Harry spent the night in the woods, stretched beside a fallen oak for support and shelter from the wind. He dreamed of the mines, of moist rocks and the smell of creosote, sulphur, paraffin torches. When he woke at dawn his skin was gritty and wet. Castor and Pollux, the twin stars in Gemini, were fading in streaks of yellow in the east; Cepheus rose into stringy morning mists and disappeared.

He bathed his arms and face in a stream. Down the road about a mile he saw the first of many oil rigs crisscrossing the sky, which was smoky and dim. Slender wooden derricks loomed over restaurants, barbershops, first aid stations. Harry noticed a sign that said “Healdton Oil Field—The Boom Is Here, The Time Is Now!” The air smelled like a thousand angry skunks.

Trucks and Model T's blared their horns at him. He half-stumbled off the road into a little coffee shop with red-checked curtains in its two grimy windows. Frying bacon, scrambled eggs routed the outside odors, which wafted through the door whenever someone entered. Harry set his bundle of clothes on the gouged wooden floor, took a seat at a table, and spent the last of the league's money on a lukewarm cup of coffee. He asked the woman who poured it if there was any action over at the Osage rnines. She laughed. “Who'd work for them now?” With the pot of coffee she gestured out a window toward the rigs. “Oil's the future hereabouts.”

“I guess so,” Harry said. He looked around the room. The mineral, the means of production may have changed, but the men hadn't. Stooped, scarred, burned; weary and resigned, they ate their breakfasts listlessly didn't speak. The other kind of men were here too, the kind like Dugan and Fawkes of the mines, who always appeared whenever desperation mingled with the possibility of fortune. Harry watched these men, in their dark suit coats, smile and slap each other's backs.

“If you're looking for work, kid,” one said as Harry rose to leave, “see Ewing in Building Sixty-three, next door.”

This remark offended Harry deeply; the man's assumption that everyone here was fuel for his fire. “No,” Harry said quietly, suppressing his rage. “I don't need a job, thank you.”

The land used to be sumac, snakeweed, chinquapin oak. Now it was gas flames, stagnant oily pools, level roads. Women in bright red dresses stood in the open doorways of wooden shacks, yelling and whistling at the men. Their strained good cheer reminded him of Sherrie. One winked at him. Her sloppy make-up covered yellow bruises on her cheeks. He fast-walked down the road, filled with sorrow for the waste of lives and land.

By the depot, on a side track, an old passenger car had been set up as a Red Cross canteen. Women his mother's age served hash and ham, coffee and tea to soldiers on their way to or from Fort Sill. The fresh recruits stood in line for candy, cigarettes, chewing gum. Most of them were just a little older than Harry, clearly scared and confused, but like the shack-women, laughing loudly, kidding around, making the best of what they had.

Harry didn't get another ride until midafternoon when a soldier in a Model T offered him a lift. The boy had gotten a day-pass to visit his father, who was laid up in Walters with a weak heart. “They're shippin' us out next week,” he told Harry. “This may be the last time I'll ever see my old man.”

“Where you going?” Harry asked.

“Dunno. We were just told to get ready. France, more'n likely.”

“Were you training at Fort Sill?”

“Yep.”

“Know a guy named Olin?”

“Olin … no, don't think so. Why?”

“No reason. He's just a friend.”

The boy's father had been a farmer who couldn't pay his bills. Like Andrew, he'd sold all he owned and moved into town. “Purty soon, city streets and oil derricks gonna gobble up ever' bless-ed acre of corn and wheat.”

“Looks that way,” Harry said. When they arrived in town, just at dusk, he told the boy to drop him anywhere. “Good luck over there,” he said.

The boy grinned. “Them Huns don't got a prayer with me on the prowl. I'll trim their whiskers for ‘em.”

Harry nodded and shook his hand.

He remembered the day, years ago, he'd come to town without his mother's permission. He recalled the young men stringing electric wires. Modernization. Bob Cochran was right. Beneath a dim, flickering streetlight, a small marquee read Wollam Theater, and below that “Now Playing—'Flirting With Fate.'”

He watched the soldier drive off, then strolled past dress shops, beauty parlors, pharmacies, Wallace's Grocery, the Wilhelm Hotel. He saw his father's livery stable, and down the block, across the street, a small store, the Emporium. In tiny letters on the plate glass window, “Avram Greenbaum, Prop.” Harry smiled. So it
was
true. Avram had done all right for himself.

He peered in the window. Shoes, soaps, bottles of cremes. Tonics in containers of green and brown and clear cut glass. Harry would come by tomorrow for a nickel cup of lemonade.

He shouldered his bundle and shuffled down the walk toward his parents' house. The downtown buildings were dark, the streets deserted. Dinnertime. He began to whistlers a tune—until he heard footsteps behind him, urgent whispers. He paused, looked around. Nothing. He walked a little farther, stopped and turned. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed a figure in an alley near the livery stable. He pressed against the wall of the nearest building, held his breath and watched. The figure emerged from the alley followed by four others. They ran into the middle of the street and raised their arms. Harry couldn't see what they held in their hands, but they all made swift throwing motions; the next thing he heard was the crash of shattering glass. Avram's store. The men yelled words Harry couldn't understand, then scattered into the shadows.

A
nnie Mae put a finger to her lips. “Oh my,” she said, staring at the shards on the walk. “What happened, Mr. Greenbaum?” Avram nodded at her, at Andrew and Harry, obviously grateful for their friendly concern. He explained to them, painfully, that he'd received a steady stream of threats ever since opening the store. Graffiti. Anonymous notes. “I don't know why people think the telephone is such a marvelous invention,” he said. “It's just a faster way to spread hate.” Callers told him they didn't want “someone like him” settling in their community. “I've lived in this area for nearly twenty years. As long as I moved about in the wagon, no one thought of me as part of the place. They were happy for me to serve them. But now that I've established a business in the center of town …” He shook his head. His appearance still had the power to surprise Harry, to put him off a little. Avram wore his flat black hat even inside the store. In the city, Harry had seen dozens of Jewish men and women—the Orthodox kind—but he never got used to them. Though it shamed him, he understood, somewhat, people's impulse to keep strangers out of their midst. Difference meant unpredictability. Chaos and fear.

Socialism still has a long way to go, Harry thought, even in the hearts of its bearers.

While Avram swept and threw away the glass, Harry looked around. Mops and brooms, dishwashing soaps, bubble baths, cleansers, and the dreaded chill tonic he'd swallowed so much of as a boy. A row of novels, some still with their pages uncut, filled a wooden shelf on a wall.
The Red Badge of Courage. Marching Men
by Sherwood Anderson. Frank Norris's
The Octopus
.

Harry recalled the summer encampments, a few years ago, where intelligent men and women talked art, literature, politics. Those nights around the supper fires seemed a miracle of sanity now; he feared they'd never return.

By his big black adding machine, Avram had framed a photo of an elderly couple. His parents? Their clothes, the formal pose, even the indistinct drapery in the background seemed European, somehow. Harry remembered wondering, once, if the man had a family, and he wondered again now. There were no recent pictures of a wife or kids. By all indications, Avram was solely devoted to his work.

Harry had learned, in the city, just how hard that could be.

“May I have a look at your piece goods, Mr. Greenbaum?” Annie Mae asked. “I've just about outgrown this old dress.”

He led her to the rear of the store. She moved slowly. Her belly was big and she'd complained all morning that her back was killing her, her joints were terribly sore.

Make a good family, Harry thought. Loneliness jogged him, dizzying him, pinching his chest. His mother's swelling reminded him of Mollie, the day she'd told him she was pregnant. He hadn't seen or heard from her since; he'd been on the road almost constantly. Her child would be—what?—six or seven now? To steady himself, he grabbed the splintery edge of a plywood table, by a colorful stack of bath towels.

Andrew handed Annie Mae three dollars and she paid for some calico, spotted like a cat. “Broken windows notwithstanding, are you making a decent living here?” Andrew asked.

“Passable.”

“Then, as capitalist traps go, you'd recommend retail?”