The Boy Orator (5 page)

Andrew winced while she sponged him clean. “I'm sorry. Sit still and I'll try not to hurt,” she whispered, as she'd done every night when he'd first found work in these parts, a dozen years ago. Each dawn, in early spring, she remembered, he'd be out, biting into trees with his hand briar saw, slicing the ridged bark as if cutting hard bread; then, using a steam-powered skidder cable rented from a neighbor, he'd drag the logs, with their sweet meat exposed, out of the mud. Some evenings he'd straggle home from the woods slashed across his back from a snapped choker chain, flying out of the crazy steam contraption, and Annie Mae would stand over him in the dim lamplight of her kitchen, spreading butter on the bumps of his swollen skin.

She did this now, recollecting those early days, humming random tunes to soothe him as she worked. “Is it okay if I touch you here?” she asked him, “or here?” brushing purple patches on his shoulders, back, and arms. He groaned and shook. She whispered, “Shhh, shhh. Just stay still.”

After feeding Harry a bowl of hot beef stew, and insisting he swallow some tea, she tucked him into bed.

“Ma?”

“What is it, honey?” She kissed his forehead.

“I'm not really tired.” But his eyes were fluttering even as he spoke. “Can I have my marbles?”

“Tomorrow, Harry. You'll play with them tomorrow.”

“I just want to hold them.”

She smiled. He was her
boy
still, not a politician in those wild, drunk towns, as Andrew insisted he'd become. On the floor, she found the little bag of cat's eyes and placed it in his palm. His fingers twitched, but before they could close, he was out.

For hours, Annie Mae kept the poultice pressed to Andrew's flesh, massaged him gently with her mixtures of sugar and leaves: Choctaw cures she'd learned shortly after arriving in the Territory.

She shivered, recalling those grinding first days. When they'd first got to Lehigh, Andrew's brother, Lee, who'd promised to find them a place to live, was gone. His wife, June, had the law after him—he'd never actually divorced her, he'd simply disappeared. Posters showed up on every wall in town, describing Lee's beefy build, his thin brown hair, declaring his wife and kids destitute. Finally, June found herself a fine new man, printed her own divorce notice in the paper, and that was that. To this day, no one had heard from Lee.

Annie Mae and Andrew had missed the first Oklahoma land-rush by a good nine years, but cheap lots were still available for families willing to work them; Andrew claimed sixteen grubby acres (at just over a dollar apiece—money he borrowed from the bank) west of East Cache Creek. Within a month, he'd met and befriended officials from the Osage Coal Company over near Krebs and the Rock Island outfit out of Alderson. They wanted the red oak on his land. Immediately, he began supplying them and helping them build their mines.

How did we ever get through it? Annie Mae thought, feeling again her loneliness at home and the depth of Andrew's exhaustion. How do we get through it now?

Each week, he hauled the timber over amber hills, vales punched flat into the land, in the wagon he'd brought from Texas. Sometimes its wheels sliced through thickets of fleshy brown mushrooms, he told Annie Mae, and the whole forest filled with a scent as dark and honeyed as boiling sugar.

The fellows he supplied with logs, the mining operators, were “ruthless capitalists,” he said, like the landowners his father railed against in Bonham, but they treated Andrew well as long as he kept the lumber coming. He had a child to feed, so he took their money without much thought.

Meanwhile, Annie Mae had stocked her shelves with flour and cornmeal she'd bought off the backs of traveling salesmen, set up a sewing machine, hung in her kitchen a large calendar mailed out each year by the Citizens National Bank of Oklahoma City. On it she marked the dates of Harry's first haircut, his first coherent phrases. By the kitchen door she stacked magazines she'd bought in Walters, a town of eight hundred, two dusty miles down the road—the
Farmer-Stockman, Capper's Weekly, Comfort
. The family used them in the outhouse, fifty yards away down a narrow, bushy trail.

She felt leaden with memory now as she washed her husband's face, delicately, as though his injury were a threat to her, too. Life could crumble in a heartbeat. Harry moaned in his sleep. She went to check on him. He'd rolled on his side, twisting the sheet around his legs. The marbles had slipped to the floor; one by one she picked them up.

She kissed Harry's cheek, drew the sheet to his chin. One day, when he was still an infant, she remembered, she was hanging clothes on a line when she heard a rustling behind her. She turned and saw a small Indian woman standing by the side of her house. Annie Mae was so startled she dropped her clothespins. Harry slept in a basket nearby.

“I came to see you,” said the woman. She didn't move.

“Yes?” Annie Mae stood still too.

“I thought you might be lonely.”

The woman's name was Mahalie. She was Choctaw, married to a white farmer from whom she'd learned her English. In the next few weeks, as Annie Mae got to know her, Mahalie said most of her sisters married whites because they were gentler and richer than Choctaw men. “In most places, I'm told, a white man who marries one of us is immediately cast out of his circle,” she told Annie Mae. “Around here, there's not much trouble over that—people don't see each other often, anyway. We're too busy and our homes are far apart.”

Annie Mae understood, then, that Mahalie felt lonely, too. She brought around other Indian women—Choctaws, Creeks—some of whom she hadn't known long herself. “So you'll never want for company,” she said, clearly happy to be fashioning a new group of friends. They cooked together, tended each other's babies. Annie Mae hung a fat iron pot from an oak tripod in her yard; around it the dark women gathered, hushed, watching her stir soupy beans. Now and then, one of them would pull a waxy square of lard from beneath her dusty shawl and toss it into the pot, making the beans hiss like snakes. The women nodded solemnly at the progress they were making with the food.

Harry was the first white child some of them had ever seen. They touched his face, kissed him, passed him around. Annie Mae was eager to learn their tongues, but “hegee” was the only word she ever acquired—Creek for tobacco. The women wanted to speak only English, the “language of the future,” they said.

They
did
introduce her to burn-weed, scurvy grass, mayapple and other medicines to ease the chronic ache in her back, to break Harry's fevers, keep him regular and free of worms. They soaked wagon chains in buckets of rainwater to make an iron tonic for the babies.

Annie Mae commented once on the robustness of all the Indian kids she saw.

“Yes,” Mahalie said. “The weak ones die right away.”

H
ARRY RECOVERED QUICKLY UNDER
Annie Mae's stern daily care, with only a minor scar to remind him of the Anadarko incident. When his strength returned, he followed her through the house as she arranged pear blossoms in a fine bouquet on the table, fed premature chicks in a pen in a corner, or drew water for the washtub. Always, for him, she was a commanding, comforting spirit. He loved her hay-thick auburn hair, the whisper of her floor-length dress when she moved from room to room.

Andrew's maladies lingered. He wouldn't leave his bed or talk much. He drifted. Annie Mae sat by him, quietly crying, washing him, holding his hands.

Harry had to handle the chores. Besides selling timber to coal interests, his father earned a living farming, repairing neighbors' wagons. Harry had always helped around the place. In late spring, as temperatures warmed, Andrew asked him to watch the alfalfa field behind the barn, to look for the first violet blossoms on the stalks, which meant they were ready to cut. He'd help his father bundle the stuff and sell it, as silage or hay, to feed the county's sheep.

He watched the potatoes, too, for early signs of blight. The dark green leaves of Andrew's Pink Eyes and Lumpers crumpled like paper if the fungus had infected their stems. Harry loved it when the spuds turned out healthy (usually they did) and his mother roasted them over a mild fire in a pot full of buttermilk.

From constant horse traffic, the farmyard was pitted, worn down in certain places to skull-white limestone beneath the topsoil. Sometimes, when he was running around the yard, pulling burdock from the tangled tails of the horses or keeping an eye on the crops, he'd find a tiny crinoid or a brachiopod shell—a slender stone daisy—in a chewed-up patch of dirt. His father identified them for him, told him these were petrified creatures from an ancient age, when all this land was sea.

This spring, Andrew had encouraged Harry's public speaking more than his farmwork; despite his hours in the sun, Harry had failed to take in the finer points of cultivation. Now, with his father laid up, he over- or under-fertilized the fields, damaging crops. He fed the chickens too much—he
tried
to be sparing!—making them sluggish and lazy.

Andrew was already angry at him for shortchanging the league, chugging the choc—when it came right down to it, he couldn't lie to his dad—and dragging the dog home. It had followed the wagon out of Anadarko that morning. Andrew slept fitfully all the way back; Harry stopped the horses three or four times, stood in the loose spring seat, yelled, “Shoo!” but the dog's tail leaped as if Harry's shouts were a promise of food. He gave up, hoisted the poor creature into his lap, and named it Halley. “Sit now, Halley, be a good boy.” Halley farted with pleasure.

Andrew was too weak to punish Harry, but his scowls let the boy know he wasn't happy about the money, the new pet, the beer, or his work. Annie Mae frowned on Halley, too—she called him “filthy, a burden, a pest.” So Harry spent most of his time outdoors with the dog and the swaybacked mule, Patrick Nagle. The real Patrick Nagle was an Oklahoma Democrat-turned-Socialist, an active member of the Friends of Irish Freedom, and a hero of Andrew's, who tended to name his animals (and his son) after people he admired. The mule had hauled timber for years until its back gave out. Now Harry helped it enjoy a pleasant retirement. He patted and talked to it while Halley yipped around the spiked stakes of the old loblolly fence.

At first Harry was happy to be off the road, home with his ma. His chores exhausted him, but the long sunny weekends lightened his mood. He loved the smell of grass, the cool of the mud, the long corridors of afternoon sky where thunderheads swirled like buttery curdles of cream. In the fields upwind, dry cereal oats spilled, crackling, through steel bins in the county's grain elevators, settling into troughs. From there, men would shovel them onto the MK & T when it next came through on the rails. The elevators were stark white, splashed with colorful words: Poag Grain Inc., Equity Coop Exchange, General Mills. Harry squinted into the sun, watched the letters dance in fly-riddled ripples of heat. The elevators' spires rose like the massive columns of cathedrals he'd seen in picture books, shading cows and rows of brittle wheat.

In the evenings, Harry, Patrick Nagle, and Halley chased fireflies around the mule's narrow, fenced-in pen. Harry crushed the bugs, spread the glow all over Patrick Nagle's musky neck. The animal hummed with warmth, and Harry hugged him close.

On weekdays he rode four miles to school in the county's John Deere wagon, a boxlike contraption with tall, spoked wheels and a canvas roof, drawn by two red mules. He always had makeup homework to do, from the many trips he'd taken, but he was a quick learner. The schoolhouse, a single square room packed with kids of all ages, buzzed with news of the comet the week Harry returned from Anadarko. Eddie McGarrah, a farmer's boy from over near Cookietown, swore that diamonds fell from the sky that night, slicing the ears off his daddy's prize hogs. Randy Olin, from Walters, said his sister had given birth to a bloody mess, cursed by the star, that smoked and fizzed and finally disintegrated in her hands.

“I don't believe it,” Harry said. “That comet talk was nonsense.”

“You calling me a fibber?” Olin pushed him into McGarrah, who shoved him back at Olin.

“You bet I am, both of you,” Harry said. “Filthy liars.” The boys scuffled, knocking over desks, until the teacher, a stout woman with red, blocky arms, separated them.

“Look at him—always up on stage,” Olin said. “I'm just as good as you, Shaughnessy, any day of the week.”

Harry's side began to ache. When he reached for his books he felt his skin burn. He untucked his shirt, examined his scar. It hadn't split, but in the fight he'd bruised himself again. That day the ride home in the school wagon, over spidery tree roots exposed in the road, pained him so much he nearly fainted. His mother was too busy to pay him any mind when he reached the house. She was haggling with the salesman, the man Andrew called the “Jew Peddler,” who rode by once a month in his red-painted hack offering sleeve holders and garters, thimbles, pins and ribbons, K. C. Baking Powder, soda, salt, and Cloverine Salve. He wore a flat black hat and a long black shirt that looked too hot to Harry. His beard formed a thick, round pad on his chest. When Harry first saw him, years ago, he laughed, but Andrew shushed him. “That old fellow has more stamina than you and me put together,” he said. “He works hard and I wouldn't be surprised if he earns enough money someday to rent him a building or two in Oklahoma City. Then we'll be traveling to
him
.”

As his mother counted her coins, Harry washed his tender wound in the kitchen. The chicks in the pen were getting downy and big. Harry cooed to them to take his mind off the soap's subtle sting. He remembered Olin's words, about the stage. Usually Harry kept quiet around his classmates. He sensed their jealousy and tried to fit in, but he couldn't. They mocked him: “Come
speak
to me, Boy Orator.” “Oh, open your honey lips.” Loneliness pierced his chest. Never, he thought. Never again will I give another speech.