The Boy Orator (8 page)

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.

T
HAT NIGHT
A
NNIE
M
AE
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' fingered 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.

S
HE 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

T
he 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.

“Evening, Frank,” Andrew said to the man. “Are we too late to grab a can of beans?”

“Mr. Shaughnessy! Pleasure to see you again. Lord, man, what happened to your leg?”

“Got in a little scrape but I'm better now, thanks.”

“Wellsir, I don't sell food no more. Since you's here, Osage has built a eat-hall over by the boardinghouse. Serves eggs and grits for company scrip. That's where everyone goes this time of night.” He sprinkled tobacco into his palm from a little cloth sack.

“Eggs and grits it is, then,” Andrew said.

“This your boy? The little preacher you's telling me about last time?”

“Yes. Harry, this is Frank. Say hello.”

“I gotta warn you, Mr. Shaughnessy, the new manager, fellow named Fawkes, he don't abide union talk or nothing of the kind. He's thrown a couple of boys outta camp already. Best watch yourself.”

Andrew nodded. “All right. Thank you, Frank.”

Harry helped his father back into the wagon, circled the pond, heading north. Dew shivered from drooping pines all around them. Venus pulsed above the tallest limbs. Recent rains had muddied the roads, gouged them with twigs and weeds. Andrew grabbed his leg whenever the wagon lurched. A woman's voice drifted through the trees, carried, it seemed, on panes of light from a yellow window up ahead. Harry stopped the mules.

A sign on a square pine building said “Floor Space—25 Cents A Night.” The window they'd seen was set in a low building next to the boardinghouse. Someone had painted “Beaver Trap” on a two-by-four above the door. Harry heard the woman's voice again, weaving through laughter and shouts: a woeful tale of squandered love.