The Boy Orator

by Tracy Daugherty

  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.

  8

  Annie 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 h
e 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?”

  “It’s not for everyone.” Behind his counter, Avram raised the lid of a metal freezer and poured them all glasses of lemonade from a tall, pudgy bottle. “How’s the speaking business?” he asked Harry.

  “Most folks cover their ears.”

  “All the more reason to talk.”

  “I think we had this conversation once, didn’t we?”

  “So we did.” Avram smiled.

  Harry pointed at the broken window. He drained his glass. “Be careful.”

  Avram bowed and tipped his hat.

  Back on the street, strolling with his parents, Harry noticed on nearly every building recruitment ads for the army. On one, a gorilla in a spiked German helmet grasped a helpless woman. “Destroy This Mad Brute,” the copy read. “Enlist!”

  Harry wondered, and worried, about his status with the draft board. Still no word.

  Walters didn’t please him any more now than it used to. He thought it ugly and flat. The buildings were too close together—he still missed the spaciousness of the farm—without the cozy charm of the big-city blocks he’d seen.

  Andrew told Annie Mae he should run by the livery stable. She took a dollar from him for groceries, and asked Harry to wait for her by the butcher’s shop. He gripped her paper-wrapped fabric, stared idly across the street at the barber’s where he’d come to find Warren Stargell years ago, and saw, loping toward him, a long, familiar form. Doughy, more stooped than he used to be, but it was him, all right. Eddie McGarrah. Harry grinned. At first McGarrah didn’t recognize him, then he didn’t seem to know how to respond. He smiled, frowned, then simply stared.

  “How you doing, Eddie?”

  “Same old six and seven.”

  “You remember me?”

  “Sure. The Boy Orator.”

  “That’s right. Harry Shaughnessy. It’s been a long time. Put ‘er there. Where you keeping yourself these days?”

  “Roughnecking mostly, out in the oil fields east of here.” He looked at the sky as though something were in it. Nothing was. “Hard work, good money.”

  Harry shifted the package under his arm. “I heard about Randy,” he said softly.

  McGarrah nodded.

  “Were you in touch with him, out at the fort?” “Yeah. He was eager to ship out.” He coughed into his hands. “Ready to serve his country.”

  “You know what happened, exactly?”

  “Some kind of explosion’s all we heard.”

  McGarrah seemed lost, unused to the daylight, out of practice talking. Why hadn’t the army snatched him? Well, he didn’t look healthy. In the past, Harry wouldn’t have given him the time of day, but now he was grateful for the familiarity, however strained. Obviously, though, McGarrah wanted to be anywhere in the county but on this particular street corner. He didn’t want to talk about Olin; Harry didn’t press him. The encounter was turning gloomy. “Okay. Well. It’s good to see you. Take care of yourself.”

  “Yep,” McGarrah sighed, and shuffled away like a lucky rascal wriggling out of a scrape. Harry felt lonely watching him leave. He stood by himself, remembering his school days, craving a smoke (he’d promised his mother he’d try to quit), in this flat, ugly town that wasn’t his home.

  The house his parents lived in wasn’t home, either, though Annie Mae had hung the old curtains. She had the latest Citizens National Bank calendar in her kitchen, and that recalled the farm. Best of all, though, she’d asked Mahalie to come live with her, to help out during her pregnancy. Mahalie couldn’t turn back time, or ease Harry fully, but her presence seemed natural and soothing.

  To insure a safe delivery, she insisted that Annie Mae wear a tight girdle just beneath her breasts; this would prevent the fetus from rising too high in her body, Mahalie said. She told Annie Mae to keep fresh willow leaves under her mattress. The leaves guaranteed fertility, health, robustness. Mahalie combed Annie Mae’s hair each night before bed: plaits, even accidental tangles, might incline the umbilical cord to strangle the baby at birth. Annie Mae put no stock in these ancient Choctaw rituals, but they were harmless, she said; she was grateful for Mahalie’s love, for her care and concern.

  In his first few days in Walters, Harry didn’t know what to do with himself. His mother was well tended to, his father had plenty of employees at the livery stable, he wasn’t giving any speeches. To keep his mind off the draft board and the war, he accompanied Annie Mae and Mahalie whenever they took morning walks. Halley followed happily, fetching sticks. The old dog was sinewy, still a gasbag, twitchy with ticks and fleas and restless energy.

  “Watch your step,” Mahalie said one day. “If a pregnant woman trips on a rabbit hole, her child’ll be a harelip.” Harry laughed, then hushed when his mother frowned. He picked an Indian paintbrush and tossed it at her, playfully. This prompted another warning from Mahalie. “If the flower touches her face, her baby’ll be born with a cherry-red stain on its forehead.” Harry surrendered, shook his head, and walked away. Halley dropped a slobbery twig at his feet. He threw it again, glanced east, across the streets. A gray haze hung above the oil fields. Much as he hated to, maybe he should hire himself out, he thought. Make a little cash. Distract himself. He could speak to Eddie McGarrah about it. On second thought—poor, bashful Eddie—he’d learn the rigs on his own.

  That night after supper, as he was standing on the porch, staring again at the smudgy glow in the east, wondering what to do with himself, his father suggested, “Let’s take a little walk.” Andrew lowered his voice so Annie Mae couldn’t hear him. “Bring a smoke or two if you want.” Harry smiled.

  They strolled into town. Andrew’s limp didn’t slow him up anymore; it was just a part of who he was. Harry pulled a pouch of Bull Durham from his pocket, rolled a smoke for himself and his dad.

 
In a squatty barn behind the livery stable the Socialist League had gathered: Warren Stargell and a lot of men Harry didn’t know. (A number of their brother-farmers had stopped attending meetings, Andrew explained; the new blood was mostly from the oil fields and the small petroleum towns near Walters.) Harry was shocked by Warren Stargell’s thinning hair, the sagging yellow skin of his face. He was old and worn-out, though his lazy left eye still exuded light.

  Cigarettes fogged the room. Everyone stood and talked—shouting and laughing—all at once. In the old days, the meetings were decorous and grave, well-organized. Tonight, a wild almost-violence peppered the haze.

  Most of the new men were young, a little older than Harry—here, it seemed, for a high old time, for something to do. They were whiskery and rank-smelling, strong and nakedly bored.

  Warren Stargell banged his hand on a tabletop, calling the meeting to order. “Is this a popular war?” he yawped.

  “No!” the group)—fifty or sixty men, Harry guessed—yelled back. Like a school game. He thought of Eddie McGarrah, of their scattered classmates.

  “Who gave the United States government the right to ship our healthy bodies, and the bodies of our sons, to Europe?”

  “No one!”

  “That’s right. The people don’t want this fight. And the government serves the people!”

  The men cheered, slapped each other’s sweaty shoulders—more in the spirit of high jinks and play than with any true fellowship, Harry thought.

  “Now, I’ve been talking to our brothers in the IWW—”

  “The Wobblies? They’re goddam cowards!” someone shouted. “They won’t take a stand agin’ the war!”

  Warren Stargell raised his arms. “Wait, wait, now listen to me. Some of the men in the Local 230—up the road, in the city—they’re starting to see things our way. They want to help us end conscription. But they’re convinced the time for speeches and pamphlets has passed, and by God, I think they’re right. Hear me now. We need a series of dramatic events—attention from the press—to make our point.”