The Boy Orator Read Free

leering grin, Annie Mae realized now. She’d been observing him carefully. He smiled the same way at Andrew. The man was simply lonely, hungry for human contact, any contact. He no longer scared Annie Mae, but she saw in him the end result of crazy dreams. A man heads for the edge of the world, seeking pleasure and fortune, she thought, and winds up a parched old ghost. She saw in him Andrew’s brother, Lee. She saw a possible future for her husband. For these reasons, she didn’t like being near him. Harry kicked and blubbered whenever he came close, as if warning the man to stay away from his mother, and Annie Mae was grateful for her son’s frightful noise.
    Finally, she agreed to cross the river, not because the water seemed significantly safer to her, but because she couldn’t abide the ferry captain any longer—the reminder, in his dusty, sad dishevelment, of false expectations. Better to move on and know your own troubles firsthand, rather than pace the banks anticipating them.
    â€œPromise me,” she told Andrew, “wherever we settle, you’ll keep men like him away from us.”
    â€œI promise.”
    She shook her head, crying.
    â€œI do, honey.”
    â€œYou can’t. He’ll be everywhere. Who else travels where we’re going, except lost old souls like him?” She tightened her grip on her baby.
    â€œNow, Annie—”
    â€œPromise me Harry won’t be a slave to the land all his life.”
    â€œOf course not. That’s why we’re moving. Harry’ll get whatever he wants.”
    â€œPromise me you won’t drag him into politics.”
    â€œHoney—”
    â€œPromise me.”
    He looked at her, then slid his gaze toward the water. “Now’s the time,” he said softly. “It won’t get calmer than this. Not for a while.”
    â€œAndrew—”
    â€œWe’re leaving. Get your stuff, now.”
    He guided the team onto the raft. The wagon’s wooden wheels rumbled like echoes in a tunnel on the smooth, floating planks. Annie Mae, lanced with pain in the lower part of her back, stepped aboard with Harry, and the ferry captain shoved off with a long oak pole. “Don’t know why you want to go,” Parker muttered to Andrew, watching Annie Mae. “It’s nothing but savage country, up north.”
    Precisely, she thought.
    Andrew only nodded. The ferry dipped slightly at the edge of a rowdy whirlpool—Annie Mae, tipped upward, saw clouds like rags plugging scattershot holes in the sky—then straightened out, heading for a line of tender elms on the opposite shore. Andrew reached for her hand. She grasped it, reluctantly at first, then gratefully as the raft’s rocking increased. Clinging tightly to each other, they slipped into the Indian Territory, Harry yammering, all the while, at cottonwood, bluestem, mistletoe.

PART ONE
    Cotton County, 1910

1
    L ater this evening, Harry knew, he’d celebrate his twelfth birthday with his father, just the two of them, in the restaurant of the Palmer Hotel, where all the waiters wore bow ties and jackets, and all the windows, spread before the wide, dusty streets, showed knots of huddled strangers who’d come to trade their goods—Comanches hawking jewelry and skins, cotton farmers stacking hoes on wooden walks in front of the millinery shop and the pharmacy. Harry’s father would tell him to order anything he wanted from the menu: steak and Irish potatoes, chicken and dumplings, hot apple pie. He’d claim, as he always did on these trips, he was proud of his son, and maybe as a treat back in the room he’d offer Harry a sip of warm choc beer. The bottle, Andrew’s “after-dinner blessing,” was stuffed in the leather grip they shared that didn’t shut all the way. But before any meals Harry had to give his speech.
    Anadarko, Oklahoma, a townsite of two thousand folks or so, was hot and humid