The Boy Orator Read Free Page A

this early May afternoon. The tradesmen rubbed their eyes with dirty plaid bandannas. It wasn’t likely they’d stop to hear a serious talk, Andrew had warned Harry. They’d want to get their business done and go home.
    Besides the market, Harry had to compete with the comet. Any hour now Earth would pass through its tail. The experts Andrew had seen quoted in the papers didn’t know if this would harm the atmosphere. Two years ago they’d detected toxic gas in Comet Morehouse; this new visitor, speeding much closer to the planet, might trigger influenza outbreaks. On the other hand, comet tails were exceedingly thin: a change in the wind, nothing more.
    A young man in a green tweed suit set a cardboard box in the street next to a sweaty team of horses near the makeshift platform Harry and Andrew planned to use. He wiped his face with a long yellow kerchief. His companion, a small Indian woman in a white dress, helped him open the box. From its depths he pulled a rubber mask. “Don’t let the first decade of the twentieth century be your last!” he shouted above the din of sales, the tool prices, the buggy rattles, and whip-cracks. “Protect yourself from Heaven’s hellish messenger! I hold in my hand here a one-hundred-percent authentic breathing mask—guaranteed to help you survive Halley’s Comet! Six bits for the breath of life, step on up, that’s it sir, step right ahead!”
    Andrew grumbled then said to Harry, “Come on now, before he draws all the crowd.” He lifted his lanky boy onto the platform, a series of chicken crates stacked and wired together, fashioned this morning by an industrious cattle auctioneer. On a street-pole behind the crates, Harry’s thin face, sketched in pencil, beamed from a poster:
    17 May 1910
Come Hear Harry Shaughnessy
THE BOY ORATOR
Main Street, Anadarko (Weather Permitting)
Endorsed by the Farm Labor Progressive League
GOOD LOUD SPEAKER
    He wasn’t the only “baby” orator in the state; Andrew had stolen that idea. The Baptists every politician hoped to reach—a powerful bloc of voters—literally believed the Bible’s promise that “a little child shall lead them.” At rallies, brush arbor revivals, even in the halls of the state capitol, parents and party bosses taught any kid with volume a patriotic nugget or two, urged him onto stages, and hailed him as a prophet of Oklahoma’s coming economic miracle.
    Harry, though—Harry was the genuine article. Andrew had recognized his talent instantly when, in a school Christmas pageant, at the age of six, he’d overcome his stage fright long enough to blurt, “Welcome ladies and gentlemen, and bless us all on this holy night of our Lord.” The cadence and timbre of his voice were steady as oak, strong enough to fill the auditorium. Afterwards the other fathers told Andrew, “Sounds like you’ve got a young firebrand there” or “Dress him up, take him on the road.”
    Andrew saved for months, scoring a timely timber sale to the mines, to buy his boy a nice cotton suit, dark blue. He bought pomade for Harry’s curly red hair, taught him to stand up straight and slap color into his flat, freckled cheeks right before each speech. At seven, with his daddy’s eager help, Harry began learning the Socialist gospel. Late most afternoons, they’d practice together in the windy barn behind their house near East Cache Creek. The Cache, just north of the Red River in Cotton County, was a muddy burble, and a former Kiowa homestead (before white settlers drove the Indians out “long ahead of us,” Andrew’s neighbors had told him when he’d moved there years ago).
    Harry was tall and awkward for his age; his arms poked like kindling from the sleeves of his wrinkled suit. Andrew would stand him on a hay bale, prompt him from the shadows, while barn cats scurried through the horse stalls, and a