The Boy Orator by Tracy Daugherty Page A

dad for me.”
    As soon as she left, Harry packed a turkey sandwich in a knapsack, promised his dad he’d hurry, and headed down the dirt-and-gravel highway to Walters.
    Grasshoppers ticked against the cuffs of Harry’s long denim pants. A violet sky, peppered with blue and gray clouds.
    A shouting man in a Model T nearly ran him off the road. “Damn clanky things,” Andrew always said of cars. “I swear, Model T’s have shook more hell out of people than all the preachers in the county.”
    Eight years ago, spring rains and river floods had wiped out most of the roads. Harry didn’t remember, but he’d heard his father’s stories. The Oklahoma Territory passed a “road tax,” requiring residents to spend four days a year grading and raising beds for proper drainage. “‘Course, we all squawked like Thanksgiving turkeys running from the ax,” Andrew said. “Fellows failed to show for work, the Territory fined ‘em five bucks. Finally, they changed the law but we all wound up on the road gangs, anyway, otherwise we’d never have had clear paths into town.”
    Harry had asked him once, when they’d first started practicing speeches, “If you want to change a law, you squawk like a turkey?”
    Andrew laughed so hard he popped a button. Since Anadarko, Harry missed his father’s laughter. “No. It’s better to sell a bunch of turkeys, then pass the jack along to your friendly congressman.”
    This was Harry’s first political lesson. Recalling it now, he ached for his father’s health. Maybe the whiskey would help.
    Two shirtless young men with shovels cleared packed mud and stones from ruts where the automobile had passed. They nodded hello.
    On the edge of town he saw other young men centering poles in a row in the ground, uncoiling rigid wire from giant wooden spools in a field. One of the workers winked at him. “What are you doing?” Harry asked.
    â€œGonna set some houses ablaze,” the man said.
    Harry unwrapped his sandwich, sat and watched awhile, recalling Bob Cochran’s prediction: “Electric lights are just the beginning.”
    Shouldn’t dawdle, he thought, rousing himself, shaking crumbs from his shirt and rolling up his knapsack. His ma would be back in just a few hours. The men strung wires like webs, crosshatching a section of sky. Harry tried to imagine pulsing light inside the lines waiting to explode in someone’s home.
    Walters, just west of the Shaughnessy farm, was a little smaller than Anadarko. In its ongoing bid to become the county seat, it called itself the “New Jerusalem,” a farmers’ paradise in the center of fertile bottomland. Harry had heard his father discuss the governance issue with his friends at political gatherings—he even understood most of what they said—and he was eager to poke around the place on his own.
    This wasn’t a market day, but Walters stores were blocked by heavy plows, farmers buying tools for next fall’s harvest. Men with dark, rich soil on their hands sat talking in wagons or in shadows by the livery stable. Horseflies dived at the split carcass of a quail, shoved against the base of an empty water trough in front of the jail.
    A leathery man on a mule strummed a guitar and sang:
    Farmer said to the boll weevil,
“I see you at my door.”
“Yessir,” said the boll weevil,
“I been here before.
Gonna get your home, gonna get your home.”
    On a nearly vacant side street Harry noticed the Jew Peddler’s fiery red hack. The right front wheel had cratered, pitching the wagon forward at an abrupt and dangerous angle. Harry approached it cautiously, peering through the canvas curtain in back of the rolling store, inspecting the boxes and jars and paper-wrapped objects for sale. Red, yellow, and purple gleamed in a blade of sunlight through the narrow part in the curtain; he was dazzled