The Boy Orator by Tracy Daugherty Read Free Book Online

still too.
    â€œI thought you might be lonely.”
    The woman’s name was Mahalie. She was Choctaw, married to a white farmer from whom she’d learned her English. In the next few weeks, as Annie Mae got to know her, Mahalie said most of her sisters married whites because they were gentler and richer than Choctaw men. “In most places, I’m told, a white man who marries one of us is immediately cast out of his circle,” she told Annie Mae. “Around here, there’s not much trouble over that—people don’t see each other often, anyway. We’re too busy and our homes are far apart.”
    Annie Mae understood, then, that Mahalie felt lonely, too. She brought around other Indian women—Choctaws, Creeks—some of whom she hadn’t known long herself. “So you’ll never want for company,” she said, clearly happy to be fashioning a new group of friends. They cooked together, tended each other’s babies. Annie Mae hung a fat iron pot from an oak tripod in her yard; around it the dark women gathered, hushed, watching her stir soupy beans. Now and then, one of them would pull a waxy square of lard from beneath her dusty shawl and toss it into the pot, making the beans hiss like snakes. The women nodded solemnly at the progress they were making with the food.
    Harry was the first white child some of them had ever seen. They touched his face, kissed him, passed him around. Annie Mae was eager to learn their tongues, but “hegee” was the only word she ever acquired—Creek for tobacco. The women wanted to speak only English, the “language of the future,” they said.
    They did introduce her to burn-weed, scurvy grass, mayapple and other medicines to ease the chronic ache in her back, to break Harry’s fevers, keep him regular and free of worms. They soaked wagon chains in buckets of rainwater to make an iron tonic for the babies.
    Annie Mae commented once on the robustness of all the Indian kids she saw.
    â€œYes,” Mahalie said. “The weak ones die right away.”
    H ARRY RECOVERED QUICKLY UNDER Annie Mae’s stern daily care, with only a minor scar to remind him of the Anadarko incident. When his strength returned, he followed her through the house as she arranged pear blossoms in a fine bouquet on the table, fed premature chicks in a pen in a corner, or drew water for the washtub. Always, for him, she was a commanding, comforting spirit. He loved her hay-thick auburn hair, the whisper of her floor-length dress when she moved from room to room.
    Andrew’s maladies lingered. He wouldn’t leave his bed or talk much. He drifted. Annie Mae sat by him, quietly crying, washing him, holding his hands.
    Harry had to handle the chores. Besides selling timber to coal interests, his father earned a living farming, repairing neighbors’ wagons. Harry had always helped around the place. In late spring, as temperatures warmed, Andrew asked him to watch the alfalfa field behind the barn, to look for the first violet blossoms on the stalks, which meant they were ready to cut. He’d help his father bundle the stuff and sell it, as silage or hay, to feed the county’s sheep.
    He watched the potatoes, too, for early signs of blight. The dark green leaves of Andrew’s Pink Eyes and Lumpers crumpled like paper if the fungus had infected their stems. Harry loved it when the spuds turned out healthy (usually they did) and his mother roasted them over a mild fire in a pot full of buttermilk.
    From constant horse traffic, the farmyard was pitted, worn down in certain places to skull-white limestone beneath the topsoil. Sometimes, when he was running around the yard, pulling burdock from the tangled tails of the horses or keeping an eye on the crops, he’d find a tiny crinoid or a brachiopod shell—a slender stone daisy—in a chewed-up patch of dirt. His father identified them for him, told him these were petrified