Years later, searching through his papers, I learned that Standard Oil Company, which he’d cursed in rallies as a young socialist, had lobbied him to sponsor a road bill so it could get easier access to the natural gas deposits in Egbert’s fields.
Harry stood, shaking hands with men who passed in the aisle, waving at others across the room, mouthing, “Fight for me!”
Finally, the Speaker called the vote. Someone proposed an amendment to the bill. “Son of a bitch,” Harry muttered. “They’ll drain its juice.”
Even today, I can’t say for sure what happened next, but I know Harry crushed the motion without uttering a word. People turned to him. He danced like a featherweight. Winks, hand-gibes, nods. Later, when the tote board flashed and clattered and came up mostly green, I understood that Harry had finessed his way to victory.
“I want to know who managed that bill!” A rangy man with thick black eyebrows approached him. “I hear Harry Shaughnessy managed that bill.” He bent to me. “Are you Harry Shaughnessy?” he asked.
“Yessir,” I said. For I was.
“Well Harry, you’re one fine floor manager.”
“Thank you.”
“A pretty good artist, too, I see.”
Harry told me, “Harry, say hello to Governor Edmonson.” I could tell he felt pleased with himself, and I was pleased for him. He was an important man: the governor had sought him out. As his namesake, as a privileged visitor to the people’s chamber, I thought, I must be important too.
Now, six years later, a new governor, Dewey Bartlett, had called on him to resolve an “Indian problem.” Recently an article had appeared in Time magazine saying that Oklahoma’s blacks had no political clout and that the state’s Indians were disorganized and ignored. Since then, Governor Bartlett had moved quickly, whenever he could, to erase the racist image Time had painted of him. Though Bartlett was a Republican, Harry defended his efforts to assist minority employment. “He’s established the Full Employment Commission, whose primary purpose is to loan money to Mexicans, blacks, and Indians for job training,” Harry said in speeches statewide. “He’s created the Oklahoma Indian Affairs Commission, and he’s appointed the state’s first black judge. What more can he do?”
The only thing I knew about Bartlett was that his campaign slogans were “Bring Back Our Okies!” and “Help an Okie!” and that his supporters all wore Okie pins on their shirts. He wanted to change the Okie image, from that of a poor dirt farmer like Tom Joad to that of a small industrialist, like a rubber tire manufacturer or a clothing supplier. He was probably glad Steinbeck had died.
After leaving the Dairy Queen, Harry and I passed through post oak and the twisted spikes of Arkansas yucca, heading north through Henryetta, Okmulgee, and Taft, a predominantly black town, on our way to Jay. There, a dispute had flared between local officials and a loose band of Cherokees, Kiowas, and Creeks, who were upset about the arrest and prosecution of a young Cherokee for hunting deer out of season. The young man had argued that the land belonged to his people. State laws didn’t apply to him; he followed the will of his tribe. The debate, Harry explained to me, had escalated into shouting matches on the streets and in the courts.
Finally, one of the Kiowa leaders requested Harry as a mediator. Harry didn’t know anyone in Delaware County so he didn’t understand why he was called, but the situation was urgent, said the governor’s staff.
Before my fight with him about Vietnam, I’d been eager to come along. As a boy, I’d accompanied him many times to Indian powwows in Sultan Park, north of Walters, his hometown. I remembered drums thundering beside the park’s little stream. Dogwood blossoms fell all around us. The dancers, in robes of white feathers and long blue beads, moved in solemn circles beneath quivering willows. I loved the dancers’ thick, straight hair, their long cheekbones. They looked much more down-to-earth than the actors I’d seen on TV shoot-’em-ups wearing moccasins and buckskin pants. They didn’t grunt or eat raw animals. They broiled deer meat over open fires in the park, cut it into strips, mixed it with vegetable oil and fresh berries. They laughed and sang. Their ceremonies were full of movement, lines, and grace. I sketched them so fast, so intently, I ran out of breath.
But now Harry and I were bristling at each other, and I wished I’d stayed in Walters at my grandma’s house.
The day before, my parents and I had driven up from Texas to spend Christmas with Harry and Zorah. She loved the holidays, and her tree was the finest of the season, decorated with strings of long thin lights filled with colored water. When you plugged them in they bubbled.
Zorah doted on me. When I was little, she’d leave dollar bills in pink plastic eggs for me at Easter or slip coins into my coat pockets. The morning Harry and I left for Jay, she caught me at the door. “In case you stop for a treat,” she said, slipping me a buck.
She also gave us two freshly baked gingerbread cookies. Harry had smuggled his into the Dairy Queen to eat with his coffee. I’d saved mine: a reward, later, for surviving this day with a man I no longer knew.
The trouble between us had started when my folks asked me to explain to him why I’d been suspended from school for a week, right before break. I’d drawn a poster of screaming Vietnamese children, from pictures I’d seen in Life magazine, and scrawled at the top in psychedelic lettering, “Stop the Bombing!” Late one afternoon, I’d mimeographed dozens of these and taped them to the classroom doors of my junior high.
Everyone knew who did it. Each month, I’d made posters for dances and other school events. My style was distinctive, the vice principal told me dryly as he pronounced my sentence.
Of all the members of my family, Harry would appreciate my convictions, I thought. After all, he was a former socialist, a man who’d opposed the draft as a kid, a man who called me Pancho because my infant face had recalled, for him, smudgy photos he’d seen in history books of the great revolutionary, Pancho Villa.
Instead, after I’d laid out my story, he told me, “If you don’t like your government’s policies, you work within the system to change them. This maverick stuff, Pancho, it’s useless and dangerous.”
“What maverick stuff?” I asked.
“The protests. The campus riots. The troubles in the cities. You’re what, fourteen, fifteen?”
“Thirteen.”
“Old enough to have more sense.”
What had happened to the Boy Orator, I wondered, humiliated and confused. What had happened to the guy who’d scorned the nation’s “industrial giants and munitions makers”? I looked at his sagging cheeks. He wasn’t a boy anymore, not even in spirit. He was seventy now. But could a person change that much?
I carried a petition with me denouncing America’s bombing of North Vietnam. My Catholic “Youth for Peace” group was sponsoring a drive for signatures to mail to the president. Harry wouldn’t touch it. “These radical young priests in the church now, playing politics — they don’t know the first thing,” he said. “Ought to stick to pouring wine and chanting to themselves.”
“I can’t believe you,” I said. “You’re talking about the church!”
“Well, I expect you to straighten up.”
That night, helping Zorah trim the tree, I asked her if I’d done something to tick Harry off. It didn’t seem possible that my misadventures were enough to upset him so.
“Nope. He’s become cautious, that’s all.” She sprinkled tinsel on the tree.
“I’ve always seen him as a fighter,” I said. He had a promotional photo of Jack Dempsey, acquired somewhere on his travels. Besides the Pogo books, it was my favorite thing in his house. “Boxing’s not so different from running for office,” he’d told me once when he caught me admiring the picture. “The winner’s the one who can take the most blows.”