The Prince of Fenway Park

by Julianna Baggott

  He opened his eyes, and bits of dirt were crumbling off the ceiling. Oscar sputtered awake. The dirt stopped crumbling.

  It was still somewhat dark in the room. His father was snoring on the other side of the crawl space. Oscar knew it was still night. He heard feet on the ladder. He crawled over to the hole and looked down. It was Auntie Gormley. She was tottering across the living room to her bleacher seat. She sat down exhausted, breathing hard. She closed her eyes, folded her hands in her lap. What had she been doing up here? Oscar wondered.

  The other aunties weren’t in sight. Oscar could hear them talking in the kitchen. The radios were all still tuned to the AM talk radio sports station. But not all of the sounds that Oscar heard were coming from below. On the other side of the pitcher’s mound, there was some strange thudding and a horrible laugh, like lonesome braying. And then he heard hooves clomping away from the mound. A set of hooves. Oscar’s heart was thumping loudly. He could hear it in his ears.

  Oscar looked around the little space. His father’s alarm clock read 12:04. At the foot of Oscar’s pallet in the red glow of the clock there sat a box with red shoelaces on top of it, all bound together into a makeshift bow. It was a gift, maybe a birthday gift. It was officially Oscar’s birthday.

  He crawled out from under his quilt and down to the foot of the pallet. Oscar untied the bow and opened the box. Inside of it, there was a model of a ball field, with yellow foul poles and a green wall, brown dirt, and white bases; it was, of course, Fenway Park. There was an old-fashioned scoreboard and batting cages and small, wooden figures—ballplayers made of wood. They wore tiny gloves made of real leather. More ballplayers—in jerseys from every era, and not just Red Sox jerseys—lined the edges of the field. Oscar saw Dodgers, Yankees, Braves—both Atlanta Braves and old Boston Braves—Chicago White Sox, and Cubs, too. The park was surrounded by stands filled with faces of fans painted onto the walls. There was writing on the side of the box: the date 09, 05, 1918. And there was only one player on the field: the pitcher standing on the mound—a lefty in a Red Sox uniform. Was it Babe Ruth? When he was traded to the Yankees, he was a pitcher, and the date fit.

  But then the park was also modern. There was the Green Monster and its contemporary scoreboard. Oscar noticed that there was something strange about the scoreboard. All ten innings and the slots for runs, hits, and errors were lined up on the far wall. It was wrong. It was wrong, and yet it sort of made sense to Oscar. In fact, it seemed to be in a kind of code. Oscar had never been good at codes. His teacher from the year before had used them in math class, but they never made much sense to Oscar. This one, however, made perfect sense.

  HE99E8ER7HOEE

  Normally this would just look like a very strange score: H meaning Hits; E meaning Errors; R meaning Runs. They never got mixed in with the score; and the score never had blank spots, either, as if an inning had been missed. Usually an inning has only one number and one tally at the end: three digits—runs, hits, errors. Oscar knew it was wrong, that it wasn’t meant to be the score of an actual game at all. But what surprised him was that he read it immediately, without really even thinking about it. He could barely explain his own thought process, it had been so quick. It was a five-letter word and an eight-letter word separated by a space; that had been obvious. The Es represented vowels, any old vowels. The Hs were Hs. The R was an R. The 9s were Ps, as Ps look like 9s: circles on sticks. The 8 was a B with its one circlish bump on top of another. And if the slant of a 7 was straighten up it would be a T. The second H helped, as repetitions do in code breaking; and if an O was shored up with a stiff back, it became a D.

  It read: HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

  He tried to explain the weird way his brain had just worked by the fact that it was his birthday, technically speaking. It was after midnight. He was twelve years old. He’d wondered if anyone would remember. And someone had.

  He crawled over to the ladder again and peered down at Auntie Gormley. Is that what she’d been up to in the crawl space while he was dreaming? Had she been giving him his gift with its scoreboard message? What made her think he’d even notice it? And, if he did, why did she think he’d be able to figure it out? And why had he been able to figure it out?

  He peered down into the small parlor again. The other two aunties were sleeping soundly. This time when he looked at Auntie Gormley, her eyes opened immediately and locked onto his. She smiled, and then she began to blink. It was a complicated series of blinks that would look like someone having a fit…except that it didn’t look that way to Oscar. No. It seemed as if she was spelling out words—another code—and the words made sense.

  The first zigzag eye movement and half blink with the left eye was the letter Y. Rolling her eyes with a half blink meant O. A smile motion and a half blink meant U. A full blink meant a new word. She’d spelled Y-O-U. The rest of the sentence was easy to understand: H-A-V-E full blink G-I-F-T.

  “I do?” Oscar whispered down over the distant racket of pans in the kitchen.

  She blinked once for Yes.

  “Did you give it to me?”

  She blinked once again.

  “But I didn’t think you could. I didn’t think any of you could. I don’t belong here. I’m not of any use.”

  She rolled her eyes as if to say Nonsense!

  “Do you think I can help?”

  She blinked.

  “Do you think I’m the one who can save us?”

  She blinked.

  Oscar couldn’t quite believe it. He wondered what his father would say—and Auntie Fedelma.

  “What is my gift?” Oscar asked.

  She only looked at him knowingly.

  “It’s that,” he said, pointing at the scoreboard. “It’s the ability to, well, break codes? To understand without being spoken to? It’s the gift of, um, of…Am I close? It’s the gift of…”

  And then Auntie Gormley spelled out: R-E-A-DI-N-G S-I-G-N-S.

  “Oh,” he said, a little confused and disappointed. What good would that do? He needed the gift of toughness and bravery and strength. Sure, he’d be able to understand Auntie Gormley better, but what good would this do him in breaking the Curse?

  He sat back on his heels for a moment, trying to process it all. He looked over at his father, still asleep, then again at the message: Happy Birthday.

  Auntie Gormley knew it was his birthday. She’d given him a gift. He hadn’t expected anything. He leaned over the edge and whispered, “Thank you.”

  Auntie Gormley nodded and closed her eyes.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Curse

  OSCAR REALIZED THAT HE’D DOZED off when he was woken by a thudding noise. He opened his eyes to see his father on his knees, wearing his orange safety vest, knocking on the rubber of the pitcher’s mound with the end of a baseball bat.

  “Glad you’re up, Oscar!” his father said.

  “You woke me up,” Oscar said. His father’s clock read 1:05 a.m. “Are they awake?” Oscar asked, looking down through a knothole. The living room was still lit, the radios on.

  “Oh, they nap sometimes, but they may still be listening to the recaps. It’s like the middle of the day for us, you know. We’re nocturnal. We’re on the opposite clock as those up there.” He pointed overhead. “Easier for everyone that way.”

  “Oh,” Oscar said.

  “Well, it’s a good thing you’re up. You can come along and help me with my work.”

  And with that he gave one last hard jolt to the rubber atop the mound. It popped out of place. A bit of moonlight streamed down, filling the crawl space.

  Oscar could barely speak. He could see a rectangle of dark sky. “Is that…”

  “It is,” his father said. “I need to check the field conditions. See if there are any problems.” He pulled a brass periscope out of the trunk and then flipped a switch on the wall that Oscar hadn’t seen before. A bank of field lights turned on overhead, and the rectangular hole grew brighter. Oscar’s father fitted the periscope’s wide e
ye up through the hole. He fiddled with the focus and pinched his own eye shut to have a look.

  “What kind of problems?”

  “The Pooka of Fenway Park. He sometimes gallops through the field around midnight. He can ruin the infield dirt, making grounders impossible to read, or put divots in a baseline that’ll cause a ball to pop foul and holes in the outfield that’ll cause a ballplayer to twist an ankle. Almost as bad as the Bossards made Comiskey Park.”

  “The Bossards?”

  “Gene Bossard was the big daddy of groundskeeper cheats—worked for the White Sox. They wrote it all up in his obituary even. You know Fenway was built on a swamp; well, Bossard kept Comiskey Park that way for the sinker ball pitchers, and he watered down first base when the base stealers were in town. He moved the portable fences back for the Yankees. He kept the baselines raised, too, for Nellie Fox’s bunts—so they stayed fair. The Bossards invented frozen baseballs; and their nastiest trick was putting baseballs in an old room with a humidifier forever on full tilt so the balls would get heavy with water. Some say the pitchers had to wipe the mildew off them.” He shook his head.

  “Are you that kind of groundskeeper?” Oscar asked.

  “Nope. My skills are used for the good of the game. I repair what the Pooka destroys.”

  Oscar’s father peered across the field one last time. “The Pooka must be restless tonight. There’s work to be done. Have a look.” He tipped the periscope toward Oscar. Oscar shut one eye and peered through the lens.

  It was a glorious sight. The floodlights made the grass so green, it had a yellow undershine to it. Oscar’s eye roved over the powdered white lines, the giant scoreboard and the towering stadium, the rows and rows of seats.

  “It’s amazing!”

  “Yep, a real mess all right.”

  “What?” Oscar said. “I don’t see any problems.”

  “Look at the grounds, Oscar. Look closely.”

  At first Oscar was too astonished to see anything wrong; but he stared as hard as he could, and then the pockmarks and divots became clear. “Oh,” he said. “I see them now.”

  He lowered his voice. “The truth is, Oscar, not everyone wants the Curse to be reversed.”

  “Really?” Oscar asked, looking at his father.

  “Some depend on it.” He took the periscope from Oscar and put it back in the trunk.

  “How?” Oscar said.

  His father reached his arm up and out of the rectangular hole, patted around, laid his hand on the rubber, and pulled it back into place, plugging the hole. He whispered, “The Curse is what made them who they are.” He glanced at his duffel bag sitting in the corner. “Do you want to read it?”

  “Read what?”

  “The Curse.”

  Oscar glanced at the duffel bag too. “Is it in there?”

  “I keep it with me at all times.”

  Oscar thought of the dusty, golden, locked box. He wanted to come clean with his father, tell him that he’d peeked in the duffel bag when his father had been in the bathroom at Pizzeria Uno, but even more importantly now, he needed to tell his father about his gift. But he wasn’t sure if his father would believe him or not. How would he put it? I am the one who can save us. It’s me after all. But Oscar could barely believe it himself.

  Oscar’s father was crawling to the duffel bag, pulling it toward Oscar. Oscar spoke very softly. “I got a gift,” he said.

  His father shook his head. “Oh, that’s right! It’s your birthday! Happy birthday, Oscar. I have to rewrap your gift. Maybe we’ll have a little party later.”

  “No,” Oscar said. “I got a gift.” He lunged to the foot of his pallet and picked up the Fenway Park model, and then he paused and looked at his father.

  “And I got a real gift. I’m twelve now.”

  His father froze. “But, but, you’re…you’re not…”

  “I know,” Oscar said. “But Auntie Gormley gave it to me, and it’s stuck.”

  Oscar’s father looked down through the square hole leading to the living room. Oscar did too. The three aunties were fast asleep. “It stuck?” he asked.

  “I can read signs.”

  “What kind of signs?”

  “Well, I’m not sure what kind yet. But so far I can read Auntie Gormley’s blinks, and I read that.” He pointed to the scoreboard on the model.

  “That’s no score at all.”

  “It says ‘Happy Birthday.’”

  “It does?”

  “Yep.”

  His father stared at the scoreboard. He was disappointed, Oscar could tell. And Oscar was embarrassed. It wasn’t a gift at all. He’d broken one code, and he’d been able to understand an old lady. Big deal.

  His father said, “Oh, well, that’s all good, Oscar. I’m glad that Auntie Gormley gave you a gift.” And this seemed worst of all, that his father was faking being pleased about it. He was holding the duffel bag. “Do you want to read the Curse?”

  Oscar nodded, even though he didn’t really feel like it anymore. What good would it do?

  His father took out the dusty golden box. He pulled a key chain out of his back pocket and stuck one of the keys into the lock. The lock gave a click, and the box popped open. Inside was a long, narrow scroll of paper. Oscar’s father pulled it out. “Have to be careful with it. It’s so old.”

  “How old?” Oscar asked.

  “Written in 1919.”

  This was the year that Babe Ruth had been traded. “So the Curse has everything to do with Babe Ruth, doesn’t it?”

  “Only in part. Only in part. Here,” he said, handing him the scroll. “Read it to yourself. The beginning of it doesn’t make much sense. No one’s ever been able to make sense of it. And the rest, well, we understand it all too well. I can’t bear to hear it again.”

  Oscar unrolled the tiny scroll and started to read silently.

  The Curse and Its Three Unbreakable Rules

  We are each an orphan, a big-handed boy learning to stitch seams. We try hard to find a place called home. Tough hearts, baseball tough, lodged in our chests, are more bruised than you can know. Use your eyes to see Babe there…an unloved boy in a tailor shop. His heart can break, like all of ours, into a wide green field filled with a need to be loved—a roaring crowd of love. And now I will curse you on the blood moon, the hunter’s moon—because who are you, Red Sox, to sell a soul, to call it names and cast it out?

  Sincerely,

  Keeffe Egg

  May you be cursed, Fenway Park.

  May horned creatures reign the dark.

  May a Pooka roost in your hill.

  May the Banshee cry and keen at will.

  May weasels nest

  and nettles infest.

  May herds of mice swarm

  and evil managers do harm.

  May you be close enough to taste the win

  but always, truly, lose before you even begin.

  And now the Three Unbreakable Rules:

  1. No one can explain anything to the Breaker of the Curse beyond the words writ here.

  2. Every Cursed Creature has a Position to Play.

  3. There can be only one Breaker of the Curse.

  Once he sets his mind to breaking the Curse, he

  must succeed or no one ever will.

  As Oscar rolled up the Curse, his hands were shaking. His heart felt jittery, as if it were kicking around in his chest. “Who is Keeffe?” he asked.

  “The Aunties’ father, my grandfather.”

  “What about your father? Who was he?” Oscar asked.

  “Never mind him either. He didn’t get on the ship. He was fully human. He abandoned us. Keeffe was my father figure. But then he cursed us and left us.”

  “Oh,” Oscar said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know; I should be forgiving. My grandfather had failings. He never got over being cast out of Ireland. And he was heartbroken at the time, too. My grandmother was sickly on the ship. She didn’t make it over.”

  “His w
ife died?” Oscar asked.

  “People died on ships back then. I wasn’t born yet. I never knew her.”

  “And your father had already left you.”

  “Yes,” his father said, a little frustrated. “What’s your point?”

  “It’s just that you’re kind of an orphan, almost, half. And the aunties are orphans too, in a way. We’re all a long line of orphans. It’s strange….” Oscar looked down at the rolled-up scroll in his hands. He felt a little breathless, as if he were being chased.

  “But I have the aunties, and you have your mother and me.”

  “That’s right,” Oscar said. “But still, if you’re an orphan once, you always are, in some way. There’s always somebody—maybe a stranger you’ll never even meet—who you’ve got to forgive.”

  “I know I’m supposed to forgive Keeffe. But the fact is, he ran off. Got out while the getting was still good, before his curse had time to take.”

  “But,” Oscar said, his heart thudding loudly now, “there’s a message inside of the note to the reader of the Curse.”

  “A message?”

  “And I think it was written to me.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Message Inside of the Curse

  IT WAS EASY FOR OSCAR. He saw it right away. He read it as clearly as if it were the only thing the Curse had to say.

  “In the first paragraph—the part you said doesn’t make much sense—well, at the beginning of each sentence, I counted letters until I came to the twelfth letter,” he said.

  “Why did you do that?” his father asked.

  “I don’t know. I mean, twelve is an important number—you know, for me, well, today. But I can’t explain why I did it. I just did. I kind of crossed out the first eleven letters and concentrated on the twelfth in my mind, and then I read each word that started with those twelfth letters.”

  His father took the Curse from him and did what Oscar said. He said the words slowly just one at a time. “Cross out the first eleven letters: ‘We are each an’…and you’re left with the word ‘orphan.’”