Later—when I got frightened in bed and I guess cried a little because Papa’s eyes were like mustard and ketchup and his teeth were all rotten and screwed up and then I woke up and Irwin’s bed was empty and I could hear the darkness breathing so I called and called and for the longest time nobody answered—Papa finally came plodding up the stairs three-fourths asleep, and laid down beside me, which he hadn’t done in so long I could barely remember. He didn’t get in my bed. Mumbling something about wiggleworms, he pushed Irwin’s bed against mine, flopped down on top of it, folded his arms behind his head, shut his eyes, and said, “Don’t you worry, Kade. I called Uncle Marv and Aunt Mary Jane’s. And Mama’s fine. She’s just gonna spend a little time up there.”
I nodded, but felt confused. I hadn’t been worried about Mama. I’d forgotten all about her. So was he worried? “What you and I need,” he said, “is a song.”
Before I could even agree he started singing a cowboy tune called Cool Clear Water in a voice so low and soothing that before it ended I was digging my thumbnail into my forehead—which is a trick Peter taught me to keep from falling asleep in church—because I was afraid if I dozed off, Papa would stop singing and leave. But Papa’s is a voice, once it’s warmed up, that carries you with it whether you want to go or not, and by the time Cool Water ended and The Old Man Is A-Waitin’ For to Carry You to Freedom began, my forehead, thumbnail, brain and thoughts were all smooshed together down into the pillow.
Follow! Follow, follow, he sang, Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd …
It was a song the slaves had sung to the Big Dipper, Papa once told me, back when they were lost in the woods trying to run away North. They called it the Drinkin’ Gourd, he said, because they used gourds for dippers, because the poor don’t buy what they can grow. But the mystery of the song to me was who this “Old Man” was who was waiting for to carry them to freedom. When I’d asked around, Irwin thought it was Abe Lincoln, Peter guessed it might be Jesus, and Everett and Mama figured it was God since they called him “Old Man.” But Papa told me that really no Old Man carried the slaves to freedom. He said they’d walked the whole way themselves, and carried each other, and that most of their offspring were having to walk and carry each other still. I’m not sure what he meant by all that. But I do know that once, just last winter, after a strike shut down the mill and Papa got into serious trouble with his union for not picketing, because he was out moonlighting for a carpenter, because we were out of money and almost out of food, a guy named Theodore Bikel came on the car radio and sang this very song, and Papa got serious and sad as I’ve ever seen him, and said the song was about us now too. A white mill nigger, he called himself, and Mama didn’t even shush him. “Except,” he said, “there’s no North for us to run to.”
But now he sang it like last winter never happened, and as his voice dipped low for another Follow, follow the people in the song appeared to me—a whole band of them, dressed all ragtag, carrying babies and bundles, hunched low in the starlight as they moved across a field of corn stubble toward a black wall of trees. Knowing they were dream-people and that I’d fall asleep if I kept watching, I tried to make them enter the trees and disappear. But they were still in the open when I heard Papa singing How can there be a cherry that has no stone?, which was a whole ’nother song. And even in the wrong song the ragtag people kept moving north through the corn stubble, and when they did reach the wall of trees, instead of vanishing they signaled me to come on in with them. So I did. I stepped right into the trees. And even in the dark we saw that the very first tree we’d come to was just loaded with cherries, though it was corn-stubble season, so I was sure, now, that I was asleep. But I sat down with them anyhow, watching as the ones who could climb began dropping sweet black cherries down to the old ones and little ones who couldn’t. And when I caught a cherry finally, and slipped it in my mouth, its taste and my body and Papa’s voice and the people and tree all began to make that whole and perfect sense which nothing ever seems to make by day. How can there be a cherry that has no stone? the music asked, and at once I saw the mama silhouette picking pits from the cherries. How can there be a baby with no crying? it asked as she passed the pitted fruit to her infant, who made no cry as it sucked the sweet juice. How can there be a story that has no end? it asked as we all leaned back against rocks and tree trunks and let the cherry juice and song go humming all round and through us. Then I remembered it must be Papa still making the music, it must be his voice we still heard, alone and outside our world somewhere—and I looked around at my friends, the silhouettes, afraid that, should he grow tired and end the song, our whole sweet world would end too.
But then I felt his real hand on my real head, felt his gray eyes watching me, though my eyes were closed. And he sang every last verse again.
And then again.
And unless I dreamed it, yet again.
When I woke it was hot, his bed was empty, it was Sabbath, and downstairs I could hear the Yankees and Indians already going at it. So all of that, more or less, is how I came to be sitting here in the situation I’m calling an Underhanded Miracle. Maybe most people won’t think a Miracle should include bad or wrong things like Papa and Mama’s fight or Papa’s dead thumb or his eight beers in it. But take a close look at Jonah’s whale or Balaam’s ass or Peter’s cock crowing three times and you’ll see that every one of those Miracles happened when Jonah, Balaam and Peter were doing a wrong or bad thing. So maybe this Underhanded Miracle of my family scattering every which way, leaving me to watch baseball and fish with Papa on Sabbath, is kind of our whale, and maybe it’ll spit us out and put us back together even better than before.
Or maybe it won’t. How would I know? Either way it’s Cleveland 3, Yankees 1, and soon as this game’s over we’re heading up the Wind! So concentrate!
· · · ·
Stengel has finally stopped smelling his fingers and faking signs. With two out and one on in the eighth, it’s no big secret that Mantle will be trying to bust fences. The Mick takes a ball, then takes another, and when Mudcat Grant stops to yell at the ump, Papa says he doesn’t blame him. He says both pitches were sliders thrown so close to the outside corner that Mantle couldn’t hit them and the ump couldn’t tell what they were. But inside every ump, Papa says, is a baseball fan, and for some reason baseball fans all love Mickey Mantle, so the fan in the ump called them balls.
Mudcat fires a high fastball next, for a called strike. Then he throws a low fastball—and in a split second you can see why everybody loves Mantle. One instant he’s just standing there like any other yokel, but the next instant his body coils and explodes, and even through the TV you can hear the sweetest kind of bat-crack as the ball gets golfed to Kingdom Come. While it’s sailing toward the bleachers, though, and Pee Wee is going apeshit about how hard it’s hit, Papa just mutters, “Strike two.” And I notice Dizzy huffing and puffing like the wolf that blew the little pigs’ houses down, because he knows it’s foul too, and is trying to blow it fair.
“FOUL BALL!” hollers Pee Wee about two years after we realized it.
“Jammed him,” Papa says.
“Jammed him,” says Diz.
Papa grins.
I like Dizzy Dean a lot. I suspected I would even before I was ever sick enough to get to stay home from church and watch him, because Everett told me he got in trouble once for saying “Call us Diz and Pee for short” right on national TV. Pee Wee Reese seems nice enough, and I guess he was one heck of a ballplayer, but as an announcer Pee isn’t a bad name for him, since he just sort of pees out what’s happened after it’s happened even though you saw it better yourself. Right now, for instance, he is saying that Mantle just struck out (“Change-up,” says Papa), and that it’s a crying shame his homer drifted foul because foul homers don’t count, and if it had counted the score would be a lot different than it is right now. Dizzy is more the way Everett is at a ballgame. He tells you things you hadn’t noticed, and things that have nothing to do with what’s ha
ppening, and he gets mad at umps, makes fun of bad plays and players, calls errors “eras” and basemen “sackers,” tells lies, brags, invents fake statistics to win arguments, and generally grates on Pee Wee’s nerves till you feel you’re really living through a flesh-and-blood ballgame instead of sitting in your house staring at a box. Right now, for instance, Diz is saying that a foul ball should be considered fair, provided a pitcher hits it. A foul that pops backward over the backstop and into the fans should count as a homer for a pitcher, he says. And when Pee Wee says he’s not so sure about that, Dizzy roars, “You were a shortstop! What do you know?”
“I’ll tell you what I know,” Pee Wee says. “I know all you folks out there are gonna be real pleased with these fine products!” And onto the screen pops a couple of housewives who start having a poop fit when they see how clean their new dish soap got the dinner plates.
Papa is different than anybody I ever saw watch baseball. We get to watch the World Series with him when the games don’t fall on Sabbath, and we watch live minor league ball together most Sundays (usually the Triple A Tugs down in Portland, who Papa used to massacre almost single-handed, and who he might be pitching for today if it weren’t for his thumb). Papa’s ball-watching style is to just sit there like a hawk on a fencepost, not saying a word unless something really good or really strange happens, but when the game’s a tight one he looks almost crazy, his eyes get so big and black. He looks crazy right now, in fact, and he’s only staring at the dish soap.
He’s just fired up another Lucky. I used to like to watch him smoke, but his hands didn’t shake then, and he didn’t smoke even half as many. I guess he quit once, when I was little, but after the thumb thing happened and the twins were born and Mama had an operation called a hysterectomy and afterward almost died and was so weak and weepy for a year that Grandawma and her bulldog Gomorrah had to give up their house in Pullman and come live with us to help out with the twins, he took it up again with a vengeance.
Papa’s friend Roy told Everett recently that Papa would be a foreman at the mill if it wasn’t for his thumb. If that’s true, it doesn’t make much sense, since as a foreman Papa wouldn’t need his crushed thumb at all. Maybe Roy means he’s not a foreman because of the lawsuit …
Papa’s lawsuit started last March, when Mama read in the paper about some surgeon down in Portland who removed a big toe off a guy and built him a new thumb out of it. Papa wasn’t any too excited by this, but Mama made an appointment anyway, and they drove on down to see what the surgeon would say. The guy’s name was Dr. Boyd Franken, and he was a frank ’un all right: I guess when he saw Papa’s scars and X rays he started cussing so bad that Papa had to ask him to quit. He apologized, but said that the creature who’d tried to rebuild Papa’s thumb must have been a Mallard or Pintail or Quacky Campbell maybe. Papa told Dr. Franken the guy had seemed human enough. “He better never lose a button off his shirt, then,” Franken said, “because he’d kill himself trying to sew it back on—not that you or I would miss him.” Holding Papa’s hand open, he showed both my parents how the duck-doctor should have saved the bone he’d replaced with plastic, and how the screws were unnecessary, and how he’d made such a hash of the tendons and nerves and skin grafts that Papa had been scarred and crippled up a lot worse than he should have been, not to mention the agony he must have gone through before it all went dead. Mama said that Papa turned gray when he heard all this, but that he only said, “What’s done’s done.” But Papa said that Mama turned purple when she heard it, and she went after his old surgeon the next day, even though Papa didn’t want her to. But the guy was already dead.
Dr. Franken filled out a bunch of papers and sent them to the mill, saying that Papa had been a victim of “malpractice” and that the damage was “irreversible,” but that by having the dead part of his thumb cut off, his big toe transplanted onto his hand, and a fake toe called a prosthylactic or some such thing sewed onto where the real toe used to be, Papa would most likely end up with a thumb that had feeling in it and could do a thing or two. So the mill sent Franken’s papers to their insurance company, who sent them on to their own doctors, who hemmed and hawed for four whole months then told the insurance company that the whole idea was expensive and risky and “completely unwarranted.” So that’s what the mill told Papa. “I guess that’s that,” he’d said, lighting up a Lucky. But Mama said, “The hell it is!” And she got on the horn to Dr. Franken, told him what had happened, and he had another swearing fit worse than his first, but Mama was so mad at the insurance company that even though he used words like “flaming assholes” she didn’t realize till later that he was cussing: she said she thought he was quoting the Psalms.
We couldn’t afford a lawyer, but after a long struggle Mama and Doc Franken finally talked Papa into taking his case to his union. Then Papa’s union talked to more doctors yet, and to their own lawyers, and decided to take the mill’s insurance company to court. The courts are so slow that we won’t know what’s happening till sometime this fall, but if Papa’s union’s lawyers whip the mill’s insurance company’s lawyers, then the mill, or the insurance company, or anyhow somebody besides us is going to pay Dr. Franken to build Papa a new thumb. That’s the best I can understand it, anyhow. Papa says it’s one heck of a kerfuffle. Mama says it’s all in God’s Hands. I think that means they don’t quite understand it either.
Everett is sure that Papa will win the suit, have the surgery, and make a sensational pro baseball comeback. Peter’s not so sure. He says that Papa’s toe is going to make an awfully big, awfully weird thumb. Everett says it’s weirdness could give Papa’s pitches extra stuff, but Pete says he isn’t sure Papa wants stuff. He thinks Papa might settle for things like being able to work a pair of scissors or pliers left-handed again. Papa is completely boring on the subject. All he ever says is: “We’ll see.”
The Indians are up now, top of the ninth. I was having trouble concentrating, so I’m standing behind Papa’s chair, letting his concentration leak into mine, which is another trick Peter taught me. Peter claims that a person’s mind is much larger than their brain. He claims your mind actually hovers out around your head in a pulsing, invisible ball of varying size and color. Peter claims lots of things. He reads an awful lot.
Vic Power, the Indians’ Negro first baseman, is the hitter. It’s weird to see a big black man like Power getting called an “Indian.” Come to think of it, it’s pretty strange to see a bunch of white guys running around calling themselves “Indians” too. How are real Indians supposed to feel about this? I mean, what if there was a team of white guys, with an Indian first baseman, called “the Cleveland Negroes”? It’d make exactly as much sense. Better yet, what if there was a team of Negroes and Indians called “the Cleveland White Guys”? I think a lot of pale-faced folks wouldn’t be all that thrilled. That’s one big advantage the Yankees have: black, red, brown or white, they look like Yanks, and act like Yanks, and are Yanks. None of this cutesy Oriole or Cub or White-Indian crap for them.
But my concentration is really shot. Whitey Ford struck Power out on three straight pitches, and I didn’t even know it till I heard Dizzy saying that the way Whitey handles pressure brings to mind another fine young pitcher of his acquaintanceship, namely himself. Pee Wee didn’t laugh at this, but Papa did. Jimmy Piersall is the hitter now.
It doesn’t seem fair, though, Papa laughing. He never laughs when we brag. He won’t even let us brag about him. Everett once tried to defend some bragging he was doing about Papa by saying that the Diz once said, “It ain’t braggin’ if you done it.” Papa said, “That was Dizzy talking about Dizzy. You’re Everett talking about me.” Everett said he didn’t see the difference. Papa said, “Well, there is one.” Everett said he still didn’t see it. “If you think I’m worth bragging about,” Papa told him, “you’ll take my word for it.” Everett said, “What is this? Father Knows Best?” But he hasn’t bragged about Papa since.
Mama still brags about him, though. She
and Everett both know what Papa’s done as a ballplayer better than Papa himself. Everett can recite all Papa’s statistics and reel off lists of all the big league sluggers he’s fooled, but Mama watched Papa play for years when Everett was just an ignorant little blob in her lap, so she has more stories. The trouble with Mama’s stories is that after she tells a good one she’ll sometimes put on her Pious Face, sigh, and say, “Sometimes I’m afraid I know baseball better than I know my own Bible.” Last time she said it, though, Everett told her that God didn’t even own a Bible, so chances were He knew baseball better too. Mama looked sort of squirmy, but she laughed.
The person who never brags or laughs about baseball or Papa is Grandawma. I don’t know if it’s her Englishness or college or Darwin or what, but when she was living with us last year she once told Everett and me that baseball had turned Papa into a complete nobody. Of course Everett hit the ceiling. “If Papa’s a nobody,” he yelled, “who’s paying for Gomorrah’s stinking dog food?” Grandawma told him the dog’s name was Isadora. “Picky about names, huh?” Everett said. “Okay. Name me three big league ballplayers.”
Grandawma was just irritated enough to give it a try. “Babe Ruth!” she snapped. “Lou Gehrig! And, um, Oscar Unitas!”
The Brothers K Page 4
