the hedge hideout/winter/1964
There are, as far as I can tell, just two types of people who can bear to watch baseball without talking: total non-baseball fans and hard-core players. The hard-core player can watch in silence because his immersion is so complete that he feels no need to speak, while the persona non baseball can do it because his ignorance is so vast that he sees nothing worthy of comment. For the rest of us, watching any sort of baseball-like proceeding without discussing what we’re seeing is about as much fun as drinking nonalcoholic beer while fishing without a hook.
That’s why, if it weren’t for the new freeway just a block and a half south of our house, Papa would have heard Everett and me jabbering in our hedge hideout the first night we crawled into it. As baseball aficionados and mediocre players both, it was doubly impossible for us not to converse loudly and at length about the intricacies of the one-man ballgame being played in our backyard, and thanks to the freeway’s riverine roar we could do it without getting caught. It was odd to have something to thank a freeway for.
We snuck out to check on Papa’s shedball progress once a week on the average, and as time passed both his pitching and Everett’s hedge-bound analysis of it became far more skillful than I’d at first thought possible. Despite the dead thumb, Papa gradually developed four distinct pitches. And despite our laurel-leaf-and shed-obstructed view of the proceedings, Everett was able—by pointing out the varying spins, speeds and trajectories—to teach me how to identify all four. He dubbed them “the Heater,” “the Hangman,” “the Knucklebrain” and “the Kamikaze.”
The Heater was a fastball, and Everett said that Papa’s was more effective than ever in that it was still lightning fast, but was also so wild now that it would scare the living guano out of anybody on earth except maybe our Uncle Marv. The Hangman was basically just a hanging curve—the sorry remnant, Everett guessed, of the darting slider that had once been Papa’s money pitch and had earned him the nickname Hook. The Knucklebrain was a no-spin no-dance no-account knuckler that any .250-hitting Single A musclebrain could have kabonged into the bleachers of his choice. But the Kamikaze was our favorite: it was a high-speed sinking fastball that dove as violently and late as any Zero-flying pilot who ever bought the farm for Tojo. More often than not the thing went up in flames ten feet in front of the plate, or missed the mattress altogether and blammed the garage siding. But when it managed to hit the strike zone, the Kamikaze looked so actionable and unhittable that it really did seem like something piloted, something more flown than thrown.
For all its perspicacity, Everett’s shedball analysis was, for him, a melancholy business. Hunching in a damp niche in a dirty hedge watching pitches being flung into a wall by a crapped-out millworker was, after all, a far and farcical cry from his boyhood dream of catching Smoke Chance in a major league, or minor league, or at least a sandlot game. Hooked as he was on the idea that Papa’s new hobby was a surreptitious comeback, and haunted as he was by memories of Papa’s glory days, Everett couldn’t help but be depressed by most of the pitches that limped out into the light.
But to my mind, hunching in that hedge stands out as the best thing I did that year, and one of the best things I’ve ever done, period. The dank laurel, the darkness and the need for low-voiced secrecy created an atmosphere that made our talk more considered than the ebullient, hormone-garbled yammering we were prone to elsewhere. And with an eight-piece family crammed in a house the size of ours, it was a balm to discover a place, however squalid, where intimacy with one of my brothers was not a necessity but a choice. But it was that maimed little remnant of what had once been Papa’s great art form that has really stayed with me. There is a part of me that wants to state flat out that I learned more in the hedge about the defiance of dullness and career death, about the glory hidden in defeat, about the amazing inner capacities of a straightforward, no-frills man—even a man stripped of hope—than I’ve learned anywhere since. But such grandiose claims and language clash with the swaddling clothes my hedge insights came wrapped in. All I remember feeling at first was the sad satisfaction of knowing that, whatever he was doing in that shed, he was doing it partly for me, and that watching even his most brain-damaged Knucklers and hungest Hangmen beat watching him chain-smoke himself to death in front of the TV. But as the weeks passed and he kept slamming bucketful after bucketful of baseballs against that padded wall, a wall in me began to give way: I began to sense a new realm of athletic possibility, or a different sort of scale upon which to weigh a life …
the suppertable/winter/1964
At the very first six o’clock no-Papa supper we had bowed our heads and sat there for some time before we realized that Papa’s chair was empty, and that no prayer, no trusty little footbridge, was forthcoming. If she’d been incredibly wise I think that Mama would have let that spontaneous, unified silence serve as our prayer. What she did instead was open her eyes, scowl at Papa’s chair for a moment, then clear her throat and announce that grace-saying would, in his absence, be a duty shared by all. Like a poker player, she dealt first to her left. As a result, for three nights running Everett and Peter and I maintained the tried-and-true tradition of the pell-mell request for gratefulheartsourFather. Then the duty shifted to the other side of the table, where Freddy, Irwin and Bet lurked, with weird devotion in their hearts, and God-knows-what in their muzzy little brains.
Winifred’s turn came first, and began most inauspiciously: wearing an involuntarily red face and a voluntarily sullen scowl, she whined, “Dear Jesus, oh, Mama! I don’t know how!”
“Say any prayer you like, sweetheart,” Mama said reassuringly.
Freddy gave it a moment’s thought—or more likely a moment’s no-thought—then squeezed her eyes and fists shut, reeled off a deft rendition of “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” and wrapped it up in a style touchingly reminiscent of Papa by chanting, in a single exhalation, “An’ blessPapaWinnieEvertKadePete MamaDawmaBet’n’GomorrahAmen” (listing us, as always, in order of personal preference). Opening her eyes again, she turned to her idol, Irwin, hoping for a word or look of approval. When instead a delighted but thunderous peal of laughter came crashing down on her head, she burst into tears.
Mama managed to shut Irwin up and calm Freddy most of the way down, but by the time she’d done so Freddy had figured out that “Now I Sit Me Down to Eat” might have been more appropriate for the occasion, so she wanted to give it another shot. Mama sighed, and I’m sure would have told Freddy to save it for next time if Everett hadn’t started grumbling about his food getting cold. Unfortunately for all of us, Mama seemed to think she was omnipotent at times, or at least refused to back away from such preternaturally difficult tasks as teaching Everett to stop grumbling. Zapping him with a pointed scowl, she gave Freddy the go-ahead.
I noticed that Freddy looked hard at Papa’s empty chair before scrinching her eyes shut. And in light of what followed, I think she must have been contemplating some of the changes that had come over him the past year: how often he was still sweating and blotchy-faced with fatigue when she kissed him goodnight, for instance; or how his hair had begun to silver, as though he was exposed daily to a snow that did not fall upon the rest of us. Be that as it may, what she blurted out this time was “Dear Jesus. Papa hurts.”
And you could feel the words fly through the room like an archer’s arrow, piercing hearts. For a moment there was silence. Then we grew aware of the wind and the pouring rain outside, and realized in slow unison that Papa was out there in it, exhausted from his day’s work at the mill, yet so “hurt,” so wounded by his life that he was able to take solace in a bucketful of rubber-coated baseballs. I believe, today, that the ability to find such solace is a wonderful thing. But for some reason it struck us all as pure tragedy that winter night. “Papa hurts,” Freddy repeated, and a second arrow pierced us. “And he doesn’t look or smell right either,” she added. “So please, dear Jesus, whatever it is that’s hurting him, make it go away!”
She hesitated a moment, checked our faces, decided she’d succeeded, and mumbled, “Amen, I guess.” And no one laughed or even smiled at this. In fact the person most likely to—Irwin—was on the verge of tears.
That was the first night.
the hedge
The truth is, Papa was hurting less and less. He’d been running six miles every other night for months now. His nicotine fits had faded. And though his pitching was still crazy and he still swore about it, he would just as often whistle, or joke with himself, or even sing as he pitched—and I’d noticed that there was less and less correlation between his sound effects and the accuracy of his pitches. Normal baseball results no longer seemed to matter to him. If he was throwing strikes which the dead thumb twisted into wild pitches, the hell with it, he’d whistle anyway. The truth is, as the weeks passed Papa seemed to take increasing pleasure in everything he did in the shed. Even the swearing and wall-punching eventually began to sound like something he enjoyed. He got better at them too.
This gradual change of focus made a deep impression on me. If Papa had known that Everett and I were out there spying on him, the effect wouldn’t have been the same: his knowledge of our presence would have reduced his shedball into a hackneyed lesson in “Never say die!” But because he believed he was alone, his efforts were not just an athletic Aesop fable. They were a genuine, two-sided battle—like a ballgame is supposed to be. They were Papa’s two-sided struggle to reconcile who he had been (the finest athlete a lot of people had ever seen) with who he had become (a millworking, shedball-playing father of six). And the key to that reconciliation grew more evident every day.
I could call it “detachment,” or “purity of effort,” or “a refusal to judge by results.” But as I watched from the hedge I felt no need to squeeze it into a formula. I was learning not by words like these, but by the nonsensical songs and babblings and sound effects that accompanied Papa’s destinationless pitches out into the night, that there are genuine alternatives to the black-and-white categories into which most of us dump our lives. I was learning not by thinking, but through a father/son osmosis, that winning and losing, success and failure, are like the chalk strike zones I’d watched Papa draw. There was no question that shedball wasn’t aimed at the Bigs, or even at the bush. It was just an oddball backyard hobby built upon the shards of Papa’s old baseball dreams and accomplishments. But while many ex-ballplayers hoard their shards, sucking on them and staining their lives with them the way Papa had done with his Lucky Strikes, Papa himself had finally crunched his shards underfoot, found a new and pure kind of effort to make, and commenced punching walls, swearing, joking, whistling and living his life as if the past had passed. And in the present he was surviving. Perhaps even thriving. He didn’t know. It wasn’t his business to know. His business was to simply keep making the effort.
the suppertable
The next Papa-less night at grace time it was Irwin’s turn. And he too was moved by the emptiness of Papa’s chair and by another spring rainstorm to put in a word to the Powers That Be on Papa’s behalf. Unfortunately, he chose as his elocutionary model our stalwart pastor, Elder Denzel D. Babcock. Bowing his head, flaring his nostrils, drawing a deep breath and gripping both temples in his big right hand, he squinched his eyes shut and suddenly boomed, “LORD!” And when Mama lurched halfway out of her chair, it was only a matter of time before Everett, Peter and I went off like champagne corks.
“Of course I believe in You to the hilt!” Irwin emoted. “You know that as well as I do! Better than I do even! You know everything, Lord. I’d be the dead last of Your servants to question that! …”
His style had a certain Jimmy Stewart-ish sincerity to it. But sincerity at triple volume is something else again. Though Bet and Freddy were gawking at him with admiration, or at least awe, the rest of his congregation was in serious trouble: there was a sound like paper tearing in the back of Everett’s throat; Peter had covered his face with both hands; I was panting like a dog having puppies; and somebody’s stifled hysteria (Mama’s!?) was shaking the table so violently that milk was sloshing down the sides of all our glasses. Then Irwin let it all hang out:
“… But out in the darkest, blackest streets o’ Camas Washington tonight, Lord, out in that godawful cold and wind and rain, a solitary man is runnin’ his lonely guts out! …”
(The twins remained enthralled, but Everett had turned sea-anemone purple, Mama’s head was bent so low her neck looked broken, I was making the noises of the puppies being born, and Peter was sliding down out of his chair like wax running down a candle holder.)
“… And WHY?” Irwin bellowed. “Why is that man out there in the cold and black and dark? I’ll tell You why, Lord! He won’t admit it. Not to us. Maybe not even to himself. But the reason that man is out there tonight is he’s tryin’ to fight and claw and scratch his way back into baseball, Lord! We see it plain as the nose on our faces! And that is why I beseech thee Lord God Christ Almighty! That is why I am on my knees …” (He flung his chair back and plunked down on his knees.) “That is why I am saying that it’d be great thing, just a dandy, dandy thing, if You and Your Father decided to help that lonely! wet! running! man win his long dark fight. Thank You Lord! Amen!”
Bet and Freddy burst out in wild applause. Peter vanished under the table. Everett choked, reached for his milk, accidentally knocked it over, then let his face plop down into the puddle. Mama jumped up and ran to the kitchen closet—I thought for a mop—but instead she just shut herself inside, and an eerie rasping, sobbing laughter began leaking out through the door. My newborn puppies and I threw back our heads and howled. Irwin just sat there grinning, perfectly pleased with all of our reactions.
the hedge
One cold damp evening in early March, Peter slipped out of the house and joined us in the hedge. He looked embarrassed as we made room for him: espionage went against his noble nature. He’d been as interested as us in Papa’s new hobby from the start, but being a private person himself, he had more respect for Papa’s privacy.
To my surprise, Everett didn’t tease him. Maybe he was as curious as I was to hear what Peter would say. We watched fifteen or twenty pitches without saying a word. Unlike Everett and me, Pete was a hard-core ballplayer, and so felt no need to speak. After a while, though, I saw him cock his head, scowl, and turn toward the laundromat parking lot—where what sounded like a horse was clomping across the asphalt toward us. “Hey!” it called out way too loudly. “Where are you guys?”
Peter stuck a hand out. In crawled Irwin.
It was Winnie’s first visit too. His reason for refusing to spy had been that the Bible says “Honor thy father.” But Everett had finally convinced him that spying on Papa’s secrets was doing him a kind of honor. “Cozy little spot you got here!” he said, wiping some greenish hedge gunk off the side of his face.
“Whisper!” Everett told him.
“Who’s watching the twins?” I asked.
“Mama’s got ’em in the bath.”
“Was that a fastball or curve?” Peter asked.
“That was the slider,” Everett said.
“Too straight for the slider,” Peter argued.
“Too slow for a fastball,” I said.
“We call it the Hangman,” Everett explained, “because it hangs. It’s the best he can do, Pete.”
“I see,” said Peter.
“I don’t!” Irwin blurted. “How can he play ball without the trusty ol’ slider?”
“He’s not playing ball!” Everett snapped. “Can’t you see? He’s farting around in a manurey old shed. And keep your voice down.”
“He’s not farting around,” I said defensively. “He’s staying in shape. He’s doing something besides smoking. He’s keeping his head on straight.”
“Which is more’n I can say for us!” Irwin said. “Ha! We’re fuckin’ nuts, hunkerin’ out here in a filthy ol’ hedge!”
Irwin’s cussing always sounded forced to me. He hated cuss
ing, normally, but he loved Everett and Everett cussed, so around his oldest brother Irwin did what he hated out of love. “Go back inside if you don’t like it,” Everett told him.
kerBlamm! A pitch got away from Papa and slammed the bare garage wall.
“Mmnffmunffle!” went Irwin the same instant: it would have been a full shout, but Everett had lunged over and covered his mouth just in time.
“The Heater!” I whispered, feeling as proud as if I’d thrown it.
“But watch,” Everett told them. “He usually tries the Kamikaze next.”
Peter and Irwin shifted around for a better view, and sure enough, out into the light flew what looked like another Heater—till it snapped, like a yo-yo on a string, down into the dirt in front of the plate. Peter let out a soft whistle.
“Like a Whiffleball in a head wind!” Irwin said, when Everett let his mouth out.
“Does he ever control it?” Pete asked.
“One in six is a strike,” Everett told him. “Three in six are WPs.”
“What are WPs?” Irwin asked.
“Wombat Poops,” said Peter.
“Winnie Peckers,” Everett said.
“Wild Pitches,” I told him, but by then he just snorted and refused to believe me.
“How do you s’pose he throws it?” Peter wondered.
“We think it’s some sort of two-fingered fastball,” Everett said.
“Could be a scuffball,” Peter said. “Or even a spitter, the way it moves.”
Throughout our long spying careers, Everett and I hadn’t even considered these nefarious possibilities—but Everett immediately began nodding his head sagely, so that Peter would think we had.
The Brothers K Page 20
