CHAPTER FOUR
Epiphany of a Toe
Boys, this game may be your only chance to be good … You might screw up everything else in your life and poison the ones who love you, create misery, create such pain and devastation it will be repeated by generations of descendants. Boys, there’s plenty of room for tragedy in this life … Don’t have it said that you never did anything right. Win this game.
—Garrison Keillor, “The Babe”
–I–
When Papa found out about the “Washougal Inquisition,” he got into a two-hour shouting match with Mama, slept on the couch that night, came home from work with a thrift-store set of twin beds the next day, dragged his and Mama’s old double mattress out back, and converted it into a new target pad for his shedball pitches. “Is that a metaphor or a simile?” Everett asked Peter as they stood watching out the kitchen window. I remember this remark clearly, because I didn’t understand it, and didn’t like it when Peter laughed.
Next Papa, for the first time ever, walked down the block to the crappy little 7-Eleven that had replaced the Walsh family’s old corner grocery, bought himself a short case of Miller beer, and toted it home on his shoulder, sort of like a bazooka. Sliding all but one into the refrigerator just as the rest of us were sliding into our chairs for supper, he poured his one bottle into a white plastic Huckleberry Hound glass, carried it over to our forever-alcoholless suppertable, sat casually down in the heat of Mama’s blowtorch stare, and rattled off his trusty old Giveusgratefulhearts grace. He then said, “I live here.”
This statement got no argument. But it didn’t turn down the blowtorch either.
“I’m the father here,” he added. “And I pay the bills here. That gives me the right to make some decisions. Not all the decisions. But some. So here’s three.”
Mama still just sat and stared.
“Decision One. From now on I keep beer in the refrigerator. It’s for nobody but me—Everett, Kade, Irwin, you got that? For Laura’s sake I put this condition on me: if I ever drink more than two in a night, I lose my right to keep it here. But otherwise, get used to it. This world can be a pain, and beer can’t change that. But it’s a slight relief at times. And this teetotally religious crap is getting this family nowhere. Everett, wipe that idiotic smirk off your face. Bet, please stop wiggling.”
Everett wiped. Bet stopped. Mama didn’t move or speak.
“Decision Two. Eight people live here, and the God I believe in put us here to love and respect each other despite our differences. I used to think this was so obvious it didn’t need saying. But after last night I see that some of us don’t believe in love or respect anymore, so those of us who do are going to have to fight back. I started fighting back at lunch hour today, when I phoned that Babcock character and told him he’s no longer welcome in our house.”
Everett flew up out of his chair with the beginnings of a great “Hallelujah!” in his lungs, but Papa’s fist slammed down on the table and Everett dropped back into his chair so fast that it seemed as if Papa had punched him on the top of the head. “What I need from you,” Papa said, “is silence.”
Everett got the message. Papa turned back to the rest of us. “Phoning Laura’s preacher that way was high-handed, I know. But not near as highhanded as it was for that jackass to sit down in my chair and try to teach my children to fear each other. Bet, please! Don’t kick the table. Everett, a smirk isn’t silence, and that’s your last warning. Irwin, listen. If you’re still fond of Babcock’s sermons and like his church, by all means, keep going. I’m not trying to change the way anybody worships. It’s only in this house he’s not welcome. And I hope you see why.”
Irwin grinned hugely, and said, “It’s fair.” But Mama slid her chair back, and not as if ready to fight: she looked ready to flee. It surprised me.
“Decision Three,” Papa said. “According to the God I believe in, the six kids who live here are equal. So I see no reason why, for months now, the three who go to church have been cared for in ways that the other three haven’t. To me, that’s the opposite of Christianity. To me that smacks of Babcock. And like I said, he’s no longer welcome here.”
Papa glanced at Mama, but she just sat there, pondering some nothingness in the center of the table. “Your mother has to do what she thinks is right,” he told us. “But so do I. And I’ve kept quiet too long. I want you kids to know we disagree. I think it should be six school lunches or no school lunches, six mended shirts or no mended shirts, six goodnight kisses or no goodnight kisses. So my third decision is, well … just a warning, really. I don’t want to make trouble, but I just don’t like the way we’re living. So, what I’m saying is, if things don’t change, I may move out … at least for a while.”
I was still struggling to take this in when Irwin roared, “Okay! Okay then, Papa! Things will change!”
“Don’t do it, Papa!” “Stay!” “Please don’t!” “Things’ll change!” the rest of us chimed in.
“From now on I make my own lunches!” Irwin bellowed at Mama. “And everybody else’s if they want! And I’ll do the laundry too—the whole house’s I mean. Even nasty ol’ Everett’s! Even his Atheistic ol’ socks! Starting now! I mean it!” And with that he plugged his nose, held his breath, and dropped like a deep-sea diver down under the table, where he started wrestling the rancid high-top tennis shoes and unmentionable socks from Everett’s ankles and feet. But while Everett blushed and kicked at him and the rest of us broke out laughing, Mama stood, turned, and started down the hallway—and I saw that she was weaving like a drunk: twice she had to grab the wall to keep from falling.
“And Freddy and me,” Bet’s voice nearly shattered the windows with shrill goodwill, “we can keep scientific track of Mama! Like if she doesn’t kiss Kade goodnight, we won’t let her kiss us. Or if she makes a face at Peter, we’ll make her make faces at us. Or if Everett’s room’s a mess, she’ll have to leave ours messy too!”
“Your hearts,” Papa said, wincing down the hallway, “are in just the right place. But listen.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I feel like we’re starting to gang up on Mama, like we’re leaving her out of the fun, see. So what say, before we do anything drastic, we try ganging up in a better way? What say we all go back there, right now, and try to tell her how much we love her? That way, maybe she’ll feel so much a part of us she’ll want to treat us all equal on her own.”
This was the sort of idea that hippies (including me) would pretty well beat to death in a few years. But it seemed fresh and wild at the time, so that was what we did. Piling out of our chairs, we traipsed down the hall, burst into her bedroom, and found her crying hard and closing a chaotically packed suitcase. But we encircled and glommed on to her with our fourteen arms and hands anyhow, and told her in three octaves and seven voices how much we loved her. It was embarrassing, at first, at least to us “rebels.” But as the thing took hold, as we saw, for instance, how Papa had shut his eyes and was cooing his very softest and kindest no matter how dumb it sounded, we began to feel how ridiculously sweet and true this expression of love was, till there stood Everett, patting Mama’s shoulders and hair the way one pats a kitty, shiny-eyed with regret for making her so mad all the time; and Peter, holding her hand, telling her how much he missed talking with her, having her tease him, hearing her laugh; and me, touching whatever I could reach in there between Irwin and Freddy, unable to speak, but moved to tears by the overwhelming, mountain-moving force I felt our united love to be …
Yet the instant we’d touched her, Mama’s tears had stopped and she’d put on a stiff smile. And the longer we encircled her, the more pained and terrible that smile became. Then, the instant we released her, she dropped the smile, lifted her suitcase so that it formed a barrier between her and Papa, and said, “I love you all too. And I’m your mother. Which gives me the right to make some decisions. Here’s just one.”
Knowing more or less what was coming, it stabbed me to see Irwin still beaming at her
with stupid hope. “I’m leaving,” she said—and still Irwin’s smile didn’t fade. “You seem to need your father more than me, and to respect him more than me. So I’m going to go stay with my brother and Mary Jane. It’s getting to be a habit, I know. But it’s hard for me here. I spend my whole day here, every day, feeling so mad I could spit. I’m so ashamed and afraid of the terrible things some of my children have chosen to believe that I, I just don’t know what to do. I keep hoping it’ll get better, I keep hoping you’ll see the light. But it never does. You never do. So I’m leaving.”
Love really does generate tremendous power. But what the truisms about it fail to add is that the results of that power are almost impossible for human beings to predict or control. All our sevenfold love did to Mama at that moment was give her the strength to lift her heavy suitcase as if it were made of balsa wood, and to float away after it without once looking back.
“Don’t go!” Irwin pleaded as she vanished down the hallway. And he, at least, meant what he said. But when the rest of us chimed in—as we’d done when Papa spoke of leaving—the hollowness of our pleas echoed far longer and louder than the pleas themselves.
–II–
“I just don’t know what to tell you,” Papa said when we finally sat down to supper without her. “We tried. It didn’t work. I don’t know what to say.”
Most of us were nodding, or shrugging, or feeling confused. But then a surprising thing happened: Peter turned to Papa, and in an accusing, almost angry tone, said, “I think you do know what to tell us.”
The rest of us gaped at him. But Papa, for a moment, seemed stunned, maybe even a little frightened—and Peter saw this. “I think there’s something about Mama,” he said, “something important, that explains why she gets this way. And, whatever it is, I think it’s time you told us.”
Papa pulled enough of himself together to snap, “What are you talking about?”
But Peter was undeterred. “I can’t say exactly. I just know that Mama used to love us too much to act this way. So there’s got to be a reason. And you know her best. So you must know the reason.”
The twins and Irwin were still gawking at Peter, but Everett was eyeing Papa now, and looking more than a little troubled as Papa said, “Listen, Peter. If I knew any such secret, yours or hers or anybody’s, I’d just have to keep it. That’s what secrets are.”
“So there is one.”
“I didn’t say that. I only said I wouldn’t give a secret away. If you think Mama has one you should know about, ask her yourself.”
“But she won’t tell me!” Peter cried. “You know that, Papa! She thinks I worship Satan! She acts like she hates me! And by not telling us why, you leave us no choice but to think she’s mean and unfair and crazy.”
Papa said nothing to this, and his face had gone so dead that I had no idea whether it was fury or confession that he was close to. But he was close to something, because when he picked up his beer he drank, without pleasure or pause, till it was gone.
“What if,” Peter said, “not knowing this thing, we just can’t love her anymore? It’s getting hard. It’s even hard for you, and you know.”
“Not one more word,” Papa whispered.
“I only want not to hate her back!” Peter said—and when his voice broke we realized how hard it was for him to defy Papa like this. “I only want not to treat her the way she treats me.”
Papa wouldn’t look at him. He just toyed with his white plastic cup. But there was obvious sorrow, and maybe sympathy too, in the way he was staring at Huckleberry Hound.
–III–
I wish I’d had the love, the wisdom, the empathy or even just the raw curiosity to try and find out, back in the mid-sixties, why Mama would storm off the way she did. She always went to stay with her brother and his wife, outside Spokane. She always left in such terrible hurt and anger that it seemed she would never return. And she always came back, calmer but basically unchanged, after three or four days. I’ve learned enough, in the years since, to know that she was leading a life as intricate and dramatic, as painful, and as worthy of respect as my father’s. But this paragraph is revisionist. Mama’s absences were a relief to me, her returns a mild disappointment, and unlike Peter, I had no great curiosity about, the motivations of either. I felt at times that she loved me. I also felt, almost constantly, that she disliked me. And I was satisfied to reciprocate. It damaged us. But that’s the way it was.
–IV–
Papa’s star-crossed pitching career, in my opinion, did more to shape Everett than all the books he ever read and classes he attended put together. Papa’s bum baseball luck had some effect on all of us: for instance, it gave us all a soft spot for snakebit heroes, and made all of us but Irwin quick to smirk at any successful person who thought they got to where they got by simply being gifted. But Papa’s baseball history did so much to shape Everett’s darkish outlook on life that it may be impossible to understand Everett without a complete knowledge of that history. So here is the rest:
After his Oklahoma conversion from straight power-pitching to power-and-junk, Papa went 10 and 13 for the Tacoma Timbers in 1954 and 9 and 15 in 1955. Before even mentioning the won-loss record, Everett would have put the numbers in perspective by pointing out that Tacoma was a cellar club both seasons, and the worst hitting team in the league in ’55. Papa had the most victories (and most losses), most complete games, second-best earned run average (2.95), second-best winning percentage, and also the best pitcher’s batting average on the team over the two-year span. So when both the Timbers’ parent teams (the Senators in ’54, the Giants in ’55) never called him up for a look, and then, for the ’56 season, the Timbers offered him a one-year contract with no raise, Papa decided he’d seen enough of Tacoma. Shredding the contract, he walked out of the Timbers’ office, telephoned the Portland Tugs (against whom he had a career record of 5 and 0 and an ERA of 1.19), arranged a tryout, and enjoyed a camp that included five scoreless innings and an RBI double in exhibition against Tacoma, and three no-hit innings against the Tugs’ parent team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Yet when contract time came, the Tugs cited his age, his old injuries and the twenty-eight Tacoma losses instead of the fact that they’d never once beaten him, then offered so little money that Papa asked for an hour or two to think it over. Strolling over to the nearest cafe, he was stirring sugar into a bitter cup of coffee and thinking about cashing in his baseball chips when a guy in a Panama hat and dark glasses walked up, removed both, revealed the face of a stranger who nevertheless grinned like a long-lost friend, and said, “Hugh Chance? The name’s Jinx Dodds. And I’m a real pirate, not a Pittsburgh phony. I steal ballplayers from fools who can’t appreciate ’em. And I’d like to steal you.”
“Real pirate” was a slightly poeticized description. But Jinx Dodds really was a part-time real estate broker, developer, slumlord and gambler, and he really did own an unaffiliated Class B team in Washington State, the Battle Ground Bulldogs. He also possessed the piratical clout, cleverness and cash necessary to match the Tugs’ monetary offer, and to pitch Papa in a way that would allow him to hold a full-time job on the side.
So that’s what Papa did. After finding—with the ubiquitous Dodds’s help—both a rental house in Camas and a full-time job at the Crown Z mill, Papa celebrated turning twenty-seven years old by winning twenty-seven games for the Cascade League Champion ’Dogs, including six shutouts, three two-hitters, eight home runs and a .364 batting average that would have led not just pitchers but the entire league if he’d had a few dozen more at-bats—
and all summer long a diminutive, lippy, worshipful batboy named Everett handed him his antique Rawlings and his holy Adirondacks and became so hopelessly enamored of the idea that this rare summer of glory was the way the world was meant to be that almost everything that would happen to his father or himself for the next decade or more would strike him as a cheat, a stroke of hideous luck, or an intolerable bore.
Papa’s was an almost unhea
rd-of sort of minor league season, in that anybody who plays that well for even a month at that level is usually sent up to a higher league. But the players who get sent up are usually twenty-one or younger and consider any higher league “up,” whereas Papa had played so much Triple A ball for so little money that he was no longer interested in any definition of “up” but the highest. He actually turned down two modest but honest Pacific Coast League offers late that summer, simply because his two-paycheck Bulldog/Crown Z arrangement was too lucrative to give up. He even promised Jinx Dodds to come do it again next year if no major league offers came his way.
By September, though, news of his spectacular season had wended its way to the top, and by October so many teams had hinted at so many offers of such wildly varying concreteness that he was shopping around for a sports lawyer to help him sort things out. In November, though, when he learned that Mama was pregnant yet again, he suffered a fit of caution and career doubt that ended in a down payment on our Clark Street house instead of the lawyer. And that was when and where it all ended. Handling his own negotiations, Papa was leaning toward Cincinnati (who was offering him more money to play two months of winter ball in the Dominican League than he could make in four months at the mill) when Mama began to hemorrhage, found out she was carrying twins, and was told to stay in bed if she wanted to keep them. So Papa had given his regrets to the Reds and stayed home to help her, but was still talking tryout with St. Louis, Baltimore and Cleveland when he crushed his thumb at the mill.
The Brothers K Page 31
