Waiting for Teddy Williams

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “What?” E.A. called. “What’s that?”

  Teddy stopped and turned back. “I said, ask Gypsy Lee.” Then he continued down the mountain, leaving E.A. standing beside Long Tom, more confused than ever.

  19

  TRADITIONALLY, Kingdom County farm families paid their property taxes with maple syrup income or by selling off some young stock or mature timber. Not the WYSOTT Allens. For as long as there had been WYSOTT Allens, they’d paid their taxes by peddling moonshine or running whiskey, a tradition first Gran, and then Gypsy, had faithfully continued to honor by smuggling American booze north into Canada, where it was worth about twice its value in the United States.

  They started out just after sunrise in the Late Great Patsy Cline, with Gypsy driving, E.A. navigating, Gran and Old Bill in the back seat. Gran had a rule of the road, which was that they had to stop at every yard sale and garage sale they came to. Gypsy liked yard sales, too. She’d outfitted E.A. at them for years. Some of his favorite Red Sox caps and T-shirts had been bought off three-legged card tables in backcountry hollows and mill-town tenement yards. In St. Johnsbury they stopped at a sale outside a dented-can store. Gypsy bought a mildewed set of Raymond Chandler paperbacks and Gran bought The Illustrated History of Spiritualism. E.A. bought a baseball card, a dog-eared 1942 Topps Johnny Pesky.

  They kept to the back roads because Patsy wasn’t registered, though Bill had stuck a 1958 See Vermont plate on the back just before they left home. At the liquor store in Lancaster, New Hampshire, Gypsy bought ten fifths of Seagram’s. A yellow tomcat weighing at least twenty pounds lay on the counter.

  “How much you want for that cat?” Bill said to the clerk.

  “We don’t need any cats,” Gran said.

  “What I like about a cat is they don’t require much choring,” Bill said.

  “You can have him for ten dollars,” the clerk said. Bill paid her, and they took the yellow cat along.

  In Franconia they bought ten fifths of Home Comfort. In Woodsville fifteen half-gallons of Jack Daniel’s. In Lebanon another six gallons.

  By midafternoon Patsy was riding on her springs. The cat, which Gran had named Bucky Dent, was lolling upside down in her lap, all four paws in the air, purring from the Seagram’s Gran had been feeding it. At various yard sales en route they’d picked up a set of Boswell’s Life of Johnson for Gypsy, an ancient three fingered baseball mitt for E.A., and a 1934 Philco upright radio with tubes as big as shotgun shells for Gran to try to bring in the Red Sox on.

  They arrived home at dusk, detouring out around the village to avoid encountering the deputy. After dropping off Gran, Bill, and the intoxicated Bucky Dent, Gypsy and E.A. started up the Canada Post Road toward their rendezvous. Gypsy drove, with E.A. holding the Battery Beam in case they spotted a deer or a moose.

  They crept up the mountain. Twice they stopped so E.A could get out and lay some long hemlock planks, which they’d hidden in the woods, over ditches where the culverts had been washed out, just as Outlaw Allen had done many years before. Near the fork in the road, E.A. spotted the lights of a vehicle coming out the River Road far below. It passed Midnight Auto and turned up the Canada Post Road. Gypsy put the rifle scope on it. “It’s our dear, beloved deputy,” she said.

  E.A.’s heart began to beat faster as Gypsy drove up the right fork toward the new beaver bog he’d discovered on May Day. While the warden’s four-wheel-drive truck could probably negotiate the gullies where the culverts had been, no vehicle that was not amphibious could get through that bog. Just beyond an old log landing, the road ended and the flat, black water stretched away into the darkness behind the beaver dam. Gypsy backed into the landing and cut the lights.

  Ten minutes later they heard the warden’s engine whining as he gunned his truck up the mountain. The lights of the peace officer’s vehicle flared into view. It bowled along toward them, the siren shrieking as it passed the landing where Gypsy and E.A. waited in the dark. The truck shot off the new beaver dam, landing in five feet of water. The siren continued to scream after the lights went out. Gypsy and E.A. stayed just long enough to ascertain that the warden was uninjured, which to judge from his very inventive language seemed to be the case, before heading back out to the fork and taking the left branch.

  When they reached the mountaintop, E.A. was startled to see three large men in RCMP uniforms standing beside Long Tom in the headlights of a truck.

  “Don’t worry, hon, it’s not what you think,” Gypsy said.

  The biggest officer stepped up to the window of the rig. “Miss Gypsy Allen, I presume,” he said, and E.A. recognized the reassuring baritone of Sergeant Preston of the Yukon—Gypsy’s Corporal Colin Urquahart.

  “Good evening, officer,” she said. “I believe that you and my son are already acquainted.”

  “We’ve met at your place once or twice, eh?” Sergeant Preston said, winking at E.A. He waved to the other two officers. “Boys, here’s the good stuff for the annual barbecue. Get a load out and help me transfer it.”

  To Gypsy he said, “And yes, Gypsy Lee, I know the drill. I’m going to pay you in American currency.”

  Driving back along the Post Road, Gypsy was in such a good mood that E.A. came close to asking the all-important question. The property tax money in her pocket, she sang “Sticks and Stones.”

  “There was old John Crow the whiskey runner,

  Sold his soul to the drink one summer.

  And my friend Richard, down in the trailer,

  Lost both arms to an old hay baler.”

  Very inspiring. But to E.A. the time still didn’t seem quite right. Next week Gypsy had promised to take him wild-orchid poaching to celebrate her thirtieth birthday. That might be the right venue. In the meantime, the warden would have to hire Devil Dan to derrick his truck out of the bog with the Hook. They passed the deputy walking down the mountain, drenched to the skin and waving wildly for them to stop.

  But of course they didn’t.

  20

  WILD WOODSFLOWER GULF lay in a crease high on the mountain. Here, in a sequestered hollow, several kinds of lady’s slippers grew undisturbed. Undisturbed, that is, by anyone but E.A. and Gypsy, who privately farmed them for an orchidist at the Montreal Botanical Gardens who had a summer home on Lake Memphremagog.

  They left Patsy at the fork where the warden had taken the wrong turn and fished their way up the steep brook that rose in the gulf. Gypsy fished one pool, E.A. fished the next, then she hopscotched around him to the pool above. They’d fished this way for years. The pools were tiny stone washbasins, pockets under overhanging yellow birch roots, dark curves in the shadows of looming hemlocks. The trout were small, with backs the color of new maple leaves, red speckles ringed with turquoise, and orange stomachs. Gypsy was as adept at brook fishing as she was awkward at baseball. She could pluck a trout out of a run only a few inches deep, and she had a sixth sense for where they’d be lying.

  Besides his fishing pole, E.A. had a sack and shovel. Tiny blue butterflies—azures, Gypsy said—congregated around damp spots on the trail beside the stream. Spotted wood frogs lived in the lush bankside ferns. A moose had preceded them up the mountain, its muddy hoof prints six inches deep. The sun broke through and everything glistened—the leaves, the maroon and yellow and blue stones in the streambed, the dark hemlock trunks. A winter wren whistled, the longest birdcall in the world. Gypsy shook her head, said she wished she had his wind and vibrato. A Blackburnian warbler flashed from tree to tree, its fiery throat gleaming.

  They startled a partridge and her brood. The mother bird flapped off, dragging a wing. The chicks ran a few steps in the opposite direction, then grabbed dead leaves and turned upside down under them, lying perfectly still. How in the world could she get that wonderful adaptation into a song? Gypsy wondered to E.A. There had to be a way.

  They came to more forks in the brook, each time taking the larger branch. Finally the stream was just a seep and they ran out of fishing. Ahead was the gulf, a rav
ine about one hundred feet deep and three hundred feet long. Beside a deer path winding up the south wall of the chasm, between jumbled boulders covered with moss, grew hundreds of yellow, pink, and showy lady’s slippers. These wild orchids were notoriously difficult to transplant, but Gypsy knew exactly how to do it successfully and never took more than six or seven specimens of each color. The Canadian botanist paid her fifty dollars apiece for them. The same amount he paid her per hour to pose as Persephone, bedecked with a floral crown and little else, while he photographed her.

  “The trick here, hon, is to get plenty of dirt around their roots and bring back enough extra woods dirt for each plant to think it’s still growing back in the Vermont forest, even though it’s in a conservatory belonging to some horse’s ass in Montreal.”

  Exhuming a saffron-colored orchid, E.A. wondered if he’d ever be able to stand living in a city, even for part of the year. If he was going to play major-league baseball, he’d have to figure out a way. He slipped the gorgeous exotic into the burlap bag and spaded up a pink lady’s slipper. As a small boy, he’d thought the pink ones were elves’ shoes.

  “Ma? How come it’s against the law to dig these flowers up?”

  “Well, a lot of orchid poachers aren’t very conservation-minded, hon. They’d clean out a patch the way old Huck Lapointe cleaned out the trout in that beaver pond up behind his place a few years ago. It’s a good law so far as it goes. But it’s still just man’s law. The day I open up Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John and see where Our Father Who Art in Heaven or his Loving Son says ‘Thou shalt not pick, destroy, transplant, or sell the showy lady’s slipper,’ I’ll never dig up another one. I promise.”

  “Ma?”

  “What, sweetie?”

  “If I asked you something, would you answer it?”

  “Always, hon. Are you starting to have dreams about holding commerce with naked girls? That’s entirely normal, sweetie. I’m really happy for you.”

  “No, ma. Well, yeah, but we’ve been over all that before. It’s about Teddy. The drifter.”

  “Oh.” Gypsy brushed her red hair away from her eyes. “What do you want to know about him?”

  E.A. took a breath. “Did Teddy kill my father? In that wreck with the train?”

  “Teddy kill your father? Oh, hon. No. Jesum Crow, sweetie. Where on earth . . . you thought Teddy killed your father?”

  E.A. nodded.

  “Honey boy, who do you think your father was?”

  “I know who he was, ma. His initials are on the water tower with yours. They’re pretty faint, but you can make them out. Plus I saw the write-up on the accident in an old Monitor. And his picture in your yearbook. Ferdinand Viens.”

  Gypsy’s hands shot to her mouth. “Fern Viens? Hon, those aren’t Fern Viens’s initials on the tank. And Teddy Williams never killed your pa because—”

  “Because what, ma?”

  “Because those initials aren’t F V, Ethan. They’re E W. For Edward Williams. Teddy Williams is your father.”

  TEDDY

  21

  “NOW I GET IT,” E.A. told the Colonel. “He came back on my eighth birthday to try to set things right.”

  “I used to watch him from out here,” the Colonel said. “He had the smoothest swing, the quickest hands, the best throw to second I ever saw. Ages past, the House of David came here to play our boys. Ran all over us, needless to say. Fisk played here. Rich Gale, Bill Lee, a passel of them. Teddy was as good as the best. The accident was on the eve of the day he was slated to go down to Worcester, I believe it was, for his big tryout. Instead he went to the hospital and then to prison. Well, there are worse things he could do than come back to show his boy how to play ball.”

  “I told him I never wanted to see him again,” Ethan said, wishing more than anything that he hadn’t.

  “That doesn’t matter. He wants to see you. For better or for worse, he’s your pa. Now skedaddle. BP’s beginning down yonder on the ball field.”

  As the Colonel had predicted, Teddy came back, and E.A.’s thirteenth summer turned out to be a good one. E.A. heard that Teddy was running a lathe at the bat mill and staying at the hotel. They didn’t talk about the accident again, or about Teddy’s being E.A.’s pa. Two or three evenings a week he’d appear at Gran’s and they’d go through BP and fielding practice, and around dusk he’d drift back over to the village. Sometimes Gypsy watched them for a minute from the dooryard, but Gran stayed inside, hunkered over the yard-sale Philco, trying to pick up the Red Sox games through the mountain static. One night in late June Boston blew an eight-run lead and lost to Seattle 12–11. The Sox never bounced back from that loss and neither did Gran.

  Ethan made the Outlaws. It was getting harder to recruit new players, interest in town ball was waning, and teams were dropping out of the Northern Border League. Even in the Common attendance had fallen off. In another five or six years, E.A. figured, town ball would be a thing of the past. But when Moonface got drank and stumbled into the Colonel’s pedestal and broke his toe, E.A. began starting regularly at shortstop.

  What was the book on him? Well, that he had a quick bat. It was hard to get a fastball past him, though he’d still occasionally swing at a hard pitch up and out of the strike zone. In the field he was nearly flawless. He rarely made an error, and he held his ground on Cy’s throws down to second to nail stealing base runners. He had some trouble hitting curve balls. He didn’t shy away or stick his foot in the water bucket or get out on his front foot too fast, and he saw the ball all the way to the bat and tried to go with the pitch. But the craftier curve-ball pitchers could get him to pop up or ground out weakly three out of four times with a hook on the outside corner. Still, by mid-July he was hitting .340, second-highest on the team after Earl, and leading the Outlaws with walks, steals, and on-base percentage. The men called him the Kid. Kid Allen, like a prizefighter. But they teased him less than they used to. He had a knack for being in the right place to make a big play in the field and for knocking in the game-winning run or scoring it by taking an extra bag with his daring base running. He had an instinct for the game, they said. And he had the most heart of any player anyone, including the elderly bat boys on the hotel porch, could remember. Nothing daunted him. In any clutch situation he wanted to go up to the plate. In the field he wanted the ball to be hit to him.

  True, E.A. had Gypsy’s slender build. He was never going to be as rugged as Earl, much less Teddy, and this troubled him. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to hit the really long ball. Also, at night, and even during the day, he was confused by thoughts about “holding intimate commerce with girls,” as Gypsy had put it. But since he didn’t attend school and lived outside the village, he knew few girls, and none well, and in fact had little commerce of any kind with them. Mainly E.A. concentrated on baseball, as he always had, working hard on his game, bribing the Outlaws to give him extra BP in exchange for duplicate baseball cards, working out on his own, and continuing to run everywhere he went.

  At first Gypsy wouldn’t let him go to away games with the Outlaws because she correctly suspected that they drank and drove. Not only did they drink prodigious quantities of beer coming home from games late at night, they drank en route to their games as well. E.A. wheedled and begged to go along, but to no avail until the Outlaws had to play a double-header in Woodsville, New Hampshire, one Sunday with only eight players, and he talked Earl into making him the designated driver. That was fine with Gypsy. At thirteen he drove as well as or better than most of the men on the team anyway. Certainly he drove better sober than they did drunk. Usually he drove Pappy’s big Buick, driving forty-five or fifty at most, to New Hampshire and western Maine, up into Canada (Pappy drove through the checkpoints), over into upstate New York. Anyplace they could pick up a game.

  Teddy continued to practice with him regularly, but he didn’t come to many of E.A.’s games. Teddy had little interest in town-team ball. When E.A. admitted that curve balls tied him in knots, Teddy threw him
breaking pitches by the hour, spotting them wherever E.A. requested. He continued to give the boy very little advice. This was part of what made him a good teacher. When E.A. punched a breaking ball on the outside corner over first base and was mad at himself for not driving it into a gap, Teddy said, “That’s about all you can do with that pitch, Ethan. That was a good piece of hitting.”

  He never gave E.A. any advice at all about throwing but continued to insist that they toss together before every workout. They’d start twenty feet apart. Then thirty. Fifty. Sixty. As if, E.A. thought, playing catch was some kind of father-son ritual. Once Teddy asked E.A. if his arm ever hurt him. Ethan said no.

  In September, orange-and-black monarch butterflies began to congregate in the high mowing meadow. As part of E.A.’s home-schooling, Gypsy borrowed Big Earl’s Rand McNally Road Atlas and traced out the southward flight of the monarchs, teaching him history and geography along the way. “Now they’re going over the old Erie Canal, hon—Clinton’s ditch, they called it. It opened the way for westward expansion. Here’s Gettysburg . . .” And she told him all about Pickett’s charge and gave him a wonderful book to read called The Killer Angels, about General Robert E. Lee and General James Longstreet and an incredibly brave young man from Maine named Joshua Chamberlain.

  Once again color was appearing on the mountainside, creeping down from the top, past Wild Woodsflower Gulf, past Warden’s Bog, the first blush of the maples gradually intensifying to vivid reds and yellows. Bill said it hurt his eyes to look at the fall foliage. He didn’t know why the leaves had to bother to change; it seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, just to drop off a few days later. Gypsy said the only other place in the world where the fall foliage was as bright was a province in northern China. Gran said the Red Sox could all go to China in a handbasket. Maybe they could beat the Taiwan Little League All-Stars, though she had her doubts. E.A. was studying algebra and Latin that fall, which Gypsy said he needed for his college boards. He didn’t mind. Gypsy had been a whiz at algebra and Latin.