Painting the Corners Again

by Weintraub, Bob;

  —Lefty Grove

  HE WAS NINETY-NINE years old, just a wisp of a man, when I first heard him tell that amazing story. But don’t let yourself take any of it lightly on account of that. Believe me, Russ had all his marbles. He was playing with a full deck and the joker to boot.

  I’d been an aide in the nursing home just a short while back then—it was 1981, in San Diego—but it didn’t take long to see that Russ was easily the smartest person there. He could talk on any subject at all and tell you things you’d never heard before. When he spoke, you listened, because you knew he had something to teach you every time. Russ read magazines like National Geographic and Smithsonian from cover to cover and watched a lot of videos his family brought him. Operas and documentaries about history were his favorites, and his TV never moved off the education channel. Russ had bad hands, very arthritic, but all he had to do was press a few buttons on his remote to get things going.

  “So what do y’all know ’bout Teddy Roosevelt?” he asked me one afternoon when I was in his room to get his pills ready. “You must have studied him back in school, Arthur.”

  He was the only one who called me Arthur. Everyone else knew I preferred Art or Artie, but Russ had this thing about formality that made him use a person’s full name. He even learned how to pronounce the names of the aides who came from foreign countries, though everyone else had nicknames for them to make it easier. The funny part was that no one ever called him by his full name, which was Russell, and he didn’t seem to care.

  “Not too much,” I answered. “I know he was president sometime in the early 1900s, but I couldn’t tell you which years. And he fought in one of the wars, the Spanish-American I think it was. I remember seeing pictures of him on horseback, charging up a hill. But I forget whether that was in Mexico or where it was.”

  “That’s damn good, Arthur,” he said. “Roosevelt became president in 1901, when McKinley got himself assassinated. He served in office for not quite eight years. The Spanish-American war broke out before that, and was fought mostly in Cuba. And Roosevelt was a big American hero by the time it was over. He sure was. It helped him no end getting elected after that. The picture you’re thinking ’bout was the one showing him leading his men up what was called San Juan Hill.”

  Russ stopped talking for a minute and just stared at me while I put the pills he needed in a small cup. When I finished, he motioned for me to sit near his wheelchair, on the side of his bed. “Like lots of things,” he said, “there’s a story ’bout that, one worth telling.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I’m going to spell it out for you, Arthur. Just be patient.” He rolled his head back and looked up at the ceiling for a minute. He smiled while he was in that position and you could tell he was seeing something in his mind’s eye that made him do it.

  “In 1898,” he began, and lowered his head again, “I was already sixteen years old. I lived in Texas, in a small town ’bout forty miles outside of San Antone called Fenton. My father had grown up as a cowboy in Oklahoma and still made a living for himself that way. Neighbors who owned cattle had him come ’round to rope them and brand them, and sometimes he was paid to break broncos. I used to love watching him do that. After school I worked different jobs in town, but in the summer most of us boys from ’round there had little to do. School let out early in June and we had three months to just take ourselves over to the ball field every day and razz each other ’bout girls at night.

  “In May that year we had the greatest thing happen to us. Today, it’d be like the whole Barnum & Bailey Circus suddenly showing up to perform in some town out in the middle of nowhere. What a time it was. And that’s when I first heard ’bout what they called the Spanish-American war.”

  “What was it, Russ?” I asked. “What happened?”

  He smiled again. “We suddenly had all of a thousand soldiers set up camp right near our town, ’tween us and San Antone, and start training for going to war. It was either land the Gov’ment must have owned, or maybe they leased it from someone, I can’t remember. But they put up them tents all over the place. When I say soldiers, Arthur, I mean most of them were cowboys, just like my old man had been, and they came to that camp from places you’d expect, like Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma. Of course those states were still Indian Territories back then, and there were some real Indians, straight off the reservation, in camp too. All of them had spent most of their lives on the back of a horse and had been brought together to form a cavalry regiment. We went over there lots of times after school and they’d let us stand around watching them ride and do marching drills and take shooting practice with their Springfield rifles. We heard the fighting was going to be in Cuba and they’d be up against some bad foreigners from Spain who’d taken over the island.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I remember now that it was Cuba, not Mexico. An American ship got blown up in the harbor, in Havana.”

  “A ship called the Maine, Arthur, and that’s what got this country into the war. They said it was the Spanish who did it.”

  Russ seemed to be waiting for some kind of an acknowledgement from me. I shook my head up and down and he continued.

  “One day one of the officers came over to talk with us. Seeing him come near, we all would’ve sworn it was Mr. Wyman, who taught English and Geography in school and coached the boys in sports. We figured he must’ve joined the regiment. I think one of us even said, ‘Hello, Mr. Wyman’ before this fellow told us his name was Theodore Roosevelt, and he was a lieutenant colonel, second in charge of the regiment. I mean he and Mr. Wyman could’ve been doubles for each other, with the same walrus mustaches and little round eyeglasses. He even kept rubbing his mustache with his thumb the same way Mr. Wyman always did. Roosevelt saw how we were looking at him, sort of scared like, and must’ve thought it was on account of how important he was.

  “Anyway, he told us they’d prob’ly be training there a few more weeks and then ship out to some port city in Texas or Florida for the trip over to Cuba. That’s when we found out the regiment’s name officially was the First Volunteer Cavalry, but everyone had started calling them the ‘Rough Riders.’ Roosevelt liked that name—you could tell from the big smile on his face when he said it—and he let us know they all couldn’t wait to go fight and help Cuba get independent from Spain.”

  “But Roosevelt came from New York,” I interrupted, “and was just a politician. How could they send him out west to lead a cavalry regiment?”

  “Good question, Arthur,” Russ said. “I didn’t know it then, but turned out he’d spent two years in the North Dakota Badlands when he was younger. That was after his wife died giving birth to their first child. He must’ve wanted to go off by himself and think about things. Started from scratch and became quite a cowboy.”

  Russ let those last words sink in and then picked up the story.

  “I guess he noticed a few of us carrying what went for baseball gloves back then and asked where we played. I told him ’bout the field in our town and he asked if we’d like to play some games against his men on the weekend. We said sure we would and agreed they could use our gloves while they were in the field. So right then we arranged to play two games that Saturday and Sunday.

  “Well, we didn’t know what to expect though we figured most of those cowboys didn’t know too much about playing baseball. But come to find out the regiment had guys in it from the East Coast, and a bunch of them played one sport or another in college. On Saturday they walloped us by better than ten runs, against Billy Johnson who was the best pitcher in our school. And on Sunday it prob’ly would’ve been by twice as much except for Roosevelt mercifully ending the game after six innings, saying his men had to get back to camp for an early dinner. We were totally embarrassed and said we wanted to play them again the next weekend. He said that’d be fine and he’d try bringing more cowboys and fewer Easterners with him.

  “School let out for the summer that week and so we practiced hard
every day ‘til almost dark, getting off the field for just a couple hours starting at noon when the sun beat down the worst. We’d asked Mr. Wyman to run the practices for us and he’d agreed because he still wasn’t sure if he had a summer job in San Antone or not. I played third base for the team but I had a real good arm so Mr. Wyman had me doing some pitching too. We’d already let him know how he looked just like Colonel Roosevelt and he was nipping at the bit to see it for himself. He could ride a horse as good as Roosevelt—we all knew that from the times we’d seen him in the local rodeos they had in Fenton. In fact, next to my old man, he was the best in town.

  “Before the Saturday game got started, we brought Mr. Wyman over to the Colonel and you could see they hardly believed their eyes. They shook hands and laughed and you’d have sworn there was a mirror there ’tween the two of them. Roosevelt told us this was the last weekend we’d be playing because they’d received their orders to ship out and would be leaving by train for Tampa on the following Thursday. The game that day was a lot closer than the first two, but they still had a few of the college guys with them and beat us by two or three runs right at the end. I smoked a home run in that one, a line drive over the left fielder’s head he was still chasing when I’d finished rounding the bases.”

  “Did Teddy Roosevelt play at all?” I asked.

  “I was just getting to that,” Russ said. “But you ought to understand back then no one called him ‘Teddy.’ He was ‘Colonel’ to everyone. Wasn’t ‘til long afterwards that some newspaperman started the ‘Teddy’ business. Anyhow, for the first three games he sat on their bench most of the time but every so often went out and coached at one of the bases. He was about forty years old then, prob’ly twice as old as most of the soldiers who were playing. But after three innings or so of the final game, Roosevelt put himself in and played right field where he must’ve figured he wouldn’t have much to do. He laughed when he went out there and hollered over for Mr. Wyman to get in the game too. ‘Come on, Tyler,’ he said, ‘let’s show these young bucks a thing or two.’ Mr. Wyman laughed right back at him but shook his head and said he’d stay where he was.

  “On his first time at bat the Colonel hit a dying quail into center field for a single and was happy as heck about it. We actually got ourselves the lead in that game and built it up to ’bout five runs with a couple innings to go. Then, when the ‘Rough Riders’ started a rally and were getting closer, Mr. Wyman put me in to pitch.

  “They cut us down to just a run ahead and had a couple men on base when it was Roosevelt’s turn to bat again. He stood real close to home plate, not leaving much room for a pitcher to throw inside. I figured I had to move him off a little by aiming the ball at his belt buckle. I never intended it to be any higher, but that’s where it went. Well, he just froze right there when he saw the ball coming at him, then turned away at the last second but not in time to keep from getting hit on the back of the head. He sort’ve twisted ’round a little and then just flopped right down in the dirt.”

  Russ stopped talking for a few moments and I knew he was reliving that scene again.

  “Well, natur’ly,” he went on, “everyone came running over to him. I was one of the first and was scared to death seeing him lying there with his eyes closed, his glasses on the ground, and him not moving at all. Mr. Wyman took charge and began asking Roosevelt a few questions to see how he’d answer. I guess he didn’t like what he heard because after that he hollered for a soldier to ride into town with one of us boys and bring back Doc Lacey and a wagon as fast as we could. I figured I should go since I was the one who hit him and we got Doc back to the field in no more than half an hour.

  “The short of it is it took Doc Lacey only a few minutes to know Roosevelt had himself a severe concussion. He wanted to treat him in his office, where there was a bed in the room next door, so he got some of the soldiers to move the Colonel there in the wagon, slowly and carefully. The game never picked up from that point, as you’d imagine, so we always said afterwards we’d won it.”

  Russ took a second to chuckle at that.

  “On Monday morning I went over to Doc Lacey’s office to see Mr. Roosevelt so I could apologize for hitting him in the head. But Doc told me he was sleeping and prob’ly wouldn’t be able to have any visitors for several days. He said he might even have to move him to the hospital in San Antone. I repeated what Roosevelt had said ’bout heading for Tampa on Thursday with his regiment. But Doc just shook his head, saying there was no chance of that and telling me the Colonel wouldn’t leave his office to make the trip unless it was over Doc’s dead body.”

  “So what happened?” I asked, probably raising my voice a little too much.

  Russ winked at me, as if to tell me to calm down, that it was all coming out. “On Wednesday,” he continued, “I went back there again to see if there’d been any improvement. Just as I got to the office, the door opened and I was almost bowled over to see Mr. Roosevelt coming out with another soldier, an older man with white hair and gold stars on his uniform. But then I realized it was really Mr. Wyman when he said, ‘Good morning, Russell,’ told me Doc wasn’t letting any visitors in and said he wanted to see all the boys at the ball field at four o’clock that afternoon.

  “Well, most of us showed up and were sitting ’round and talking instead of practicing, but we had to wait ‘til close to four-thirty before Mr. Wyman got there. He came on horseback, riding in hard, and was dressed in old clothes and a long pair of boots you could tell had just been shined. A job had come through for him in San Antone, he told us, if he could be there by Thursday afternoon, so he was leaving early the next morning. He said he’d be back teaching in September, God willing, and told us we should have a good summer and play lots of baseball. Then we were all surprised when he shook hands with everyone there before mounting up, saluting like the soldiers did and riding off.

  “After baseball practice on Thursday, just ’bout noon, I went back to Doc Lacey’s office again, hoping to see Mr. Roosevelt. But when I went inside, no one was there. The bed he kept in the next room was empty when I looked in and the mattress was gone. I hollered up the stairs to the second floor, first for Doc and then for Mrs. Lacey, but there was no answer. I went over to the food and grain store Sam Jenkins ran and asked if he’d seen Doc. He had, he told me, ’bout eight o’clock that morning when he first opened up and was sweeping in front. Doc and Mrs. Lacey drove by slowly, with their own horse and a borrowed one pulling the wagon. He said Mr. Wyman was with them, riding with Doc up front. Doc’s wife was sitting in back on a pile of blankets, and there was something else in there with her but it was mostly covered up and Sam couldn’t make out what it was. Doc said he and the missus were going to see some friends in San Antone and Mr. Wyman waved at Sam as the wagon passed on by.”

  I guessed it was Roosevelt lying in the wagon on that missing mattress, but I could see Russ wanted to keep on with the story without my interrupting again.

  “The next week, when I went to Doc’s and asked him ’bout Mr. Roosevelt, he told me the Colonel had made a remarkable recovery from his concussion and went back to his regiment on Thursday morning in time to ship out with all the others. I reminded Doc what he’d said on Monday ’bout Mr. Roosevelt having no chance of leaving, but he cut me short and said there was no sense asking lots of questions, you couldn’t always be just right in predicting how well or poorly a patient would respond to treatment.

  “When September came, we had a substitute teacher for the better part of three weeks before Mr. Wyman returned. He looked more tanned than he ever had before, and when he wore a short-sleeved shirt with no jacket on, you could see several places on his arms where it looked like long cuts were still healing. He told us we all looked a foot taller than when he’d seen us last and asked whether we’d enjoyed the summer. Everyone said ‘Yes,’ of course, and then I asked him ’bout his. ‘Work is work,’ he answered, flashing us a smile, ‘but it was totally interesting and I’ll tell you more about it some
time.’ He never did, all that year, and then moved to another school way down in Houston just after my class graduated. That was the last I saw of him.

  “Being where we lived, we never heard anything about the Spanish-American war while the fighting was going on. But a couple years later, when Roosevelt was running for vice president on the ticket with McKinley, I was living at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. That’s when I read all ’bout how he’d been such a hero in the war, leading his troops on a charge up San Juan Hill on horseback and helping kick the Spanish army out of Cuba. And in one of the pictures that caught my eye in a book ’bout the war, there was Colonel Roosevelt, the leader of the ‘Rough Riders’ posing with some other soldiers, bandages showing on both his arms.

  “And you know what, Arthur? Ever since that day, when I saw that picture and thought about the baseball I threw hitting Roosevelt in the head and all, I’ve always said to myself, ‘Good job that summer, Mr. Wyman, a damn good job over there in Cuba.’”

  Russ winked at me again. “Now what do y’all think of that, Arthur?” he asked.

  And all I could say was, “I don’t know, Russ.”

  I stayed in that nursing home for four years. When I left, Russ was a hundred and three years old, sharp as ever, and still figuring the story was worth telling to every new nurse or aide that came there to work.

  MATTERS OF PRINCIPLE

  “There is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first or last time. I owe him my best.”

  —Joe DiMaggio

  THAT’S RIGHT, EVERYONE knows North Dakota doesn’t have a city big enough to get itself a major league baseball team, but there’s a lot of baseball playing that goes on here. In the time you’re asking me about, back in the mid-fifties, Devil’s Lake—where I’ve lived all my life—was one of four towns in our corner of the state that had a professional team. The teams were in what was called the North Dakota–Minnesota Independent League. Minnesota had four teams across the state line from us, and the eight clubs played their entire schedules against each other. It was usually still cold in May, and then too cold for baseball after about midway into September, so the teams played a 75-game season during the months of June, July, and August. Then the first place team in each state played each other to see which one could win four games and be the league champion. We all called that the “little world series,” just to make it seem more important.