by Jon Billman
FOR HILARY
I was obliged to submit to being helped back to camp, and in the cool of the evening watched the return of the fishers, who were as proud of the strings of ugly little things they carried as if they had been pickerel or bass.
—Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Boots and Saddles
Cheers to my family, my parents, Duane and Nancy, and especially to my wife, Hilary, for the trainload of patience and the lantern-light reading. Here’s to John Keeble, who shared his wine and turkey and gave me the best writing advice I’ve ever received: Write hard. To Mick and Pam, for a place in Zion to hang my hat. To everyone on the fire crew in Lead, South Dakota—you showed me how to identify my escape routes. Here’s to Ham and Kim, Kristin Lang, and the Wyoming Arts Council. Here’s to the magazine editors, to Leigh Feldman, my agent, and Courtney Hodell, my editor, for the jalopy tour of downtown Faith. To all the philosophers and liars in Kemmerer, Wyoming. And for the hand with the branding iron, here’s to Annie Proulx, my friend on the other side of the Divide. May you always have tight lines, dry powder, and a shot of whiskey in your coffee cup.
Indians
Kerr’s Fault
Custer Complex
Calcutta
Honeyville
Becky Weed
Atomic Bar
Sugar City
Custer on Mondays
Ash
Winter Fat
When We Were Wolves
Albatross
ike all prolonged natural disasters, the Dakota dust bowl bred superstition. Real estate changed hands by the bushel. The government and railroad boosters had told dirt-poor eastern farmers that if they moved into the Great American Desert and plowed, the rains would come. But unlike the chinch bugs, rain had not followed the plow here. After the buffalo were gone, the cattle ate the buffalo grass down to nothing. Then came the barbed-wire fences that only wind and soil and grasshoppers could pass through. After a few good wet years the droughts came. Then more mice and rabbits and winds. Without asking, folks in the Dakotas got parts of Texas and Oklahoma, and Canada landed good Dakota bottomland for a whistle. Townships, counties, entire states began to hold collective days of prayer to try to coax God into ending the suffering. It was a form of spiritual cloud-seeding as well as a one-ring circus. Preachers wrung their hands, looked at their shoes, then at the sky. People’s new hope was that beating the socks off an Indian ball team might change the medicine.
We spent most of the Depression as barnstormers, living like the hoboes who packed the boxcars thick as blackbirds and playing other Indian League reservation teams, civic all-stars, semi-pro teams, barnstorming colored squads, CCC teams, Rotarians, and prison teams for whatever beans, chickens, Grain Belt beer, and gasoline we could get.
We drove around the Dakotas with the windows open, our mouths shut against the dirt that would settle on our teeth. Sometimes the dust would be so bad we had to keep wet handkerchiefs over our faces to breathe. When we were playing well and did have the money, we weren’t allowed in most hotels or motor lodges. We stayed in the colored motels, but those were rare in the plains. Usually we stopped the car and slept with fleas and chiggers on wool blankets under the stars. Never rained anyway.
Our pitcher, Job Looks Twice, could tell the weather in his sleeve. “Hot today,” he’d say in the relative cool of the morning when we set out in the old Model T for another town. Waves of heat would rise from the hood of the car. Dust rolled in the open windows and stuck to our faces. “Very hot.” It was in the last of the wet years that Job, drunk as nine Indians, had fallen asleep on the tracks in downtown Sioux City, giving his right arm to a loaded eastbound grain train.
They could not reattach his arm because they never found it. For a time, just after the accident, Job cursed God and prayed that he might die. But the stump healed without infection, and unlike the rest of the country, Job’s personal depression was short-lived. He cropped his hair, bought a new black traveling suit and straw fedora, and—good thing he pitched from the port side—went on to keep us well above 500. This in 1931, when it wouldn’t rain any real amount on the plains for another ten years. Ever since the accident, Job could forecast the weather in his sleeve, from some feeling, or nonfeeling, where his arm used to be. We knew it wouldn’t rain, for Job’s barometric arm told us so. Dust was a part of our lives.
Job was a second-generation product of the missionaries and, after the accident, became obsessed with repentance. The loss of the limb had thrown the big lefty off-balance just enough to make his curve ball dance and his slider tail slick and hard. With the stump, which began just above where his elbow had been before Sioux City, he cradled his left-handed, three-fingered glove against his chest. He released the ball, followed through with his good arm, and capped the glove onto his good hand before the pitch reached the strike zone.
Job could field bunts as well as shots rifled at the mound, but he didn’t need to have much range as a fielder: the other Indians— Asa Red Owl, Carp Whitehorse, Baptist Thundergrass, Walter and Jacob Elk, Jeremiah “Big Chief” Montgomery, Otis Downwind, and myself—covered the field like a trade blanket. At the plate Job learned to bunt one-handed and usually beat the throw to first.
In those days farmers and bankers would search the dawn sky for signs of rain, but the only clouds were clouds of dust, the only storms the soil-and-wind rollers that blew out of the south and west. “We cannot expect to understand the mysteries of God’s weather,” Job would say. He believed everything happened for a reason, God’s reason. And unlike the rest of the team, Job never tried to question the logic behind it.
Besides his beloved spitball, Job was partial to another illegal gem he called his needleball. At any general store you could buy 78-rpm phonograph needles fifty for a dime. Job kept a few of the needles stuck in the seams of his trousers and a dozen or so more behind the mound under his rosin bag. With a motion that looked like he was simply wiping his only hand, he would unquiver a needle and finger it into the threads of the ball. The weight of the needle put rising zip onto his fastball and a ten-inch break in his nickel curve. Umpires would examine the ball but never find anything because the impact with the mitt or bat knocked the needle from the seams and into the dirt.
Before his accident Job’s needleball had nearly killed a white man over to Woonsocket. The guy had used his spikes on Baptist Thundergrass at second base in the first inning, and Job had been brushing him back all afternoon with a salvo of knockdowns at the chest. Job would get the batter nervous and deep in the box, then paint the outside corner for strikes. A fastball in the eighth got away and he caught the batter in the temple. The man appeared dead, but as it turned out, Job only blinded him.
The Woonsocket players, too stunned to charge the mound, hovered around their downed comrade, fanning dust away from his nostrils. A minister climbed out of the stands and stood over the body, saying a prayer for his soul. Big Chief Montgomery walked out of a dirt devil in right field and started the car while the newly blind man held everyone’s attention. The Indians lit out of town under cover of a dust storm. Blind man couldn’t do more than snap beans for a living. Ever after the Indians steered clear of Woonsocket.
When Job lost his arm to the grain train he had thought it was retribution for the blinding. Arm for an eye. Job believed that if he lived a good life his de-railed arm would be waiting for him when he died.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I’ll reach for something with the arm that’s not there. A tin cup. A baseball. I can feel the thing but can’t pick it up. Then I’m aware that it will not be raining anytime soon.” Job was sure weather came from heaven. “If my good outweighs the not-good and I make it there, I’ll get my arm back. And the blind man from Woonsocket will get his eyes.”
As boys, we had an old horsehide ball my father, a missionary from Sioux Falls, had given us. Though I was white and Presbyterian as hell, I had hair black as a crow. I wore it long and braided. I tanned like a buffalo hide under the sun. My father’s life work was to save the heathen from the fires of damnation. When the Indians took to barnstorming, I chose baseball over Jesus, packed my Sunday suit in a canvas satchel, and set out for the open prairie with the Everywhere Spirit.
We had all grown up together in Porcupine, playing prairie ball on a sand-and-rock field in the cool of early evening. As kids, when the Cubs and White Sox games were on and the weather allowed for good reception, we would sit cross-legged in the mercantile owned by Asa’s mother and listen through the static on a storage-battery neutrodyne set to the Chicago teams on WLS. The nine of us, shiny black hair, no shirts, dirty bare feet, stared at the radio among the canned goods. The radio put the idea of professional baseball into our heads. We would play ball, passing around our one and only glove, taking turns spitting Red Man chaw into the sweet spot and working it in with our fists. We learned to field bad hops bare-handed, bad hops being the rule.
Job stayed out past dark every night, throwing at a red strike zone painted on an outhouse behind the store. Throw, walk, pick up the ball, back to the makeshift mound, throw again at the target he could no longer see. Job’s pitching made a slow, metered thump against the weathered wood, like the beating of a drum at sunset.
I began to stay behind with him to catch, where the whistling sound of his pitches became so familiar that soon I could catch Job in the dark. Though I was small and skinny, I grew to realize that my purpose in life would be to wear the secondhand tools of ignorance in the dirt behind home plate.
“How’s the arm tonight?” I’d yell to Job as I squatted to catch a fastball, knowing he wouldn’t answer. His mind was too busy listening to the electric hum of his pitches.
We got the red-and-gray wool-flannel uniforms, patched and stained, but free, from a women’s relief circle over in Mud Butte. The uniforms were at least ten years old, having belonged to a team of white ranch hands. The team name came easy—the felt letters across the chest already scripted: MUD BUTTE INDIANS.
The Indians’ play had much in common with the colored teams of the time. We were hustlers. We liked to bunt. We loved to steal third and home. We utilized the squeeze play and the hit-and-run. We knew about sacrificing.
Sometimes our aggressiveness cost us runs. But often, against the better teams—colored teams and semi-pro squads out of Aberdeen or Jamestown or Dickinson or Mobridge or Chadron or Stillwater—we made up the difference between losing and winning through hustle alone. This with only an hour or two of bad sleep in the car and just nine players—no one on the pine. Job Looks Twice had to pitch the entire game, and even doubleheaders some Sundays. The winning was so easy we sometimes put one of the Elk brothers on the mound and rested Job’s arm. Some days we played our hearts out and won. Other days a different luck would pick up a bat and knock us into the next county.
Close calls always went to the other team. Called strikes were unheard-of. Job never argued with umpires, because he knew it was fruitless. The umps had the support of the fans, who sometimes resembled angry mobs. The other teams had to either go down swinging or hit the ball into play so we could glove it.
Our vested interest in winning games went well beyond pride. When we didn’t win we didn’t get paid. We were in high demand. Our name was hoodoo. Many people believed that beating the Indians would bring a break from the dust. As well as being the catcher, I also arranged the Indians’ schedule, which usually meant wiping the layers of dust from my face, tucking my braid down the back of my collar and hustling into town while the rest of the Indians scrounged up supper by the river. Except for Job. We’d find the local watering hole and speak with the mayor, the sheriff, barkeeps, the undertaker, the men who planned the games. They ran ads in the local newspapers, cartoons of feathered savages with big teeth and tomahawks running bases. Word of our winning preceded us, and opposing teams shot beanballs at our heads in the early innings. Sometimes it was a hard sell to get the men interested in playing us at all. “Beat us and maybe it will rain,” I told them, their eyes on Job and the arm that wasn’t there. Hell, their faces would say, if we can’t beat a one-armed Indian baseball team, we don’t deserve rain.
“You shouldn’t sell us on rain,” Job said to me once on the way back to the river camp. “It will come back to hurt us.”
“Sometimes it’s the only way I can sell us,” I said. The more I sold the Indians as rainmakers, the less Job accompanied me to town, until finally he stopped altogether.
Just before the Indians lost Job to the weather for good, we’d played an honest-to-God rainmaking in Custer and won under a hot, cloudless sky. The pinewoods around Custer were terribly dry and infected with beetles, and fire threatened to flatten the entire town. Heavy woodsmoke from the lumber kilns hung in the brown trees like a premonition. The mill boss let his employees off on a Wednesday afternoon for the game and townsfolk took a desperation holiday. Custer also had gotten word that beating the Indians would bring rain. The Indians beat the Colonels 7 to 0. We were glad for the victory and downright thankful to make it out of town with our hides. They were too mad that we took away their rain to bother paying us. These white towns took their water rights seriously. It was a long time thereafter before Custer got rain.
We kept winning games and it kept not raining. Sometimes we got paid, but most often not. Job began believing in the pattern of winning and no rain, no matter how hard we tried to talk him out of it.
“Maybe it is true,” Job said to me after the Custer win. “You say it when you go to town.”
“I only say it so they’ll want to play us. Its business,” I tried to reason.
“We won the game and I know the weather,” he said, gripping his empty sleeve. “There is no rain.”
“Times are hard,” Otis Downwind said. “Back in Winner I saw a porcupine behind the madhouse eating on a onion.”
“So what?”
Otis looked at Job and paused. “Times are hard when a porcupine’s gotta eat a onion.”
After a few more nonpaying, no-rain wins, when things were looking especially hungry for the Indians, I managed to set up a rainmaking game in Faith, with a couple of other games along the way. We spent the next few days in the car, heading into the setting sun, to Faith, at a bone-jarring thirty miles per hour.
The car wasn’t a thing to rely on. The best Model Ts lasted about thirty-five thousand miles. Ours had over fifty thousand miles when Asa bought it from an old man in Mitchell. The car handled the rutted dirt roads like a cattle car. The wind and dirt had sandblasted the paint off and the body was rusted nearly through. Now and then it would backfire—Kaboom!—loud as a field gun. For relief from the heat we hung canvas water bags from the door hinges. Condensation formed and made the air blowing over the bags less hot. When the radiator boiled over—which happened every fifty or so miles with the load of us—the bags came in handy. Some days the T started. Other days it didn’t.
Tumbleweeds collected along the fencerows and dirt drifted against the tumbleweeds until it almost covered the fences. What grass was left burned. Smoke filled the sky and we never truly did see it blue. Some days, through the haze, a dirt roller would birth out of the horizon. It looked like a thunderstorm, but blacker, angrier. Sometimes it would strike while the Indians would be on a ball field, sometimes we’d be in the middle of nowhere in the Ford. The sun would disappear altogether and there’d be midnight at noon.
On the way to Faith we stopped to wash our uniforms and feet with rocks and powdered soap in a shallow, muddy slew of the Bad River. Job loved to fish for catfish. He would bait his hook with a grasshopper at the end of a braided line on an old cane pole he carried strapped to the car like an antenna. Some folks who had already lost everything lived along the rivers in Hoover camps. They fished for food and when
the carp and catfish weren’t biting there was no dinner. Out of canned hams and beets, our guys hadn’t eaten since early the day before, when we caught a few bluegills and Job beaned a rain crow with a fastball. We roasted the pigeon-tasting bird over the campfire and ate it with coffee.
The next day Job landed a channel cat that must have gone fifteen pounds. He picked up the fish by the lip and walked to a little camp of tents that met with the river and the highway. He gave the cat to a family of sharecroppers with eight or ten young kids.
“What in hell,” said Carp Whitehorse. “You gave them our dinner for nothing?”
“Not for nothing,” Job said, shaking his stump at the third baseman. “Nothing is for nothing.”
Our uniforms dried flapping in the wind on the long drive to Faith.
The Indians blew into town from the east. I slowed the car and idled down Main Street to the ball field at the west end of town, near the sun-bleached Lutheran church. Folks on the square pointed and stared. A brass band warmed up with scales in a weathered gazebo.
The outfield in Faith was dirt, cracked and hard, just like the infield. Barbed wire separated center from the scrabbled wheat field, where brown-and-yellow shoots of Russian wheat gasped for water and fought to stay upright. This wheat held hope. As Job threw me some lifeless pitches and the rest of the Indians played pepper and stretched, the bleachers slowly filled with baseball fans, the convicted, and the simply curious.
“How’s the arm tonight?” I yelled to Job.
“Which one?” Job said.
There was at the time a white barnstorming team from a religious settlement up in Michigan called the House of David. They let their hair and beards grow long and God-like and kept Bibles with them in the dugout. We had met the Whiskers on the road before, at chautauquas and county fairs, and respected them because, yes, they preached humbly to the fans before the games, but after the first pitch their spirits were real. Their fervor for God turned into a fervor for baseball and winning. They cursed like Philistines in their blue-and-gray uniforms and threw at batters’ heads. A Whisker—pitcher named Benson—eventually made it to the Bigs. The games were as intense as firefights. It was like facing Jesus at every position.
