Shoeless Joe

by W. P. Kinsella

  “It was 1909, the year after the big fire here, and the town was rebuilding; the whole area smelled of new, sawed lumber. And I guess I got better.” He stops to laugh a gentle, ironic laugh. “I’ve been here for forty-six years. I got on at Dr. Rood’s hospital, and the air was clear and dry, and the cool weather keeps you on your toes. I never could handle the humidity down home. And then I met Alicia. She was from Rochester. I could have gone there lots of times to work at the clinic, but by then I’d settled into the school job and I knew everybody in the community and everybody knew me … Did I tell you I’m supposed to be a great cousin, or something, to this Billy Graham fellow who preaches on the TV and in Yankee Stadium?” Doc Graham lets go with a spitball that whaps against the black sofa like a ball hitting a catcher’s mitt. “Did you know his grandfather was named Crook Graham?” He laughs again. “Some young fellow from the university in Minneapolis came up here once, and he had it all mapped out. Claimed my daddy was a second cousin of Crook Graham. Now I don’t know what relation that would make me to this evangelist, or why anyone would care. I’ve always been too busy for that sort of thing, though Alicia’s a good Catholic and my family wasn’t very happy when I married her. That fellow from the university wanted to know what I thought of my famous tenth cousin or whatever. ‘You must be awful desperate for testimonials, to come to a shirttail relative like me,’ I told him. I don’t think he liked that very well. He was tall and pale and wore a black suit and tried to act solemn. Didn’t look to me like he found religion very joyful—that’s the one word I figure should be associated with it…”

  “Talk to me about baseball,” I say. “About what it means to you. About dreams and reality. You must have wanted to be another King Kelly, Nap Lajoie, John McGraw, or Wee Willie Keeler. What was it like to see your dreams flutter away?”

  “That’s a tall order, young fellow. Maybe you should try asking me a straight question?”

  “Well, it’s not so much what I want to ask as what I want to get a feel for. If someone asks, you can say, ‘I played for the New York Giants.’ Willie Mays or Christy Mathewson could say the same words, but they’d have a very different meaning. What was it like to brush against fame like a stranger hurrying past in a crowd?”

  “I didn’t think much of it at the time. Hardly anybody recognizes the most significant moments of their life at the time they happen. I figured there’d be plenty more days. I always told myself I was going to crack the line-up. But looking back, I can see that I knew. I knew, even as I trotted out to right field that afternoon in 1905, that I was a minor leaguer in a major-league park—that I was one step too slow on the bases, and a split second too slow with the bat. But you don’t admit something like that to yourself when you’re young and full of hope.”

  “Some men wouldn’t have been able to cope,” I say. “You’ve met veterans who sit in bars for the rest of their lives and half-brag, half-whine about what they did in the war…”

  “Which was usually nothing,” says Doc, letting fly with another spitball. “Heroes don’t need to talk about what they did.”

  “Like you?”

  “Well, I maybe have the state of mind, but I never had the game. Even in the minors, I wasn’t much of a hero. I never talk about my past unless I’m asked, and then the less the better. I don’t have my office full of pictures of me in my uniform, and I’ve never been back on an old-timer’s day to get photographed with the real stars. That kind of stuff rubs me the wrong way. It was kind of like going someplace you know you’ll never visit again, like seeing the Mona Lisa, or touching a fist-sized diamond, or ordering a one-hundred-dollar meal in a restaurant.”

  “Why did you stay?” I ask, spreading my hands to show I mean the school, the town, the state. “You could have gone anywhere.”

  Doc looks puzzled.

  “My partner checked the town records,” I go on. “You don’t even make five hundred dollars a month.”

  “I got a little practice after hours …”

  “But you could have been wealthy, lived in a big city …”

  “This is my favorite place in the whole world,” Doc says quietly. “I don’t think I have to tell you what that means. You look like the kind of fellow who has a favorite place. Once the land touches you, the wind never blows so cold again. You feel for the land like it was your child. When that happens to you, you can’t be bought.”

  “I know,” I say, and I think of the soft breath of Iowa on my face.

  We simply sit and look at each other, like old friends at a reunion, happy with each other’s presence. I sip the inky coffee, which puckers my mouth. Doc downs another thick cupful.

  “They have one of the turnstiles from the Polo Grounds at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown,” I say, and then I look at Doc Graham and feel like making the motion of covering my lips with my fingers, to show I’ve said something I shouldn’t have. In the time and space Moonlight and I now inhabit, the Polo Grounds still sit in New York, the floodlights cooling after a night game. I decide to try and cover my tracks.

  “From the early days, it is. They put in new equipment a few years ago and donated the old one. It’s lovely—operated by a foot pedal and scarred worse than a streetfighter’s face. When you think of the thousands, perhaps millions, of people who walked through that gate—living and dead, famous and unknown; the first smells of the concessions reaching their nostrils—it sort of leaves you in awe…” I smile at Doc, who sits quietly, chewing, perhaps wondering why I am babbling so.

  I’ve splashed down here in the fifties, landing softly as if the earth were foam rubber. I must keep my tongue from betraying me. It is another year before Don Larsen will pitch his perfect game in the World Series. “Keep it safe. Keep it safe,” a little voice inside me says. I try.

  “Tell me about playing for the Giants. What was it like walking out on the field for the first time?”

  “I remember the situation clearly, but the other, what I felt, I’m not so sure about.” And he pauses, staring over my head to where an eye chart hangs on the wall. “It was the end of the eighth inning, and we were way ahead. I was sitting on the bench, half dozing. I’d been up with the Giants for most of a month, but I’d never seen any action. John McGraw just pointed a bony finger at me and said, ‘Right field.’ I jumped up like I was sitting on a spring, grabbed my glove, and trotted out, hoping I wouldn’t trip or do anything to attract attention to me. Afterward, the other players told me the announcer boomed out, ‘Graham now playing right field,’ but I didn’t hear it.

  “I’d practiced in the outfield all the time I’d been with the Giants, but it was a different matter to play it. It seemed like a mile to the infield; the batter looked like a midget, his bat a toothpick. I tried to take deep breaths and calm down, wondering what I’d do if the ball was hit my way, hoping it wouldn’t be, and at the same time hoping it would. The fans had no effect on me. I never even knew they were there. In the minors, why sometimes I’d visit with the fans, and on the road they’d needle me, usually with good humor. But that day, if the fans made any noise I didn’t hear it.”

  As if anticipating my next question, he goes on.

  “I tried to make myself extra alert, watch the bat, the pitcher’s motion, so I could get a good jump on the ball. But I felt so isolated. I kept telling myself, this is it. You’ve hit the top. The major leagues. You can say for the rest of your life, ‘I played for the New York Giants.’ “

  “And did you ever get to make a play?”

  “No. The ball was never hit out of the infield. A pop-up to the left side, a soft grounder to short, and a come-backer, and it was all over. I bet I wasn’t out in right field more than five minutes. And that was fifty years ago.” Doc smiles and laughs again. “I didn’t know my memory was that good. I guess it made more of an impression on me than I like to admit. It was the top of my profession. I likely could have made it somewhere else. The Giants won the pennant by nine games over Pittsburgh that year. Christy Mathewson wo
n thirty-one games. It was a hard line-up to crack.” He is silent. We stare at each other for a long time.

  “What makes that half-inning so interesting that you walk around outside my house at night, fifty years later?” he asks. “Seems to me maybe it was your footsteps woke me up.”

  “I think I came here because your time was so short. I wanted to know how it affected your life. But I can see you’ve done well. It would have killed some men to get so close. They’d never do anything else but talk about how close they were.”

  “If I’d only got to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy. You have to keep things in perspective. I mean, I love the game, but it’s only that, a game.”

  “Still, if you could do anything you wanted to do—if you could take time and turn it in your hands like rubbing up a new baseball; if you could stop somewhere in time, and in the silence and mystery and calm of that situation you could have a baseball wish…” I stop to let the question register.

  Doc smiles wryly, takes a new piece of paper, holds it between his lips, flicks it forward with his tongue.

  “And are you the kind of man who could give me that wish?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just asking questions.”

  “You don’t know much, Ray Kinsella,” he says, but with a twinkle in his eye. “You don’t know much; you pull an old man out of bed and sift through his life …”

  “The wish,” I say softly, and take a long sip of my coffee, which is bitter and cold and almost makes me cough.

  Doc leans his left elbow on the desk and rubs his forehead thoughtfully with a palm, as if it were an eraser that could erase the years and age lines and take him back to 1905 and the Polo Grounds in New York.

  And as I look at him, I think of a certain twilight back in Iowa, when Karin and I walked across our field with Shoeless Joe Jackson hours before a game was due to be played. The sounds of the other players practicing faded away.

  “This is the kind of place where anything can happen, isn’t it?” Joe said to me that night.

  “I know it is,” I replied. The fading sun was a rich orange; the shadows of the tall light standards reached across the field like long black arms. Yards away, the mysterious green and gold corn rustled like delicate guests in conversation. Beside me, Karin stood barefoot, her dainty feet barely repressing the thick plush of the grass.

  “It is that kind of a place,” said Joe. “It is.” And he sat down on the tender green grass of the outfield, untied his shoes and pulled them off, peeled off his socks and stuffed them in his shoes, then flung the shoes one at a time against the left-field wall, thwack! thwack! where they fell to the warning track like shot birds.

  Then he stood up and walked a few steps, and the look on his face would have inspired soldiers and poets and pinch hitters to perform as never before. He stepped around slowly, letting the cool tickle enter his soles and run up his legs. Then he began to dance, at first as if his ears alone heard the music of an Irish jig. Then, high-stepping with a wild exuberance and fervor, part dance, part chase, he took Karin by the hands and whirled her, screeching with delight, until her body was parallel with his waist and her strawberry-blond hair was splayed out, fan-shaped, like a splash of sunshine.

  “If I had a wish,” says Doc Graham, another spitball thumping onto the sofa beside me, “mind you, I said if—it would be to hold a bat in a major-league game. I was a pretty fair hitter in the minors—.335 one year—and I wasn’t bad in practice with the Giants. But I never got to bat. I’d have liked the chance to stare down a pitcher. Stare him down, and then wink just as he goes into the wind-up; make him wonder if I know something he doesn’t, if he should change the pitch in mid-delivery. Yes, that’s what I wish for, Ray Kinsella: the chance to squint my eyes when the sky is so blue it hurts to look at it, and to feel the tingle that runs up your arms when you connect dead-on. The chance to run the bases, stretch a double to a triple, and flop face-first into third base, wrapping my arm around the bag. That’s what I wish, Ray Kinsella, whoever you are. Is there enough magic floating around out in the night for you to make it come true?”

  “Is it time?” I ask Jerry the next morning as he shaves in front of the motel mirror, carefully scanning the silver mustache that quivers like milk on his upper lip.

  “I think we’ve done what we came to do.”

  “Which was?”

  “To see if one inning can change the world.”

  “And did it?”

  “You know as much as I do,” he says. At first I only smile. But I cannot contain myself. I tell him of my postmidnight rendezvous, and of all I learned from Doc Graham. Salinger is more silent than usual. I am not unhappy as I notice him thrust his notebook deep into our suitcase. Now he knows how I felt when he told me he had heard a voice I had not.

  We pack the car, check out of the motel, and, moving like a tatting shuttle, drive up and down the shady, shadowy, leaf-friendly streets of Chisholm one last time.

  “You are coming back to Iowa with me,” I say, attempting not to sound overanxious about it, thinking that, if necessary, I might even apologize for stumbling into a part of the dream that should surely be his.

  “I couldn’t quit now,” says Salinger, smiling slowly. “You’ve told me about your ballpark one too many times. I’ve got to see it. See if you’ve been telling me the truth.”

  “Not everybody can see it,” I say. “You might not…”

  “I’ll give it a try,” he says, in a tone that indicates the subject is closed.

  Somewhere in Chisholm, at that moment, a boy, a bat on his right shoulder, cap pulled down over his eyes, his glove hung on the end of the bat, walks off in search of summer. The boy is crossing toward a park. As we turn onto the highway near Longyear Lake, he appears, arm raised in a hitchhiker’s stance, thumb out, with a grin as warm as July, as American as johnnycake, on his face.

  I brake the car. Jerry opens his door, steps out, pushes the seat forward so the young man can get into the back seat. He tosses his duffel bag in ahead of him; a pair of baseball cleats are knotted around the neck of the bag.

  The stranger wears a baseball uniform—a standard white-striped uniform without insignia. His hair is the shiny black of a well-curried horse and shimmers in the sunshine, a few freckles decorate his nose, and his eyes are as blue as any of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes.

  “Thank you,” he says as he settles in. “You’re the first car by. I didn’t expect to get a lift so soon.” His voice is soft as the skin of a ripe peach.

  “How far are you going?” I ask.

  “How far are you going?” he says in reply, flashing a disarming smile.

  “Iowa,” I say. “We’re going home.” The words choke in my throat, and I feel as if I may never breathe again. I look at Jerry, and his eyes are wide, and I know that he knows what I know. He simply makes the now-familiar gesture of shaking his head in wonder.

  “Then I’ll ride along for a ways,” the stranger says. “I’m a ballplayer.” He pats the front of his uniform a number of times, like a rookie third-base coach too conscientious about giving signals. “I’m looking for a place to play, and I heard rumors about the Midwest. They say every town out there has a team, and that they’ll find you a job for the daytime so you can play ball at night and on weekends. Thought I’d give it a try,” he says, and he smiles again.

  “We know a little about baseball,” says Jerry. “I’m J. D. Salinger, and this is Ray Kinsella. Ray’s quite a character.”

  “I’m Archie Graham,” the boy replies.

  IV

  The Oldest Living

  Chicago Cub

  I look at Archie and I wonder how he feels—what kind of crisscrossing the dimensions of time have done to land him here, to stand him on a curving highway by a lake outside Chisholm, Minnesota, at the very moment we come driving by. Or could this all be in my imagination? Is Archie Graham really just a kid looking for a place to play baseball in the Midwest?

 
“Archie Graham, is it?” says Jerry. We look at each other with secretive expressions. Expressions of childhood. “We know something he doesn’t know” expressions.

  “Yes sir,” says the boy.

  “Haven’t we seen you before?” asks Jerry.

  “No sir, I think not.”

  “You from around here?” Jerry persists.

  There is a long, long pause. Looking through the rearview mirror, I try to frame the expression on his face.

  “My family hails from North Carolina,” he says finally. His lips curve in an enigmatic line, as if he has chosen his words carefully.

  I shake my head ever so slightly at Jerry, as an indication that he should stop asking questions. And he changes the subject to the weather and current baseball standings, which I have to help him out with.

  I realize, talking with Archie Graham as the miles roll by, that there are gaps in his life, like boards pulled off an outfield fence by anxious fans. And I come to believe he has been created by the strength of my dreams, by the depth of my belief in what has been happening. The young Archie Graham is like a doll Jerry and I have conjured up to satisfy our desire that fantasy turn into truth.

  “We are heading for Iowa, but slowly,” I say. “We’re stopping in Minneapolis for a Twins game, and then home. Do you want to come with us?”

  But before he can answer, Jerry says, “You must be a fan of the game.” I stare at him as the words hang in the air like skywriting. Jerry’s face remains impassive. I glance back at Archie, who has his slim hands clasped together and is staring at the back of Jerry’s head. He seems unperturbed. Is Jerry playing cat and mouse with me? Does he somehow know what I know?