Shoeless Joe

by W. P. Kinsella

  “A relief pitcher,” I reply. Groceries? I recall the story I heard about Jerry craving soybeans. “Do you really eat a lot of soybeans?” I ask.

  “Relief pitcher? Soybeans?” He laughs pleasantly. “Never tasted the things that I know of, though I’ve read they’re supposed to be good for you.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “That I’ve never tasted soybeans?”

  “Yes.”

  Jerry shrugs. “That doesn’t sound as unusual to me as it would have a week ago. I guess I’m getting used to you,” he says, then abruptly switches to a new subject. “Your wife isn’t a vegetarian, is she? The thought just crossed my mind that I hate eggplant casseroles, and dishes with a lot of noodles covered in stuff that looks like powdered horse dung.”

  “We’re meat and potato people,” I say.

  “Somebody say something about food?” asks the hitchhiker from the back seat. His voice is a little high, but softened by his whispery Carolina drawl. “Anytime you want to stop, I’m ready to eat again.”

  The deeper we penetrate Iowa, the greener it gets. It has been summer for all my odyssey, but a lean, scanty summer of thin trees and cropped yellow grass. Here, near the heart of the nation, everything is lush: The corn is waist high, the trees fat-leaved, the grass tall, and the earth soft.

  I wheel off the interstate at Exit 244.

  In the over-air-conditioned motel in Minneapolis during the few hours between our trip to the ballpark and our rising, I had dreamed of Eddie Scissons. As we rolled toward Iowa City, I decided on a definite plan of action. Today Eddie haunts my waking hours like a dropped pop-up. I can see him sitting across the polished maple table from me at the Friendship Center: back straight, huge hands spread out on the table in front of him, face pink as rose petals.

  “Know what I’m gonna do?” Eddie said.

  “No,” I said, although I’m always tempted to answer a question like that with a yes.

  “Goin’ to be buried in a Chicago Cubs uniform.” He smiled and nodded his head up and down, waiting for my reaction.

  And as I thought about the statement, I pictured Eddie laid out across a circular table, stiff as a board, head and feet extended over the edges, dressed in a soft, new-smelling uniform with a grinning bear-cub insignia, his large feet encased in shiny, uncrumpled spikes, his head covered by a Cubs’ cap.

  “Spikes and cap, too?” I said. I felt it better to take Eddie’s statement in stride, for I didn’t think he was trying to shock me, only to share something he knew no one else understood.

  “By golly, I hadn’t thought of cleats. I got the cap.” He tapped his mane of yellowish-white hair. “Just up and wrote to the Cubs one day and asked how much for a size 44 uniform and cap, and they sent back the price and I ordered one, and I got it put away with lots of mothballs, in a cedar chest my wife used to keep linen in. But I never thought of cleats. Now I’d look right foolish, I’m afraid, all laid out fit to start a new season, but with patent-leather shoes on, or brogues, or even slippers. Nope, nothin’ will do but cleats, and I thank you for reminding me.”

  “Didn’t you tell them who you were?” I asked. “They should give a uniform to their oldest living player.”

  “Well now, I never thought of that either. Why I reckon they don’t know who I am anymore. I played in 1908, ‘09, and ‘10. Why it’s nearly seventy years since the last time I stepped out on the grass at Wrigley Field. I was just a kid. Did I tell you I was called Kid Scissons?”

  I nodded, to show that he has told me.

  “It was Three Finger Brown give me the nickname. You know what his full name was? Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown. Now it was no wonder he didn’t mind being called Three Finger, or sometimes Miner, for that’s what he was, and how he lost part of his pitchin’ hand and got his nickname.

  “He was the first man ever to pitch four straight shutouts. Did you know that?” I nodded negatively, even though I did know. “And I was there. Didn’t get to play. A fellow who’s pitchin’ shutout ball don’t need no relief pitcher. That was in the summer of 1908, my first summer in the big leagues. He pitched the last one on July Fourth, and they set up firecrackers and rockets after the game, and had a rack of sparklers that spelled out BROWN in big, burning blue-silver letters—pretty fancy for that long ago.”

  “I wish I could have seen it.”

  “Yes sir, I’m gonna have to get me a pair of size-twelve baseball shoes to go with my uniform. I bet if I dug down in some of the boxes I got at home, I could find a pair of spikes from my playing days, but they’d be all gray and petrified like me, and wouldn’t be classy enough to wear with a new uniform. They all think I’m crazy, you know, but I’m not.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “The Cubs have been my whole life. I’ve followed them for eighty years—since I was seven and an uncle of mine came from Chicago to visit our farm in Nebraska, clutching a fistful of Chicago sports pages, a copy of the St. Louis Sporting News, and a gift for describing the beauty and mystery of baseball. I’d listen to him for hours, both of us sitting on the front step of the house, and Ma would have to call me twice for meals and ten times for bed. And he brought me a baseball, a bat, and a glove. He showed me how to hit and how to throw, and he painted a target on the side of the barn with whitewash. ‘Laziest man in creation,’ was how my father described my uncle. ‘Stuffed full of dreams,’ he said he was, and I guess he was right.

  “After he was gone, I retold his stories to my dog, so I wouldn’t forget them. And after the ball was worn out, I practiced with rocks, and frozen horse turds in the winter, and I made my own baseballs out of cowhide stuffed with hay and mud. Uncle Clyde even told me how to do that; said to always put a frog in the middle of the ball, to give it a true bounce. And I did.” Eddie grinned like a kid.

  “The Cubs have been my whole life,” he repeated. “I kicked around in the minors for a few years, but once you been to the top, it’s hard to settle for less. I worked for years in Chicago, so I could be close to them—hardly missed a game, season after season. Then I got offered a school-principal job out here in Iowa, and I had a family and times were tough. But I still had the summers: used to go up for homestands. It’s just the last year or two that I’ve got too old and tired to make the trip. Only regret I have is that I never had a son of my own to teach to love the game. Have three daughters. Used to take them to the games, but they didn’t catch the fever. They’re all Bible thumpers, and been treating me like I was senile ever since they were old enough to think for themselves.”

  I felt a genuine pang of guilt for not having shared my magical windfall with Eddie. I can’t think of anyone who would have enjoyed it more.

  “This is home,” I say as the car glides down Dubuque Street into Iowa City, past City Park, and along the Iowa River, green and peaceful as Chinese silk, where it snakes between grassy banks with university buildings on either side. Salinger and Moonlight Graham are busy as rubbernecking tourists as we drive toward the center of town.

  Iowa City: immortalized by Meredith Wilson as River City in The Music Man. Shady streets, very old white frame houses, porch swings, lilacs, one-pump gas stations, and good neighbors. But the wagons have been gathered into a circle, and the pioneers are being picked off one by one by fast-food franchises that spring up everywhere like evil mushrooms, by concrete-and-glass buildings, muffler shops, and Howard Johnson motels. Each of these destroys a little more history. Iowa City is a town of grandfathers fighting a losing battle against time.

  “We have a drugstore with a soda fountain,” I say. “It’s dark and cool and you can smell malt in the air like a musky perfume. And they have cold lemon-Cokes in sweating glasses, a lime drink called a Green River, and just the best chocolate malts in America. It’s called Pearson’s—right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. I’ll take you there tomorrow.”

  I think about the message I received at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, while we cavorted like mythical creatures on the damp gras
s. It was even less precise than previous ones. What I saw was Eddie Scissons seated across a table from me, the brass serpent-head of his cane hidden under his large hands. With the ambiguousness of a true oracle, the voice spoke of sharing and betrayal in a way that I knew meant Eddie Scissons.

  I ease the car across town and park in the lot next to the Bishop Cridge. Friendship Center, located in a renovated Victorian house. Tall honeysuckle, each stock measled with scarlet berries, clothes the front of the building, thickening the air.

  As I open the door into the common room, I see Eddie Scissons, the oldest living Chicago Cub, sitting in a square green easy chair. His back is to me, but the mane of white hair easily identifies him.

  “Kid Scissons,” I say, stepping around his chair in order to face him. I stick out my hand.

  He half stands, but his creaking joints won’t let him make it all the way. “Been expecting you,” he says. “At least I think I have,” he goes on, a puzzled expression drifting across his face. “I dreamed about you last night and I said to myself, I bet Ray’s gonna come see me today.”

  He settles back into the chair, but instead of looking at me he looks at the floor. “Whatever you want to say to me, get on with it,” he says to the faded carpet that was once the color of a green apple.

  “It’s nothing bad,” I say. “You must be remembering your dream. I want you to come out to the farm with me. I have something to show you—something I should have shown you a long time ago.” I find myself pacing back and forth. He looks up at me, his eyes the faded blue of dried bachelor’s buttons. He stares over his hands, which are cupped over the serpent-head cane.

  “Did you just come in from the farm?” he says finally.

  “I’ve been away,” I reply, “for a couple of weeks. I have people I want you to meet. Have you heard of J. D. Salinger, the writer? And a baseball player—he played in the majors—no, that’s not right, quite. Anyway, I want you to meet him.”

  Eddie fidgets in the chair. His head is down. He mumbles something about someone named Judy, who I assume is a supervisor at the center.

  “Come on,” I insist. “You don’t have to check with anybody here, and you live alone.” I reach down and take his arm and help him to stand. We move a step or two toward the door.

  “You’re not gonna hurt me, are you?” says Eddie.

  “Eddie! For heaven’s sake, it’s me, Ray Kinsella. I’m taking you out to your old farm.” And I wonder how much Eddie’s mind has deteriorated since I last saw him.

  Once Eddie has walked a few steps, it becomes easier for him to move, and we make it down the front steps and over to the car without incident, Eddie all the time looking around as if he expects to be attacked from ambush.

  Salinger moves into the back seat beside Moonlight Graham and his dolorous duffel bag, and with much difficulty, like storing an open folding chair, we get Eddie into the passenger seat.

  I burble like a meadowlark at everything I see. I am happier than I have been since I left Iowa. A quick drive through town, a stop at First National Bank to see if we are still solvent, a stop at New Pioneer Co-Op for groceries, and then we head east to the farm. I can feel Annie’s warmth pulling me, smell the sweetness of her, pure as spring rain, her tongue tart as raspberry. Annie is an Iowa girl, raised on a farm. I’ve only seen pictures of her father, a man I’m almost glad I never met. Not that we wouldn’t have liked each other, it’s just that I’m uncomfortable with most men, especially “men’s men” who know all about gears, rifles, and how to splice rope. They always make me feel like the new kid on the block, tolerated but not accepted, and they always act as though they have a common secret that I will never be party to.

  A picture of Annie’s father still sits on the darkly severe mantel in my mother-in-law’s home—a freckle-faced man with home-cut hair and a sunburned neck. He stares frankly at the world, with Annie’s green eyes. When Annie was nine, he found his way into the whirling gears of a John Deere harvester.

  Annie’s mother relishes telling the story of how it took the other members of the threshing crew over four hours to recover all the parts of him from the clanking machine. I think I would have liked him, and, more important, that he would have liked me. He went to church just to keep peace in the family, Annie has told me, and he chewed snuff and was known to drop in at Donnelly’s Bar in Iowa City for an occasional beer. Annie must have inherited her loving nature from him, and she says she remembers him once attending a baseball game when he was in Kansas City for a Great Plains Corn Growers convention.

  The kind of people I absolutely cannot tolerate are those, like Annie’s mother, who never let you forget they are religious. It seems to me that a truly religious person would let his life be example enough, would not let his religion interfere with being a human being, and would not be so insecure as to have to fawn publicly before his gods. My mother-in-law can and does work the Lord into every conversation, whether it concerns coffee prices, Karin’s cat, or the weather. The understatement of the year would be to say we do not like each other.

  When I appeared at her door to apply for the room she had advertised for rent in the Daily Iowan, the first question she asked me was, “Are you a Christian?” For the remainder of the interview, she was cold and distant, the sharp light from a circular tri-light glittering off the rims of her glasses. Housing was very scarce. I left my phone number, but held out little hope. But it was early October, her Christian roomer had been cut by the football team and had left for Georgia, after kicking a hole in his door and writing misspelled four-letter words on the wall with a crayon. I was living in a basement room where waterdrops the size of thumbtacks condensed on the walls, where the bedsheets were always cold and wet, and where large black waterbugs clacked across the linoleum all night every night. It turned out that she needed the money even if it came from a non-Christian wallet, and I needed a dry place to sleep.

  As we drive toward the farm, I think of Annie and me walking, with our arms around each other’s waists, toward the ballfield, in the evenings when the clouds are a dozen shades of pink, rose, and chocolate, looking as though they have been stirred in a blender.

  Annie is a spectator, not a fan. Like a reader who reads a whole book without caring who wrote it, she watches, enjoys, forgets, and doesn’t read the box scores and standings in the morning paper.

  I have had good reason not to tell Eddie Scissons about the baseball field I’ve built. These past few green and gold summers, I have kept it a secret. We have Eddie out to the farm for dinner every couple of months, and I drop in at the Friendship Center to listen to him talk about baseball. But when he comes to the farm, I park at the side of the house, where my enterprise is not visible, and Eddie’s arthritis keeps him from exploring the farm himself. When Annie suggests that Eddie would enjoy seeing the field, I choose not to answer her.

  “A guy from First National phoned me yesterday,” Eddie said to me during my last visit to the Friendship Center before I set out for New Hampshire.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Says you’re spending four thousand dollars for a new mini-tractor. Wanted to know if you were keeping your mortgage payments up-to-date.”

  “Oh,” I said again.

  “I said you were. What bankers don’t know doesn’t hurt them. But what do you need with one of them little tractors?”

  There was no way that I could explain to Eddie, at least so he would understand. I bought the tractor, an International Cub Cadet, so I could mow the outfield grass. It was taking me a full day to mow the ballpark with my rattletrap gas mower that had to be refueled every few circuits of the field, and stalled over and over if the grass was wet or more than an inch long. But Eddie knew enough about corn farming to know that there was no reason for me to own such a machine. And the mortgage payments were indeed in arrears, and the situation would get worse before it got better. I rationalized that it was not as if Eddie needed the money, and I fidgeted and gave evasive answers until he stopped ask
ing, but I knew he was angry with me.

  We drive east toward Annie, my farm, my miracle; and I have no idea what is going to happen when we get there. I might as well be the Wizard of Oz, Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmanuel Ambrose Diggs, heading for a Kansas farm in company of a scarecrow, a tin man, and a cowardly lion, with one eye cocked lest the wicked witch come swooping by, riding a broom and clutching a screaming black cat to her bosom.

  I feel just a touch of depression, as if a hand were passed in front of my eyes, as I turn the Datsun into the long driveway and, with a rumble, cross the metal cattle guard that keeps livestock from escaping to the roadway. Everything seems smaller than I remember it. The house is neither so stately as I have described it to Jerry and Moonlight, nor as grand as I remember it. A granary lists awkwardly, weathered gray as dust. The ballpark looks ragged and forlorn.

  But as I ease the car to a stop, a few of Annie’s white Wyandotte hens strolling out of the way, staring at the car with bland orange eyes, Karin bolts from the back door, a blur of white blouse and pink pedal pushers. She flings herself into my arms as I step from the car, and hugs my neck in unrestrained joy, smelling sweet as red clover.

  “Daddy, Daddy. It’s really you. I can tell,” she shouts.

  An unusual greeting, it seems to me.

  “I have a surprise. I have a surprise,” she shouts, kissing me madly on one cheek and then the other. She pulls back to look at me, and her eyes widen as she spots the scar at my left eyebrow, pale pink as a worm.

  “It is really you, isn’t it?” Her green eyes are troubled.

  “Of course. You’re silly.” I hug her to me, kissing her soft cheeks while she wiggles like a cat being dressed in doll’s clothes.

  Salinger has squeezed out from behind the driver’s seat, walked around the car, and is slowly easing Eddie out of the passenger side, while one of Moonlight’s long, dark arms pushes on Eddie’s back.

  I walk around the car, still holding Karin.