Shoeless Joe

by W. P. Kinsella

  “Just go up to the man and tell him you admire the way he catches a game of baseball.” Outside the window, the moon is whitish and hangs like a sickle of ice. “Share what you’ve got in common,” he goes on. “Talk about the small ballparks he took you to as a kid, where kids played with mongrel dogs under the bleachers and farmers scuffed their boots on the boards and kept one eye on the sky. Tell him your name is Ray, and introduce him to Karin—for her sake, not his, because someday she’ll be old enough to understand and appreciate what you did.

  “The right chemistry will be there, it can’t help but be. You both love the game. Make that your common ground, and nothing else will matter.” Eddie smiles at me, the cool summer moon reflected in his pale eyes.

  “But how can I do it and not give away what I know?” I think of a picture of a group of baseball players standing in front of a bleacher in a small town in Montana. It was taken by my mother with an old-fashioned Kodak box camera made of heavy black cardboard. The ballplayers in the picture are all but indistinguishable, but my mother used to point one out and say, “That’s Daddy,” and if I looked closely, I could see the square cut of his jaw, could recognize him by the way he liked to stand with his left hand resting on his hip.

  “Of course you can do it,” says Eddie. “You’re awfully good at keeping secrets. I should know.” But I hardly hear him, for I am thinking of the man I knew in Montana, John Martin Duffy Kinsella—a name as Irish as shamrocks, a name that derives from the word peninsula and was, until the mid-1800s, O’Kinshella. He was an affectionate, sentimental man who sang songs about The Wearin’ O’ the Green, and about the patriot he was named for, John Martin Duffy.

  “Of course you can do it,” Eddie says again. “You have to do it. How many people get a chance to do it? I’ve got a sneaking feeling that the magic has been here all the time, that it was what drew me out here from Chicago, not the teaching job. But I was like a key with one tooth missing. I didn’t have what it took to let the genie out of the bottle. Maybe that’s why I stopped you on the street.”

  Spikes of moonlight decorate the table as Eddie reaches across and clasps my hand. “I’m counting on you. And in more ways than one. I guess you know that there weren’t any baseball boys. That was all malarkey, like everything else I told you …”

  “I understand,” I say. And I hope I do.

  “Once you meet him, it will be like the last inning of a perfectly played ball game—you’ll pray for extra innings so you’ll never have to go home. You’ll see.” He rises and makes his way to the stairs, and seems to float upward into the moon-spangled darkness.

  I sit alone, recalling a conversation I had with Salinger.

  “That catcher’s good. Look at how fast he comes up with the ball,” Jerry said one day. “He has an arm like a catapult. Is he really? …”

  “He is.”

  “Does he know?”

  “Of course not. He’s a young man from North Dakota named Johnny Kinsella, who has just broken into the majors with the White Sox. I’m not even a glint in his eye.”

  “And you can’t tell him?”

  “That’s why I haven’t even approached him. I’m afraid I’ll give myself away.”

  “It must be painful for you.”

  “You’re a master of understatement. But if you were him, would you want to know what I know?”

  “No mere apple could equal the temptation. But no, I wouldn’t. It would destroy anyone to know his own future.”

  “I know I have to put what I’m aware of in perspective. He’s young and rugged and unafraid and full of hope. It should be enough for me, to see him doing what he loves best.”

  Salinger nodded his head in agreement.

  “But I saw him years later, worn down by life. Think about it. I’m getting to see something very special.”

  It was after noon when Salinger decided to ask Eddie if he wanted to play hearts. When he got no answer to his knock, he opened the door and found Eddie dead. Eddie must have had a premonition, for he had changed into his Chicago Cub uniform. His cap, glove, and brand-new spikes were laid out beside the bed.

  It is more difficult than you might expect to dispose of a dead body, especially when you find you know virtually nothing about the deceased. We knew that Eddie’s daughters were scattered about America in Seattle, Boston, and Phoenix, but we did not know how to contact even one of them. Some kind men from the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department finally took charge of the situation, after asking me a number of pointed questions about why I had the body of a ninety-one-year-old stranger in a Chicago Cub uniform in my guest bedroom. Eddie’s body ended up at Beckman-Jones Funeral Home in Iowa City. His daughters were notified by the proper authorities, and each dutifully booked passage to Cedar Rapids Airport. I could picture the flight paths of their airplanes sectioning a map of the United States into triangles and rectangles as they rushed home.

  Annie and I make a duty call on them at Eddie’s tiny apartment, where the three of them have holed-up on arrival. They are middle-aged women, severe as suffragettes, who inspect us critically and ask our religious affiliation. I tell them only that Eddie was homesick for the farm and that we had invited him to spend a few days with us. They sniff disdainfully each time their eyes land on one of Eddie’s baseball artifacts that line the mantel and windowsill, or when they see one of the Chicago Cub programs that are thumb-tacked to the walls of both living room and bedroom. I don’t mention my interest in baseball, but tactfully inform them of Eddie’s desire to be buried in his Cub uniform.

  “I know,” replies one who is wearing a crocheted hat. “He wrote each of us at least a dozen times to tell us that.” She scowls and sniffs.

  “The coffin will be closed, of course,” says a second daughter, whose hair looks as if it has been stained with blueberries.

  The following day the phone rings.

  “Mr. Kinsella?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Gladys Vickery speaking.”

  “Yes.”

  “I used to be Gladys Scissons. We met briefly yesterday.”

  “We did.”

  “Well, I’m calling from the lawyer’s office. My father added a strange clause to his will—just last week, in fact. I think it is preposterous, but Mr. Embury says I should at least check with you …”

  “Go on.”

  “At the end of his will, he added, ‘I want to be buried in Ray Kinsella’s cornfield.’ Just like that. No explanation or anything.”

  “No one else would understand,” I said.

  “Do you understand?”

  “We had a mutual interest in baseball.”

  “Oh,” she says in a knowing voice. “Did he fill you full of his awful stories? You know, he never played for …”

  “It’s all right. I can afford the space. Your father can be buried here.”

  “I’ll have Mr. Embury draw up a contract. We’ll pay you the same as the cemetery.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  There is a long silence, then I hear her aside to the lawyer. “He says he wants him buried there. Must be as crazy as Daddy was.”

  The daughters decide not to attend the burial. I am able to convince them that they would not want to muddy their shoes in a cornfield. The hearse that delivers Eddie’s coffin is painted an apple green, with black stripes along the sides like swaths of ribbon. The two attendants, who could easily serve as mannequins in a formal-shop window, are anxious to see the body planted. We let them wheel the coffin as far as the baseball stadium. Their eyes race back and forth in gloomy faces, and it takes great self-control for them not to ask questions. They place the coffin on the ground beside the grave. Jerry and I insist that we will lower the coffin into the grave at a more appropriate time. The dolorous attendants, who speak like English butlers with midwestern voices, reluctantly agree.

  We are not dishonoring Eddie’s last request. Yesterday, as Salinger and I headed for the cornfield behind left field, shovels i
n hand, we saw to our surprise that the ballplayers were holding a workout.

  “We’d like to be part of it,” Shoeless Joe Jackson said with great sincerity. “He loved the game as much as anyone can, and we’d like to pay our last respects.”

  “But out there you can’t?” I said, nodding toward the spaces beyond the fence, where the corn rustles greenly.

  Joe nodded. The others were behind Joe, silent and subdued.

  “What happens to you when you go through that door? It’s not fifty yards to the gravesite,” I said. But Joe and the others only smiled sadly, enigmatically.

  “If you can’t come to the grave, then suppose we bring the grave to you?” said Jerry.

  “That would be most considerate,” said Shoeless Joe, and the others nodded solemnly.

  I looked at the blade of my nearly new shovel, the black paint barely scratched, and I thought of the labor, the love, the passion I’d expended to make the field. I looked in horror at Salinger for suggesting such a thing.

  But he looked back at me with a level brown gaze, and the players stared silently at me, and Shoeless Joe walked wordlessly across the outfield, slowly, his magnificent bat, Black Betsy, wavering in front of him like a metal detector, like a divining rod.

  And the place where he stopped was in deep left field, where the grass is most lush, the grain of it like expensive carpet, the color dark and luxurious as ripe limes.

  The wind whispered through the empty stands, and heavy clouds roiled across the sky. Salinger had lowered the stars and stripes and the Iowa flag to half-mast on the flagpole in center field. Both flags snapped crisply in the breeze.

  “All right,” I said resignedly. And as I did, I felt the greatest tenderness toward Eddie Scissons. He may have exaggerated a little, but he did it with class. I hope people will be able to say the same about me after I’m gone. “But let me make the first cut,” I said, and placed the shovel on the ground and stepped down on it. I felt it slip into the earth easily, as if I were spading chocolate pudding.

  Now, as the varnished coffin sits beside the grave, I recall the service that afternoon in Iowa City—a closed-coffin service in which a minister from a church Eddie had never attended ranted and chanted and raged over his coffin. His words were, I suppose, in some way a comfort for the daughters who had engaged him, but he said not one thing about Eddie, except that he had lived a long life and produced three fine God-fearing daughters.

  Well, old buddy, I think, whatever happens, whether you stay buried here beneath a baseball field or whether it all gets leveled out and planted in corn, there’s no finer resting place in the world.

  “I think we should open the coffin,” I say aloud. No one objects. It takes Salinger and me a while to find the hidden snaps with which the undertakers have fastened it. Inside, Eddie, capless, his white mane trimmed and hair-sprayed into place, the cosmetics of the dead making him look younger than I have ever seen him, lies resplendent in his Chicago Cub uniform. His cap rests on his folded hands, his feet are encased by his new cleats, his glove lies at his side below his right hand. One of the daughters must have remembered that he was left-handed.

  “Yes, it’s Eddie Scissons,” I say.

  “Dead as Billy-be-damned,” says Salinger, playing his part.

  “It’s all right to bury him now,” I say, as the players file by the coffin, caps in hands. “There are baseball boys, Eddie. There always have been.” And as I look around me, I have the feeling that if I were to go to Iowa City tomorrow, go to the public library or the university library, find the reference section, and pick up a copy of the Baseball Encyclopedia and turn to page 2006, I would find right at the bottom of the page, right after the entry for Hal Schwenk, who played for the 1913 St. Louis Browns, and right before the entry for Jim Scoggins, who played for the 1913 Chicago White Sox, a listing under Eddie’s name that would look like this:

  And under that would be the details of Eddie’s three seasons as a relief pitcher for the Cubs: his won-and-lost record, number of innings pitched, ERA, strikeouts, bases on balls, and batting record. I have the feeling. I have the feeling.

  When it is finished, when the coffin has been lowered by the ballplayers, and the ropes retrieved, the grave filled in, the excess earth, which was piled on tarpaulins, removed, the top of the grave convex as a pitcher’s mound, I look at Joe Jackson and start to speak.

  “I’ve played on worse,” says Joe, reading my mind, and I picture him hopping over the gopher-riddled outfield of one of the Textile League ballparks in South Carolina, one of the fields where he began, and where he ended, his playing days.

  It is late afternoon when the Fargo one-ton, pulling the cream-colored twenty-foot trailer, clangs over the cattle guard and parks beside our driveway, out near the highway.

  “Uncle Richard’s brought the carnival with him,” squeals Karin. “I looked at the pictures in the trailer when we were in town. They’re icky! It’s the song I like.” She chants bits of the incantation that Richard uses to draw the public to his exhibit.

  “The midway has moved on to Cedar Rapids,” says Richard. “We’ll catch up with them in a couple of weeks. We haven’t had a holiday in years.”

  “He claims he heard a voice that told him to come here, and bring me and the exhibit,” says Gypsy in a stage whisper as she hops down from the cab. I look sharply at Richard, but he seems very interested in the ground.

  Gypsy skips around the farm, exploring like a cat that has just been dropped at a strange location. “That really is a baseball field, isn’t it?” she says, smiling her tight-lipped little smile as she spies the fence, the bleacher, the light pole.

  “The world’s strangest babies are here,” sings Karin.

  The garish canvas banners and loudspeakers are trussed to the top of the trailer.

  After supper I keep pestering Richard. “What kind of voice did you hear?” I ask as we make our way toward the baseball field, where the brilliant lights of the stadium reflect off the high, clear sky.

  “She was teasing; I don’t hear voices,” says Richard. He is taller than average, and his hands, like mine, are long and thin. He wears a cap with a long red bill. The cap advertises Turfco Fertilizer. Gypsy and Annie trail along behind us. They are virtually the same size and might have been cut from the same pattern, though on opposite sides of the earth.

  “Oh, wow!” says Gypsy as we walk along the third-base line. “It’s all there, isn’t it? Just like the big leagues. I saw a game in Minneapolis once. This could be the same stadium.”

  So Gypsy sees. I turn to find Annie grinning with approval.

  “There’s nothing out there but an empty ballpark,” says Richard, “and it’s a little one, like the place in Montana where we went when we were kids.” But we ignore him. Annie and I and Jerry are joyous as children, welcoming Gypsy to our special fraternity.

  As we sit down on the warped bleacher, Richard looks for a long time at Gypsy, at her tough but beautiful face with the laugh lines patterned around her eyes and mouth like spider webs. And I think I know what he is feeling. That somehow he sees her slipping out of his arms, moving further and further away from him though remaining perfectly still.

  “Ray,” he says to me, looking wildly around him. “Ray, teach me how to see.”

  Several days later, as we are all watching a game, I imagine Eddie Scissons sitting to my right, his hands cupped over the head of his cane. His veins are so blue and bulging that his hands might be backed with spruce bark. On the other side of me, Jerry leans forward, engrossed in the game, his chin cupped by his left hand. The humid air surrounds us like a cocoon. Karin, in a green-and-gold sunsuit, sits between Richard and Gypsy, sipping Coke from a frosty green bottle.

  I seem to possess magnified sense perception, where the protection of my miracle is concerned. Over the hum of the crowd, I hear a car crossing the cattle guard, then a door slamming, feet climbing the steps to the house, a knock, the creak of the door opening, voices, the door slamming
, feet descending. The voices get louder.

  Then I see them behind the backstop: Mark and Bluestein, walking right through the grandstand, oblivious to all but themselves. In the distance, I hear the screen door slam and Annie’s light footsteps tattoo down the stairs.

  Mark and Bluestein are talking and gesturing to each other as if no one else were present, as if the lights weren’t blazing, as if a flamingo-pink sunset were not painted on the right-field sky.

  Annie rushes past them, disregarding the crowd.

  “Mommy,” says Karin, standing and pointing, slopping her orange drink and making puddles on the dark green boards at her feet.

  “What?” says Jerry as Karin’s voice brings him back to reality.

  “Ray, they’ve got an order of some kind,” yells Annie from below. “They have temporary control of the farm.”

  On the field, the action is suspended. The White Sox, who are on the field, relax, as if a pitching change is taking place. Happy Felsch drifts over to right field to talk with Moonlight Graham.

  “Go back to the house,” says Mark, grabbing Annie’s arm.

  “The hell I will. You thieving…”

  “I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” says Mark. “We’ll see that you’re taken care of. You and…” He has never been able to remember Karin’s name.

  Like an irate manager, Annie kicks dirt all over Mark’s shoes and the cuffs of his expensive suit. He grabs her and picks her up by the arm. Annie knees him. He drops her. We lose sight of them for a moment as Jerry and I scramble down the bleacher and walk around the end of the fence. We stay outside the foul line as long as we can, but then cut across the field to where the others are standing. They are in shallow left field, Annie shrilling like a blue jay at Mark and Bluestein. Bluestein is carrying an ax.

  “What’s going on?” I demand of Bluestein, who is wearing a wide-shouldered green corduroy suit that makes him look like a gangster.