Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  I forgot about Johnson, and I forgot about Rogan. I smoothed over the spot on the mound Rogan had dug out, and went to work, oblivious of the heat, the crowd, the “book” we had on each hitter. I left the spots to Bingo, who had been around for as long as Johnson had, though he himself had never been a star, merely a journeyman catcher who knew how to handle pitchers, and—his one distinction—could, until he quit (at the age of forty-seven, a year after my departure), rifle the ball to second base and catch a runner stealing without having to rise from his squat position. His right forearm seemed twice the width of my own.

  Batting first in the second inning, Mule Suttles, the ABC’s clean-up man, ticked a foul ball into the first base stands, but he was the only man to touch the ball. I gave him two balls before striking him out, ran the count to three and two on Anderson, who followed him and went down swinging, and then struck out Rogan, batting sixth, on three straight pitches, all low and away.

  Johnson sat next to me between innings. “You want to pace yourself, boy,” he said again. “You’ll melt that arm, a day like this. You want to pace yourself.” Sweat dripped down above my eyes and I tasted salt in my mouth. I looked at the field and said nothing. Jack Henry, the hot day making the light olive caste of his skin seem especially cool, sat on my other side, rubbing his hand across the D in Dodgers, thereby giving Dixon the sign to take until two strikes were against him. He nodded. “Sure,” Brick said. “You listen to old Brick, who’s been around. You want to pace yourself.”

  Jack Henry agreed. “It’s a hot one. Rogan has his stuff, but if we make him throw a lot of balls, he might get tired seventh or eighth inning. You got to have luck against him.”

  I watched Rogan. He used his fast ball sparingly, varied his speeds, wanted us to hit the ball; he tempted us by making the first and second pitches his best ones, but Jack Henry made us wait him out, and, two strikes in the hole, our second three men all had to chop at bad pitches, where they didn’t like them, and we were down again in the second, one-two-three. “You’ll melt that arm, fair ass, a day like this,” Johnson said as he passed me on the way to the outfield at the beginning of the third inning.

  I could not reply. Instead, I threw hard. I stung Bingo’s hand with my warm-up pitches and refused his advice to take it easy. There was nothing I wanted to do except to throw strikes, to make the ball move faster and faster, until it disappeared. My infielders chided the opposing team, but I no longer heard their sweet teasing words. I heard only Johnson’s voice, telling me that I had brains. I mowed down the first man to face me, on three pitches. When he had swung and missed for the third time, and the ball made its way behind me, around the infield, Jack Henry, instead of tossing it to me, walked with it to the mound. I knew, from the way I felt, that my face must have been flushed. “You got to pace yourself some,” Jack said. I blinked, aware of the sound of laughter. “You gone to put us out of jobs if you keep this up.” The laughter grew and I tried to place it, to clear my head—though I did not want to; I wanted to get on with it, but Jack Henry held the ball, his glove slipped down along the underside of his left wrist so that he could rub the ball for me with both hands. He motioned behind me and I followed his glance to right field, where Johnson, lying on the grass, was feigning sleep, his cap over his face. I did not smile, for I knew, of course, that this alleged comic tribute to my strikeouts—a standard ploy of outfielders on all barnstorming teams—had its double-edge.

  Bingo Rouillard joined us. “I been tryin’ to get him to go slow, Jack,” he said.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Sure,” Jack Henry said. “You get them to hit it a few times, first or second pitch, we’ll handle the rest. You got to save yourself for the late innings. A day like this, you goin’ to lose seven, maybe eight pounds from sweat—even a skinny boy like you. You want to pace yourself, save some of that juice for later on.”

  “All right,” I said a second time, grudgingly, knowing that they were wrong, but lacking, in the dizziness my anger induced while I was not in motion, the confidence which could have made me forswear surrender.

  Bingo squatted behind the plate. “You ain’t goin’ to even see this one,” he told the batter, and I gave him my big motion, reared back and tried to take a little off the ball, aiming it low and outside. As soon as it was released, however, stumbling slightly to the right from the awkwardness of having pulled the string, of having arrested the fluidity of my motion, I saw my error—I saw the ball spinning lazily, high and outside, too slow, as large as a grapefruit. I saw the batter swing the instant I released the ball, anticipating my blazer—and I saw him smile—though I remember only that he did, and cannot now see that smile or remember that face—and catch his swing, hitch the bat as one never should, and then continue, whacking the ball with the meat of the bat, hitting it where it was pitched—shoulder high and on the outside corner—so that as soon as it left home plate there was no doubt but that it would land on the other side of the right field wall.

  “That’s all right now,” Jack Henry said to me, handling the slightly roughed ball that was to replace the first. “Ain’t but one run—you pitch to ’em.”

  I knew that, behind me, Johnson was smiling. I had pitched badly—taken too much off the ball, but even if I had pitched as I had wanted to, I knew, it would have been wrong. Rouillard and Barton were at the mound also, thinking they had to calm their young pitcher down, but I did not hear, or need to hear, their words of consolation and encouragement. I threw hard to the next batter—as hard as I had thrown to the men in the first two innings—and he lofted an easy fly to Kelly in left field. The man after him bunted, but I was on the ball at once as it skittered along the third base line, and I threw him out at first, with steps to spare. The inning was over, they had only one hit and one run, and yet I sensed that for me it was all over; the spell had been broken, and try as I might—throw as hard as any man had ever thrown, harder than I had thrown in innings one and two—I would never again match the perfection of those innings, I could never, I sensed, be satisfied. (“But fortune is glass,” says Publilius Syrus, “it shatters when it shines.”

  There had been, I saw at once, no need to pace myself. I had more than enough energy to bear down on every pitch in every inning of every game. Why, then, had I listened?

  “You took too much off that ball, boy,” Johnson said to me, between innings.

  I said nothing, for to reply would have been to acknowledge the difference he had made in my life; still, I vowed that I would never again, for as long as I played, let up on a batter. I vowed that I would begin every game with the will to pitch a perfect game—no hits, no runs, no walks, no man reaching first base—though I knew that no matter how mightily I pitched thereafter, I could now, in the language of the game, be reached.

  I held them hitless and scoreless through the fourth and fifth innings. In our half of the fifth, we pushed a run across: I singled to left, Jones moved me to second with a bunt, and Jack Henry, batting left-handed, poked a long single down the right field line which enabled me to score. We touched Rogan for at least one hit in each inning after the third, yet we remained unable to score against him. As the day wore on, the crowd grew quieter, and it seems to me now, as I see them again, that—after the home run against me—they lost interest, grew languid, as if they were sleeping. We sucked on oranges between innings, and our bat boy fanned me with a newspaper. I did not bother to tell him to stop. Jack Henry took Johnson out of the game in the seventh inning, the hot day being brutal to a man his age, and, though Johnson did not request his own removal, surely it was not accidental that, in their half of the eighth inning, his replacement, a young boy named Virgil Whitaker, trying for a shoestring catch of a sinking line drive, missed the ball, so that, as it rolled into the rightfield corner—a hit and not an error—the two men I had allowed on base via a walk and a Texas League single both scored. Johnson sat on the bench, his head back, a wet towel around his neck, shaking his head. He would never have
tried to catch a ball like that, he told us.

  In the eighth and ninth innings Rogan pitched at the same pace he had employed in the first inning, mixing his fast ball and curve ball, getting us to hit in front of the ball when he would slow down, and to chop at balls that threatened to nick the corners of the plate. I struck out their side in the top of the ninth, but after Bingo Rouillard had popped out to the second baseman to start the bottom of the ninth, even I knew that the fans were right to begin moving toward the exits. We went down without seriously threatening, and I had lost my first game, 3 to 1, giving up a total of six hits to Rogan’s ten.

  My brothers came to the locker room and tried to console me, pointing out that the winning runs were not, in the true sense, earned, but they saw that I was beyond consolation. Mr. Tanner shook my hand and commended me in a Latin phrase I did not understand. “Don’t you worry none,” Johnson said to me, as I sat brooding in front of my locker. “It was a hot day and McGraw wasn’t watching.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, without thinking.

  Other players moved near. I could smell the piercing sweetness of oil of wintergreen, though it did not cut the thickness of the day’s heat. “Sure,” Johnson said, and his hand was on my shoulder. My brother Tucker sat on the bench next to me, his jacket and tie still on, his derby in his lap. “But let me ask you something: how many kids you got?”

  “None,” I replied, pulling my shoulder from under him. “I’m only seventeen—why should—?”

  I broke off. He was laughing at me, satisfied with himself, and the other players who had gathered around laughed also, good-naturedly, I suppose, thinking Johnson was riding me properly, in the way a veteran should ride a rookie. “You mean you ain’t got no children yet?” He walked away, chuckling to himself. Even now, I can hear the voice and be angered by the question he would come to take such pleasure in repeating. You ain’t got no children yet, fair assf He had not calculated the remark that first time, since in anything other than pitching, he calculated nothing, and yet he knew he had drawn blood, and he would, with the same off-handed manner, come to ask the question of me again and again, for no seeming reason, and at no particular time. My teammates never, I think, understood how deeply his remark went, yet they laughed nonetheless, as they had the first time, whenever he used it.

  I was the last player to leave the locker room, and when my brothers and I and Mr. Tanner reached the outside of the field, along the Sullivan Place side, there were no fans waiting. Three young black people—a girl and two boys—stood at the corner of Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place, however, holding placards which urged us not to play on Sunday, the Lord’s Sabbath. They were all very handsome, and I must have thought that they had—with the crowd gone—been waiting especially for me. Their eyes were bright and clear and I envied them their simple faith. And God blessed the Seventh Day and sanctified it: because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made.

  The girl looked at me with a frankness I found startling. She held an open Bible, in her hands, and her face—a high yellow color—despite the day’s heat and the proper black dress she wore, covering all but that face, seemed so very cool. “Father would have agreed,” Paul said to me, as he ushered us into Mr. Tanner’s carriage. I thought of Jack Henry, the third of eleven children, whose father, originally from Tennessee, had been a Baptist minister, and I felt sad, as I often would, because Jack himself had never married, and had had no children. I looked back, and the girl’s eyes moved to mine: she carried herself beautifully, her back arched, shoulders straight, chin lifted. “Not the least of your troubles,” Paul said to me, “is that you have defamed the Sabbath.” He laughed, mimicking what was written on one placard, but I saw no reason to laugh with him. I think he was made too smart, at the time, by his revered college education, by the Mencken-loving dandy it brought out in him. I preferred him as he had been behind the plate at Dexter Park, rocking slowly and talking to the batter: “Li’l brother goin’ to blow it by you, Cap’n. Li’l brother throws that ball!”

  I was furious, and all the way home, in Mr. Tanner’s elegant carriage, I fumed silently—against Johnson, against Whitaker, against Paul, against my father, against myself. I contained caverns of rage then, and though the anger in me would later become deeper, there was something wonderful about the ability of my young body to contain so much sheer rage. Then I acted; now I consider those actions—and while I do, hearing Johnson’s laugh or Paul’s voice, I can feel that younger body tighten again, and I find that I have no desire to deny the hunger I feel to be back in it. Our passions may grow more intense as we grow older, but this is so, at least in part, because we act upon them less and less.

  My mother was not in her music room when I entered our home. Instead, I found her on the ground in back of the house, her skirt spread in a circle under her as she weeded her flowerbed. She looked at me, smiling, and seemed to know that I had lost and that I did not wish to talk about it. I kissed her on the lips and asked if I could bring her something cool to drink. Was the sun not too hot for her? My brothers took her by the arms and sat her down in a metal lawn chair, under the shade of a tall oak which grew to the left of the house. I thought of the girl holding the Bible and I would have been willing to have had my mother’s arms around me, to have rested my hot head on her lap, even with my brothers there. Her eyes were most loving toward me—yet, with my brothers present she offered only those eyes. She had prepared something to refresh us, if I would get it from the ice box. She knew how hot and weary we would be. I went to the kitchen and brought the pitcher of lemonade, with glasses, back with me on a tray. My brothers had removed their hats and jackets and were laughing, though at what I never knew. I poured their drinks for them. My mother’s eyes were closed, and she did not watch me. I had not, until I drank my first glass, realized how thirsty I had been, and when I had, unmindful of the others, downed two more glasses straightaway, I found that my family was staring at me, silently. Then they laughed, and mother went inside to prepare supper. “Flowers and lemonade,” she said, smiling at me. “Oh Mason! Flowers and lemonade.”

  Feeling, as I write, the quiet of that garden again, I must wonder if I was mad to have felt the way I did feel when I was on the playing field. The peace of the Sabbath reigned in our home, yet it could do nothing for me. I allowed my mother to serve me, I allowed myself to rest, to think of nothing—still, the peace I felt as I threw a baseball was the peace I sought, and cherished.

  I wonder: when was I more mad—then, when the phantoms of my mind drove me to love and to hate, to desire and to deny with a passion that was beyond words? Or now, when I find names for what passed then, when I try to fix with words those things which had no names, those events and feelings which never did have, or could have had, beginnings or ends?

  II

  Birds

  Then I asked: “Does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?”

  He replied: “All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.”

  —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  5

  In a daze, Sam descended the staircase, walked around the first-floor landing, and entered the store. He heard the sound of his father’s laughter. “Ah, Mason,” he heard Ben say. Flo saw Sam, took his hand. In the front room, Ben and Mason sat on wooden chairs, facing one another, holding paper cups. Tidewater looked at Sam, steadily, and Sam returned the man’s gaze.

  “We were just talking about you,” Ben said. “The three of us were planning a trip.”

  Sam’s own eyes were steady, he knew, and Tidewater would sense nothing. Still, things were blurred—he felt the way he did sometimes, coming in from the snow to a warm room. Pinpoints of light, like stars, flickered in front of him.

  “Will you come?” Flo asked, pressing his hand, and handing him a cup.

  “We intend to visit—before you
r father leaves us—some childhood scenes. It was at my request,” Tidewater said. “We’d like to see the houses we grew up in, the fields we played in.”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “I’ve just been reading your story.”

  “Good,” Ben said, and leaned forward, toward Tidewater. “Didn’t I tell you, Mason? My son Sam Junior is the sports expert.”

  “Don’t be like that,” Flo said, sitting down between Tidewater and Ben. Sam saw Tidewater’s eyes enlarge, in anger, and then close. In high school, Sam remembered, on his team jackets he’d always had Sam Jr. stitched in. He remembered the jacket from their synagogue team: red and yellow, a satin material, with the initials of the synagogue on the back—CST—and, on the front, where the left breast pocket would have been, a Star of David embroidered over a felt emblem of a basketball. His name had been stitched in on the right side. Ben’s middle name was Sam also—for Samson. His own Sam was for Samuel. They’d been named for different grandfathers, he for his mother’s father, whom he’d never known, Ben for his father’s father, plowed under somewhere in Poland. Benjamin Samson Berman. Samuel Paul Berman.