Prairie Hardball

by Alison Gordon

  “Welcome to the River View Inn,” she said cheerfully. “I sure hope you have a reservation, because we’re all filled up.”

  We assured her that we did, and she passed cards across the counter for us to fill out.

  While I was printing our particulars, Andy struggled through the double glass doors with the bags, drenched. I bit my lip to stifle the laugh that would have been suicidal under the circumstances.

  “I’ve got nice adjoining rooms for you on the fourth floor,” the clerk said. “That’s in non-smoking.”

  And spelled double trouble. I saw the out and grabbed it.

  “That must be the room for Sheila and the girls,” I said to my mother. “You’ll want the grandchildren next door.” Not to mention poor Andy had maxed out on Henry family togetherness. We ended up on the third floor.

  We had to walk past the hotel pool to get to the elevator. There were potted palms and beach umbrellas scattered around it in an apparent attempt to make the patrons feel as if they were at a resort in some salubrious southern clime. The area echoed with the splashes of children using a water slide which spiralled down from the ceiling two storeys above and there was an unmistakable whiff of chlorine, a drawback, I would have thought, for patrons of the poolside restaurant. Nonetheless, there was a large and cheerful group at several tables pushed together. Most of them were older women.

  “Mum, look, those must be your friends.”

  She looked at them, nervously.

  “Aren’t you going to say hello?”

  “I’ll just freshen up first,” she said.

  They didn’t give her a chance. A woman wearing a mauve pants suit got up from the table and bustled over to us, pushing a bright blue wheeled walker in front of her. Everything about her was round, her tightly curled grey hair, her pink cheeks, her merry eyes, her body. She was instantly likeable.

  “Helen? Helen Henry, it is you, isn’t it?”

  My mother smiled.

  “Edna Summers, you haven’t changed a bit.”

  “A bit broader in the beam,” she said, “and the knees are shot, but with this contraption I’m frisky as ever.”

  Then Edna, she of the famous championship-winning home run against the Rockford Peaches, hustled my mother over to the group at the table.

  “Look who’s here! Wheels MacLaren!”

  Wheels? We followed them to the table, where my mother was the flustered, but beaming, centre of attention. While we were being introduced to all of the women and their friends and relations, I was struck by their wonderful variety. Some, like Edna, resembled the small-town women I had grown up with. Others were more sophisticated. They were tall, short, fat, thin; dressed in linen, in polyester, in dresses, in pants; hair permed, hair bobbed, grey, blue, blonde, bottle-black. They looked like grannies, they looked like librarians, they looked like gym teachers, dog groomers, duchesses, Hungarian madames. I couldn’t keep track of their names.

  My parents sat down at the table. Andy and I took their bags to their room, then went to ours. It wasn’t the kind of four-star accommodation I was used to while travelling with the ball team, but what it lacked in terry-cloth robes and bath oils it made up for in privacy. And it had a king-sized bed.

  I lit a smoke and went to the window and cranked it open. Beyond the parking lot and highway, I could see the North Saskatchewan River valley, and if I pressed my cheek against the glass, a sliver of what might just be water.

  “Look,” I said. “The river view.”

  While Andy changed into dry clothes, I checked the phone book. We stopped by the poolside table on the way back out.

  “We’ve got an errand to run,” I told my father, giving him his room key.

  “We have to be at the lunch at noon,” he fussed.

  “We’ll be back in plenty of time.”

  With the map of The Battlefords Andy had picked up at the front desk, it wasn’t hard to find what we were looking for: a sign with the stylized sheaf of wheat used to identify government buildings.

  “Bingo,” I said, parking outside.

  The Liquor Board store gave Andy something new to scoff at while we hunted for the single-malt Scotch.

  “I’ve never seen so many different kinds of rye,” he said, in amazement. “There are acres of rye in here.”

  “This is nothing,” I said. “I once counted thirty-seven brands in the big store in Regina.”

  The Scotch was hidden in a corner next to the brandies and other exotic libations, and we managed to find the Glenlivet.

  “The weekend just looked up,” he said.

  On the way back to the hotel, we detoured to find the Baseball Hall of Fame. It backs onto an abandoned farm at the edge of town, with an old windmill marking the site of the original well.

  Cooperstown it’s not. The tourist guide identifies the tiny building only as the oldest church in town, but giant baseball bats on the front lawn indicate its current use. The door was locked, with a note posted saying that it would be open in the afternoon.

  To complete the grand tour, we located the Legion Hall where the luncheon was scheduled and the Community Centre for dinner. We drove back across the river valley that separates Battleford from North Battleford, which turned out to have a main street filled with vacant stores, pawn shops, and other indicators of hard times. The life of the town had moved to the mall on the highway across from our hotel.

  The phone rang the moment we got back into the room. My mother, worried.

  “It’s a five-minute drive,” I said. “We’ll meet you in the lobby in ten minutes. Did Sheila get here yet?”

  “They just walked in.”

  “Good. We’ll see you in the lobby.”

  When I got off the phone, Andy handed me a shot of Scotch in a plastic glass.

  “I know it’s early, but I figured we could use it.”

  We clicked glasses and downed the drinks in one gulp.

  “I’m ready for anything now,” he said, then reconsidered. “Except perhaps another dinner with Uncle Stan and Auntie Merle.”

  Chapter 6

  The lunch reminded me of socials in the old church basement when I was young. The Legion Hall was an unassuming building on Battleford’s main street with a hand-lettered welcome sign on an easel on the pavement outside the building. There was a coatrack inside the door, where we left our dripping umbrellas before presenting ourselves at the reception table. My mother was given a tag with her name written in elaborate calligraphy. Underneath, as an afterthought that rather spoiled the effect, the word “inductee” had been added in ballpoint pen.

  The rest of us were left to fend for ourselves while one of the hostesses took my parents away to meet people. We hung around looking at strangers and caught up with each other’s lives.

  My sister, Sheila, is one of those busy women. She raises the kids, keeps the ranch books, and works at the library, while still finding time to volunteer at a sheltered workshop and sing in the church choir. I, in the meantime, barely manage one job. I don’t volunteer. I don’t do good works. I don’t even go to church, and Andy’s lucky if I make dinner more than once a week, even in the off-season.

  It goes without saying that I am reduced to a simmering stew of equal parts love, inadequacy, and resentment whenever I’m in her orbit. Her kids and I have a great time together, but I feel as if she thinks I set a bad example.

  Her husband, Buddy, is a cattleman, happiest working with his stock or talking with his cronies. He’s a big wheel in the Saskatchewan Stockgrowers Association. He’s a small, stringy kind of guy, in contrast with my sister, who carries a few extra pounds on her hips. He’s more at home on saddle leather than on chintz, but he clearly worships Sheila and the girls, even if their feminine world is not one he understands.

  The girls, Amy, who is eleven, and Claire, nine, were on their best behaviour, wearing pretty
sundresses—made by Sheila, of course—and brightly coloured sandals. Although they were probably bored with all the adults in the room, most of whom would qualify for discounts at the movie house, they were silenced by the sense of occasion. They stuck to me like a pair of adoring puppies, and cast flirtatious glances at Andy, whom they thought terribly glamorous.

  After a while, we headed for the food table, which was covered with a paper tablecloth that had baseball stuff printed on it, bats and balls and gloves, with serviettes and paper plates to match.

  There was a choice of boring sandwiches cut on the diagonal—ham, tuna, or egg salad on white bread, brown bread, or a combination of the two. There was a coffee urn, a teapot, and a pitcher of something orange that tasted unlike any actual fruit. But the pickles were homemade, and there were tasty-looking goodies for after.

  We filled our paper plates and Styrofoam cups and found a place to sit down at one of the long folding tables. Sheila took a plate of sandwiches to my parents, and came back smiling.

  “She’s having the time of her life,” she said.

  “That’s our Mum. Born to mingle.”

  “Well, it’s good to see her in the spotlight for a change instead of just being wife-of.”

  “And it’s probably good for Daddy to see how husband-of feels,” I laughed.

  “He doesn’t look like he minds,” Andy said.

  “Yeah, he’s plenty proud,” Sheila said.

  A man on my left interrupted us, a good-looking guy probably in his early fifties. A middle-aged hunk, Doreen would have said. He was lean, with deep-set blue eyes, good cheekbones, and a sensuous mouth. His hair, grey at the temples, was dark and wavy. He looked a little dangerous, the kind of man I used to fall for, before I lost my taste for trouble.

  “I couldn’t help overhearing,” he said in the flat accent of the American Mid-West. “Is your mother one of the inductees?”

  “Yes, over there, in the blue-and-white stripes,” I said.

  “Who did she play for?”

  “The Racine Belles.”

  “No kidding? My mom did, too.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Virna Wilton. She was the shortstop.”

  He pointed her out, a tall, elegant-looking woman in pants and a long, loose jacket. She wore sling-back sandals. Her most striking feature was her upswept salt-and-pepper hair, with one silver streak waving back off her forehead.

  “For heaven’s sake,” Sheila said. “She was one of Mum’s best friends. Helen Henry. MacLaren, she was then.”

  “Wheels MacLaren? You’re kidding!”

  We introduced ourselves. He was Jack Wilton.

  “You’re the second person today I’ve heard call her that,” I said. “I never even knew she had a nickname. Why did they call her Wheels? Did she steal lots of bases?”

  “It was just a pun,” Jack said. “You know, Helen Wheels. Hell on wheels. They used to call her Hellion, too.”

  “You know a lot about it,” Sheila said.

  “I grew up with the league. Mom was in it until the end. She moved to Fort Wayne after the Belles folded, and played with the Daisies until 1954. I was nine at the time.”

  “Our mother lasted five years,” Sheila said. “She quit after the 1947 season to get married.”

  “A lot of women did that,” he said.

  “What about your father?” Andy asked him. “Didn’t he mind his wife playing ball?”

  “I didn’t have a father. I mean, obviously I did, but I never knew him. He died overseas in the war. I mainly had a lot of honorary aunts.”

  “Did you travel around with the team?”

  “Sometimes. Or I’d stay home with the landlady. It was a different way to grow up, but it suited us.”

  “Did you get to be a bat boy?” asked my tomboy niece Claire, who is campaigning to move to Toronto to live with us and work as the Titans’ first bat girl.

  “Sure. I had to earn my keep,” Jack said, giving her a killer smile.

  “Well, if it was girls’ baseball, why didn’t they have bat girls?” Claire asked.

  “Well, they did. But since I was a boy, I had to be a bat boy, didn’t I?”

  “There’s no such thing as a bat girl in real baseball,” said Amy, whose ambition is to become a veterinarian. Specializing in horses, she says. “It’s a dumb idea.”

  Seeing that the two were about to get into an is-not-is-too free-for-all, I suggested a dessert run. When we came back with plates full of cookies, Nanaimo bars, and date squares, Andy and Jack were talking hate mail with Sheila.

  “Jack’s mother got letters, too,” Andy said.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about this before?” Sheila demanded. “This is awful. We have to tell someone about this.”

  “I told my mother that we should go to the police,” Jack said, “but she thinks it’s just a joke.”

  “It probably is,” I said. “But we should find out if anyone else got one.”

  “Let’s go ask,” Sheila said, getting up from the table. I followed her across the room to where my parents were sitting with several other players. Jack went to his mother, who was with a different group.

  “I was just telling your mother about the letter I got,” Edna Summers said. “I was quite frightened.”

  “Why, of course you would be,” one of the other women said, a tall woman with gold-rimmed glasses. Her name tag identified her as Willetta Heising, who had played for the Rockford Peaches.

  “Did you get one, too?” I asked.

  “No. The only ones I’ve heard about are the Belles.”

  Jack Wilton joined us at the table.

  “My mother said she had heard that Shirley Goodman, the pitcher, got a letter, too,” he said.

  “I don’t think she’s here yet,” Edna said. “At least I haven’t seen her.”

  “My mother spoke to her on the phone last week,” Jack said, then put out his hand. “I’m Jack Wilton, by the way.”

  “Edna Summers. I was Edna Adams.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you. And you must be Helen Henry. I’ve heard a lot about you. Both from your charming daughters and my own mother.”

  “Well. Nice to meet you,” my mother said, a little rudely, I thought, then turned to my father. “I think we should be getting back to the hotel, don’t you, Douglas?”

  She stood up.

  “Excuse me, please,” she said. “I’ll just see to the little girls.”

  She was turning to walk away when the room was pierced by a loud whistle. Once he had got our attention, a jokey gentleman in a plaid shirt introduced himself as a vice-president of the Hall of Fame board and announced that the museum was open and that we were all welcome to visit.

  “Do you want to go?” I asked my mother.

  “Oh, you mustn’t,” Edna explained. “We Belles are all waiting until tomorrow, after the induction.”

  “Once it’s official, you mean,” I said. “That makes sense. What do you want to do instead?”

  “I’ll just go back to the hotel,” she said. “I think your father wants to rest his hip a bit, and we’ve got a big night ahead of us.”

  “Did someone mention going to the police?” Edna asked.

  “I think someone should,” I agreed and we moved towards the door.

  “I’d be happy to go,” Jack said. “What about you, Andy? It might be good to have a policeman along, too.”

  “That’s a good idea,” my sister said. “They’ll listen to you.”

  Andy looked trapped.

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “That’s fine.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “No, I don’t want to make a big production of this. Do you have the letter with you?”

  I dug it out of my bag and gave it to him.


  “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.”

  Chapter 7

  Andy took Jack with him in our purple rental car, which the nieces had by now dubbed the Grapemobile, and followed the tourist map to the Battlefords Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment across the river in North Battleford. It was an unadorned two-storey brick building a couple of blocks off the main street into town.

  It was apparently a slow crime day. Inspector Walter Digby, the top cop, invited the two into his office, standard Mountie issue, including the portrait of Her Majesty gazing down upon them from the wall behind the desk.

  Andy and Jack had decided on the way over that Andy would do the talking, cop to cop. He and Inspector Digby began by exploring the possibility of mutual law enforcement friends, and came up with several to break the ice. Andy had been on a forensics course ten years before with Digby’s former partner, and Digby had gone to RCMP training college in Regina with a Mountie Andy had worked with on a series of drug-related murders in overlapping jurisdictions in Ontario.

  That out of the way, like a secret handshake in a fraternal order, Digby dropped his social tone and inquired about the reason for the visit. Andy told him about the letters.

  “Since they were postmarked here in the Battlefords, I thought you might have some usual suspects in your files.”

  “Do you have letters with you?” Digby asked.

  “Just the one Mrs. Henry got yesterday,” Andy said, putting it on the desk. “She threw out the previous one, but her description is consistent with it being the same writer.”

  “It looks like the one my mother got, too,” Jack said.

  Digby studied the letter. He appeared to be around Andy’s age, in the mid-forties, but might as well have come from a different generation altogether. What hair he had was trimmed short and combed neatly, and he had one of those trim toothbrush moustaches that put one in mind of World War Two officers. He was in full uniform, and everything about him was tidy, from the polish on his shoes to the rigidly aligned stacks of paper on his desk. Disorder did not appear to be a permissible option in his life.