Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

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  In loving memory of my brother, A. Paul Di Ionno

  Induction Day

  Prologue

  The guy came unnoticed because all eyes were on Joe Grudeck.

  But Grudeck saw movement in the far periphery of his catcher’s eyes. He knew the geometry of throwing angles and running lines; he knew the large man moving fast against the oblique light of the white tent would get to the stage before anyone could stop him.

  The guy was bootlegging something; when he saw it was a sledgehammer and not a gun, he decided to stand his ground. Joe Grudeck, tough as a lug nut. That’s how a Globe writer once described him.

  The guy vaulted onstage and went right for Grudeck’s bronze plaque. The 12-pound sledge bounced off, leaving a deep dent in the bronzed Red Sox hat on Grudeck’s likeness. The second swing came from the heels with the fluid grace of a practiced arc; chin tucked, big shoulders and hips rotating as one, arms extended but tight. The hammerhead hit the bronze Grudeck’s throat, shooting off sparks and leaving a jagged fracture down the middle. The plaque fell to the stage in two pieces, and the crash reverberated through the audience, silent in a collective gasp.

  This guy was no terrorist, Grudeck thought. No crazy fan. He was dressed oddly, like a mountain man, but he sure knew how to wield that stick. Grudeck didn’t waste time thinking who or why, it was go time and the competitive rage that made him a star of several “Basebrawl” DVDs took over. It’s why the fans called him Joe Grrreww, like a growl. So here we go, he thought, another SportsCenter clip.

  He shoved the podium over. The sheets of his speech fluttered down. The full water glass bounced on the stage floor, leaving a large puddle. The microphone came down with a feedback shriek. The piercing sound fed Grudeck’s blood-rush anger, like flint igniting a grill pent up with propane. Whoosh! Grudeck charged and tried to tackle him, but the guy sprawled back and his fists came down on Grudeck’s head and neck—one, two, three, four—like a sock full of nickels. Grudeck got a buzz in his ears, like the static hum from power lines at night when all else was quiet. Five, six, seven. The punches connected like an ax on dead wood and Grudeck’s neck felt rubbery. He slid on the wet floor and went to one knee, stuck under the guy’s weight, helpless. He took in air deep and got a noseful of the guy’s body odor; stale sweat, firewood smoke, and something oily, like gasoline.

  Grudeck gasped and coughed, and felt his thighs involuntarily quiver from muscle fatigue. So this is what weak in the knees feels like, he thought. A lifetime of leaving blood and guts on the field and Grudeck never before felt his knees go weak. He wondered if his pants, now sticky with sweat and spilled water, were hanging off his ass. He was afraid of how comical, how stupid, he looked. With his next breath he pulled in the guy’s legs and drove up, and they both fell straight back, quaking the stage floor when they fell. Now Grudeck was on top and straddled the guy, set to strike down, but the guy got hold of Grudeck’s throat with both hands. Grudeck tried to punch, but couldn’t get through the guy’s arms. So he, too, went for the throat, and their arms intertwined like cable strands on a suspension bridge. It was then that Grudeck felt the guy’s true strength. He pushed Grudeck up with scary, surprising ease. Grudeck dug his fingers into the guy’s throat, but the guy only dug deeper. Grudeck fought to breathe and swallow. He felt a stab under his skull and his arms tingled and went weak. But then came more arms, these in blue sleeves, to the rescue. Then came a billy club pressed against the guy’s throat, another across his chest. He let go, hands up in surrender. Cops picked up Grudeck and hustled him away; his shaky legs just went for the ride.

  There was a woman in white. “You okay, Mr. Grudeck?” He had that tin-can taste of blood in his mouth; he was put in a chair. “Mr. Grudeck?” He felt water running behind his eyes, closed them, then saw the bleeding blue daylight, and opened them quick to make it stop.

  Grudeck watched the cops lead the guy out. Young men pushed through women and children and overturned chairs to get closer, throwing balled-up programs and plastic cups at him. The staid induction ceremony was history. The crowd was now part of the evening news. Violent, unexpected news; cell phones recording it from all angles.

  Now chairs went airborne. Two cops broke from the phalanx, nightsticks at chest level, but the mob engulfed them. The fans came in tight, fingers like daggers in the guy’s face, screaming curses.

  Grudeck’s mother was led to him. Sal, his agent, on one side, two Hall security guards on the other.

  “Are you all right, Joey?” She sounded like she was in a fish tank. “This crazy world . . . I don’t understand,” she said, taking his face in both hands.

  Grudeck looked back at the crowd and saw the bat, a bobbing mast on a roiling sea of chaos. It was his, a genuine Joe Grudeck model, red-wine-stained ash, high in the air. It made Grudeck think of the gleaming silver crucifix he held high, arms above his head, when he was an altar boy at St. Joe’s, leading the Mass procession.

  His heart banged harder at the thought of his life flashing by. He saw a young first-aid worker step in front of his mother, her white uniform glowing. Angel of Mercy. He saw two girls bathed in dawn light, long-haired angels limping out of his dark Syracuse motel room. Silhouettes in the doorway. One had her panties balled up in her fist, the other trying to snap her jeans, tear-streamed mascara on their faces.

  Is that what this is about? Grudeck thought. After all these years. His Induction Day, fucked up. His Hall plaque, busted. His speech, never delivered, never recorded for posterity, in a puddle of spilled water, ink running. Tear-streamed mascara.

  “Mr. Grudeck . . . Mr. Gru . . .” It was the girl in white, voice far away in the upper deck.

  He saw his bat, blood-red, waving crazily, now at the head of the procession, and then, like a whip, he saw it come down hard on the big guy’s head, the sickening crack of wood on skull. The big guy staggered but stayed on his feet. Tough as a lug nut, Grudeck thought. You had to admire the bastard. The big guy twisted away from the blow and looked back at Grudeck. Mutual respect. Blood ran down his face in one jagged stream and dripped off his chin. Again Grudeck flashed to St. Joe’s, the painting of Christ bleeding from the crown of thorns, near the entry where he led the boys in from recess, sweaty and laughing, ties and shirttails everywhere.

  This was not good. He was drifting away.

  “Mr. Gruuu . . .” A translucent green mask on his face, the red stretcher straps tight on his chest, the muted wail of the ambulance siren. He saw the IV bag, and felt the needle go into his arm. Catcher’s eyes, still taking it all in, blurred.

  The ceiling lights of the ER, the brown face of the doctor. But then the runny, bloody bright blue color of daylight sky came back, and it all got too bright. Everything got whirly, like the lights at Fenway the night he got beaned, only spinning faster.

  He was in and out, like airplane sleep, all those road trips. He felt a heavy hand on him, moving a blanket. He heard the bouncing blip of a machine turn to one steady note, the curtain ripped back, hurried feet squeaking on the linoleum floor. He heard the words swelling and cerebral as his clothes were cut with scissors. He was powerless to object. In and out, paralyzed. So, so tired. He tried to see Stacy’s face. She should have been here, he thought. Then there we
re more lights, round like those at the ballpark but right up close, blinding bright, bleaching everything white. Another needle in the arm, everything dissolved. And he was gone.

  Winter

  Chapter One

  Each morning in the black before the Otsego Lake dawn, Horace Mueller took his hands out from under the “Odd Feller” quilt Sally’s mother made them as a wedding gift twenty-some years before. The cold air felt like ice on a bruise. Horace was not a religious man, not in the church-kneeling way. But there in the dark he prayed silently to calm the turbulence in his head. “Thank you, God, for letting me wake another day, whether it brings sorrow or joy. And continue to guide me, Lord, to who I am, and what I stand for.”

  He would lie still and recite those words until he felt a presence; a warm visit in his chest that always made him think of glowing embers of a dying fire suddenly fueled by a gust of fresh air, rekindling. It was God, partnering in his existence, urging him to take on another day.

  And then Horace went to work on his hands. He did manual labor, and they hurt, every morning, in some way. Sometimes it was arthritic grating of the knuckles. Sometimes it was nerve numbness burning his palms. Either way, he had to work them back to use. He flexed and extended them, stretching tendons and ligaments, feeling metacarpal bones rise and fall beneath his skin. He bent his fingers back, pulling the skin on callused palms. He cracked each knuckle; the small ones made a snapping sound like twigs underfoot, the fist knuckles made a deeper crack, like bat on ball.

  Then it was time to get up and throw an armful of logs into the woodstove. This was Horace’s winter ritual: the dawn warming of his drafty farmhouse, circa 1910. It was a headfirst dive into a frigid lake.

  On this morning, after a few minutes of hand yawning, Horace put them back under the blanket. The pattern of muslin patches rose and fell as he moved his hands—an invading army under the cloak of darkness—until they found their target: the bunched-up hem of Sally’s nightshirt gathered just below her behind. He went under it, then approached the waistband of her flannel pajama bottoms, deftly as he could. He knew his touch was rough; cracked calluses irritated her skin, soft as when they met at Cornell. Horace tried to file them down with an emery board, but it only scuffed the hardened skin, creating little needles that scratched Sally like cat claws. He tried to soften his hands with Sally’s moisturizing cream, but it only left his skin plump and vulnerable to the next day’s labor; a failed marriage of a woman’s lotion and a workingman’s hands.

  Horace pressed into her, sliding the nightshirt up over the guitar curve of her hip, trying to draw her warmth. He listened as the frigid lake winds leaked through the weathered clapboard siding; the kind of dry cold that sucked moisture out of wood, making the coals in the wood-burning stove burn hotter and faster. He had to get up and get the fire going. But first . . . He arched his back like a waking lion, pushing himself into the humid crevice of Sally’s underside. Sally stirred, and backed into Horace with a slight twitch, the faint promise of intimacy. Somewhere, somewhere in her sleep, she remembers, Horace thought. He cupped her butt and pushed forward, leading with his erection, which parted her thighs and ran the full width of her flesh. He reached around her and grabbed the head, and nestled it against the silky fabric of her panties.

  Back in college, Horace’s favorite time was the heavy-lidded mornings, when Sally woke him with a tug, or her lips. She would fall into him, with that skinny little body. Thin, but strong, the kind of woman that never falls out of shape. Horace would sink into her tenderness. Once there, he tried to lessen his weight. He held himself off Sally the best he could, staying up on his elbows. She would rise up to him, and accept him into her body.

  After he became the blacksmith, things changed. He tried to keep his rough fingers off her skin, caressing her head and hair, using just his mouth on her breasts, shoulders, neck, face, and ears, unaware his beard irritated her. Sometimes weeks went by. After Michael was born weeks became months, months became half years. Colicky as a baby, and needing Mommy’s middle-of-the-night comfort as a toddler, Michael was between them so much Horace nicknamed him “the human chastity belt.” He was almost five when she finally removed him from their bed. But then Sally was afraid their noises, heard through the thin walls of the farmhouse, would wake him. She had a harder and harder time relaxing, and Horace had a harder and harder time convincing her it was all right. And now that she was working out four times a week at a fitness club, well, it reminded Horace of the old saying about boxers who stale by fight time. “They left it in the gym.”

  So now, on this cold January morning, Horace moved into her . . . if only to prove he was ready.

  “Don’t, Horace,” she said when his prodding woke her. “It’s too early. And cold. I’m always cold. Did you stoke the fire yet?”

  “Going now.”

  “I wish to God we’d put more real heat in this house. It gets colder every year.”

  “I wish to God you’d let me warm you up,” Horace wanted to say, but instead squeezed himself out from underneath the covers to not let more cold air in. On quickly went the flannel shirt, long johns, and Wigwams he kept piled on the frayed rush twine chair next to the bed. He tiptoed down the hall barely wide enough to contain his shoulders. The wide-plank floors cried under his weight. He reloaded the stove from the small indoor stack, the wood bone dry, warm and ready to burn, and then went out the back door, to get more from the porch cord. The outside air was nature’s cold shower; it shrank his nuts and killed his erection. It was no use to him, anyway. The hard, splintery edges of the split logs dug into his skin and brought new pain to his hands. Just once, he wished his son, now fourteen, would get his lazy ass out of bed and do this. The kid had no problem getting up for early practices in whatever sports season it was. But chores? Or old-fashioned work? Forget it.

  Horace stoked the fire, and it spat a few embers onto the floor, which Horace snuffed with his feet. He shut the furnace door and stood, warming his hands, admiring his piece of cast-iron Americana. He found it a couple of summers ago, at an estate sale in a Cooperstown Victorian that was being converted to a B&B. It was rusting away in the garage, junked long ago when oil heat was put in. Horace saw it as a restoration project for Michael and himself. They’d move it home, strip off rust, sand metal back to silver bone, then black-coat it back to good use. But it was baseball season then, and Michael was too busy practicing or playing. After school. Weekends. Always.

  So Horace did it alone, like most things these days. He pivoted it from the garage, moving leg by leg, then tilted it into the back of his old Ford Escort wagon. The 489 pounds of cast iron pancaked the car’s rear suspension, which creaked and cursed all the way home. It was backbreaking, for car and man. The whole time he was busting his nuts, he cursed Sally for not making Michael help. Mikey had a Legion Ball practice, then Babe Ruth practice. God forbid he miss.

  “What’s more important? Helping his father on the rare day he really needs it, or going to yet another of a million sports practices,” Horace argued.

  “What’s more important to him, is the question,” Sally said. “Not what’s more important to you.”

  That was always the question, and the answer enforced by Sally bitterly defined Horace’s fatherhood.

  Horace stood in the dark, the room lit only by fire glow peeking through the furnace grates. He warmed and flexed his blacksmith’s hands, the palm lines indelibly darkened with the dirty gray stains of bituminous coal. Coal shoveled into the hearth, ash shoveled out, just part of a strongman’s work; wielding hammers and pressing bellows and stacking pig iron. His was a lost, ancient craft, with roots older than written history and tools invented in the smoky dawn of civilization. He was an authentic blacksmith, and had the aches to prove it. But he was also an actor, “a living historian” as they said down at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, and an educator. The smithy was first stop on the re-created-village tour. Sparks flew and hammers rang as Horace forged a new horseshoe for
groups of scouts, senior citizens, or kids on class trips and delivered this soliloquy.

  The blacksmith is a living reminder of a day when strength and function were inseparable; whenever and wherever God’s great beasts were domesticated to do heavy work, the blacksmith was the man who kept them pulling, and in the process, forged himself into a beast of a man.

  From the discovery of flint and coke and iron, the blacksmith was the strongman who understood earth’s metals and minerals, who carried the world forward on his broad shoulders. He was the first to understand the abundance of these God-given gifts in the earth, the first metallurgist, the first maker of weapons, the father of heavy industry, the grandfather of all technology. From the horseshoe to the iron-banded wagon wheel, it was the blacksmith who helped push mankind’s transportation forward. From the ancient Hittite blacksmiths came Damascus steel, and the ’smith became the swordsmith and, then, the gunsmith. The blacksmith is ancient, but he endured, because he is the epitome of self-reliance. And here, at the Farmers’ Museum, you will see the self-reliant family farm, the self-reliant rural village, the self-reliant America, the one of work and prayer. One that should not be forgotten.

  He delivered this with theatrical enthusiasm, reveling in his role of eccentric throwback. He was the star of the village. Anyone could dress up and play chicken farmer, milkmaid, or preacher, or run the apothecary or general store, but Horace put on a show. He made flames leap, like magic, from lumps of black coal, then played in that fire with gloved or bare hands. Horace, the giant, the circus strongman, clanged his heavy tools off red-hot metal with delight. With his dark hair long, his face perpetually tanned and leathered by the constant heat of the forge, Horace saw himself as a mythic figure, the revered subject of Longfellow’s ode, an American working strongman like Paul Bunyan or John Henry. He was hardened from the years of wielding heavy tools. At forty-five, with shoulders broad, chest and abdomen firm, arms and legs thick and sculpted, he had never felt physically stronger. The smith, a mighty man is he. He could snap a quarter-inch strand of pig iron over his knee, walk a 500-pound anvil across his shop floor, and work an easy eight hours chopping wood or banging out steel. He moved the Glenwood by himself and had to replace two porch stairs at home that splintered under the weight of him and stove. And yet all that muscle could not beat back the encroaching despair that his family, his country, and all the things he wanted to think true were slipping away. So he prayed for purpose, and fought the good fight.