Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  He thought about his baseball idea. Maybe it was a way to bring Michael closer to him. It was sports, after all. Michael had changed, and it was more than just growing up. It was growing away. Cell phone attached to hand, to text friends or play games or get sports news alerts. Alerts, as in urgent. Crazy world, Horace thought, one filled with constant diversion. He wanted to show Michael something authentic. He wanted to raise a boy who could do more with his hands than push buttons, and understood the holistic value of crafting something, even if you worked in a place of obscurity, like a farm museum smithy. He believed a man’s true character was formed in those dark places, alone, not under the bright lights of the playing field.

  Maybe Horace would volunteer to do the research, and get Michael interested. Horace could show him the simple church-picnic rural roots of the game, hand-wound, leather-stitched balls, pedal-lathed bats, burlap bags as bases. Maybe it would lead him to see that Horace’s village, Horace’s work, was important.

  On the winding roads into Cooperstown, Horace decided to ask Grundling to give Michael a summer job, mowing fields, painting fences, helping in barns. Horace envisioned Michael pitching hay and throwing bales in the summer sun, tanned and strong, hair matted with sweat but a smile on his face. He saw them sitting together on a crude bench, shaded by the horse barn, devouring sandwiches from brown paper bags and guzzling the iced tea Sally made.

  He saw Michael captivated by Horace’s passionate and detailed stories of the hops industry nurtured by their German ancestors. Michael would learn their history, their family history. What an exercise in perspective! Perhaps even . . . relevance!

  After work they could walk across Lake Street to the art museum and rediscover the collections. Horace took Michael there often when he was little to show him the detailed New York farm-town streetscapes of Fritz Vogt, and the dreamy, muted Hudson River landscapes of Thomas Cole. His Last of the Mohicans scenes hung there, painted in the months after the publication of Cooper’s famous book. He imagined Michael growing ambitious to read Cooper, like generations of farm boys who turned pages by candlelight and dreamed of adventure; boys with imaginations as expansive as the fields and forests around them, where they played Natty Bumppo on his Leatherstocking adventures. Boys who were apprentices in his character: loner, leader, fighter, peacemaker; virtuous or murderous, whichever the situation called for. Tight-jawed, iron-willed, fearless, and incorruptible, able to adapt to enemy turf and win. Always win.

  “Look around you, son,” Horace would say. “Cooperstown may not be the birthplace of baseball, but it is the birthplace of something bigger. It is the birthplace of American manhood.”

  This pleasant daydream brought calm to Horace’s soul. He let out a deep breath, expunging the anger “Cool, Cool Cooperstown” brought on.

  And just then, the drivetrain dropped out of the Econoline. Horace heard a bang, felt the power go dead in his hands, then a spark-flying scrape of metal against pavement. He pulled off the road and perched it on a drainage ditch, and dented the fender with his foot.

  * * *

  THE FLATBED TOW TRUCK pulled into the gravel horseshoe driveway of the old stables, where Hank Greenwald came out to meet it.

  “Dropped the trans,” Horace told him. “Thing’s useless.”

  “Thing’s old,” Hank said with a smirk. “That don’t make it useless. Everything’s fixable, till it’s not.”

  Hank’s father had worked for Ambrose Clark, who built the stables and barns now used for storage and horticulture development. Across the street, where Ambrose’s racehorses trained and grazed on a hundred acres, was the new Clark Sports Center with state-of-the-art fitness toys, and the town’s baseball diamonds and soccer fields. It was on those fields that the Hall hosted its annual induction ceremony.

  Old Hank had worked on the estate since he was just a boy.

  “Only place I’d ever been,” Hank liked to say. “I’m the last of the Ambrose farmhands.”

  Hank wore the uniform of the foundation, cream-colored work clothes with forest-green patches and an embroidered Hank over the pocket of his work jacket.

  “Just call me Mr. Cream Jeans,” he liked to say.

  Hank waved the tow truck over to the storage stables, opposite the garden greenhouses on the property, and slid the giant bay doors open on their rollers.

  “Easy as the day she was made,” Hank said.

  Yes, the barns were in remarkably good shape for their age, in some ways better than new. Rural decay was like urban decay, thought Horace. A by-product of poverty. When there was money, like in the Clark Foundation, things stayed in shape. People, too. Hank was at least eighty-five, trim, fit, and strong through work, despite smoking a half pack of Pall Malls a day.

  Inside he had the wheel of a freight wagon, circa 1880, balanced on a vise, rebanding it with a strip of galvanized steel.

  “Old one rusted off,” he said. “Ain’t authentic but it’ll hold better.”

  The van was dropped, and as they unloaded the junk tools and equipment, Horace told Hank about his plans to work with Michael—and why.

  “Everything is changing so fast, Hank, a boy doesn’t even have a chance to breathe fresh air anymore, let alone work up a palm full of calluses,” said Horace.

  “It’s a good idea, Horace. A damn good idea,” Hank said, taking a smoke out of his jacket pocket. “Reminds me a little of me and my dad. I got all the schooling I needed from my dad and Irish Jimmy Henkins, who knew everything there was to know ’bout thoroughbreds. And when I look around this place, I see all my daddy built and I maintained. Fences. Gates. Ring posts. Even the birdhouses. He put in that flagpole over there, straight as an arrow with nothing but his eye.”

  Horace looked at the pole, towering over the barn, the American flag straight in the winter breeze, the Clark Foundation colors and logo below it.

  “Made every one of them stalls his self,” Hank said, gesturing toward the barn. “Wood, iron, and all. Got his initials in some of ’em. He’s been gone thirty-some years now, but his work is still standing. A young boy should see his daddy’s work.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Horace said. “The kid only sees what he wants to see. His games, his gadgets. Sits there with plugs in his ears.”

  Hank let out a big sigh, then took a long deliberate drag of his cigarette.

  “Nah, that’s no damn good. You got to be out in the world to see it change,” he said, exhaling. “Look over there, at that Sports Center. When most people around here look it at, they see a new building, a big gym, the induction hoopla in summer. When I look over there, I see the whole damn thing, old and new. I see Mr. Ambrose’s training track, and Irish Jimmy leaning over the rail with a stopwatch, watching the colored exercise boy work some t-bred into a lather. I see my daddy on a tractor, grading the track, the dust flying up behind him. I see a field of mares and their rickety-legged foals. I see me and my daddy, repairing the split-rail fence some stallion kicked down. That’s what I see.”

  Just then, the sound of hammer strikes echoed across the empty playing fields. Both men looked toward the noise. Over at the Clark Center, two young men were putting in a roadside sign that said:

  Baseball Hall of Fame

  Induction Day

  July 26

  Congratulations Joe Grudeck!

  Chapter Five

  Grudeck was on his way to Union, to tell his mother, thinking about his father. The day Chuck Grudeck lived for, he wasn’t here to see. Life cheated some people that way, Grudeck knew. Irony, the driving force of the universe, like his dad said.

  He turned Jimmy Mac’s new Cadillac CTS onto Route 78, an interstate descent from the wealth-belt hills, where Grudeck now lived, to the industrial basin of blue-collar Jersey, where Grudeck was from.

  Grudeck hadn’t lived there full-time since he left for rookie camp, a week after his high school graduation, three months after his eighteenth birthday. That was almost thirty years ago, when his dad took three days of
f from the fabricating plant and drove him down to Winter Haven. With Joey’s new steamer trunk and duffel bag in the backseat of the family Malibu, they made Florida in twenty hours, stopping only for gas, food, and the bathroom. Joey slept most of the way, resting up. His father drove in silence, not even AM radio.

  “This is your destiny,” his father said in his ear as they hugged good-bye. “Your destiny. You were destined for this, from the time you could walk.”

  Now, in the fast lane of the interstate, Grudeck thought about how much his dad sacrificed, but also what he gained. Yes, he created Joe Grudeck, but in exchange got to be Joe Grudeck’s father. Yes, from the time Joey could walk, Chuck Grudeck put a glove and bat in his hand, or a football or basketball, until Chuck put Joey in wrestling in sixth grade. Basketball was for moolies anyway, his father said. When Joey got old enough to join teams, Chuck Grudeck took the night shift at Jenn-Air, where he shaped galvanized casings for heating and cooling vents, so he could coach his son.

  “I’m not going to put you in the hands of some jerk,” he always said.

  Chuck Grudeck was a good coach, simple as that. He put in the time, and drilled his teams on fundamentals. “Play right, play better” was his motto. And they won easily with Joey in the lineup. Still, Grudeck remembered his father being fair. He let other kids pitch and bat cleanup. He made Joey sit out two innings a game, so other parents couldn’t piss and moan about their sons’ playing time. In football, he put him on the line for the second half.

  “Clear a path for so-and-so,” his dad would whisper to him on the sidelines. Joey would be lead blocker, knocking down kids the whole way. With Joey blocking, every kid on his team got the thrill of scoring a touchdown, which made Chuck Grudeck a hero with the parents.

  He was a hard-ass in only one area: sportsmanship. His boys behaved on the field. No football spikes, end-zone dances, no trash talk or number ones.

  “Win the World Series or the Super Bowl, then you can put up number one,” Chuck told his players. “Until then, there’s always somebody better.”

  Joe Grudeck held these values as a major leaguer. Play with hustle, not strut. He demanded the same from his teammates.

  Like this legendary Joe Grrr-eww story: The Red Sox acquired a young Dominican slugger named Pujo Gutierrez. Grudeck at the time was a ten-year vet, at the very top of his game and team captain. Pujo batted cleanup, just ahead of him in the line-up. One night at Fenway, Pujo hit a long, long home run over the Green Monster, then took a slow, slow trot ’round the bases. Grudeck got drilled in the hip with the next pitch. That’s baseball. Grudeck headed to first, stoic but stung. But in the locker room after the game, Grudeck called Gutierrez over to his stall.

  “Hey, Pujo, look at this,” Grudeck said, and showed him the bruise on his hip. Then, he swung a right hook into Gutierrez’s thigh, sending him to the floor with a charley horse.

  “Now we’re even, motherfucker,” Grudeck said. “Think about your teammates next time you’re tempted to rub somebody’s face in shit.”

  That was the Chuck Grudeck in Joe.

  * * *

  IT WAS THIRTY-ONE MILES from Grudeck’s condo to his boyhood home on Stuyvesant Avenue, mostly on Route 78. He was on the final leg now, where six lanes were blasted through the traprock of the Watchung Mountains, creating half-pipes of brown outcrops. On the ridge, a panoramic view of urban Jersey opened up, from the Manhattan skyline east to the rise of Staten Island south. Life down there was work. Real work. Rail lines. Port cranes. Power plants. Smokestacks. Planes coming and going, like blinking stars. Middle-class ’burbs, with church steeples and water spheres peeking out over treelines. Grudeck first noticed it the night of his father’s funeral, when he took off from Newark Airport to rejoin the team. As he rose above the Jerseyscape, he thought of all the people down there like Chuck and Sylvia Grudeck; all the people not like him. He escaped their obscurity. He was the most famous person ever to come out of his town, a “baseball icon,” as the sportswriters say. He left, but didn’t. He always came back, but wasn’t invested. Not in Union, not anywhere.

  Grudeck came off the highway and onto Morris Avenue, Union’s main street. But the traffic, always the traffic, made him impatient, so he made a couple of turns and ended up on Lehigh Avenue in the industry section where Jenn-Air used to be. Lehigh Avenue was the tax base in the old days—DiGi Automotive Products, Armstrong Binding, Holman Plastics, East Coast Corrugated Boxes, Jenn-Air, and Liberty Dairies, a milk-processing plant. Places his friends’ fathers worked. Sponsors of Pop Warner and Little League. Some of those plants were replaced by clean corporate offices. These names—Schering, Comcast, Bank of America—were part of the new economy: pharmaceuticals, communications, money, run by the kind of guys Grudeck played golf with these days. Jenn-Air, where his father worked forty-five years, and a few others were vacant, with “Available” signs out front, for God knows how long. Lehigh Avenue ended back at Morris, and Grudeck turned toward home, through the downtown.

  The Union center was old, built up in the 1920s, and beat up ever since. Some of the old stores, killed by highway big-box stores, now had signs in Español for international phone cards and money orders. But other places, like Lutz Pork Store and Green Pharmacy, were hanging on. His mother was a customer for decades, and some had personalized autographed pictures of Grudeck on their walls. To the guys at Lutz—makers of world’s best Polish sausage, Joey Grudeck.

  He drove past the town hall, a Colonial-style complex with a bronzed eagle in a clock tower. As a kid, the clock always said “you’re late” as he ran home for dinner. As he passed it now, he could almost smell the woody air of fall, when dark came too early, or the fresh-dirt scent of spring, when the extended daylight tricked him into thinking he had more time. All those days, and seasons, he ran past that clock, his sneaker treads packed with mud; the days when his body had elastic immortality, no hand pain, no joint inflammation, just the strong, hard rubber muscles of youth.

  He drove past Connecticut Farms School, the public grammar school. He remembered thinking it was a dumb name. They weren’t in Connecticut and there weren’t any farms. But it was the first town name, later changed to Union right after the Civil War. Still, the name “Farmers” was stuck on the high school sports teams. Grudeck hated it. It was a mushy name, implying no strength, speed, or bad intent, no animal prowess or heroic quality. Just a name from a forgotten past.

  He passed the old brick church, which dated back to George Washington days. Grudeck knew this only because he got caught vandalizing it. He was just in fifth grade when he became the only kid who could hit a ball out of St. Joe’s schoolyard and onto church property. First, it was into the adjacent cemetery. Then the church, on a bounce. It wasn’t long until he could reach it on a fly, and then it wasn’t long before he broke a tall, arched window.

  The minister saw the whole thing: a gaggle of boys pointing toward the church, the biggest boy’s long stride and perfect swing, a swing so easy but so muscular, so tuned but so natural, it could only be a gift from God. He saw the launch, and the high, arcing trajectory of the ball. He lost it in the sky, then heard the clatter of broken glass in the sanctuary as the boys jumped on the batter in celebration.

  The minister grabbed the ball and went straight to Sister Jacinta, the principal at St. Joe’s. The boys were still buzzing when she came at them like a thundercloud, dark gray, angry, and swirling, with her heavy nun’s dress trailing in the wind she created. Behind her was the minister, hurrying to keep up, white hair rising like a cumulus cloud over his black church suit. The sister had the baseball in hand, and waved Grudeck over with it.

  “Mr. Grudeck . . . you lose something?” she asked.

  Grudeck looked at her, mustering all the innocence he could in his face.

  “This look familiar?” she asked, holding the ball up to his face.

  “Umm . . . I think. That might be the ball I just hit over into the churchyard.”

  “The churchyard?”
<
br />   “Yeah, I mean, yes, Sister. The church over there, ’cross the street.”

  “I know where the church is. Did you see it land in the churchyard?”

  “No, I was running . . . you’re never supposed to watch the ball after you hit it,” Grudeck said. Maybe this bit of Little League wisdom would be convincing.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, Mr. Grudeck,” Sister said, “the ball didn’t land in the churchyard, it broke a church window. And Reverend Angus here says it looked to him like you did it on purpose.”

  Angus. Grudeck heard his buddies stifle giggles as soon as they heard the name, which caused Grudeck to smirk, which caused Sister to say, “Oh, so you think this is funny? I’m not sure your father will think it’s funny when he has to pay for the window. And I don’t think Reverend Angus here thinks it’s funny.”

  There it was again. More giggles, this time louder. Grudeck bit the inside of his mouth, enough to taste blood. He didn’t want to answer, afraid he might bust out.

  “So, you do think this is funny?” Sister asked, now tossing the ball up and catching it in one hand, over and over, like a cop tapping his nightstick.

  “Nosister,” Grudeck finally managed.

  “And did you do it on purpose?”

  “No, Sister, I didn’t think I could hit it that far.”

  “But you were aiming for the church?” she asked.

  Grudeck was trying to think how to answer that when, after a few long beats of silence, Angus rescued him.

  “I think the point here is, you boys should be more careful, lest we grown-ups take you for vandals,” he said. “Now, I saw the whole thing, and it looked to me like you boys were delighted the window was broken. So, what I would like is for you boys to come down to the church after school and clean up the mess, and then do some yard work in our cemetery this weekend to earn the money to pay for that window. Maybe along the way, you’ll learn something about the history of our church—and our town—so you’ll think twice next time.”