They were patronizing her. Jeremy didn’t mind. In the space of a whisper and the draw of a breath they would be where he was. No time at all. Maybe he’d understand them then. Maybe he wouldn’t embarrass them. Maybe they wouldn’t cringe when he sang or roll their eyes when he prayed.
Maybe it wouldn’t matter.
His only regret was that he’d miss the wake. He always enjoyed a good wake, and his would be a grand one. Jerome would see to that. The clink of beer bottles in the hall signaled the arrival of the mourners. He hoped they’d had the good sense to hire Shawn Kennedy to play the fiddle. Hugh O’Donnell was cheaper, but he was too old to be good for more than a couple of hours.
The undertaker bent over the bed. Jeremy couldn’t see the beads any more. Only the reflection of his face in the undertaker’s eyes as he reached down to close Jeremy’s lids.
There was a kindness in the old man’s eyes.
Jeremy might not get a beer, but he knew he’d get a shave.
Rat was flat on his back in bed, staring up at the ceiling. More specifically, at a converted gas chandelier suspended there from brass chains. The fixture was draped with one hundred seventy-eight glass beads affixed to wire threads. In the glass beads—so refined were his senses by their recent habitation of the corpse of Jeremy O’Brien—he could easily make out the reflection of his soul, one hundred seventy-eight times over.
“If you take ugly,” he said to Cummings as that obsequious individual sifted into the room on his occupational errands, “and multiply it by one hundred seventy-eight, what have you got?”
“‘What have you?’ would be grammatically correct, sir.”
“Stow the English lesson,” said Rat.
“Yes, sir.”
“Beside the point.”
“Yes, sir. Forgive the liberty. Your question again?”
Rat repeated the question, to which Cummings, believing the Occupant had propounded a riddle, replied: “I do not know, sir. What have you?”
“I don’t have a clue,” said Rat. “But there it is.” He directed his large, brown eyes at the beads.
“You do not detect improvement, sir?” said Cummings, as he removed a prehistoric baseball uniform from the bottom drawer of a dresser Rat hadn’t noticed before. Nor did he notice now.
“Inasmuch as change may be taken to signify improvement, yes. It has boots, now. Much like your own.”
Cummings inclined his head at an approving angle. He prided himself on his boots. “Indeed, sir. I trust it will not be stinting in their maintenance.”
If the expression in the creature’s eyes was anything to go by, the care and feeding of its pedimentary accoutrement was probably pretty near the bottom of its to-do list. It seemed to be grappling, like Rat, with having been a dead Irishman; a trying condition at the best of times.
“These Irish are poetical folk, Cummings.”
“The observation is not without precedent, sir. Yes. They are a complex race, capable of both great beauty and barbarity.” He unfolded a thin, three-fingered baseball glove and drizzled half a teaspoonful of corn oil into the pocket, massaging the silky liquid into the folds and creases with his thumbs. “It has been noted that an Irishman has no greater friend, nor more ruthless an enemy than another Irishman. That to defeat them, one need only leave them alone.”
Rat considered this. “Smacks of profiling, Cummings.”
“Sir?”
“The act of attributing certain characteristics to a race. Not politically correct in my world.”
“It was you who said the Irish are poetical, sir.”
“Yes, but that was a compliment.”
“So, one may speak the truth, so long as those about whom it is spoken do not take exception?”
“You have distilled the argument to a savory broth, my good man.”
“I see,” said Cummings. He had retrieved a pair of over-used baseball shoes from the lower shelves of a nearby bookcase and was flexing them between his hands. “Then, in your world, the obvious must submit to the acceptable?”
Rat wondered if that was so. He decided to make an example of himself. “It may not have slipped your notice that I am black, Cummings.”
“You refer to your complexion?”
“The same.”
“I would have thought Negroid more politic, but . . .”
“Don’t want to go there, honk,” said Rat. “Black is the designation au courant.”
“As you wish. The attribute has not escaped my notice, sir.”
“Hence, at some point, African?”
Cummings allowed that this was probable.
“Yet, I’m about as athletic as Tinkerbell.”
“There are those anthropologists who would regard the fact as the exception that proves the rule, sir.”
Rat was getting nowhere. As the Irishness of the late Jeremy O’Brien seeped from his bones, so did argumentativeness. “There seems a lot about death in these vignettes,” he said at last, still closely regarding the image of his soul in the beads above.
“It is a theme that unites us all, sir,” said Cummings. He produced a fine wire brush and, with it, began to disinter the shoes from their crust of mud and dirt. The action was mechanical, as, to a great extent, had been his conversation. His thoughts were animated by the recent and poignant memory of having become nearly invisible. He wondered if the event was a foreshadowing of things to come. Nor was his wondering casual or disinterested.
“So it is,” said Rat thoughtfully. He was ruminating on the overall benefit of having been a dead Irishman. “I’m sure there’s a moral in this latest installment, but I’m having trouble digging it out.”
“I’m sure it will come to you in time, sir,” said Cummings, placing the shoes by the bed, a narrow cot in the gently swaying sleeping car of a westbound train. “Allow it to ferment.” He held open the covers and Rat insinuated himself betwixt the sheets.
“It might have been about love.”
“A commendable subject, sir, about which much has been written.”
“Or it might have been about friendship.”
“Also worthy of contemplation.”
“Or it might have been a primer on mortuary sciences.”
Perplexity flexed one of the follicles in Cummings’ left eyebrow, beyond which it left no visible impression.
Rat recalled himself to the moment. “Day’s end, Cummings?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Another corker?”
“Each is, in its own way, noteworthy, sir.”
Again, Rat had the disquieting conviction that Cummings was, in the private recesses of his being, laughing hysterically.
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“No, sir. I think it is best.”
“That bad?” Rat inquired. “Never mind! I don’t want to know.”
“Very good, sir.” Cummings folded the baseball uniform neatly under the pillow on which Rat’s head rested. “Will there be anything else?”
Rat looked around. “A train?”
“So it would seem.”
“I like trains,” Rat said as the rhythmical clicking of the rails stitched a web of sleep about his brain.
“A fortunate coincidence, sir,” said Cummings. As he withdrew, the curtain descended over the compartment and began swaying gently from side to side. In his last conscious glimpses, Rat saw, between the folds of an ancient rucksack at the opposite end of the bed, a tiny brass trophy in the shape of a baseball player. His reflection therein was of a white man of medium build and fractured hopes. A man whose life was a series of backward glances. A man who—he knew in the foggy osmosis of the region he entered nightly —wasn’t the central character in the drama of his own life. That role had been taken by T.J., his kid brother; an undersized boy with an oversized gift, who rode the shoulders of his every waking thought with whispers of what might have been, but who would find his greatest calling far from . . .
Red Dust and Dreams
The
seventeenth and eighteenth nights
“Come on, T.J. Throw the ball!”
T.J. was six. It was the first fly-ball he’d ever caught. It was as if someone had dropped a fistful of pirate doubloons into his hand, and he wasn’t in any great hurry to give it up. So he ran home clutching it, with half the kids in the neighborhood in hot pursuit.
Nothing short of Grandy’s threat to take him to the woodshed would make T.J. part with that ball. Grandy—Pa’s dad—was ’bout as old as a Biblical character and he didn’t use many words, but he packed ’em with meaning.
To most kids, giving up that baseball would’ve been all right. They might have sulked and hollered and complained that the world was an unfair place, but they’d’ve learned to live with the disappointment, preferring it to steaming piles of contempt from the rest of the kids on both teams, who only had the one ball amongst ’em. T.J. didn’t see it that way, though. He didn’t have a clear understandin’ of the rules of the game—being only just turned six—but he had it in his head it was some kind of trophy, and it seemed pretty clear to him a trophy was something worth keepin’. Even fighting for, if it came to that, which he was prepared to do ’til Grandy made that remark about the woodshed.
Fightin’ a dozen or so boys twice your size was a win all ’round, far as T.J. could see. ’Course you’d lose the ball in the end, but you’d have won compensation in respect and you’d wear the bruises like badges. At least you wouldn’t have just give it up like it was nothin’. But to get dragged off to the woodshed and come out howlin’ and bawlin’—which everybody did who ever went there ’cause them was the only signs of repentance Grandy recognized and he wouldn’t leave off ’til they were forthcoming at a certain volume, which indicated sincerity—and just have to hand it over like you was some sobby little girl was an ignominy too gross to contemplate.
Maybe that’s when T.J. got took over by baseball. I mean, most kids’ll take it up for an afternoon every now and then if there ain’t work to do, or if the creek don’t call too loud with mighty coolin’ on a hot Oklahoma day, or if there ain’t girls to look at and no one’s got three cents for a Coke or a lemonade down at the drugstore. Not T.J. Once he got the hang of the principles of the game, he glommed onto it like it was somethin’ too hot and sticky to wash off. Not that he tried. Mornin’, noon, and night that boy was at it. If Grandy hadn’t give in and bought that boy a ball, he might as well have gone and shot himself, T.J. was that insistent. Grandy figured—his own peace of mind aside—that kind of tenacity might come in handy one day and ought to be rewarded. I guess he reckoned the forty-three cents he laid out down at the emporium was an investment in the child’s future.
Well, that ball nearly drove us all crazy. T.J. hadn’t never been an early riser. Generally Ma had to struggle to get ’im up at five to fetch the eggs from the henhouse, and feed the chickens and milk the goat, which was all the chores he had to do before breakfast, bein’ only just turned six. But once he got that ball, he was up before the daggum rooster, and outside in nothin’ but his coveralls—and barefoot besides—tossin’ that ball up on the kitchen roof (which is all as high as he could throw the thing) and it would rattle around on the tin up there and come rollin’ down with just enough locomotion to clear the gutter and pop out into the air for a little flight into his glove. Which ain’t to say it ended up there often at first. Turns out that first catch we talked about earlier was a fluke. This come as a hard lesson to the boy, but he didn’t give it up, owin’ probably to that persistence Grandy recognized. No sir, he’d run after that ball wherever it went; it had a pernicious streak did that ball, endin’ up most times pretty well under the rose bushes at the bottom of the yard, which had that boy covered with scratches like it was an engine made for the purpose. T.J. hardly took no notice. He’d crawl under there and get it and bring it back out and stand in that same spot by the rain barrel and toss ’er up again and thud, rattle, roll, pop and drop there she went.
Over and over and over like some Oriental torture. But Grandy wouldn’t let us stop ’im or even yell at ’im, even though it was drivin’ him as nuts as it was us.
Ma didn’t say nothin’ ’til five-thirty, then she’d holler it was time for him to go about his chores and if he didn’t she’d take his ball away and that’s how she got him to do anything she wanted ’til he left home. I expect if he’d ever lived long enough to get married, his wife would’ve handled him pretty much the same way. But he didn’t, not in the ordinary sense, anyway.
Once chores were cleared (and Ma saw they were done right or else) he’d be at it again. Thud, rattle, roll, pop and drop, so it became the rhythm of the place after awhile. You’d be out yonder pitchin’ hay or takin’ in the corn or sloppin’ the hogs and all of a sudden that ragged little percussion would stop—on those rare occasions when the rose bush got involved in the game—and it was like someone stuck a wrench in a machine. You’d stop what you were doin’ and wait for it to start again. It come to be familiar, you know how even somethin’ irritatin’ can seem like home if you live with it long enough. Ma used to say that about Grandy’s snoring, which blew out the curtains from three rooms away. “How can you live with that racket?” Mrs. Kelkinny asked her one day when Grandy fell asleep on the front porch and put on a display. Ma just smiled. “I hate to think of the day I won’t hear it no more,” is all Ma said. She was special close to Grandy. Aunt May said Ma wasn’t over-loved by her own daddy and when she married Pa, Grandy just took to her like butter and treated her like a princess, which he did even more after Pa died under the tractor. He was always watchful over Ma that none of us boys took advantage of her or pushed her nose too close to the grindstone—as boys are apt—but there was no two ways about T.J. and that damn ball. That’s what we called it, for all we’re a pretty religious family and watch our language, even when we drop somethin’ heavy on one extremity or other. Every time someone talked about that ball it was ‘that damn ball’ and that was the one expletive that was allowed, ’cause everyone agreed it was so. Except T.J. of course.
There wasn’t a vertical, horizontal, or sloping surface of the whole farm that wasn’t covered with ball smudges. Even the chickens—generally a pretty nervous bunch—learned to live with periodic attacks on the henhouse.
In fact, Georgy swore they lay more eggs and bigger after one of T.J.’s sessions. Cows never seemed to mind one way or the other, bein’ too stupid to notice anything out of the ordinary. (Grandy always said cows was number than a pounded thumb and wouldn’t let us have steak more than once or twice a week for fear we’d catch it. He only let us eat off Flora once a week ’cause she was ’specially dumb. Her steaks occupied the ice house a good long time.)
I’m gettin’ off the point, which is that by the time he was seven or eight, T.J. had a reputation as a ballplayer. And he deserved it. There wasn’t a ball you could hit or throw within a reasonable perimeter that’d get past him. Durin’ the course of any given season he’d fall to earth like a forest full of trees, snatchin’ balls in a way that was almost supernatural. He pitched, too. Once he’d got his catchin’ skills down, he painted a strike zone on the barn and he’d wail away at that ’til you thought his arm would spring its socket. And there wasn’t no mistakin’ his strikes. He had this little dish of blue chalk he’d roll that ball around in and when it hit that little painted-on box on the barn wall, it’d leave a mark to show just where it landed.
When he first started out, there was enough chalk on that barn so anyone would’ve thought it was a geological oddity. Next rain would wash it all away, though. Wasn’t long before he could place that ball anywhere he wanted inside that square. Within an inch. I’m not kidding. Any of them kids who watched him would say the same thing. Within an inch. Pretty soon he backed off from Little League to Major League distance. For a while the balls painted the barn with a pretty broad brush, but I bet it wasn’t two weeks before they had no more chance of getting outside that painted-on square than Willie Hatcher, the town
drunk, had of gettin’ outside the hoosegow on a Saturday night.
Okay, T.J. Move on to battin’. Well, this was his weak spot for a long time, mainly ’cause he couldn’t very well pitch to himself, could he? He got the rest of us to do it sometimes, but we had lives to live! He could pester like nobody’s business, but you got to draw the line somewhere, don’t you? He even had Ma at it, but he despised her underhand pitches, which anybody could hit blindfolded, and her overhand throws were as likely to kill some innocent passerby as come within a day’s journey of home plate. Not that he didn’t appreciate the effort, but he scorned the results without holdin’ much back.
Grandy would’ve done it with all his heart, but the arthritis in his gnarly old fingers wouldn’t even let him grip the ball. He hated that.
Finally, T.J. come up with this contraption out in the barn, all on his own, which was a pitchin’ machine. I don’t recollect exactly how it worked, but I know he used a conveyor belt and a one-cylinder gasoline engine that nobody recollected the original use of, and some springs, and a thing like a catapult that could throw a ball hard enough to take your head off if you weren’t careful, which it almost demonstrated on T.J. a couple of times ’til he got the aimin’ mechanism refined. Well, like pitchin’ took a while to master, so did hittin’, but by the end of that first summer he’d got what they call a ‘batter’s eye’ so sharp it was like that ball was comin’ at him slow motion.
Whack! Whack! Whack! He was a hittin’ demon. After a while it got too easy. Too easy, he said! That ball comin’ at him ninety miles an hour and him only eight years old and not more than a head taller than that bat! So he bunged a little widget into the catapult that made it wobble just as it was lettin’ go of the ball, and it threw sliders, and sinkers, and screwballs, oh my! You never knew what was comin’, but before long that contraption run out of surprises and never again did that ball hit up against the wall behind T.J.
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