I’m sayin’ ball. Of course, no one ball could stand up under that kind of regimen. It was the men of the Grange who supplied ’em for him, just for the entertainment of it. Grandy put ’em up to it, and they guffawed him at first but he told ’em to come out to the barn and see for themselves what T.J. was up to and, since there wasn’t much else to do, they did. And what they saw beat the motion picture show to ashes! They’d come out of an evenin’ with beer or cider and Ma’d roast corn on the cob and sometimes make fudge, and it was an evenin’s entertainment for the price of a baseball. Not a bad deal.
’Course them men started sayin’ watch out when T.J. got old enough to play on the Little League team, which you had to be nine to do. Why, just think what would happen! County? Wasn’t no question. They could ride that boy’s back all the way to the State Championship!
And them old men turned out to be prophets, ’cause that’s just what happened. God put a powerful desire in T.J. and there just wasn’t nothin’ else but baseball in one form or another would satisfy. The day he turned nine, Mitchy Cauldrell, coach of the Prairie Dogs, Chouteau’s little league team, stuck the boy in a uniform—that for all it was the smallest one they had was still three sizes too big, an’ T.J. practically had to take three steps in it before the uniform begun to move—and made him startin’ pitcher that day against the Pryor Panthers. It was halfway through the season and Chouteau was at the bottom of the league, twelve games out of first place. Add in that we’d never beat Pryor, which was the closest thing to a city thereabouts, and add in that they had Briley Fortune, the best hitter anybody’d ever seen for his age (he was hittin’ .457 when he took the plate against T.J.) and you’ve pretty much got the setup that day.
Well, a crowd turned out an’ expectations was high that, even if Pryor whooped up on us pretty bad like always, at least this game was goin’ to have some interesting moments. And so it did. Briley was sixteen years old and roughly twice T.J.’s size—fact you had to squint to see T.J. out there on that red dirt mound at all—and he come out there to the plate with a big grin on his face and he said somethin’ like: “Where’s the pitcher? All I see’s a little heap of laundry out there!” Everybody heard ’im and his teammates laughed and Mitchy and the rest of the Prairie Dogs was beginnin’ to wonder if this was such a good idea after all. T.J.’d spent most of his warm-up tryin’ to claw his way outside that uniform and every time he threw the ball, which he didn’t do with none of the verve he exhibited in the barn, his hat would fall over his eyes and he’d had to drop his head a way back for a look under the visor to see where it went. It was comical and tragical both, a lot like somethin’ Shakespeare would have put down if he was into baseball.
The umpire called ‘batter-up’ and there wasn’t no avoidin’ it any more.
Briley swung his bat around and pointed it at T.J., who didn’t notice ’cause he was tryin’ to dig out from under his cap. Finally he caught sight of the catcher and heaved the first pitch of his career, and it went clear over the catcher’s head, and over the umpire’s head, and into the stands behind home plate where it put a quick end to Smilin’ Murphy’s corn dog. That put the opposition in a good mood.
Someone threw the ball back toward T.J., but he didn’t see it so it went right by him out to Stip Hawkins on second base, leavin’ a little trail of mustard on the way. I swear you could see that mustard all the way from the bleachers where me and Kenny and the rest of the boys were.
“Ball one,” says the umpire with a chuckle. He put his head down and said to the catcher and Briley, “That was so far out, I oughta call it two balls.” But it was so quiet by then everybody heard ’im. Mitchy told Walt Pankins to start throwin’ in the bullpen.
T.J. eventually got the ball back, an’ he rubbed off the mustard in the armpit of his uniform. Then off come the hat, which was no small sacrifice in a bright sun and the temperature nearin’ 98.
“I’m down here!” said Briley, wavin’ and mocking.
I don’t know what was goin’ through T.J.’s mind just then, but I tell you those of us who were blood-related to him was feelin’ pretty small, and we all held our breath when he hauled back and let the next one fly. Well, it was closer, but still went behind Briley by two or three feet.
“Ball two!” said the umpire, who shouldn’t have been smilin’ so hard, but couldn’t help it. And I couldn’t blame him, ’cause T.J. did look like a little midget clown out there tryin’ to find a clearin’ through that uniform.
Briley was gettin’ into it. He turned around at the plate and pretended he was gonna bat lefty, since that’s the side the pitches seemed to favor. Ma and Grandy was about the only ones didn’t laugh at that. Even I almost choked myself tryin’ to keep it in.
Off come T.J.’s shirt, and now he looked like a twig stuck in a planter, but a twig that meant business. Well, he snatched the ball when the catcher finally tracked it down and tossed it back, and fondled it for a second or two. Then he bent down, got the sign—there was only three signs, fast ball, slow ball, curve—and shook it off. Folks thought this was humorous, but Grandy seemed to think somethin’ historical was about to happen. And he was right. T.J. settled on a sign and, holdin’ the ball in his mitt so nobody could see his fingers, just stood there about ten seconds ’til the Panthers started jeering, and then another ten seconds after that, and the umpire was just about to straighten up and say somethin’ when the pitch came.
Well, nobody saw it. All there was was this kind of blurry activity of T.J.’s right arm and the next thing you know Petey Prinder, the catcher, was flat on his back with a little pillow of dust risin’ over his shoulders. ’Course, when he went over, the umpire did too. All of a sudden everything was so quiet you could step in it up to your ankles.
“What was that?” said Briley, who thought somethin’ supernatural had happened ’cause when that ball passed him it was about the size of a termite’s testicle.
Petey and the umpire untangled themselves and they was tryin’ to figure out the same question.
“Strike one,” the umpire said when he put his hat back on. “I think.”
Nobody was laughin’ any more. Nobody was even breathin’ when T.J. got ready for his next pitch, least of all Briley who knew he’d just witnessed something disordinary.
Everybody was surprised when T.J. dropped the ball and his glove right there on the mound and stomped off to the dugout. Nobody said nothin’ for a minute or so, bein’ taken off guard like that and wonderin’ if the boy’d hurt himself, but when he come back out he wasn’t wearin’ nothin’ but his overalls, and he was barefoot just like at home.
Well this was mighty irregular and the Panther’s coach protested, but the umpire said there was nothin’ in the rules that mandated the uniform. He said it wasn’t like basketball, where you needed uniforms to tell one team from the other. “I think everyone here’s got a pretty good idea which team is in the field, and which ain’t,” he said. And that was the end of the argument.
And that was it. T.J. picked up the ball and rolled it around the end of his skinny little nine-year-old fingers like it was a pet serpent, and Briley knew then it was all over. That next pitch come right at his head about eighty-five miles an hour and he threw himself to the ground just as it curved and dropped across the plate smooth as cream.
“Strike two!” said the umpire, who was serious as a train wreck by now.
Next pitch Briley swung, but it was more ’cause he felt he had to do something rather than just stand there lookin’ stupid, but the ball was already halfway back to T.J. by that time and the ump had already called “Strike three! You’re out!”
Well the cheer that went up was like nothin’ you ever heard. Even the corn was clappin’ in the field next door. And that was the way it was for seven innings. Three pitches a batter—since none of ’em come within’ a Sabbath-day’s howdy of hittin’ it—three batters an inning, seven innings a game. Sixty-three pitches. Twenty-one strike-outs by the tow-haired boy on the mo
und who didn’t know nothin’ but baseball.
He wasn’t merciful when it come his time to bat, neither. Three home runs he got, in three innings, one of ’em a grand slam. Who knows how many more he’d’ve had if Mitchy hadn’t took pity on the Panthers in the fourth when the score was 18-0, and pinch-hit Lucky Marshall for T.J.; you could do that in them days, pinch-hit for a pitcher and leave ’im in the game, least by Oklahoma rules you could.
Of course the Prairie Dogs rode T.J.’s arm and bat to the State Championship that year, and kept it up for the next five years, too. Still a record in these parts. They didn’t win every game, of course, ’cause there was other pitchers ’sides T.J. But Mitchy’d stick him in here and there, middle-relief or closer, whenever the rest of the team was havin’ trouble haulin’ ’emselves over the fence in a game that counted. Boy had an arm like a piston and he never did get to the end of it when it come to pitchin’.
Local sports writers run out of hyperbole early on and was mostly repeatin’ ’emselves, which must’ve give ’em headaches ’cause there wasn’t a thesaurus big enough to hold words for all the things T.J. done. Wasn’t long before he was gettin’ attention all over the southwest and folks’d come two, three days’ trip to see one’ve his games, just so’s they could say they saw him when . . . ’cause there wasn’t no doubt he’d cut a pretty deep furrow through the record books once he got to the big leagues.
There was scouts out there by the time he was thirteen and they’d try to talk casual, like “yeah he shows promise, that boy, we’ll have to keep an eye on him,” but it was hard to make out the words for the drool an’ you could see they hardly slept nights after one’ve T.J.’s games, ’cause they had trouble blinking.
And that’s how it was in the summer of ’17 when Pootch Hawley of the Salina All Stars caught T.J. upside the head with that fastball. T.J. went down like a harlot’s knickers and just laid there in the dirt. Pootch said later he felt some awful ’bout what happened, but there’s folks still say to this day he did it on purpose. Not a bad strategy in a war to cut down the general, but this wasn’t war, it was just baseball. Anyway, he got up finally, T.J. did, and wobbled on out to first and everyone figured he was okay.
Next up come Pike Sterrit an’ he took a mighty tear at one low and outside and caught just enough of the ball to make it change its mind ’bout where it was goin’. It come right back to the pitcher, but slow. Still, there wasn’t no way Pike was gonna make it to first. But T.J. wasn’t there to stand around decoratin’ first base. He was off and slidin’ barefoot into second before that pitcher knew which way was backwards, and that’s when it happened. I know you ain’t gonna credit what I’m about to tell you, no one does, but there’s plenty folks alive today saw it same as me, back in Chouteau, Oklahoma, and they’ll swear to it.
Every time I tell this I run right up against the same problem them sports writers had, which is there just ain’t words for it, but here she goes:
T.J. went into his slide about six feet from the bag an’ beat out the throw by a good whole second. And when he did, he kicked up this cloud of dust that shoulda just hung there like any other cloud of dust in that breathless heat, but it didn’t. It took the shape of a little whole-hearted baseball player in bare feet and overalls and struck out toward third base for all it was worth. Now, even if there was a wind to account for that phenomenon, it would’ve been outta the southeast, which means blowing in the opposite direction. Do you take my meaning? There was that cloud of dust, shaped just like T.J. hell-bent for third base, and it rounded third and struck out for home and the catcher didn’t know what to do, and the second baseman was just standin’ there with his jaw dropped, lookin’ at the ball in his hand, and lookin’ at T.J. still layin’ on the ground at his feet and then up at that dust devil kickin’ up dust of its own with home plate not fifteen feet away. But there’s no tellin’ if it ever made it, ’cause it just dissolved. Disappeared like a politician’s promise. There. I said it just like I always say it and you’re thinkin’ I’m crazy. Well, so be it. I don’t expect I’m the only one whose gun’s a little loose in his holster, but that’s the way it was and I’d swear to it in a room full of Bibles.
It was a minute or two before anyone had the presence of mind to look back at T.J. He was layin’ there, still as cut wheat. They carried him off, finally, and took ’im to the hospital up in Pryor.
He come to a day or so later, but he wasn’t the same after that, nor would you be. He’d get dizzy real easy and had a hard time walkin’ for a few weeks. Pretty soon he never even talked about baseball anymore, and Grandy and Ma wondered what would happen to him. After all, he lived for baseball, that boy. It was his whole life and when it was gone, what’d he have left?
He’d’ve been a legend, I s’pose, but folks stopped talkin’ ’bout him.
It’s that way, ain’t it, when they build someone up and have all these expectations then somethin’ happens to put the kibosh on all them dreams. It was like he’d let ’em down; like it was his fault. He felt it, too.
He spent most of his time sittin’ on the fence under the oak at the bottom of the yard, starin’ out across the fields. Grandy and Ma didn’t know what to do with him. Neither did we, so we just let ’im sit. He had to find somethin’ else to wrap his life around, but nobody had no idea what that might be.
Oh yes, we asked him about that dust devil, but he said he didn’t know what we was talkin’ about and not to ask again ’cause he thought it was crazy.
Then one day he got up early and was gone. Next thing we heard, he’d joined the infantry. We got this postcard from a place over in France called Amiens. Seems there was a hell of a war goin’ on over there, ’bout six planets away from Chouteau, Oklahoma.
It was upon tiptoe that Cummings approached Rat’s chamber door the next morning, a situation conditioned less by his desire not to disturb the Occupant, though there was that, than by the fact that his feet were invisible. Indeed, from the knees downward, he noted with a disquiet all his own, he was far less apparent than he would wish. He had made mental note of the progress of the malady throughout the early morning hours when, as was his custom, he polished the statuary and tended the flora and fauna in the mansion’s immediate vicinity, and it was persistent.
The condition was without parallel in his previous experience on the island and, while it would be too much to imply that he was alarmed, any adjective less emphatic would not have fallen too wide of the mark.
It was not that his feet weren’t there. They were. He could feel them, even if he couldn’t see them; simply that they provided no visible means of support.
At any rate, his instinctive response was to walk upon tiptoe, as if to raise himself as far as possible above the affliction, and so it was that he approached the bedroom door. Upon arrival, however, introspection along these lines vanished, much like his feet, for the air was suddenly tinged with an unfamiliar odor. He sniffed, in the manner of a plesiosaur detecting upon the wind the harbinger of its own extinction. The perfume was instantly unpleasant, pungent with the odor of death and destruction.
Harold Erasmus Jackson would not be disturbed that morning.
Now I don’t claim to know much about what went on over there in France.
It was all damn foolishness for all I could tell, which is the other thing you can say “damn” about ’sides T.J.’s baseball. I never did hear Grandy say “foolishness” without precedin’ it with “damn.” Far as I could tell it was about somebody shootin’ a duke and apparently his kin took offense and the next thing you know all them kings and queens of all them countries—which are all a pretty inbred bunch, which may account for their behavior—well, they got into one whale of a family quarrel and got the whole world sucked into it somehow or other. I ain’t clear on how we got roped into the farrago, but we had to go over there an’ straighten ’em out. And that’s pretty much all I know about that part of it.
What else I know I got from Butch Comstock. Now, ther
e’s folks who say Butchy ain’t someone to set your clock by, if you get my meanin’, ’specially since he left his left arm and his right leg an’ most of his common sense over there in France. But he still had his right hand, and he’d raise it right up to God every time he told this story over the cracker barrel down at the emporium and there’s more folks credit it than you might think, mostly ’cause they remembered about T.J. and the dust devil on second base and that made everything possible, even if it wasn’t likely. Most everybody agreed there was somethin’ more than natural ’bout that boy, so they wasn’t so surprised by what Butch told ’em that they couldn’t make themselves believe it. Whether you believe it is up to you. And if you don’t, well I don’t blame you. I can’t say I would either, if I didn’t know better. Anyway, here’s what happened, accordin’ to Butch.
Him and Cootchieman Springfield (Cootchieman got his name when he got caught peekin’ under the tent at the Hootchie-Cootchie show up in Pryor back about 1914 or ’15) they was best friends and they signed up together and got sent over together and ended up in France, which to hear Butchy tell it, was mostly mud by that time. ’Cordin’ to him it was like hell out of control and I heard other stories and read some newspaper clippin’s that back him up on that.
Seems his job was keepin’ the trenches clear of that mud that come oozin’ in and when they run out of lumber they’d stuff the chinks with dead soldiers.
Stand ’em right up, they would, in all their kit and wedge ’em right in there to keep the mud from fillin’ the trenches. Can you imagine! Butch says they turned the faces of them dead doughboys into the mud, ’cause it was inhuman enough what they had to do without havin’ to look at their faces. Don’t even say them boys shoulda been buried proper ’cause Butchy’d remind you pretty sharp that there wasn’t no way to do that. The air was mostly made of fast-movin’ lead an’ if you stuck your head up outta them trenches, they’d be usin’ you to keep the mud out. You see what I mean about it bein’ hell. Butchy tells stories like that that would keep you up twelve nights runnin’ but they ain’t fit for womenfolk and kids who might be readin’ this, and they ain’t particular to T.J.’s story, which is what this is all about. Let’s just say you could take the worst nightmare you ever had and multiply it by about six hundred and you’d have a fair idea of what it was like for them boys.
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