The Brooklyn Nine

by Alan Gratz

  “I think I’ll turn you over to your aunt and uncle,” Cartwright said, but Uncle Albert and Aunt Jenell wouldn’t let him leave without pumping his hand and thanking him again and again. Aunt Jenell even surprised Cartwright with a hug.

  “Good-bye, young squire,” Cartwright said. He shook Felix’s hand. “I hope this doesn’t slow down your dreams.”

  “What does he mean, this slowing down my dreams?” Felix asked when Cartwright was gone.

  “Mr. Cartwright was so kind,” Aunt Jenell said. “He paid for all your hospital care. We couldn’t have afforded it otherwise.”

  “But Felix, my boy,” Uncle Albert said, “we’ve had to spend the money you saved to bring your family to America. I’m sorry. The fire, it has put so many people out of work, including me. When the warehouses burned, there was less cloth to be cut, and with less cloth to be cut, they do not need so many cutters. I’ve been let go.”

  “All the money I’ve saved? But—” Felix didn’t understand, wanted to demand how they could just use up the money he’d put aside, but the way his aunt and uncle stared at the floor in shame told him they must have had no choice. “But . . . there will be work again, won’t there?” Felix asked. “Cartwright said everything will be rebuilt.”

  “But not soon enough for us,” Uncle Albert said. “We had very little savings. You know that. We—we’ve had to move from our apartment in Kleindeutschland.”

  “Albert has found us work here in Brooklyn. Sewing suits.”

  No, Felix thought—not that. Not living in the darkness, working his fingers to the bone for pennies like the Neumans.

  “But my job as a runner—I can still do that. If there are pieces to be sewn, there must be someone running them to the department stores!”

  Albert and Jenell shared a sad look, and his aunt put a hand on Felix’s leg.

  “Felix, your legs—they were injured in the explosion.”

  What? No—it couldn’t be. But the strange cold sensation he had . . . Felix ripped the sheets and blankets off. Underneath, his legs were blackened and scarred.

  “They’ve given you a drug, to combat the pain,” Uncle Albert told him. “They say the pain will get better, but that it will never go away.”

  Felix didn’t want to cry, but the tears came whether he wanted them or not. He was the fastest boy in New York. The fastest boy in America. His legs had taken him across Germany and across an ocean to a new world. It was on his legs that he had planned to carry his mother and father and baby sister away from the blight and the famine and the poverty of Bremen. It was on his legs that his family’s future depended, and now here they lay, ashen and crippled like Lower Manhattan itself.

  Aunt Jenell wrapped him in another hug and let him cry.

  Uncle Albert carried Felix home from the hospital the next day, even though Felix could walk passably well. What he couldn’t do was run, and Felix wondered what the point of having feet at all was if he couldn’t do that. His shoes too, the beautiful shoes his father had made for him, his only connection to the family he’d left behind, had been so mangled and burned in the explosion that they were unusable now. Felix didn’t want to see them, had told his uncle to throw them away, but Uncle Albert had insisted on keeping them. The leather, he said, could be used for something else.

  On the way to their new flat Felix saw a group of boys playing three-out, all-out in a pig field. They were in between innings, chasing each other around with the ball to see who would bat next, ignoring the pigs the way the uptown ladies and gentlemen did on Broadway.

  Felix turned his head away so he couldn’t see, and told his uncle to keep walking.

  Their new apartment was much like the Neumans’, only they shared it not with more Schneiders but with another family, the Smiths. They had been Schmidts, but changed their name to something more American in the hopes of landing better work. Uncle Albert was considering doing the same.

  There were two bedrooms in the Schneider/Smith home—one for each of the families—and a small kitchen where they all shared meals and sewing work. Felix’s new job was stitching the broad, flat pieces of suit jackets together while Aunt Jenell pieced the sleeves. Uncle Albert, a master tailor, did the more complicated parts. Like the Neumans, they had no windows in their flat, and in the summer the heat was stifling. By midday Felix was so sweaty the needle would slip right out of his hand.

  When the runner came to pick up their work, Felix would disappear into one of the bedrooms.

  Life went on this way for more weeks and months than Felix could count. Uncle Albert didn’t change their last name, but he did join a Christian church, which gave them Sundays off. Sometimes Felix would take his free day and wander down to the docks at the end of Flatbush Avenue and watch the city across the East River recover in stages. First one warehouse, then another, then a tall office building, a bank, a dry-goods store. Like Cartwright said, always newer, bigger, better.

  Felix saw too the huge masted steamers with flywheels amidships, like the one he had stolen away on to cross the Atlantic, unloading thousands of new immigrants upon the docks at the Battery as they had once delivered him. Felix remembered his first steps into this crowded new world of hope and promise, and he longed to be one of them again, a greenhorn fresh off the boat, ready to make his fortune and bring his family to the New World. There on the Brooklyn pier, Felix resolved to start again.

  That night while everyone else slept, Felix found a wine cork in the kitchen and wrapped yards of twine and thread around it. When that was done he pulled out the pair of shoes his father had made for him, and with Uncle Albert’s shears he cut away the charred leather and trimmed what was left into wide strips. Then, using a thick needle and the laces from his useless shoes, he began to sew the leather strips around the outside of his twine ball. When he was finished, Felix scratched a small S on his new baseball, an S for Schneider.

  Cartwright had said that baseball was America, and somehow, some way, Felix would find a way to get back in the game. Even if it took him a lifetime to do it. Even if it took him nine lifetimes to do it. Felix would play ball again.

  Second Inning: The Red-Legged Devil

  Northern Virginia, 1864

  1

  “I reckon that’s the best baseball in Spotsylvania, Virginia,” Stuart said.

  “I reckon this is the only baseball in Spotsylvania, Virginia,” Louis Schneider said. He flipped his father’s baseball high in the air and dashed forward to catch it.

  “Louis! Will you stop!? We could be set upon by Rebs any second!”

  Stuart’s skittishness was understandable, if a little tiresome. Louis had been there for Stuart’s rookie engagement in the Civil War—what the career men called “Seeing the Elephant”—and had seen Stuart come away the worse for it. After their first battle, most men went one way or the other: They either got crazy, or they got scared. Stuart got scared. He’d been a jumble of nerves ever since, and the whole time they’d been on patrol today he’d jumped and twitched at every little sound.

  Louis sighed and stowed the baseball away in his haversack, extracting a copy of Beadle’s Dime Baseball Player to look at as the two walked their patrol.

  “Where on Earth’d you find that?”

  “My pa sent it to me. He’s a top rail player, only he could never go pro because of his legs. Got messed up in an explosion.”

  “In—in the war?” Stuart asked.

  “No, fighting a fire when he was a kid. That’s why I joined the Army—because he couldn’t.”

  Stuart peered at Louis. “Just how old are you, anyway?”

  “Sixteen,” Louis lied. “Say, it says here the National Association voted the fly rule in. No more catching a ball on the bounce.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What? I’m serious,” Louis said, but he knew Stuart was still on about his age.

  Stuart stopped and tensed, gripping his rifle in both hands. Louis looked ahead and saw a little general store at a cross-roads. A thin tr
ail of smoke rose from the chimney pipe.

  “Say, you don’t suppose it’s open, do you?” Louis asked.

  “You’re not thinking of going in there! Louis, we’re deep into Virginia. What if the owner is a Confederate?”

  Louis grinned. “I’m counting on it. Follow my lead.”

  Louis bounded up the steps into the store but froze inside the door. To his amazement, it was stocked like a Brooklyn Heights grocers. There were barrels of fresh apples, carrots, and pecans, hunks of salt pork, sacks of flour and cornmeal and potatoes, shelves of fresh bread, rows of eggs. For a moment, he and Stuart stood in the doorway drooling. It was all Louis could do to keep from lunging for the first scrumptious morsel in sight and not cease eating until he was arrested or shot, whichever came first.

  The shopkeeper came out from a small pantry in the back and stopped short when he saw them. Louis and Stuart weren’t wearing Union blues, but they weren’t wearing Confederate grays either. The shopkeeper’s hand disappeared beneath the counter and came back with a pistol, which he laid down beside the register.

  “I’ll have no trouble now, you hear?” he told the boys.

  Louis stepped forward with his hands in the air. “And we don’t aim to cause any.”

  The shopkeeper nodded at them. “What kind of costume is that, anyway? French? Hessian?”

  “We’re the Brooklyn Fourteenth,” Louis told him. “We’re with the Army of the Potomac.”

  Beside him, Louis could hear Stuart hiss. The grocer picked up his gun again.

  “This ain’t a commissary, neither Union nor otherwise. You either got money or you don’t—and I charge double for Yankees.”

  That told Louis all he needed to know. Heedless of the shopkeeper’s gun, he strolled through the aisles, surveying the goods like he was shopping.

  “Louis, let’s get out of here,” Stuart whispered for all to hear.

  Louis ignored him and spoke to the grocer. “Oh, I’ve got a bit of money,” he said. “But I’m afraid it’s just this worthless Confederate stuff.” He pulled a few small bills out of his pocket and set them on the counter. “I understand it’s not good for much of anything. Like everything else down here.”

  The shopkeeper raised himself up, insulted.

  “So long as the Confederacy still stands, boy, those notes will be good in my store.”

  “Is that so?” Louis asked. He took off his haversack and withdrew two handfuls of bills—almost five hundred dollars in Confederate money—and put them on the counter.

  “In that case,” Louis told him, “we’ll take everything you’ve got.”

  They didn’t really buy everything, of course—just as much as they could carry. But that was plenty enough for a first-rate feast, and when they returned, Louis and Stuart were hailed by their fellow soldiers as heroes to the nation.

  “It was all Louis,” Stuart told them, regaling the rest of the Brooklyn Fourteenth with the story as he lazed by the fire, licking the chicken grease off his fingers.

  “Lucky Louis!” one of the boys said with a laugh.

  “Lucky nothing—where’d you come by so many Confederate bills?” asked Corporal Bruner.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Louis said. “Every night after a fight, I wait ’til late and sneak back onto the field of battle and go through the Rebs’ coats.”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “Why not? They do it to themselves so’s there’s hardly a thing left anyway—except all that no-account cash. I was just collecting it to take home as souvenirs. I never figured on buying anything with it. Never thought I’d have the chance.”

  “Lucky Louis,” somebody said again.

  Not lucky enough to earn a promotion, thought Louis, although he’d certainly put in his time. He’d lied about his age three years ago so he could march to Washington in ’61 with the Fourteenth and beg to go to war. They let him march, but perhaps suspecting he was underage they only made him a drummer. Louis had taken over as standard bearer when Johnson took a bullet to the head at Antietam, and then had a rifle thrust in his hands at Fredericksburg. He’d battled the graybacks at Chancellorsville, spent three days dodging bullets at Gettysburg, fought in the Battle of the Wilderness, and been in half again as many skirmishes in between. Maybe he was lucky after all. Of the eleven hundred boys and men who’d left Brooklyn to the cheers of their city, only one hundred and forty-three remained. The rest, like Stuart, were fresh fish from home.

  Louis took out the baseball again and flipped it between his hands. He wasn’t lucky, he thought. It was the ball. His father had given it to him the day he left for the war, telling him to bring it back in one piece. Louis figured his father wouldn’t have let that ball go without knowing he’d get it back, which meant as long as he had it, he couldn’t help but come home safe and sound. He ran a thumb over the S scratched in the leather, the S for Schneider.

  A sergeant who’d been with them from the first clapped a hand on Louis’s shoulder.

  “Have a game with that ball of yours?” he asked.

  “Could do,” Louis told him. “If I can ever get up off this spot again.”

  The sergeant laughed. “Let us know. There’s a lad from the Tenth Massachusetts who’s challenged us to a match.”

  “I’m happy to beat the bean eaters any old time they wish,” Louis told him. “But only if they’ll play by New York rules. I’d rather the game not last three days.”

  Soldiers suddenly began scrambling for their caps and coats. Stuart leaped to his feet and knocked over the kettle before falling to the ground himself.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Are we under attack?”

  Louis stood. “General coming!” a sergeant yelled, running through the camp. “Make ready to present! General coming!”

  Louis buttoned up his uniform and helped Stuart to his feet. They scurried to attention under the watchful eye of Lieutenant Tinker as a horse’s hoof beats drew closer.

  “Atten-tion!” Tinker cried, and the Fourteenth stood straight.

  The man who rode up was known to Louis and the others who had been with the regiment the longest: He was General Abner Doubleday, the man who had commanded the Brooklyn Fourteenth at Antietam and again at Gettysburg. He was a stout man, as most generals were, with a hulking brown mustache, long tall nose, and receding line of dark curly hair. Louis counted him brave if not brilliant for his actions on the battlefield, though none of the boys thought the worse of him.

  Doubleday pulled his mount to a stop before them and surveyed their lines.

  “The Brooklyn Fourteenth,” he said. “The Red-Legged Devils.”

  They had gotten the nickname after Bull Run, where it was said they had fought with hell’s fury. General McDowell even let them keep their red breeches and hats as badges of honor when the rest of the army was issued standard blues. The Fourteenth’s uniforms, like their boys, were supplied by the City of Brooklyn herself.

  Doubleday rode up and down the lines inspecting them, then stopped to speak.

  “On many a weary march, and many a hard fought field, I have personally seen your courage and devotion. Your name is a household word in the army. You are the elite of our division.”

  Louis stood a little straighter.

  “You original members who mustered in during the formation of your regiment—you who have survived Bull Run, South Mountain, Falmouth, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Rappahanock Station, Chancellorsville, Sulphur Springs, Gettysburg, Groveton, The Wilderness, Gainesville, and Spotsylvania Court House—twice—you brave few who remain have earned your nation’s respect and gratitude. You have also earned your release from the Army of the Potomac.”

  Lucky again! Louis looked at those in Company K who had been around from the beginning. One or two of them were crying, but whether they were tears of joy or sorrow Louis didn’t know. For his part, it was as though a great weight had lifted off his shoulders. His father’s baseball had seen him through.

  “Tomorrow morning you
will take a train to Baltimore, and thence to Jersey City and home to Brooklyn, where your city fathers are even now, I am told, making ready a celebration of some consequence.” The general sniffed the air and moved his horse closer to one of the campfires. “Although I gather you’ve already had something of a celebration here today.”

  A ripple of laughter rode through the company.

  “I do swear, I have never known a regiment so full of shrewd devices to avoid unnecessary hardships as the Brooklyn Fourteenth. Where in tarnation did you—no, I had better not know.”

  “If you’d care to have a game with us,” called Corporal Rugge, “we plan to play baseball next!”

  The general laughed. “I have no talent or interest for baseball,” said Doubleday. “But I would very much like to sample whatever is brewing in that pot over yonder.”

  “Company dis-missed!” cried Lieutenant Tinker. The soldiers relaxed and fell out of ranks, and the general worked his way back to the homemade still, congratulating those who would be sent home.

  Stuart hugged his friend. “You’ve made it, Louis! Lucky Louis, you’re headed home for Brooklyn!”

  “Perhaps I’ll be home in time to see the Atlantics play the Eckfords for the championship.”

  “If the Putnams don’t win it!”

  “Have you heard? They’ve put up a fence around the Union grounds and are charging ten cents admission to see their games!”

  Stuart shook his head. “Paying admission will be the ruin of baseball. What’s next, paying the players?”

  Louis smiled. For once Stuart wasn’t listening for the snap of twigs and the report of rifles.

  “Come on,” Louis told him. “Let’s go have a game. And we won’t charge the trees and rocks any admission to watch.”

  They had more than enough to play among their own company, and the officers set to choosing up sides. The Fourteenth had a serviceable piece of oak they used for a bat, and the bases were measured off according to the New York rules. The fly rule was agreed upon, as most players thought catching the ball on the fly was more manly anyway, but “stealing” bases, a new practice introduced by Ned Cuthbert of the Philadelphia Keystones, was deemed unsportsmanlike and prohibited. General Doubleday was solicited to call balls and strikes, but he had other companies to see and so the teams made do with Lieutenant Tinker.