by Alan Gratz
“Your umpires count every pitch?”
“No. Just when things start to get out of hand one way or the other.”
“What about bunting?” Jeremiah asked. “Do your teams look upon it favorably, or—”
Louis put out a hand to stop the Confederate.
“What? What is it?” Jeremiah said.
Louis hadn’t heard anything and he hadn’t seen anything. Instead he was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t something else he should do with Jeremiah. He couldn’t believe he was even considering it, but he knew in his heart he could not take the second baseman in as a prisoner of war. Not even for a promotion.
“I think we need to turn here,” he said. He led Jeremiah off into the woods and circled around.
“Isn’t this—isn’t this the direction we just came from?” Jeremiah asked.
“Hey, who’s the one with the eyes here? Trust me.”
Jeremiah got quiet, but soon they were talking baseball again as Louis guided them through the woods. He eventually found a wide, dark field with trampled grass, which meant either the Army of Northern Virginia or a herd of elephants had come this way. Though he knew it was crazy, Louis followed the trail.
The two walked for hours, never running out of baseball talk. They had just begun discussing the merits of stealing bases when a voice in the darkness interrupted them.
“Who comes there?”
Neither of them spoke, and Jeremiah nudged Louis.
“Uh, friend!” Louis said.
The sentry waited. Louis heard a rustling. “And the countersign, friend?”
Jeremiah turned his blind eyes toward Louis like he was waiting for him to answer.
“Jeremiah,” Louis whispered. “I can’t—I don’t know—”
A confused look passed over his friend’s face, then Jeremiah turned toward the voice in the darkness and said, “Blueberry pie, friend.”
There was a pause, and Louis waited for the lead to start flying if Jeremiah’s memory had gotten knocked to Tuesday when his rifle exploded.
“Advance friend, blueberry pie,” came the response. There was more rustling, which Louis took to mean they were no longer in the sentry’s sights. “Need a hand there?”
“No!” Louis and Jeremiah said together, and too quickly.
“No,” Jeremiah said. “Thank you kindly. We’re not bad off, just got a little . . . turned around on the way home.”
“Godspeed,” the sentry told them. “And be a little quicker with the countersign next time, boys. There’s Yankees on sacred soil.”
“We will, sir. Thank you,” Jeremiah said. He nudged Louis and they were off, giving the picket a wide berth.
When they were a little ways into the woods, Louis spoke.
“I uh, I don’t know what I was thinking. I must have forgotten the password.”
“I think I can forgive my guardian angel that one transgression,” Jeremiah said.
Louis stopped him. The time for lies was at an end. “Jeremiah, I’m not an angel. I’m a devil. A Red-Legged Devil. I’m not a Reb, Jeremiah—I’m a Yankee.”
Jeremiah didn’t look as shocked as Louis thought he would be.
“I know,” he said.
“You know? What, because I didn’t know the countersign?”
Jeremiah pulled away from Louis and reached out until he found a tree to anchor himself.
“I don’t figure it’s something you’ll ever need to know,” he said, “but Nashville is south of Louisville. By a far piece. Any Southern boy’d know that. Heck, an Ohioan would know that.”
“Right,” Louis said, disappointed he hadn’t known.
“And you ain’t gonna find too many clam shells anywhere but the ocean, and you didn’t say you was from Charleston or some such.”
“I could have been from Norfolk! That’s on the ocean, isn’t it?”
“And I don’t know what city you’re from where ‘only’ three teams still count fly outs on the bounce. There ain’t but four teams in Louisville, perhaps ten in all of Kentucky.”
“Okay, okay. I get it. As a spy I’m not worth a plugged nickel.”
“Not only that,” Jeremiah said, “you talk like a Yankee.”
“Oh yeah? Well, you talk like a cotton-picking Rebel!”
Louis and Jeremiah laughed, then grew quiet.
“What I can’t figure,” Jeremiah said, “is what we’re doing at the edge of the Confederate army camp. When I had you pegged for a Yank, I thought for sure we were off to your side, not mine.”
“Why come along then?” Louis asked.
Jeremiah shrugged. “I can’t see. What was I going to do? Clonk you on the head and set out on my own? I figured a Union prison camp was better than running into trees until a bear ate me.”
“That was the plan. A prison camp, I mean. Then I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. You were going home tomorrow and so was I, and . . . well, I guess I figured anybody that liked baseball that much couldn’t be too bad a person, Reb or not.”
Jeremiah fumbled with his sack and withdrew his baseball bat.
“If you’ve a mind to clonk me now,” Louis told him, “I think it only fair to remind you that I can see you coming.”
Jeremiah smiled. “Here,” he said, holding the bat out to Louis. He meant for him to have it.
“No. I couldn’t,” Louis told him. “Your pa made that.”
“And just what am I going to do with it?” he asked. “Go on, take it. This whole thing—this whole thing was a mistake to begin with. We weren’t supposed to fire, you know. We were just watching the game on a lark. Then Samuels got twitchy and went and shot that boy, the center fielder. It wasn’t right, but we had to take it up then, or else have you boys on our heels.”
“Look, maybe it’s just a flash burn,” Louis said. “You might get your sight back after a time. Then you’ll need that bat again.”
“If that happens, my pa can make me another. Here. Take this back to—what, New York?”
“No! Pfft. Not New York. Brooklyn.”
“Is that close to Nashville?” Jeremiah asked.
“Very nearly,” Louis said, smiling.
“Here.” Jeremiah stepped forward until Louis had to take the bat or be struck by it.
“Wait, I’ll trade you,” Louis told him. He hesitated a moment, then pulled his father’s baseball from his pocket and put it in Jeremiah’s hand. The Rebel turned it over, feeling the surface of it.
“This is a fine baseball.”
“The finest,” Louis said. “My pa made that when he was a boy.”
“Sounds like you don’t want to part with it.”
“It’s my good luck charm,” Louis told him. “But I think you need it more than me.”
“You sure about that? Looked around at where you’re at lately?”
Louis smiled. “I’ll be all right. I’m going home tomorrow, and I’m not going to let anybody stop me.”
Jeremiah held out a hand and they shook as friends.
“Too bad we couldn’t have settled this whole thing over a game of baseball,” Louis told him, “trading fly balls instead of lead ones.”
“Better for your side we didn’t,” Jeremiah said. “You’d have lost for sure.”
“Oho!”
“You’d best be heading on,” Jeremiah told him. “I can make it from here.”
Louis looked about at the forest. It had started to glow with the first hint of morning.
“I think you’ll be bouncing off the trees from here to Richmond,” Louis told him. “Better let me take you a little farther in.”
This time Louis kept his eye out for sentries and spotted a campfire through the bracken before the picket spotted them. The boys shook hands once more and took their leave, Louis with a new hickory bat, Jeremiah with a new baseball. Louis hoped his father would understand, and he suspected he would.
Over his shoulder he heard Jeremiah Walker call to the sentries f
or help, and Louis took off for Brooklyn as fast as his red devil legs could carry him.
Third Inning: A Ballad of the Republic
Brooklyn, New York, 1894
1
“I’m Cap Anson!” one boy called.
“I’m Oyster Burns!” said another.
The boys had rechristened Pigtown the Polo Grounds, and now they were giving themselves upgrades by pretending to be their favorite players.
“I’m Fred Pfeffer!” Tommy Collum said.
“Fred Pfeffer, Fred Pfeffer,” sang Joseph, the biggest of the boys. “With him it’s always Fred Pfeffer. He’s like an el conductor. ‘Tickets please. Tickets. Where’s your tickets? Tickets. ’ Same thing over and over.”
They all had a laugh. On the edge of the group Arnold Schneider laughed with them.
“I’ll be King Kelly,” he said.
“King Kelly!?” Joseph said. “Does he even play anymore?”
“He played for the New York Giants last year!” Arnold said. “He turned a triple play against Brooklyn.”
“Yeah, so did my gran,” Joseph said. The boys all had another laugh. “All right, me and George choose up sides.”
One by one all the boys were chosen by the captains. All the boys but Arnold. He was the smallest and worst player there, and he knew it, but he still watched the captains, hoping one of them would take him today.
“You bring that good bat, Arnie?” Joseph asked.
“No. That bat’s my dad’s. He got it—”
“In the war. Yeah, yeah, we know. You want to play, you bring that bat next time.”
“But with me the teams are even,” Arnold said.
“He’s right,” said George. Arnold’s heart leaped.
“Here, catch,” George said. He threw the ball to Arnold, but it was too far over his head. Another boy caught it and threw it back.
“Here you go, Arnie.”
The ball sailed over his head again. And again. Arnold knew this game. They were playing keep-away. He stopped trying to catch the ball and glared at them, his hands clenched and his fists shaking.
“Boat-lickers,” he said.
“Oooooh,” Joseph laughed. “I’m soooo scared.”
Arnold wanted to cry, but he would never do that again. Not in front of the boys. Instead he walked away as fast as he could.
“Good-bye, King Kelly!” Joseph taunted, and Arnold broke into a run.
When Arnold finally slowed down to wipe the tears off his face he realized he had run halfway up Bedford Avenue. He was in the Eastern District with the vaudeville theaters. He passed Hyde & Behman’s and the Empire Theater, stopping to read the placards outside announcing the nightly acts. Above him, the Broadway-Brooklyn line rattled by on its elevated platform, and he watched as ladies and gentlemen in their fine clothes went scurrying for shop awnings to escape the soot and smoke that drifted down from the train.
Electric lights hummed at the entrance of the Gayety Theater, and a name on the board outside caught Arnold’s eye as he passed. He rushed back to read the sign:
“Appearing all this week: O’Dowd’s Neighbors! Featuring Weber and Field, Dutch Knockabouts; Haines and Vidocq, back talkers; the Braatz Brothers, acrobats; John LeClair, balancer and juggler; Drummond and Tahley, musicians; Alice Raymond, cornet player; Mike ‘King’ Kelly, famed baseballer; William Wheatman, maker of faces . . .”
Mike “King” Kelly, famed baseballer! Arnold couldn’t believe it. King Kelly? Here, in Brooklyn? On the vaudeville stage? He rushed to the door to look inside, but he only saw the lobby. The doorman eyed him and he rushed back to the sign. “Mike ‘King’ Kelly, famed baseballer.” Why had they buried him so far down the list of performers? Wouldn’t he be the star attraction?
Admission was fifty cents, and Arnold didn’t have to pat his pockets to know he didn’t have enough coins. There was no chance his parents would give him money for a vaudeville show either. They wouldn’t even like that he’d been in the theater district.
Music and laughter trickled out of the Gayety Theater. The show had already started. Arnold had to see King Kelly.
There was only one thing for it. He’d have to sneak in.
A group of young men and their ladies came strutting down the lane and stopped to consider the playbill. They would be perfect. Arnold tried to watch them without being obvious about it, silently willing them to decide to take in the show. A well-timed outburst of laughter sold them on the matter, and they moved as one toward the doorway where the men made a great show of paying their ladies’ way in. Being on the short end of ten, Arnold slipped around them out of sight of the ticket seller and ducked inside.
The theater was little more than half full, and Arnold slunk down a side aisle and slid into a seat. He waited for someone to point a finger, to grab him by the shoulder, but no one seemed to have noticed he’d snuck in, and he relaxed. King Kelly wasn’t on the stage now anyway—it was an acrobat routine with trained tumblers. After that came a man and a woman who played violins, then a face contortionist who made Arnold laugh, and a comedian who did not. He began to fear he had missed King Kelly entirely, when the master of ceremonies stepped onto the stage to announce the next act.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the emcee said, “the Gayety Theater is now proud to present that legendary Rascal of Round Ball, that Scoundrel of Swat, the Dandy of the Diamond—Mr. Mike ‘King’ Kelly in, ‘He Would Be an Actor, or, The Ballplayer’s Revenge’!”
King Kelly pranced out onto the stage with a glass of beer in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. It was him, sure enough. He wore the blue and white uniform of the Boston Beaneaters and a bright red scarf tied under his collar. His dark black hair was smoothed back under his white cap, and his big bushy mustache had just a hint of curl at the ends.
Kelly drew a polite smattering of applause and Arnold leaned forward in his seat.
“Ah, it’s great to be back here in Brooklyn,” Kelly said, his Irish accent rolling off his tongue. “Why, it was here, against your very own Brooklyn Bridegrooms, that I robbed Monte Ward of a home run. I remember that day very clearly,” he said, settling in to a story he’d clearly told many times. “’Twas getting on toward dusk when Monte stepped to the plate, and we all knew the umpire would soon call the game on account of darkness. But the score was tied two apiece, you see, and the Grooms had something cooking with two outs in the ninth. Pinckney and O’Brien stood on second and third, and a hit of any kind would send us packing back to Beantown.”
Kelly took a long draw off his beer, but not so long as to lose the audience.
“Now, it’s gotten so dark I can hardly see Clarkson on the mound, let alone the batter. But I hear the crack of the bat and see the infielders turn, and I know a scorching sphere is headed my way. I go back, back, back into the big vast swirling darkness of Eastern Park—you lot have been there, so you know what I mean—and I reach out as high as I can and I jump as high as I can,” Kelly said, pantomiming the catch as best he could with his beer in lieu of a glove, “and I come down with me hand raised high in the twilight, dashing the hopes of the Brooklyn faithful!”
The hometown crowd gave him a good-natured boo, and he smiled.
“‘Out number three!’ yells the ump. ‘Game called on account of darkness!’ So I run back to the dugout with me glove closed tight, and our manager, old Frank Selee, comes forward with the rest of the boys to congratulate me. ‘Kel,’ says he, ‘that was the finest catch I’ve ever yet seen.’
“‘And you still haven’t,’ says I, and I opened my glove. There wasn’t a thing in it. The ball went a mile over me head!”
What a marvelous trick! Arnold clapped himself silly, and the audience roared with laughter. Kelly saluted them all with his beer.
“Tell us about the ten-thousand-dollar transfer!” someone yelled.
“What’d you do with all that money?” called another.
“I ate strawberries and ice cream every day,” Kelly said with a grin.
“Yeah, and the bartenders got the rest!” someone heckled.
Kelly told a few more stories from his playing days, then recited “Casey at the Bat,” changing out mighty Casey’s name for his own. When he was finished, he left the stage to the sound of the house band playing “Slide, Kelly, Slide” and great applause.
Not even the promise of the Salambos, fire-handlers from Brazil, could keep Arnold in his seat. He dashed down the aisle and out of the theater, turning down the side alley where he hoped King Kelly would emerge. He guessed the wrong alley, though, and by the time he had run around to the other side King Kelly and another man were already halfway to the street.
“Mr. Kelly!” Arnold called. “King! King! How about an autograph!”
Kelly stopped and turned, smiling magnificently.
“One of me fans, Hiroshi!” he said to the other man. Arnold slid to a stop in front of them, and he could see now Kelly was accompanied by an Oriental—a Chinaman or some such—dressed in brightly colored silks and sporting a braided ponytail like a girl might wear. There was something crawling on the man’s right shoulder, and Arnold jumped in fright as a black monkey leaped from the Oriental onto Kelly’s back.
“Me gentleman’s gentleman,” Kelly said. “Me valet Hiroshi. Now laddie, what’s your name?”
“A—Arnold,” he said. “Arnold Schneider.”
“Right. Now, let’s see here.” He searched the pockets of his coat. “Aha. Here’s me fountain pen then. What have you got for me to sign, Arthur?”
Arnold’s heart sank. Here was King Kelly before him, ready to sign his famous autograph, and Arnold had nothing in his pocket but three pennies and a bit of fluff. Now the boys at Pigtown would never believe him.
“It’s—it’s Arnold, sir. And I’m sorry, but I don’t—”
Arnold stopped. Kelly suddenly had the most peculiar look on his face, like he had fallen asleep with his eyes open. The ballplayer’s face lost all expression and his body began to sway.
“Mr. Kelly, are you all right?”
Hiroshi tried to catch Kelly before he fell, but he was too late. The monkey jumped from the sinking ship and King Kelly dove headlong into the gutter, splashing face-first into the muck.
