The House of Daniel

by Harry Turtledove

  “Love you,” I said when she got on.

  “Love you, too.” She put a dime in the fare box. The door closed behind her. The bus growled away.

  I navigated back to the motor lodge. The fella who ran it nodded to me and said, “How’s your gal, Snake?” By then, we’d been staying there so much that he knew as much about what was going on with the team as any of us did.

  “Couldn’t be better,” I answered. Was I wearing a silly grin? I couldn’t see it for myself, but I know darn well I was.

  * * *

  Next morning after breakfast, before we got on the bus to go down to Recreation Park, I told Harv, “Need to talk with you for a few minutes.”

  He nodded. “About your girl, is it?” No, it’s not like I surprised him.

  “Uh-huh.” I nodded. “I asked her last night, and she said yes. So—”

  “So you’ll be getting off the bus,” he finished for me. He laughed at the look on my face. “What? You think you’re the first one who played with us for a while and then decided he wanted to do something else instead?”

  “I guess not.” I hadn’t thought about it at all.

  Plainly, Harv had. “How long do you aim to stick around?” he asked.

  “I was hoping till you guys head out of this part of the country,” I said. “That’ll give you time to look for a new center fielder—or a new right fielder if you put Rabbit back in center.”

  “I’m kinda thinking a right fielder, but I’ll take what I can get,” Harv said. With right fielders, he could go after more hitting in exchange for a little less glovework. He’d lived with the way I hit because I could run and throw and catch, but he’d never been thrilled about it.

  “I know you know, but I want to say it anyway—I’m not leaving ’cause I’m sore at anybody or ’cause I think anybody did me wrong. Just the opposite. You guys saved my life.” Ballplayers leaving the team might’ve told that to Harv before. I bet none of ’em meant it as literally as I did, though.

  “I do know, yeah, but I’m glad to hear it. Well, you helped us out of a jam, too. You can go get ’em with anybody. And you found ways to chip in with the bat, probably more than I expected. You’ve got your head in the game all the time, and that’s good. If you want to, you might make a pretty decent manager one of these days.”

  “Don’t know that I’d want to,” I said. “I’ve seen what a pain in the neck keeping track of a herd of ballplayers can be.”

  “You think it looks bad from the outside, just wait till you try it for real,” Harv said with one of his crooked grins. He eyed me. “You will come down to Recreation Park this afternoon?”

  “Oh, yeah!” I said.

  We played another oil-company team. This one was from Onion Oil, or something like that. We’d bumped into them before. They had some old pros out there, the same way the Oilers and the Chancelors did. (We hadn’t played the Chancelors since that one game at Shell Field. They didn’t want anything more to do with us. If you want to think it worked both ways, I won’t try to tell you you’re wrong.)

  The city of Long Beach ran Recreation Park. Some of the money from tickets and concessions went to it. It used that money to help people in town who were down on their luck. Nobody grumbled about it, not on our side and not on the Onion Oil team, either. It made our cut a little smaller, but we could put up with that. Plenty of folks needed money worse’n we did.

  We beat the Onions. It was 5-3, 5-4, something like that. I’d like to say I hit three homers ’cause I was so happy Mich told me yes. I’d like to, but I didn’t. I walked once. I bunted a couple of runners along, and one of them wound up scoring. I made two decent catches in center, and one throw that persuaded a runner of theirs not to try to come in on a fly ball. It was an all-right game, not a great one. You take what you can get.

  And when we got back to the motor lodge in Gardena after supper, the man who ran it handed me an envelope. “You’ve got mail,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  I wondered if Mich had sent me something. She’d know the motor lodge’s address. But it wasn’t her handwriting—and it wasn’t addressed to the lodge. It was to me, all right, but in care of the House of Daniel baseball team, Los Angeles. The post office came through on that one in a big way.

  Then I saw it was from Rod Graver, back in Enid. He’d done enough things for Big Stu to know I was with the House of Daniel. And he was enough of a ballplayer to know that the House of Daniel wintered in Southern California.

  I opened the envelope. Inside was a folded note. Jack—Hope this will interest you—Rod was all it said. With the folded sheet was a little story clipped from the Enid Morning News.

  Restaurant Owner Found Dead, the headline read. The story went on, Stuart Kesselring, who owned the popular diner on Independence, was found deceased in a back room of that establishment yesterday afternoon. Police say the cause of death was three bullets to the back of the head. They are treating the case as a suicide.

  Kesselring? I don’t think I ever knew his family name. He was always just Big Stu to me, and to everybody else. I read the last sentence about five times. Either it meant they were crazy or it meant somebody with all kinds of clout didn’t want any questions asked. I couldn’t be sure, not from halfway across the country, but I knew which way I’d bet.

  “You all right, Snake? Is it bad news?” Eddie asked.

  “Nooo,” I said slowly. And it wasn’t, even if it made me feel funny. I went on, “Just a line from somebody in my home town who figured out how to get hold of me. News from back there startled me a bit.”

  He knew I wasn’t telling everything there was to tell. Eddie was no dope. But he was a gent. He didn’t push me about it. Neither did anyone else.

  * * *

  Mich heard about Big Stu from me, and then not long afterwards from her brother. She wasn’t sorry to find out she didn’t have to worry about him any more. Well, neither was I. I did kinda wonder, though. Did Charlie Carstairs have enough clout to arrange something like what happened to him? I never said anything about that to her. If she wondered, too, she never said anything to me, either—or, as far as I know, to Charlie. That was bound to be just as well.

  As things worked out, I quit playing for the House of Daniel about ten days before the bus headed off to Arizona or Nevada or wherever it was going next. By then, Harv had found a guy he could put in the outfield without wanting to slit his wrists, so he didn’t grouse. I left early because J. N. Hill, who owned the feed and pet store, knew a fella who had a building-supply business and was looking for a man with a strong back to give him a hand.

  I went down to talk to the fella. His place was on Redondo, a couple of miles south of Todd Park. It was at the edge of a slough. Big white egrets and even bigger herons stood in the muddy water amongst the reeds, waiting for a fish to swim by.

  Ken Howard—that was the fella’s name—took one look at me and said, “You’ll lose the whiskers, right?”

  “Huh?” I rubbed my chin. I was so used to them, half the time I forgot I had ’em. “Oh, sure. Whatever you want. I grew ’em for the baseball team.”

  “That’s fine. But you’ll be working for me from now on.” He was a great big, burly man, but he looked sharp, too. “Here. I’ll take you around, show you what you’ll be doing.”

  Most of it was getting bricks and sacks of cement and lumber and the like into a truck, driving ’em where they needed to go, and taking ’em out again. I’d have a forklift to help at his end, but only a wheelbarrow at the other. It was a lot harder than playing center for the House of Daniel. It paid worse, too. But I’d be in town with Mich, and I’d have Saturdays and Sundays off, or time and a half if I had to go in on Saturday.

  I took the job. If that wasn’t love, I don’t know what would be.

  First thing I bought was a pair of sturdy leather gloves. Ken Howard didn’t bother with ’em. He had calluses so thick, he could stub out a cigarette in the palm of his hand and not hurt himself a bit. I nee
ded a good feel, though, if I was gonna keep playing ball.

  I rented a room, too, a bigger one than Mich’s. After we got married a couple of months later, she moved in with me. When we weren’t too tired on account of we were both working our tails off, we were very happy together. We were still happy even when we were too tired to do anything about it, only in a different way.

  And I got back to playing ball again. A company not far from where I roomed turned out what they called drizzle boots. Yeah, they were just what you’d think: rubber overshoes to keep your feet dry when it rained. They sold ’em all over the country, not just in Los Angeles, or they wouldn’t have stayed in business long.

  They had a team, called, naturally, the Gardena Galoshes. When I wanted to join, they asked me where I’d played before. I told ’em about the Enid Eagles, and I could see that didn’t mean much one way or the other. Then I said, “And the House of Daniel.” As soon as they decided they believed me, they wanted me, all right.

  They weren’t much of a team. Even next to the Eagles, they seemed pretty sorry. I hit second for them. With just a tad more power, I could’ve hit third … and I’ve already told you, any team where I hit third wouldn’t be much. But you know what? I didn’t care. Just getting out there was fun, and we picked up a few extra bucks.

  And pretty soon, I was driving a forklift at the drizzle-boots factory, and doing the other odds jobs around there that needed doing. They paid me better than Ken Howard did. The work wasn’t as wearing, either. I’m not knocking Ken. He gave me a job when I needed one bad, and he didn’t have me do anything he wasn’t doing himself. But he was six inches taller than I was, and outweighed me by seventy-five pounds. It came easier to him.

  We needed the money that came with the new job. Pretty soon, Mich found herself in a family way. That kept her from working for a good while, and we started renting a house instead of a room. I would’ve liked to buy, not rent, but you do what you can, not what you’d like to.

  If Sarah Jane Spivey wasn’t the cutest baby ever born, I have no idea who could’ve been. Maybe her ma. But having a baby complicates your life all kinds of ways. Some you can see ahead of time. Some are surprises. You worry about the future even if you’d never thought past day after tomorrow, for instance. You get more frazzled than you ever had before, too. So does your wife.

  We’re still going. Dunno how Mich does it. Me, I try to take it the same way I took playing for the House of Daniel. You can have yourself a good game, or you can have a lousy one. Either way, though, you can’t let it get to you too much. Because you always have to remember: there’s another game tomorrow, and one more the day after that. So you go on. And we’re going on. Another baby due in a few months. Maybe this one’ll be a boy.

  Author’s Note

  The House of Daniel never would have happened if Peter Beagle and I hadn’t talked baseball through dinner at a Korean barbecue place in Los Angeles. Peter is the same kind of obsessive fan I am. His memory goes back even further than mine does, and we both know a lot about things neither one of us can remember. The conversation got me thinking, and this book sprang from those thoughts. Peter isn’t to blame for any infelicities and mistakes here. They’re all mine.

  Obviously, The House of Daniel isn’t set in our world. We have no zombies, vampires, werewolves, elementals, and the like. The guy juggling oranges in Denver springs from my wife’s evil imagination, not mine. And nothing I say about the fictional House of Daniel and its beliefs should be taken as reflecting on the real House of David and its … although the real House of David did sponsor a real semipro team of long-haired, bearded baseball players.

  By the same token, my fictional 1934 Denver Post Tournament is not set up the same way as the real 1934 Denver Post Tournament. Not all my participants are the same or modeled after the same real teams. The House of David did win the real tournament, with Satchel Paige and Grover Cleveland Alexander on their pitching staff. They did beat the Negro League Kansas City Monarchs for the title. So far as I know, there were no zombie riots in the real Denver.

  Up into the early 1950s, semipro baseball was a huge part of the sport. It never quite disappeared altogether, but television killed its importance in the larger scheme of things. Most towns of any size at all in the 1930s would have a semipro team; most medium-sized cities would have semipro leagues. They were talent sources and sometimes farm teams for the minors and the majors. A lot of minor leagues were fly-by-night operations, and the Depression hit them hard, as it hit the whole country hard. Where what they called organized baseball failed, less organized and less expensive clubs carried on.

  Most of this is forgotten now. Hardly anyone who played then or who watched those games is left alive. Statistics and records were kept erratically or not kept at all. Even when they were kept, many of them are lost now or buried in microfilm of small-town papers. Some do still survive, though. I’ve mined what I could for team names and park names and dimensions. Baseball is the game for historians. If you dig, you can often find things. And I’ll say what shouldn’t need saying: for anyone writing about the United States in the second quarter of the twentieth century, WPA Guides are absolutely indispensable.

  But The House of Daniel is fiction. I am allowed to make things up, and I have. Do your own digging before you trust anything I say in here about some vanished team or ballpark. I will tell you straight off the bat that Todd Field in Gardena is entirely fictitious, and I’ve scrambled the streets and how they run. That’s the town I grew up in, and I take a native’s privilege in goofing with it. I sure wish that ballpark had been there, though!

  Two names in The House of Daniel are real, because I couldn’t make up any so perfect. Sad Slim Smith really did manage the Bohemian Brewers in Spokane in the mid-1930s. And Cliff Ditto did manage in Walla Walla … but in the 1970s. I hope his shade won’t mind my moving him in time.

  TOR BOOKS BY HARRY TURTLEDOVE

  Between the Rivers

  Conan of Venarium

  The Two Georges (by Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove)

  Household Gods (by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove)

  The First Heroes (edited by Harry Turtledove and Noreen Doyle)

  DARKNESS

  Into the Darkness

  Darkness Descending

  Through the Darkness

  Rulers of the Darkness

  Jaws of Darkness

  Out of the Darkness

  CROSSTIME TRAFFIC

  Gunpowder Empire

  Curious Notions

  In High Places

  The Disunited States of America

  The Gladiator

  The Valley-Westside War

  WRITING AS H. N. TURTELTAUB

  Justinian

  Over the Wine-Dark Sea

  The Gryphon’s Skull

  The Sacred Land

  Owls to Athens

  About the Author

  Harry Turtledove lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the novelist Laura Frankos. He is a winner of science fiction’s Hugo Award and of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History fiction. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV
<
br />   Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Author’s Note

  Tor Books by Harry Turtledove

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE HOUSE OF DANIEL

  Copyright © 2016 by Harry Turtledove

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art by Getty Images

  Cover design by Peter Lutjen

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

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  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8000-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-4668-7133-5 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781466871335

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  First Edition: April 2016