Abner & Me

by Dan Gutman

  Another injured guy was carried in on a stretcher and put onto the bloody table. He was soaking wet, and his shirt was pulled over his face. His arms were flailing around like he was a crazy man. He was shorter than the guy whose leg was amputated.

  “I don’t know if this one’s gonna make it, Doc,” said one of the guys carrying the stretcher. “He ain’t breathing. We found him in the pond. Smacked his head good too.”

  The doctor pulled the shirt down off the soldier’s face, and it took me a second or two to realize that the face looked familiar.

  “Little John!” I hollered.

  Little John didn’t recognize me. He didn’t recognize anything. His eyes were closed.

  “Another drunk,” mumbled the doctor.

  “He’s not a drunk!” I shouted. “He’s my friend! You’ve got to save him! Mom, you’ve got to do something!”

  “I’m going to do a bleeding,” the doctor said. “Nurse, will you hand me the hot iron, please?”

  “This boy has lost a lot of blood already!” Mom said. “Why would you want him to bleed further?”

  “Bleeding cleanses the system,” the doctor said, as if that explained anything. “It will save his life.”

  “If his blood pressure drops too far, he’ll go into shock!” Mom said, raising her voice a little.

  The doctor stopped what he was doing and looked at Mom.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, but are you a doctor?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then kindly keep your opinions to yourself!”

  On the table, Little John had stopped thrashing his arms around. He was lying there quietly now. Too quietly. It didn’t look like he was breathing.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” the doctor scolded Mom. “This boy is dead. Next!”

  “Wait a minute!” Mom shouted, elbowing the doctor out of the way.

  Mom leaned over Little John. She tilted his head back and put her ear to his mouth to listen for breathing. After a few seconds she pinched his nostrils closed with two fingers and opened his mouth with her other hand. Then she put her mouth, open wide, right on top of Little John’s lips.

  “Are you insane, woman?” the doctor hollered. “Stop kissing that boy! Have you no respect for the dead?”

  He tried to push Mom out of the way, but I gave him a shove that sent him falling into the pile of amputated arms and legs.

  Mom blew some air into Little John’s mouth, and then took her mouth away. She took a deep breath and did it again. Little John’s chest went up, but it didn’t look like he was conscious. Mom blew air into his mouth a few more times and checked for a pulse on his neck.

  “Is he dead, Mom?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  Mom climbed up on top of the table and straddled over Little John, with one knee on either side of him. She put her hands together against his chest and began pushing down on it, over and over again.

  “Get off that man!” the doctor said, struggling to his feet. “He’s dead! You’re a sick, perverted woman!”

  “Nobody calls my mother a pervert!” I yelled, and I socked the doctor right in the face. I got him good too, and he landed in the pile of limbs again.

  Mom kept pumping on Little John’s chest. Suddenly he coughed violently, shook his head, and opened his eyes.

  “Little John!” I shouted. Mom climbed down from the table.

  “Stosh! What are you doing here?”

  “We were looking for Abner Doubleday,” I told him. “What happened to you?”

  “Joshua told me to fetch some water, and I fell into the pond,” he said, sitting up on the table. “Can’t swim.”

  By that time, the doctor had struggled to his feet again. He was rubbing his jaw.

  “It’s a miracle!” he said, looking at Little John.

  “It’s CPR,” Mom replied matter-of-factly. “Look, if you’ve got a patient who isn’t breathing, don’t worry about his blood or his wound. He’s going to suffocate before he bleeds to death. You’ve got to make sure he has an open airway and get some air into his lungs. If that doesn’t work, pump his chest until he comes to. Understand?”

  “Uh…yes, ma’am,” the doctor said.

  “Sorry I punched you,” I told the doctor.

  Mom and I helped Little John off the table, and we walked him out of the tent. Mom’s nurse’s uniform, which was caked with mud when we walked in there, was now splotched with blood.

  Outside, a bunch of soldiers stared at Mom and stepped out of her way like she was somebody famous. They must have been listening to what was going on inside the tent.

  “Wow, Mom, you’re a hero!” I said.

  “Oh, stop it,” she replied. “We do this every day at the hospital.”

  We weren’t more than a few feet outside the tent when a guy on a horse galloped over. He stopped the horse right in front of us.

  “Atten-tion!” somebody hollered, and all the soldiers stood up straight and saluted the guy on the horse. I figured he must be a major or somebody really important.

  “Good evening, General Doubleday,” one of the soldiers said.

  11

  Poppycock and Flapdoodle

  IT WASHIM! I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. AFTER ALL MOM AND I had been through, we had finally found the one and only Abner Doubleday, the man who invented baseball.

  Or the man who might have invented baseball, anyway. That was what I was about to find out. I felt my pocket to make sure the baseball was still there.

  “At ease, men.”

  Doubleday saluted the soldiers as he hopped down off the horse. He looked pretty much the way he did in the photo. He was almost six feet tall, maybe forty years old or so. His uniform looked cleaner and less wrinkled than everyone else’s. Generals, I guess, didn’t have to do the dirty work of fighting.

  He walked right up to Mom, removed his hat, and bowed before her. His bushy hair fell mostly over one side of his head.

  “Is this the nurse of whom I’ve heard?” Doubleday asked. “I wished to meet the lady personally and issue my sincerest gratitude for the service she has rendered to our noble cause.”

  “That’d be her, sir,” Little John said. “If not for her, I’d be dead and buried, sir. She saved my buddy Willie Biddle up on Cemetery Ridge too.”

  “Is this true, ma’am?”

  “It was really nothing,” Mom said, embarrassed. “Anybody could have done it.”

  “What is your name, ma’am?”

  “Terry Stoshack, sir,” Mom said, shaking Doubleday’s hand, “and this is my son, Joey.”

  “That is an unusual nurse’s uniform you are wearing, Mrs. Stoshack,” Doubleday said. “What regiment are you with?”

  “Uh…regiment? Well…”

  “They’re with the 151st Pennsylvania, sir,” volunteered Little John.

  “Ma’am,” Doubleday said, “because of your courage and skill in the face of this horrific battle, I am going to recommend that President Lincoln award you the Medal of Honor.”

  The soldiers gasped. Mom blushed. I was truly proud of her.

  “Thank you, sir!” Mom said. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to salute or curtsy, so she did both.

  Finally, it was my chance. I didn’t know if Doubleday was going to hang around some more telling Mom how great she was, or if he was about to turn on his heel to go congratulate somebody else for an act of bravery.

  “General Doubleday,” I said, stepping up to the man. “May I ask you a question, sir?”

  “Certainly, young fellow. What is it?”

  I took a deep breath to collect my thoughts.

  “Sir, did you invent baseball?”

  Abner Doubleday stopped and peered at me for a few seconds. Instantly I regretted asking the question. Thousands of American soldiers had been killed on this horrible day. He had come over to thank Mom for saving lives. And here I was, asking him about something silly like baseball. I was afraid he was going to snap my head off.

  “Invent what
?” he finally asked.

  A crazy thought crossed my mind. What if Doubleday didn’t invent baseball? And what if baseball didn’t even exist in 1863? I would look really stupid.

  “B-baseball,” I stuttered, taking the ball out of my pocket. “The game of baseball. You know, bats, balls, gloves…”

  “Young man, are you insane?” Doubleday thundered. “Who told you I invented the game of baseball?”

  “This guy named Flip Valentini,” I said. “He’s my Little League coach, and he’s a really cool guy, and he said—”

  Mom stopped me before I could say anything even stupider.

  “Poppycock!” the general said, climbing back on his horse. “Me, invent baseball? That’s balderdash! Blather! Twaddle! Flapdoodle!”

  I didn’t know what any of those words meant, but I kind of had the feeling the answer to my question was no.

  I was a little disappointed, I must admit. It would have been cool to meet the guy who invented baseball. Mom and I had been through a lot to meet Doubleday, and I was rooting for him to be the guy. I went to put the baseball back in my pocket.

  “What’s that?” Doubleday asked.

  “A baseball,” I said. “I was going to ask you to sign it. But if you didn’t invent baseball, it probably doesn’t matter.”

  Mom grabbed the ball and held it out to Doubleday.

  “I would consider it a personal favor, sir, if you could put your autograph on this ball for my son,” Mom said. She pulled the Sharpie out of her purse. Doubleday looked at the Sharpie curiously.

  “Where does one insert the ink?” he asked.

  “The ink is already in there,” I said. “You just press on the tip.”

  Doubleday shook his head and examined the Sharpie again. Then he wrote his name on the ball and handed it to me.

  “Pennsylvania, eh?” he said, looking at me and Mom curiously. “I was not aware of such odd customs and implements here in Pennsylvania.”

  With that, he galloped away.

  “Are you happy now?” Mom asked. “You got the answer to your question, and you got a souvenir too.”

  “I’m happy, Mom,” I said, throwing an arm around her. “Let’s go home.”

  We said good-bye to Little John, and Mom told him to be careful not to fall into any more ponds, because she wouldn’t be around to rescue him next time.

  We had to find a quiet place to sit down. When I travel through time, I need to focus my concentration as strongly as I can. There was a clump of trees about a hundred yards behind us. That looked like a good place.

  I didn’t know what time it was. The sun was dipping lower in the sky, and a full moon was starting to become visible, but there was still some daylight. It was summer, I remembered, and it stayed light until nine o’clock or even later.

  As we walked over to the woods, Mom pulled out the pack of baseball cards we had brought with us and handed it to me. One of those cards would be our ticket home.

  “What’s that sound, Joey?” Mom asked, taking my hand as we walked among the trees.

  I could see a clearing past the woods. It sounded like there might be people out there. It was more than that. I heard a sharp crack too, like a rock hitting a tree or something. It was an oddly familiar sound.

  As we came through the trees into a big open field, I realized that the sound I heard was the sound of a bat hitting a ball.

  They were playing baseball out there!

  12

  Rules Are Rules

  “COME ON, SHOW SOME GINGER!” A TALL GUY WITH RED hair hollered as he tossed a ball up in the air and fungoed a pop fly to the players scattered around the field.

  They had created a homemade baseball diamond by placing four pieces of wood around the field where the bases should be. There were no dugouts, foul lines, or fences, of course. It was all very improvised, like a pickup game back home. Mom and I sat down on the grass to watch.

  The tall guy wasn’t holding a regular baseball bat. He was swinging the wooden spoke of a wagon wheel that had busted apart. The wagon was lying on its side near a tree.

  He wasn’t hitting a ball, either. It looked like a rolled-up sock with a rock inside it or something. It was pretty pathetic.

  The fielders didn’t have any gloves. They were catching the ball bare-handed. Some of them were still wearing their army uniforms. Others had stripped them off and were playing in their underwear.

  The thing that struck me most was how happy they all seemed. It was like they had forgotten all about the horrible battle they had fought just hours earlier. I guess everybody copes with stressful situations in different ways. Some people sit down next to a gravestone and cry. Some go into shock. And some play a game.

  I was anxious to get back home to Louisville, but it felt so good sitting out there on the grass. The sun was going down, and it wasn’t so hot anymore. A breeze was blowing through the trees. Mom and I decided to watch for a few minutes before going home.

  It was nice to be away from the war. I could imagine how much nicer it was for the soldiers. Some of them had been fighting for two years.

  They probably saw Mom and me sitting there watching them, but they didn’t pay us any mind. Mom massaged the back of my neck with her fingers as we watched them, the way she used to do when I was little.

  The tall guy was pretty good with the bat, but then he fouled one off deep into the woods. After some good-natured cursing, the players went to look for the ball. A few minutes later they straggled back out of the woods. Nobody had found it.

  “Sorry, gents,” the tall guy said. “Looks like we’ve got to call it a day.”

  I felt the baseball in my pocket that Abner Doubleday had signed. Some of these guys had probably never even seen a real baseball, it occurred to me.

  “You think I should let them use it?” I asked Mom.

  “It’s up to you, Joey. It’s your ball.”

  I thought it over. The baseball did look pretty new for a Civil War ball. It could use some dirt marks. That would make it look more real.

  “Hey!” I shouted, “I’ve got a baseball!”

  “Toss it here,” one of the players said. I whipped the ball to him, and he caught it on a fly.

  “By thunder, that’s some arm you got on you, son!” he said as he examined the ball. “Care to join us?”

  “Can I play, Mom?” I pleaded. “Just for a few minutes?”

  “Sure, Joey,” she said, mussing up my hair. “Have fun. We’ll go home whenever you’re ready.”

  I ran off to join the players. The tall guy seemed to be running things. He told me to grab the bat and take a turn at the plate.

  Well, actually, he didn’t say that at all. What he said was, “Striker to the line. What’s your name, son? Step up to the home base.”

  “Joe Stoshack,” I said. “But people call me Stosh.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll call you,” he said. “My name is Charles Chadwick, but most people call me Monkeywrench.”

  Monkeywrench went out to the mound, which wasn’t a mound at all but just the spot where the mound would be if they had one. He said he needed to take a few warm-up pitches.

  I picked up the bat and swung it around a few times. It was way too long and heavy for me. It was way too long and heavy for anybody. I noticed the first, second, and third basemen were playing right on their bases. It was like it hadn’t occurred to them that they could cover more fair territory if they played away from the base.

  Monkeywrench didn’t go into a regular pitcher’s windup. He took a running start and whipped the ball underhand. The catcher didn’t squat right behind the plate. He stood about ten feet back. I didn’t blame him. Without a chest protector, mask, or glove, I wouldn’t want to be right behind the batter either. One of the other players took position behind the catcher to call balls and strikes.

  “Whatcher pleasure, son?” the umpire asked me.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “High or low?” said the ump.

&nb
sp; “Huh?”

  “Ya wanna high pitch or a low pitch?” he said slowly, as if I was stupid.

  “I get to choose?” I asked.

  “Lordy! Of course ya get to choose,” said the ump. “Ain’tcha never played baseball before?”

  “High,” I said sheepishly. I’ve always been a high ball hitter.

  “Very well then.”

  Monkeywrench rubbed the ball in his hands and started swinging his arms around. Then he took a running start and whipped the ball toward me. It was up around my eyes, so I let it go.

  “Fair!” called the ump.

  “What do you mean, fair?” I asked.

  “It was a fair pitch,” he replied. “Strike one.”

  I wasn’t about to argue. I choked up on the bat and took my stance.

  “Strike it hard, Stosh!” one of the players hollered.

  The next pitch bounced in the dirt in front of the plate. The umpire called it “unfair.” One and one.

  I looked over a second strike which was, in my opinion, way outside. One and two. Now I had to protect the plate.

  “Well done, sir!” somebody hollered at Monkeywrench.

  The next pitch was way inside. I jumped out of the way, but the ball glanced off my leg. I tossed the bat aside and trotted to first base.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” asked the ump.

  “I got hit by the pitch,” I said. “Duh!”

  “So what?” the ump said. “Get back in there and take your licks. The count is two balls and two strikes.”

  Sheesh, this was going to take some getting used to. Their dumb rules were starting to make me mad.

  “Come on,” I yelled to Monkeywrench, “get it over!”

  The next pitch looked good enough, so I took a poke at it and hit a grounder toward second base.

  “Huzzah! Well struck!” somebody yelled as I dug for first. “Leg it, son!”

  I was a stride or two from the base when the ball hit me right between the shoulder blades.

  “Owwww!” I moaned as I crossed the bag. Either that second baseman had really bad aim, or he threw the ball at me on purpose. Well, at least I was safe.