by Edward Abbey
Henry mentioned his name.
“What do you want, farmer?”
Henry stated his business.
Tony paused to absorb the information, then said, “Listen, farmer, we got a real ball team here. We ain’t got time to fool around with a bunch of hillbillys.”
Henry said he had a better team than last year.
Tony laughed, a short harsh bark. “Last year you had nothin. Nothin is always nothin. Anyhow our field aint ready. Somebody tore down the backstop for firewood.”
Henry said Stump Creek had a good diamond, cleared and dragged, and the outfield in usable shape. (Gil Prothrow’s cow pasture, mined with cowpies, but he didn’t mention that.)
“Yeah? Well …” Tony K. hesitated again. “Naw, we don’t play farmers; you ain’t in our league. Goodby now …”
“Wait!” Henry risked a few bold words—a challenge.
“What? What’d you say, you crumb?”
Henry repeated the challenge, even made it a shade stronger.
A moment of silence at the other end of the line, then Tony’s snarl of contempt. “We’ll be there, Lightcap. This Saturday. Two o’clock. You furnish the balls—” Another brutal laugh. “—if you clodhoppers got any balls.”
Henry agreed but added one further stipulation: no fair bringing any players older than fourteen. Will’s our oldest player, he explained, and he’s only thirteen and a half.
Tony nearly choked on his astonishment. “Jesus but you can lie. Will’s sixteen and you know it and I know it.”
All right, Henry agreed again. But nobody over sixteen, okay?
“Don’t worry about a thing,” Tony said. “We’ll be there.” He hung up. Henry waited, hearing the earphones go back on the hooks, then slowly replaced his own, his mind already racing ahead to work out his lineup.
He and Will picked the team, writing names down on a ruled paper tablet. Henry would take over the mound, Will handle the catching, as usual. Their little brother Paul could play right field, where he’d be mostly out of the way, not in a position to do much harm. Their best player and one genuine athlete, the sharp-eyed clean-cut Eagle Scout Chuck Tait, would sparkplug the team at shortstop, or take over first, or relieve the pitcher, wherever needed. That made four players, the heart and solid core of the Stump Creek nine. But where to find the other five? Stump Creek, W.Va., population one hundred twenty (counting dogs and girls), scattered for five miles along County Road 14, did not offer a wealth of talent.
They brooded over the problem and concluded that the best they could do was have the Adams brothers, Clarence thirteen and Sonny twelve, play second and third base, and let the Fetterman boys, Junior (his baptized, Christian name—the father’s name was Bill), age thirteen, and Elman, age eleven or so, play the outfield. None of the four, as Will said, could hit a cow’s ass with a snow shovel, but who else was available?
We’re still one player short, Henry pointed out. We need somebody to start at first base. They thought about that for a while. Finally Will mentioned the name of Ginter.
“No …” said Henry.
“Who else?”
“Not Red Ginter …”
“Who else we got?”
“But Red,” said Henry. “Red’s seventeen.”
“Yeah but he’s still in fourth grade.”
“That was three years ago.”
“Well that’s where he was last time he went to school.”
“Tony would object.”
“Tony’s a liar. You wait and see. Every one of them Guineas and Polacks will be at least seventeen. You know what those Roman Cat-lickers are like—they drink blood in church every Sunday. You know—that Sacred Heart of Mary Church. Bunch of mackerel snappers.”
“I dont believe that any more, Will. They’re Catholics but they’re human like us. More or less. Besides …”
“Besides what?”
“Red won’t play.”
“Ask him. Who else we got?”
“He can’t play. He’s big but he won’t move, he won’t run.”
“He’ll catch the ball if you throw it to him. He’ll do for first base.”
“Can’t hit the ball. He swings the bat like he thinks he’s mowing hay. Like it’s a golf club. Strikes out every time.”
“Yeah but he takes a mighty powerful cut at the ball.” Will smiled, his dark eyes musing. “I saw him hit a ball four hundred feet on a line drive one time.”
“I saw that. A fluke hit and anyway it went foul.”
“He’s the only one we got left, Henry.”
Henry thought about it. “What about his little brother, Leroy? Maybe he could play.”
“Christ,” muttered Will, and he brushed back his shaggy black mop of hair and made a rotating motion with his forefinger close by his right ear. “Leroy’s crazy as a moon-eyed calf. We don’t even want him around.”
They were silent for a minute, sitting there in the kitchen at the oilcloth-covered table, lit by the amber glow of the kerosene lamp, staring at their paper lineup of eight ballplayers, five of them children. “Then it’s gotta be Red,” Henry said.
“We got no choice, Henry.”
“All right. But you go ask him.”
“We’ll go together,” Will said. “And we’ll take Elman and Junior with us.”
“We should take the twelve-gauge too.”
“We should. But we won’t.”
Swinging out from the schoolbus, late in the afternoon, Henry and Will walked half a mile homeward up the red-dog road, under the trees, then cut off up the hill through the Big Woods toward the adjacent valley two miles away. Once called Crab-apple Hollow, it became known as Hardscrabble Holler when the Ginter family, coming from no one knew where, made it their family seat in the late 1800s, soon after the end of the War Between the States. (Virginia versus West Virginia.)
The Fetterman boys had declined to join them, mumbling various excuses: their Paw’d get mad, they had all them evening chores to do, something was wrong with their big sister Wilma who’d stayed out late the night before and come home with blood running down her leg, their dog Shep was sick, Maw needed them to set out the stringbean stakes and plant crowder peas, Uncle Homer was coming to show everybody his new Ford automobile, he was the one worked at Jim Stewart’s Hardware Store in Shawnee who everybody said earned a hundred fifty dollars a month. Lies.
Will and Henry walked alone through the shade of the tall pines, a second growth but already uncut for fifty years—Joe Lightcap, their old man, logger and sawyer, had his mind on those trees; he cruised every stand of timber in the county and could estimate the board feet in a tree with one squint of his deep brown eyes. They passed the ruins of Brent’s sawmill, abandoned half a century before. There was a scatter of slabs rotting in the goldenrod, the tattered remnants of antique power belting, the enormous hill of sawdust barely beginning, after so much time, to support the growth of a few weeds on the slopes of its sterile, smoldering immensity.
Here they struck a narrow footpath leading down the steep side of the ridge toward the eroded corn patches and overgrazed pastures of Ginter’s farm. Halfway down they passed the gulch and tailings pile of a small coal mine, unworked for years. A dribble of sulfurous water leaked from the dark portal of the mine, where decayed locust props, warped beneath the overburden, shored up the roof of the tunnel. The entrance resembled a rotten mouth, spiked with fragments of teeth. There were many such small, one-man workings in the area; in one of these, as everyone knew but few dared mention aloud, old Jefferson Ginter kept his distilling equipment.
The farm buildings came in view, a collection of weather-blackened, unpainted, ramshackle structures with sagging roof-beams, then the Ginter house, a one-story slab shack with a rusted tin roof, built by the Ginters themselves, attached to a much older but sturdy, square-cornered log cabin. The Ginter coon hounds, smelling the Lightcap brothers from afar, began to bay, stretching their chains to the final link.
The path to the back porch of the
house, where they were headed, was easily wide enough for two but Henry, slowing down, allowed Will to walk before him. Will was a year and a half older, a dark stolid solid fellow, not easily intimidated by anything, broad at the shoulders and thick in the arms, built—as everyone agreed—like a brick shithouse. Though only a sophomore, he easily made first string right tackle on the varsity football team at Shawnee High School.
The back door of the house stood wide to the mellow April afternoon, opening into a dark interior. There was no screendoor and a number of Ginter chickens, moulting Reds and scraggly Leghorns, wandered idly in and out of the house, pausing to shit on the doorstep, pecking at ticks, ants, June bugs, dead flies, fallen shirt buttons, crumbs of tobacco, whatever looked edible, viable, biodegradable. A thread of blue smoke from the kitchen stovepipe rose straight up in the still air.
The dogs, four of them chained beneath the porch, barked with a hoarse and passionate intensity, rich with hatred, as Will and Henry made their cautious approach to the house. From inside the kitchen they could hear two semi-human voices engaged in fierce debate—the buzzsaw screech of a threatened woman, the baritone bellow of an outraged man.
“They’re fightin again,” says Henry. “Maybe we should come back later.”
“They’re always fightin,” Will says. “Come on.” And he marched firmly forward.
At that moment there was an explosion of hens through the open doorway, squawks of panic, wings flapping in urgent haste. The chickens were followed by a small yellow dog, also flying, or at least airborne, as if propelled by catapult from the interior. The dog cleared the porch without touching, landed running on the bare dirt of the yard—something pale and and soft clamped in its jaws—and scuttled like a wounded rat toward the security of the nearest outbuilding—a collapsed implement shed supported by the hulk of a broken-down John Deere manure spreader.
Will hesitated; Henry stopped behind him.
Old man Ginter appeared in the doorway, roaring mad. He roared after the disappearing dog: “… ever come back in here agin you docktail misbegotten yellowback hyena I’ll fill your hinder end with birdshot so goldamn stiff you’ll be shittin bee-bees through your teeth for a month.”
Another screech of female indignation from within. Old Jeff Ginter, clutching a pint Mason jar filled with a clear, oily liquid, half turned to the unseen woman behind him and roared at her: “I don’t care about no goldamn pet dog how many times I got to tell you I don’t want no goldamn dog in the house it haint sanitary goldamn it all to hell and back. How many times I got to tell you that dog of yourn haint no better’n the others. He got to learn his place and a dog’s place haint never inside a decent Christian home goldamnit woman you raised in a barn? In a cave? Under a goldamn manure pile?”
And then he saw Will and Henry, these two schoolboys in their neat clean school clothes—bright sport shirts, fresh bib overalls—staring at him from across the beaten, grassless, dungspotted yard a hundred feet away. Old Ginter was wearing bib overalls too, but his were worn through at the knee, unpatched and unwashed, and instead of a shirt he wore a long-sleeved Union suit buttoned to the neck, his winter underwear, once white but now aged to a uniform grayish blend of sweat, dust, woodsmoke, and ashes. Suddenly silent, he squinted at the boys through bloodshot eyes under pale and shaggy brows, reached inside the door and produced a shotgun, a veteran doublebarreled twelve-gauge bandaged at breech and forestock with multiple wrappings of black friction tape. Cradling the weapon in his left arm, at the ready, he snarled at the boys, “What’re you two a-doin here?”
Will gazed calmly at Ginter, waiting for Henry to speak. Henry was the captain. When Henry realized that Will was leaving the business up to him, he cleared his throat and tried to say something, starting off with a soprano squeak, “We come to see—” He stopped, swallowed, gained better control of his voicebox, and started over, this time in a firm adolescent tenor. “We come to see Red, Mister Ginter. Is Red here?”
“What’s that?” the old man shouted. “Speak up for Christ’s sake.” The dogs were still barking, a steady uproar, from the end of their taut chains beneath the porch. Ginter stepped forward and roared down at them. “Shut up! You there, Buck! Bell! Molly!” The dogs cringed, the barking subsided to a servile whimpering. “Git the hell back there!” The dogs crept backward, tails lowered, into the shadows. Only one, a young spotted Bluetick hound, dared a final snarl at the visitors. “You too, Blue! Git the hell back under there.” The fourth dog retreated, muttering quietly. Ginter looked at Henry and Will. He lifted the jar to his lips, took a sip, checked the bead at the rim, holding the jar up to the light, then lowered it and looked again at the boys. “Now what you want here? Speak up.”
Henry swallowed and said, “We’re lookin for Red.”
“What you want him for?”
“We need him for the ball team, Mister Ginter. We got a game with Blacklick Saturday.”
“My boys don’t associate with them foreigners. They hain’t no better’n niggers. Can’t even speak decent English, them people. You ever hear them try to talk? Jabber and jibber at you like a bunch of cockeyed lunatics.”
“We got a game. We need Red.”
“Red’s got better things to do than monkey around with you young snotnoses.”
Henry felt Will go rigid beside him, about to turn and walk away. Before he lost his temper. Hastily, Henry said, “Look, Mister Ginter, we really need him.” He tried flattery, though the lie sickened his soul. “Red’s our slugger, Mister Ginter. Cleanup batter, number four slot.” Lying through his teeth, he said, “We can’t hardly play without Red …” He paused.
The old man swayed a little on the porch, looking down at them, considering Henry’s mute appeal. He took another languid, loving sip from his pint of white lightning. He lowered the jar and said, “You boys oughta know better’n trouble honest folks with your foolishness. Some folks got to work for their livin.” Squinting suspiciously, he asked, “When’s this here game agonna be?”
“Saturday,” Henry assured him.
“You sure it hain’t the Sunday?”
“No sir, Saturday.”
“Any child of mine plays that baseball game on a Sunday I’ll peel his hide off his back with a drawknife’n hang him by the ears with it to yon ole butternut—” He gestured toward a nearby half-dead butternut tree, its lower limbs long since amputated for firewood. “—till sundown in July. Like I would a goldamn blacksnake. Till he stops wigglin. Ain’t Christian play games on the Sunday.”
“No sir it’s Saturday.”
Old Ginter relented. “They’re out at the pigpen sloppin the hogs, him and Leroy.” Leroy’s name suggested an afterthought. “Now you mind and let Leroy play too or by God Red don’t play neither. You hear me?”
Will and Henry glanced at each other in momentary despair. Will shrugged. They had no choice.
“Yes sir,” Henry said.
They turned and walked toward the barn, Henry avoiding where he could the freshest applications of chickenshit. “Now you mind my words now,” the old man shouted after them. They heard the resumed squawling of the woman inside the house and Ginter’s answering bellow.
Behind the barn they found Red leaning on the pigpen fence, watching his little brother Leroy inside. Red was a hugely overgrown lad, far over six feet tall and more than two hundred pounds heavy, dressed like his father in overalls and undershirt. He wore patched rubber boots on his feet; the barnyard was a swampy mire, irrigated by random streams from the spring above the barn.
Henry greeted Red with formal politeness; Red ignored him, ignored Will, who said nothing but stood close by, ready for trouble. Will never did talk much—but then, like Red Ginter, he didn’t have to. They stared at young Leroy.
Leroy was on his hands and knees inside the pen, creeping over the muck and dung toward a three-hundred-pound slime-coated sow. The sow lay on her side, eyes closed, giving suck to her litter of eight. Leroy was playing piglet. “Ernk, ernk,” he grun
ted, lowering his belly to the ground and wriggling forward, “ernk, ernk, mumma …” His broad pink harelip was twisted in what was meant to be a porcine smile.
Red encouraged him, but there was no glint of malice in his dull, pale eyes. “Keep a-goin, Leroy. You jine ‘em. And don’t settle for hind tit neither.”
Leroy squirmed closer. “Ernk ernk, mumma, gimme suck too.” He was barefoot; the ragged overalls he wore seemed two sizes too large for him. The reddish hair on his head was so thin, fine, and short he appeared nearly bald. “Ernk, mumma,” he crooned in soothing tones, “ernk, ernk …”
The great sow, lying peacefully in the April sun, at ease in the cool mud, opened one tiny red eye and saw Leroy inching toward her and her children. She grunted.
Leroy hesitated. “Ernk …?”
The sow grunted again in alarm, in annoyance, and scrambled heavily to her feet. Leroy rose up to his hands and knees. The sow squealed with anger and maternal outrage and charged, lumbering forward like a leather locomotive. Her brood hung swinging from her tough teats, unwilling to let go. Leroy jumped up, turned—”Nom nam nun of a nitch!” he yelled, running toward the boys at the fence. “I gotta get the nom nam outa here!” He leaped for the top plank, caught it and rolled over on his belly, falling to the ground outside. The mighty sow crashed like a truck into the fence, almost breaking through. But the planking, spiked to square railway ties sunk three feet in the ground, held up one more time.
Leroy got up screaming with rage, wiped the mud from his hands onto his overalls, threw a few stones at the sow—she ignored them—and limped toward the house, bawling for his Maw.
When Red, still bland-eyed and unmoved, gave him some attention, Henry explained the purpose of the visit.
“I play first or nothin,” Red says.
“That’s okay, Red, that’s where we need you.”
