Steal Away Home

by Billy Coffey

  We were in Trenton for a three-game set against the Thunder in early August. I called early that Friday morning to wish Dad well. Only some of me worried. He was Paul Cross, after all, the man who walked with a stiff lip and straight back even when he’d mopped those high school floors. I could not allow the possibility that someday his body would give out, as all bodies must. He moved our talk toward how I was playing. We were almost a dozen games out of first. My average hovered around .260. He told me not to get caught up with standings and focus instead on my average and handling the pitchers. The minors were all about making a name for yourself and that’s what I was doing, so I was to worry about me and me alone. No room for any other concerns. I told him I’d work on that and left the number to the stadium in case anybody needed me, then I told my father I loved him for the first time since I was a boy. He said quit being a pansy, all he was doing was driving down to the doctor. I’d learned long before it was the tone of Dad’s words rather than the words themselves that spoke for him. He was appreciative, and he was scared.

  The surgery began at the University of Virginia Medical Center before noon on the ninth of August, 1998, near the time we began batting practice. Jim Blackburn was our manager and still is, a burly man we all called Skip. He’d spent a few years catching in the majors and had taken a shine to me, spent much of those past days sharing the story of his sister-in-law having her own gallbladder out and coming out on the other end of it fine, though as mean as ever and twice as ugly. He watched from behind the cage while I took my swings. I stepped out after the last pitch and took in the sparse crowd already in the seats. My heart stuttered.

  Alone down the right field line sat Micky.

  I stood there with a bat in my hands as the next guy jumped in, Skip saying, “Twenty’s all you get, Owen, stop being such a hog,” through what sounded like a tunnel of wind as Micky’s face met mine. It wasn’t her out there. Couldn’t be, I knew, unless she had come back to me by means of the very magic with which she’d left. She did not speak to me from that distance but through her eyes, which were soft with sadness. I knew that sorrow as not her own, but for me. For my father. I knew.

  By all accounts Dad’s procedure started out as routinely as promised. At some point during the first inning he developed a circulation problem to his heart. A stroke resulted. Doctors did all they could. It was Mom who finally got hold of someone at the stadium at the start of the seventh inning. Skip pulled me from the game and said they’d induced a coma. I got on the next plane for Virginia, too late. Somewhere over Pennsylvania, my father passed from this world to the next. He was only fifty-two years old. I can only hope he saw a light at his last breath and not the darkness that always chased him.

  I stayed a week in Charlottesville to bury him and keep Mom company. She mourned his passing as a loving wife would, the suddenness of Dad’s departure leaving her in a shock borne out in a succession of painful reminders that she was now alone: making too much food for breakfast and supper, washing the dirty clothes he’d left in the laundry, the daily ritual of going through letters and junk mail delivered to their apartment in Paul Cross’s name. His photos stared from walls and mantels and the tops of dressers. I would be cleaning the apartment and find bits and pieces of my father everywhere. Change fallen from his pocket into the cushion of his chair; a bit of whisker caught in the blades of his razor; how his smell lingered on his side of the closet, seeping into the gray shirts and blue pants he continued to wear in his retirement.

  I found an old scrapbook tucked beneath his Bible and a pile of papers in his bottom bedside drawer. The cover was cheap cardboard washed in a fading and peeling red. Inside were photos and newspaper articles glued to the pages. Me in Little League, me in Babe Ruth and varsity, stories from the Record and papers in and around Youngstown, my baseball card. Among them I found a crumpled sheet of paper pulled from the trash. Written in Dad’s hand was 440’ measured. Harpers found it. Sign and take to Pr. Taylor in morning. Third deck Yankee Stadium. An arrow was drawn from the bottom of the page that had once pointed to a baseball.

  “He was proud of you,” Mom told me over supper two days after Dad had gone, me eating a plate of spaghetti I knew she’d made for him. “He wouldn’t allow himself to show it. Sometimes I think he didn’t know how. Some men are raised to believe in only two emotions, Owen.” She held up one finger, “Anger.” Then another, “Happiness. The world can be boiled down to one or the other in their minds. The rest gets so muddled I guess they think it’s better kept to themselves.”

  She hurt, and I knew she would for a long while. Yet there remained a strength in my mother I could not gather within myself, pain mixed with faith that Dad’s passing was a link in a chain wound about all of our lives, anchored to a faraway point where she would meet him once more. Many times during that week I paused in awe of her faith, wondering where Mom had found it. I would think back to that barn deep in Shantytown and ask myself if my father’s death would have broken her had she not found Micky during those few weeks in the summer of 1990.

  I did not fare so well. Dad’s passing served as a reminder of those things we leave undone in life, and the many last times that pass without our notice. Once, when I was about eight or nine, my father picked me up and held me in his arms over some simple thing, to say hello after a day’s work or to help me place the star atop the Christmas tree. He set me down and would never pick me up again. Inside a run-down campus apartment in Youngstown, Ohio, he said he loved me for the last time. We shared our last beer together when he and Mom helped move my things from Bluefield to Bowie. His final words to me were, Quit being a pansy, all I’m doing’s driving down to the doctor. I still wonder how different our words would have been had Dad and I known what would happen. Sometimes I think we would have talked long that morning on things felt but never said. Other times I imagine our conversation going unchanged. The hardest things to say are to the ones we love most.

  We buried him in a plot at the Riverview Cemetery with a clear view of the Rivanna. Many from Camden paid their respects. Jeffrey and Stephanie came, along with Clancy. Abigail Sebolt sat with Mom and me as the reverend gave the service. Rupert arrived. Coach Stevens. Principal Taylor. Mom spent much of the time turned toward the crowd rather than the casket she said held the bones of her husband but not his soul, searching all those familiar faces for the girl she believed had gone into hiding. Yet Micky did not make a return that day, not even to me.

  I returned to Bowie and tried righting what was fast becoming a bad season. By the last of August, my average had dipped to .250. Skip waited another month and another twenty-five points shaved off my average before summoning me into his office. He called it a pep talk. To me it was more a come-to-Jesus meeting with a thinly veiled threat of doom underneath. “Batters are a dime a dozen,” he said, “but good catchers ain’t. You need to get your head right and show us something, son. It won’t take much. Seen it happen to guys who’ve been down in the farm a few years. They get to losing their passion after a while, coasting along. You can’t do that. Show me how much you want this, and I’ll help you all I can.”

  I nodded through the whole thing, said all the right words. What I couldn’t tell Skip was I still had that drive, had it stronger than ever, and whatever was wrong with me had nothing to do with my head being in the wrong place. My heart was what worried me, like something between Dad’s dying and my return to Double-A had poked so many holes in it that I heard a whistle with every beat. I didn’t want to let him down, though. That was the thing. Skip, but Dad especially. Those next weeks I went on something of a tear and got my average back up to a somewhat respectable .263 before I tweaked a hammy while trying to outrun a throw to first in Binghamton. Skip didn’t want to put me on the DL. It would maybe be taken the wrong way by the boys upstairs. I sat for close to a week before he was left with no other choice, telling the reporters I was listed as “day-to-day.”

  Really, aren’t we all?

  -3-
<
br />   It is a quiet inning in spite of Hairston’s leadoff single. Anderson works a walk that puts two on with none out, but that is where our rally ends. Bordick pops to short and Richard K’s on four pitches. Conine lofts a weak pop-up to Soriano at second. Not once does Mike turn my way. An inning and a half. That’s the only bit remaining. One more Orioles bat and three more outs.

  Country taps my leg with his glove. He says, “Time to go to work, Hillbilly. You keep an eye on Betsy for me? She’s my ticket to Cooperstown.”

  He grins and sets the bat against me, rises and moves off to the dugout steps. Mora, the man Country replaces in left, winks at me as he passes. As he goes I see Mike take one stride from the spot where he’s stood all game. He looks at me and ponders as if to speak, then merely turns and tells Johnson to go get ’em.

  Bottom 8

  -1-

  It was silence that woke me from a broken sleep the morning after my father burst into Micky’s church, early sun through the slats of the blinds and a weariness in my body I had never known. The house felt empty. I struggled from bed and eased open my bedroom door. The kitchen table lay bare. No smell of pancakes or scrambled eggs greeted me, not even the thick aroma of Dad’s coffee in the air. It’s the small things you take for granted that become very big things when they’re gone. Beneath the unanswered questions and secret fears of our everyday beats the thin pulse of tiny rituals that serve to root us.

  I had gotten home the night before to the noise of my parents arguing in their bedroom. That morning the comforter on Mom and Dad’s bed was pulled too far to the right and a single pillow left crooked—Mom had slept alone, and not well. A bit of her perfume lingered like a spirit. Dad’s wallet and keys were gone from the dresser. Gone to work, I assumed. Dad doing all he could to pretend nothing in our lives had changed.

  My first thoughts were of Micky, left waiting for me with her scoundrel of a father in some abandoned cabin somewhere along the Saint Mary’s River where it skirted the outer edges of Shantytown. But I could not go to her just yet. Already in my mind I had begun to concoct a final way to bring her back to me, though it relied on the judgment of one person in town. And there was my mother to deal with as well. Mom would have to be first. I showered and dressed with the radio loud on my nightstand. At some point between songs from the rock station out of Charlottesville I heard the DJ mention something about the moon tonight, big and bright and the color of strawberries.

  -2-

  The fear as I drove to the library was I’d chosen the wrong place—maybe Mom had gone back to the Pines instead, and whatever meaning she had found there. But when I pulled around back of the two-story brick building I found her car in its accustomed place. It was sameness she needed now, no less than Dad and me.

  I went through the back entrance. The break room off the checkout counters was empty, as well as the little closet where books were collected in bins before being reshelved. What people had scattered themselves among the aisles paid me little mind. Mom was nowhere. I was about to ask for her when I scanned the open stacks along the second floor and saw her standing by the railing next to a cart stuffed with books. I raised a hand and climbed the stairs. She met me at the landing. There were so many words for us to say. All the books around us could not contain them all. Yet we stood facing one another in gathering silence, each too afraid to speak first.

  “You lied to me,” I said. “To Dad. I can understand you not telling him where you were going, but me? You know I love her.”

  “Which is why I couldn’t say.” She touched the side of my face with her hand. The feel of her cool skin soothed me. “Michaela told me everything. Telling you I was going off to Shantytown in the evenings would only anger you more, Owen. You already think that church took the girl you love away. You’d only think it’d taken your momma as well.”

  “Ain’t a church down there, Ma. It’s a barn. And what you all were doing in there—”

  “Was something you and your father can’t understand.”

  She sighed and let go my face, then guided me away from the steps and the prying eyes of those below. Her gaze lingered over the stacks. The rustle of papers. How the early sun poured through the windows in clean white lines to lay squares of light on the floor.

  “I’ve always liked working here,” she said. “Don’t think I ever told you that. It’s a small job that don’t pay anything, but that’s okay. The people are nice, and it’s quiet. But there was something more than those that I never could pin down until I learned what happened to Michaela. And to you.”

  “Nothing happened to me.”

  “Tell me that again.” She sighed. “You never could lie, Owen. And besides, I know the truth. So does she. You’re only too afraid to admit it. Michaela, though? That girl ain’t afraid. She loves you. I always knew that but didn’t know how much. Should make you feel good, knowing someone so touched by God thinks of you in such high esteem.”

  “You say that like she’s some kind a holy woman. She ain’t. You’d seen what me and Daddy did at Earl’s house, you’d think different.”

  “I wouldn’t. All that they got is for others, Owen. Is that so hard for you to believe? That people are good deep down, that they can change? You speak of what you don’t know and what you refuse to see. You want that girl to be who she was. You need her to be no different from her daddy, because that way you don’t have to change. But it’s not like that. They’re not like that. Something wonderful happened to Michaela, and all she wants is to speak of it to all who will listen. Why is that such a horrible thing?”

  “I’m trying to get you to listen to me, Mom. Micky isn’t what you think.”

  “I’m trying to get you to listen. Your daddy won’t. You know how many times I tried telling him? Or you? But neither of you’d ever hear it. Didn’t matter a whit what I thought. It pained me to lie, Owen. It carved a gully right through me. I fought it for days until I could fight it no more. Something in me drew myself to that girl. I’d hear the women here at nights, the ones come up from Shantytown to clean. They’d talk of the most amazing things Michaela shared, and it filled my heart. It sounded so right. So after she and Earl come to church this last time, I went one night. I’d never felt so at home anyplace. Michaela told me her story. She made me see.”

  “So she speaks and everybody in the Pines listens? They just open up their pocketbooks and give over what little they got? How much money you give Earl, Momma?”

  Her jaw clenched.

  “I’m just trying to understand what’s going on here. Why you did this. And Louise Townsend? How’d she end up there?”

  “I told Louise. I told others, but they didn’t come. Or wouldn’t. But Louise did.”

  “Can you stand there for a minute and try to see things from our side? Not like you just up and decided to turn Methodist. This is something way past that. You snuck off behind our backs. You knew what Dad would say, the trouble it’d cause. But you still chose Michaela over your own family.”

  “Like Alan Sebolt chose his church over his family? Like Clancy chose his job over Louise? Like you and your daddy both chose some future that’s not even here yet over me? Because that’s what you both love, Owen. Over all else. Day in and day out ever since you were a boy, baseball and nothing but baseball. I watch you and your father from the kitchen window, and I’m glad the two of you have something to share. But what would either of you share with me? My family was my love. I poured my very being into caring for you and him and us, never to get a return.”

  “So what you did was all your way of getting back?”

  “No, it was my way of salvaging what life I had left. Michaela showed me the truth. I can love my family hard, give them all I have, but only if my soul is bent toward higher places. The heart is a compass, and it only knows where it is if it can point true north. Mine never did. All that needle in me did was spin and spin. I got lost. Now I’m found.”

  She looked about the room before us and then downstairs, taking
it all in.

  “You know there’s books in this building first written down in times so old we know next to nothing about them? Others so new the ink’s barely dried on the page. I spent part of this morning downstairs shelving fiction and poetry. Now I’m up here with a stack of history books and science books and books on art. I’ll put them all in their places and there they’ll sit until the next person comes along and takes them home. One day not long after I started going to hear Michaela, I was standing close to where we’re standing now and happened to look down on all those books. Tens of thousands of them. Any subject you can think of. You know what I realized? No matter what story they told or what thing they talked about, all of these books ask the same questions: Why are we here, what is this all about, and what are we all gonna live for? And then I realized I’d always been asking those questions too.

  “What I’m telling you is Michaela Dullahan found those answers. We believe that with all our hearts. You, me, your father, everyone—we are here from love, for love, to love, and that love is what sets us free. She ain’t Christ returned, Owen. But I will look to that girl for wisdom before I will look to anyone else made of flesh, because I believe in who she is. I will fight for her. And I know you would too if your courage wouldn’t fail. She told me once your heart is divided. You want what you don’t need and need what you don’t want, and one day you will have to face it. That’s what Michaela said. She said that day was far off for you but she still mourned it because she won’t be there to help you. I told your father that story last night. He wouldn’t hear it.”