Madewell Brown

by Rick Collignon

  The boy was jogging far down the street now. At the end of the block, he veered off into an empty lot and was gone. “Good luck, ragtag boy,” Rachael whispered. She watched the woman hush her baby sharply, and then the two of them went back inside. Rachael slid the window closed, dried her hands and walked to the doorway that led to the bedroom.

  Sewell was asleep, naked on the bed. The sheet was bunched below his feet, and one leg was cocked at the knee. His face was turned away from her. He was lying so still that she thought he looked dead.

  “Sewell,” she said softly. “You awake, Sewell?” When he didn’t budge, she started up a humming sound in her throat and kept it up until he moaned and drew up his one leg even higher.

  From outside came the heavy bass of a car radio and the deep sound of the engine going slow. When it passed by, the room filled again with the steady fall of rain. Sewell’s arms were flung out to each side. His chest rose and fell slowly. Every bit of him was moving ever so slightly.

  Rachael brought her hands to her waist and pulled loose the string of her sweatpants. They slid down to her ankles and she kicked them off to the side. She pulled her shirt over her head and let it drop to the floor. For a while, she let the air run cool and damp along her skin. Rain streamed down the outside of the windowpane and the light in the room was gray. A sense of sadness that seemed to come from nowhere filled her heart.

  “Sewell,” she whispered. “Hey, Sewell.” She walked over to the bed, put her knee on the edge and swung herself up and over so that she was straddling his hips. And then she eased herself down slowly.

  Sewell let out a soft moan and turned his head. “Rachael,” he said. “Let me sleep, Rachael.”

  “Shhhh,” Rachael breathed out, letting her head drop. “You lie still. I got to go soon.”

  He closed his eyes and rested a hand loosely on her hips. “Where?” he asked, but even half asleep he knew where she was going. To see that old man again, to that old man and the stories he’d put in her head.

  By the time she slipped into her clothes and left the bedroom, the chicken was more than cooked, the bones falling loose, a smear of yellow fat churning on the surface. Not that it matters, she thought. Obie didn’t eat much anymore and hadn’t for a long time, just a few bites here and there to keep himself going. She’d given up trying to force food on him. If she was as old and crippled up as he was, she wouldn’t see the sense in eating anything, either. She picked up the pot and, without a good-bye to Sewell, went to her car and drove the potholed roads of South Cairo to Obie’s house.

  It was close to dark when she pulled into his driveway. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and the grass was slick with wet. Not one light was on inside the house. The old man had probably spent the day in bed staring out the window. With the rain like mist on her face, she went up the porch steps and kicked at the front door until it swung open.

  “Hey, Obie,” she called out. “What you doing in bed?” She stepped inside and shoved the door shut with her foot. She switched on the overhead light and went to the doorway leading to the bedroom.

  Later she would wonder how she had failed to know it the moment she’d walked through the door. Nowhere had there been the grating sound of Obie’s cough or his spitting or his yelling to be left in peace. There had only been the sounds of the house itself and the steady drips of water falling from the eaves. But it wasn’t until she stood in the doorway to the old man’s room that she realized Obie Poole had finally died and left her to herself.

  “Obie,” she said softly, “I brought you some chicken and here you are gone.” She put the pot carefully down on the floor and walked over to the bed.

  He was lying on his back, his face turned toward the window. His eyes were half closed and his arms were stretched out along his sides. He looked small and used up lying there. It made her think that for Obie this last step hadn’t been such a big one.

  Not yet knowing if what she felt was sadness or relief or something else altogether, she sat down on the edge of the bed and touched his face with the palm of her hand. His skin was bone dry and still warm.

  “I’ve never known you to be this quiet,” she said, her voice suddenly thick and choked. She took her hand away and brought it to her lap. Then she looked out the window, past the sodden flat grass and out at the shadow of the river running dark and swollen with rain.

  She remembered the day she had first come walking by here. Remembered seeing this old man out of the corner of her eye just sitting on his porch like everything in sight was his and no one better mess with it. She looked down at Obie and smiled. Once more, she touched his face and then she leaned over and pulled up the thin sheet so that it covered him.

  “There,” she said, sitting back down. And then she began to sing soft and slow.

  “I know a boy who’s as sweet as pie.

  I know a boy who can make me cry.

  I know a boy who’ll make me bad.

  I know a boy who’ll make me sad.

  Jump high, sweet girl, and don’t come down.

  The rope gonna catch you and knock you down.”

  A week or so after Obie Poole was laid to rest in the South Cairo cemetery, Rachael found the cardboard box that he had hidden away beneath his bed. She had spent the day cleaning up the old man’s house and sorting through his belongings. What she had come across hadn’t amounted to much and there wasn’t a thing she hadn’t seen before, except this. She leaned forward and slid the box out from beneath the bedsprings. She wiped the dust from the top and then picked it up and carried it to the kitchen table.

  It stood about a foot high, and the flaps had been taped shut. Her name was printed across the top in pencil and written so hard that the lead had poked through the cardboard.

  “What is this, Obie?” she said out loud. “What did you leave for me?”

  The day outside was dead still, and the room, even with the door open, was hot and muggy. A thick odor of river mud hung in the air, and mixed in with that was the sharp scent of tobacco that her scrubbing had set loose. She gave the box a shake. Something heavy thumped about inside. Frowning, she fetched a knife from the kitchen drawer and slit the tape that held the box shut.

  Inside was a thick stack of writing paper, smudged with dirt and pencil lead and splattered with Obie’s spit. The handwriting sprawled all over the page, small and cramped. In places, whole lines had been scratched out and words were squeezed into the space above them. There weren’t any margins, and the writing began at the very top of the paper and wormed its way to the bottom.

  Rachael bit down on her lip and tapped her fingers against the side of her leg. A slight breeze creaked the door open a few inches and the draft brushed warm and moist against the side of her face. She reached out, picked up the top page and began to read what Obie had written.

  “This is to be a true story of the game of baseball and of the men I knew who played. They were Hightop Borrows and Walter Haynes and Ollie Swan and Sully Greene and Syville Smith and Slip Marcelle and James Lee Pittman and his little brother Earl and myself Obie Poole. They was the men who played the field. The ones who threw for us was Malcolm Cole and Sparrow Higgens and Bowman Crawford and Tessie Turner and Madewell Brown. There was others, too, but they came and went as needed. And I don’t much care about those lost souls.’

  For a time after Rachael met Obie Poole, she would strut around South Cairo telling everyone that she had a granddaddy who had gone off to play ball, that his name was Madewell Brown and he could throw a ball so hard it could shatter bones and snap ball bats in two. She’d cock out her hip and say that she looked just like him and that every pitch he threw was like the whisper of a thing.

  “That’s just fine,” people would say. “But ain’t you that little girl from the South Cairo Home?”

  “My granddaddy,” Rachael would go on, flipping back her braided hair, not listening to a word, “was the leader of them all. He even played down in Mexico where they got banana trees. He played . . .
”

  “I never heard of no Madewell Brown,” they’d say, cutting her off with an edge in their voices. “Go on, now. And take your granddaddy with you.”

  When Rachael was thirteen years old, she took the bus to the Cairo library. It was the first time she’d ever crossed the river. She was careful not to mention it to Obie, not wanting to hear what he would have to say. As soon as she walked through the library door, the quiet both drew her in and brought up a shyness she’d never felt in South Cairo. In a hushed voice, she asked the woman at the front desk if there were any books about Negro Baseball. She said that her grandfather had once played and she wanted to see his name.

  “You come with me, honey,” the woman told her, smiling. “I’ll help you find them.”

  For hours, Rachael paged through book after book, studying photographs of all those black men lined up before buses, on boat docks in their striped suits and fedoras, on fields of play from New York City to Chicago to dirt fields without a name. To her, they all looked like sad men from little towns like South Cairo who had gotten themselves lost. She poured over the names of teams and the players listed at the back of each book, names she’d never heard before like Buck O’Neil and Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell. Not once in all those books did she come across a team called the South Cairo Grays or players named Syville Smith or Sully Greene or Madewell Brown or anyone else Obie had told her about.

  “They’re not here,” she said to herself. “They were never here.” A sense of shame flooded her heart, and she shoved the books away so hard that they slid off the table and fell to the floor. The clatter was loud enough that the woman at the front desk stopped what she was doing and hurried back to see what that little colored girl had done.

  Now, years later, Rachael let out a groan and shook her head. He’s left me his whole damn team, she thought. Kept them hidden from me under the bed.

  Stacked against the far wall was everything Obie had owned. A small pile of worn clothes that she’d folded neatly, two pairs of leather shoes, some blankets, a few cooking pots, an empty suitcase and a plastic bag of odds and ends. But just as on the trip she’d taken to the library, she hadn’t come across anything that had to do with the stories Obie had told her. There wasn’t a cap or a baseball glove or even some old ticket stub. Just a box filled up with what had been in Obie’s head. The old man had come to South Cairo out of nowhere and chosen a life that even he couldn’t keep straight.

  Rachael slid the sheet of paper onto the table and picked up the next one. She brought it over to the door and leaned against the frame. The sun had set across the river. The water was lying flat and still, not a current to be seen. Down by the trees near the shore, a crazy homeless man was slinging string out into the shallows. He had a tent set back in the woods. Tree branches were draped with his clothes and pieces of hard plastic and wired bottles. Shopping carts lay overturned in the weeds. He pulled in his string line slow, and when he found it empty, he let loose with a curse and tossed it out again.

  The second page Obie had written bore a line of print at the top and, beneath that, a rough sketch of a baseball field that a child could have drawn.

  “This here is where we played and the numbers we wore.”

  Rachael stared down at the page, thinking that the old man was so crazy he’d even given them all numbers. She pictured him hunched over the kitchen table, his face up close to the paper, mouthing out each word as he wrote it, writing down one story after another while outside the years passed, the river flowed by, homeless men strung string for fish and little girls grew to women.

  She went back into the room and glanced at the next sheet of paper: “Sparrow Higgens he pitching late in the game when a long ball get hit out deep to Earl in left. Earl he get under it and some fool in the stands decide to throw a live chicken at him. By good luck or bad the ball struck and killed that poor bird. And there Earl be staring down at a baseball and a dead bird thinking which one should he throw.”

  Although Rachael had heard the story before, seeing it written down almost made it into something that might be true. She slid her hand between the edge of the box and the stack of papers, letting her fingers flip the pages up. There were hundreds of them, each one filled with Obie’s writing.

  “All right, Obie,” Rachael said softly. “You can tell me one more time.” She went to the sink, filled a pot with water and coffee and waited for it to brew. When it had, she brought it to the table, took every last sheet of paper out of the box and began to read.

  Rachael read until the room cooled down and it grew pitch black outside. She read until the fire the homeless man had started back in the woods had burned to embers. She read until Sewell came by and found her slouched over the table, the surface of it scattered with papers.

  “What are you doing here, Rachael?” he asked. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Reading,” she said. “What’s it look like I’m doing?” She’d heard him drive up and climb the rickety porch steps. Then she had felt him staring at her from the doorway. All she wanted was for him to leave.

  “Leave it alone now,” Sewell said. The bare bulb in the ceiling was fluttering with moths. The dark around the house was still and quiet. “Rachael,” he said, “let’s go home.”

  “When I’m done,” she answered, finally looking at him. He was barefoot, wearing an old t-shirt and a baggy pair of shorts. A tall young man who looked out of place in Obie’s house.

  “Listen to this,” she said, turning back to the table. “I never heard this story.

  “‘We come storming out of South Cairo in the spring of 1922,’” she read, “‘for a two game day in Silas Missouri.’”

  “I don’t want to hear that stuff,” Sewell said. The night air was cold against his back. He wrapped his arms around his chest. “I want you to put it away and come home with me.”

  “You don’t have to hear it,” she said, putting down one sheet of paper and picking up another. “It’s something Obie left for me.”

  Rachael read until long after Sewell left. She read until the birds near the river began to stir and a pale light seeped in through the window. She stood up stiffly from her chair and walked out onto the porch. The morning air was fresh and cool, the flat grass folded over from damp. From the stand of trees came the soft sound of a mourning dove. She took in a deep breath and raised the sheet of paper she held in her hand.

  “We playing ball in El Paso Texas when Madewell left us. It was a hot dust ridden place and not one of us had much heart for that game. It was in the seventh inning when it happen. Madewell he on the mound like nothing wrong and the next minute he walking away without a word. Yes sir he just walk right on out of our lives. And maybe we didn’t know it then but I swear his leaving was the end of us all.”

  Obie Poole

  We come storming out of South Cairo in the spring of 1922 for a two game day in Silas Missouri. A little town outside of St Louis where the same river runs through.

  I tell you a thing nine hundred damn people come out to watch us that sunshiny day. The stands they speckled with panama hats and the bright colored dresses the ladies wore. The grass was cut short and green with spring. The base paths all sharp and smooth. I recall we all jumpy being in such a place. And I recall that we dropped that first game by the sad score of 9 to 3.

  Nothing went right from the very first pitch. Malcolm Cole he start for us and never did settle in. I could see it all from short. There Malcolm be talking to himself and making so many pitch changes that Syville nearly gave up in disgust. To make things worse Earl got the jitters so bad he was like a blind man out there in left field. Walter bobbling balls at second like they covered with hog grease. It was a sad beginning for us all around.

  In between games Earl kept pacing the dugout saying he glad his mama wasnt here to see what happened. Sitting on each side of me were Sully Greene and Ollie Swan. They laughing and going on about what they going to do once they get back home. Even Syvil
le sitting with his head hanging low. The rest of us maybe we not saying much but we thinking the same thing.

  On one of his passes by Madewell reach out and grab hold of Earls arm. Earl he say in a voice we all hear. You sit down beside Malcolm. You tell him you sorry for the way you play this game. You tell him the reason he look so bad is because of you. And when you go back out on that field you just play the game like we did back home. Then Madewell he let go of Earl and no one say another word.

  I swear if wed lost that second game maybe we all would have quit. Looked for work at the Cairo Slaughterhouse and played Sunday ball until we old men. But thats not what happened. What happened was Madewell went out and threw so damn hard those boys was swinging at the echo of the ball smacking leather and the puffs of dust that come from Syvilles glove. Later as the sky was darkening Earl hit a ball so hard that I don’t believe anyone saw where it fell.

  Earl he round those bases grinning wide and flapping his arms up and down. When everybody went out to meet him at home plate I stayed back by myself. The crowd was yelling and stomping their feet so hard the ground was shaking. High up in the sky I saw a ladys glove come floating out of the stands like a white bird flying. I tell you a thing from that moment on there was no stopping us.

  Three

  Cipriano found the bag in the far corner of the shed, just where Rufino had said it would be. It was buried beneath crumbling adobe bricks and hard sacks of cement and cans of linseed oil so swollen that Cipriano feared they might explode when he moved them. The top of the bag was squashed flat and covered with rodent droppings and chewed bits of cloth and old insulation. The leather straps that held it closed were frayed and brittle, the canvas stained from years of roof leaks.

  It was midafternoon. The inside of the shed was hot and dirtied with dust. Behind him, there was so much junk scattered about that it seemed as if Rufino had just thrown things in and let them sit here to rot. Blown tires and split wheel rims were piled against the far wall. Thrown on top of them were rotted fence posts, partial rolls of roofing and warped slabs of lumber. Burlap bags hung from the thin vigas, rusted coils of baling wire and wrenches frozen open were spiked to the walls. Strewn about on the floor were busted toilets and dismantled engines, open cans of grease, burnt-out woodstoves, split bags of clothing and rags and who knew what else. From the pane of the one small window came the drone of heavy-bodied flies and yellow jackets.