(2005) Wrapped in Rain (22 page)

When Miss Ella turned sixty, he took her out in the woods down by the quarry. I followed out of curiosity. The sun was going down and just breaking through the pines. He held her by the hand and led her onto a path of fresh pine needles he had spread just for her. Under a cathedral of forty-year-old pines, he said, "Miss Ella, you told me, `No cross, no crown."'

She nodded and looked like she couldn't quite understand where he was going with this.

"Miss Ella, I didn't have gold, so I built this for you." He pointed to his right, and there, farther down the pine-straw path, stood a cross sunk into the earth and standing about twelve feet tall and seven feet wide. Built out of fat lighter, hand-sanded, and polished to a bright finish, the post and crossbeam were ten inches square and showed no seams. It was as if the tree had grown that way and Mutt had just polished it. Miss Ella couldn't believe it. She rushed forward and clasped her hands together, and big tears welled up. She placed her hands against the wood, afraid to touch it, and then looked up. For several minutes she just stood there touching the wood as if a body really hung there. When the tears dripped off her chin, she hit her knees and leaned in. For several minutes, she clutched it, marveled, and whispered to herself.

"Matthew," she said, holding his hands with both of hers, "thank you. I have always thought this is what it would look like. You have created the one in my head. It's the nicest thing anyone has ever given me." Mutt nodded and turned to leave. "Matthew?"

He turned, and she stood up and reached into her apron.

"I had this made for you. I've just been waiting for the right time." She held out her hand and placed a polished piece of flat granite, black as onyx, about the size of a polished river stone, into his. On the front she had had carved one word in deep block letters: "Matthew." He rolled it around in his hand and traced his fingernails through each letter. "Mutt." She placed her palm against his cheek. "For when the voices lie to you. To remember." He nodded, wrapped his fingers around the rock, and slid it into his pocket. After that, she spent a lot of time at the foot of that cross.

From there, Mutt's story is a bit of a mystery, because I didn't see him very much. I was playing baseball every waking minute, and my brother disappeared. We would discover later that he spent a lot of his time riding trains. Hoboing. From what I could gather, I think he rode from New York to Miami to Seattle and back without ever buying a ticket. I suppose it was his way of seeing the world without being seen. And the more I've thought about it, the clackety-clack rhythm of the tracks and the change in scenery soothed his mind.

I'm not sure how I turned out so different. I've thought about it a lot. The assumption there is that I'm somehow fundamentally different from Mutt. I'm not so sure.

When I turned four, Miss Ella gave me a baseball and bat for my birthday. I had never seen a bat, so I didn't know what it was. "What's this?" So she showed me. And I picked it up pretty quickly. From then on, every morning, noon, and evening, "Miss Ella, will you throw to me?" "Miss Ella, can we hit?" "Miss Ella, can we ... ?" Surprisingly, she did. A lot. "Child, if it will get you out of this house so you'll quit tracking in mud and dirt, I'll throw all day."

With only one baseball, and Miss Ella needing to work, Mutt and I improvised. We picked up chert rocks and hit them out over the quarry. It wasn't the best thing for a wooden bat, but it kept us out of the house and we could hit all day and never run out of balls. Pretty soon Mutt started side tossing, and I learned to push and pull the ball at will. Like making the choice to hit it to right or left field. By the seventh grade, I was cracking the rocks. Eighth grade and I could crumble them into little pieces. In ninth grade, I pulverized my first chert rock. I still remember the cloud of dust that washed over me and the smile on Mutt's face. "I hope you don't want that one back," he said. "If you do, we're going to need more than just superglue."

Because we wanted to hit day and night, Mutt mounted spotlights inside the barn, and we set up home plate in the middle and the pitching mound up against the back wall. It didn't take me long to start poking holes in the boards at the back of the barn. After the first month, it looked like a jagged piece of Swiss cheese. Rex got really mad when he first saw it. He reached up, tore down a piece of the cypress, bent me over a feed trough, and blistered my backside. I didn't care; it was worth it. I just kept right on hitting.

The summer between my ninth- and tenth-grade years, Southern Liming heard about Waverly Hall and planned an eight-page spread titled "The Rebirth of the Southern Plantation," which I found odd given the fact that Waverly was nothing of the sort. Rex loved the attention, so he flew in, whipped the staff into shape, laid on the pomp and circumstance, and postured some more. I was in the barn, swinging my bat, trying to stay out of the house and away from him, when one of the photographers noticed the back side of the barn.

I was alone, hitting a single ball tied to a string looped over one of the rafters. The photographer saw me, saw the holes in the back of the barn, put two and two together, and said, "You do that?"

I nodded, not wanting to make conversation, happy without the company. He set up his tripod inside the barn, at deep center field, and started measuring the light. I put down my bat, climbed up in the loft, and watched with curiosity. The photographer, who looked like he was wearing a life vest stuffed with every imaginable gadget known to man, kept walking back and forth, measuring the light and looking for the right perspective. He snapped about a roll's worth of film, but after thirty or so minutes, he started getting frustrated because the holes in the wood were really distorting his readings. Light didn't shine into the barn; it swirled around and through it. He didn't see that, but I did. I guess that's when I began to notice how light created images.

Miss Ella walked out of the kitchen, into the barn, and leaned against the door, drying her hands. She told me, years later, that was when she realized I had one talent greater than all others, including swinging a baseball bat. The ability to see and read light.

The space inside the barn was small, angles awkward, and the photographer was snapping frames but growing more confused and frustrated. He looked like a guy trying to get comfortable in his favorite chair, but his boxers had hiked up, making comfort impossible. I had seen the solution thirty minutes prior, but I didn't know I had so I didn't say a word. When he grew really frustrated, I climbed through the rafters, slid over to one corner, looked down, and said, "What about right here?" The guy waved me off like a mosquito and then looked up and scratched his head. When the spread appeared in the July edition, my perspective was the lead picture in the article. That's when Miss Ella went to the pawnshop. She brought home a worn Canon A-I, an owner's manual, and six rolls of film. She didn't know the first thing about cameras, but she said, "Here, use this up and I'll get you some more." My life soon revolved around two activities: swinging the bat and squeezing the shutter button.

By the end of my sophomore year in high school, I was seldom without a baseball bat in one hand and a camera in the other. If I could find someone to throw the ball, I would hit from the moment school let out to the moment she rang the dinner bell and then after. Miss Ella had long since gotten tired of chasing baseballs, so seeing I wasn't about to give up, she mail-ordered a batting machine and paid for it with her grocery allowance. Mutt opened the box and set it up down the center aisle of the barn.

We backed home plate out of the center of the barn and put it at the other end, opposite what we were by then calling the Holy Wall. Mutt uninstalled some spotlights from the side of Waverly and reinstalled them in the barn. Now, I could hit as long as I was willing to collect the balls and feed them into the bucket above the machine. It was not uncommon to find Miss Ella watching from the comfort of that five-gallon bucket with her dress hiked up on her knees and her knee-highs pushed down around her ankles. "Tuck," she'd say, shaking her head, "you're stepping in the bucket. Step toward the pitcher," "Keep that head down, child. You can't hit the ball if you don't look at it," and "Don't swat at it. Swing that bat, boy. If you're gonna stand up there, swing! I need to hear you grunting and feel the breeze."

Miss Ella loved to sit on that bucket, beat it with a stick like a drum, and watch me hit a baseball. Many a night found the three of us in the barn under the spotlights, playing another imaginary World Series or home-run derby against the greatest in the game. If Waverly was our prison, the barn was our empty tomb. And every time we flung open the doors, we rolled away the stone.

During the summer between my junior and senior years, I found my swing. I had been dancing around it for about six months, but between practicing in the barn, mucking the stalls, mending fences, tending the orchard, and a host of odd jobs, my wrists, arms, back, and hips had gotten a good bit stronger. Add to that the gift of fast hands and it meant more broken boards. Miss Ella was sitting on the bucket in the heat of August, and I hit a line drive over the machine. The ball hit the cypress boards that made up the back wall of the barn and blew them entirely off the framing. Miss Ella stood up off the bucket, straightened her dress and apron, and smiled. That was it and we both knew it. I turned and smiled. She nodded, leaned back against the door, and started picking at her teeth with a piece of hay.

My high school coach told the scouts I was a natural. The summer before I left for Atlanta, we hung a net in front of the back side of the barn. My freshman year at Tech, I finally started growing. At six feet two and 205 pounds, I was hitting balls out at will. That's when baseball got fun.

By my sophomore year, I was batting fourth, had already hit several balls over 430 feet, and was headed to Omaha for the College World Series. Miss Ella and Mutt flew out and made every game of the series. When I took a slider deep over the left-center fence to put us up by three in the seventh game, I rounded the bases, stepped on home plate, and looked up to see Miss Ella, spotlighted by a bright red hat, hands in the air, and smiling one of the biggest smiles I had ever seen. After the game, I gave her the ball.

That summer, I was swinging in the cage surrounded by pro scouts. I wasn't doing anything differently. Just swinging like I had ten thousand times before. I felt it pop just below my belt line and felt a sharp pain in the center of my back. Two more swings and it had traveled down my right leg. A few more and it had wrapped around the right side of my waist. By the time I got back to my dorm, I was limping and barely able to walk. I got in bed and told myself I had just pulled a muscle, but I knew better. The next morning, it took six aspirin to get me out of bed, and I knew then and there that I would not play majorleague baseball.

The team doctor took a series of twelve x-rays and then an MRI. When he walked back in with the pictures, his face was somber and his head shook from side to side. I don't remember everything he said, but I do remember him saying, "You'll never swing another bat."

It's funny, I still remember the smell of his office. It smelled like popcorn, and in the background, one of his office assistants was talking about her date the night before. I walked back across campus, packed my bags, stopped in the coach's office, and then drove away. I made one stop at the Varsity for a Sprite and then drove south on 1-75, growing more numb with every mile. At midnight, I was standing on Miss Ella's porch and couldn't feel my face.

Over her loud objection, I quit school and tried to get as far away from both baseball and Waverly as I could. After driving a few days, I found myself back in Atlanta and took a job with the Atlanta Journal, shooting the court beat. Maybe I was trying to see if I could one-up Rex.

My beginnings as a photographer weren't stellar, but I dove in and tried to forget the pain of baseball. When they first hired me, they asked me, "What does a baseball player know about taking pictures?" Thanks to Miss Ella, I had saved some of my better pieces. I pulled them out of a folder and dropped them on this guy's desk, and to test my mettle, they hired me. I took every assignment they offered, and that meant I was gone a lot.

I guess Miss Ella saw my travel and resulting absence as a rebellious period, and knowing I needed space, she let me go. Like Rex, I was gone a lot, which left her there alone to walk the dank halls of Alcatraz. She didn't even let Mose know until it was too late.

I was in New York, delivering negatives to Doc, picking up a new camera, and getting my next assignment when I got the call. It was Mose. I caught the first plane back, walked in the door, and found Miss Ella in bed, cocooned beneath every blanket she owned, her face riddled with pain. I tried to get her to the hospital, but she just shook her head. Mose and I brought in a cancer specialist from Montgomery, but it was no use. The cancer had spread too far and too deep. He closed up his bag, took off his stethoscope, and uttered the three worst words I'd ever heard: "Won't be long."

I put down my camera, pulled up a chair, and just held her hand, asking God to let me take her place. The last three weeks were the worst. Miss Ella was in a lot of pain and too stubborn to take much medication. I tried to slip it in her soup or tea, anything that would dissolve it, but I had learned how to do that from her, so she was on to me pretty quick. She just shook her head. "Child, I don't need the pills." She patted the worn and underlined pages of her Bible. "Man don't live on bread alone, but every word that's right here. Just read." So I did. I started in Psalms and read all the underlined passages from there to Revelation.

On the day of the funeral, the leaves were in full color. Orange, red, and yellow splattered the landscape like the freckles on Miss Ella's cheeks. Mose dug the hole, donned his only black suit, and buried his sister next to their father, leaving a few feet on the other side for himself. He pointed down to Miss Ella and his Anna and said, "I'll join you both shortly." Out of nowhere, literally walking out of the trees, Mutt showed. Where he'd been and where he'd come from, no one knew, but his appearance told us what he hadn't been doing. Beard, hair knotted and matted, clothes torn, shoes missing. He hadn't showered in a good while.