A Quality of Light (13 page)

We existed now, far beyond the science and math of the game. We’d entered the magic that is baseball and never were there two more reverential pilgrims than Johnny Gebhardt and I.

Game two was a blowout. Johnny hit two home runs and a triple and I was on base all three times with doubles. In the field our gloves became the final resting place for anything that came our way. Games three and four went much the same, with Johnny’s bat doing most of the damage. By the time we went into the final game against Teeswater we were heroes.

It was wild. Each team scored runs almost at will. By the time we sailed into the final inning we were tied sixteen to sixteen. We were the home team for that game, so we had last bat. Teeswater went out one, two, three on grounders to Johnny and Ralphie and a flyball that Victor Ringle snared while falling down.

“Now’s our chance, team,” Alvin Giles told us while we fidgeted at our bench. “Just relax, have fun. And remember, we still get a point for a tie. So just have fun up there. Joshua, you’re leading off.”

As I took my practice swings Johnny walked up to me. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“We can get this over fast, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. Just hit a homer.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. You can do it.”

“Never have before.”

“Well, now’s the time. When you go up there just think … warrior.”

“Warrior?”

“Yeah. That’s what you are.”

“I am?”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “You are. You’re an Indian. You’re a warrior.”

“I guess.”

“Guess nothing! It’s what you were born to be. You’re a
warrior!”

“Okay.”

“Okay!”

I walked towards the plate. Everyone was milling about on the sidelines; Ralphie Wendt looked at me and showed his crossed fingers. Alvin Giles leaned against the fence and tapped his thigh with a lightly closed fist, while Sue Crawford and her friends sat on the bench with their legs bouncing up and down in anticipation. Warrior. It was what I’d been born to be, he said. Farmer. That’s what I really believed I was born to be.

I began thinking of my father and the story he’d told about his glove, my grandfather and the game he’d played as a boy. I thought about my mother and the quiet ways she’d instilled in me, the peace I felt because of it and the smooth cool of her hands on my brow. I thought about mornings on our back porch, watching the sweep of the land like it was a living thing and the curious sensation that you could actually see it breathe sometimes when the light was right and your soul was filled with gratitude. I thought about Johnny and the weeks we’d spent behind the equipment shed inventing this game, about the willow tree and the answer to baseball.

Love, he’d told me. You have to love it. I loved the game right then. Loved it as simply and completely as young boys can. As I gazed up at my parents one more time and then over at Johnny standing at our bench, I knew I could step up to that plate as a warrior. Only it would be as a spiritual warrior because it was all I knew, a spiritual warrior leaning on the common love of common people, and right then, as I stepped into the batter’s box, I wanted that ball more than I wanted anything in the entire world.

I swung so hard at the first pitch that I almost lost my balance spinning around. Strike one. I gulped hard and settled myself. I felt the thud of contact on the next pitch and watched the ball sail foul
on the third base side. Strike two. And then, time slowed. I could hear my breathing. I watched the mouths of my teammates shouting encouragement and heard nothing. The clapping hands of the crowd, the yelling, were all lost in the vacuum I’d moved into.

I heard the scrunch of the dirt as I twisted my feet for traction, and then the soft rustle of my jersey as I lifted the bat. My breath. Deep and slow and long. The ball as it was lobbed looked as big and full as a watermelon, and as I stepped into it, the distant blue hills loomed right behind it. I swung into it with a rotation of the hips and an extension of the arms that was pure Ted Williams. Only when I saw the ball rocket over the head of the left fielder did time slide back into its proper meter. As I rounded first and saw the Teeswater player scrambling to retrieve the rolling ball I knew it was over.

The crowd erupted and Johnny was leaping up and down and all around at the bench as I rounded second and began sprinting for all I was worth. I beat the throw to home plate by five feet. Johnny was all over me, hugging and thumping and yelling. My teammates lined up respectfully to shake my hand, and in the stands I caught a quick glimpse of my father standing and clapping and whistling through his teeth. I walked over to claim the ball from the Teeswater catcher, who stood staring at it in his glove. “Thanks,” I said and walked away.

We whooped and hollered for a while at the bench. Ralphie shook my hand, followed by Victor Ringle, Lenny Weber and Teddy Hohnstein.

“Way to go, Spaz,” Ralphie said and smiled.

“Thanks.” I smiled back.

“Game, Josh,” Lenny said. Teddy just grinned shyly and walked away.

“Did you think warrior?” Johnny asked when everyone had dribbled away.

We seemed bigger right then, taller, stronger, heavier. We were more than skinny kids now. We’d become bigger through our friendship and the love of a game we’d spent a long time inventing for ourselves. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I thought warrior.”

“Knew it!” Johnny said and punched my shoulder.

My parents were standing by the backstop, my father with one long brown arm draped over my mother’s shoulders. I felt, for the first time in my life, like a man. I held the ball in my hand and it was a comfortable weight.

“You guys made me broke today,” my dad said.

“And you made me proud,” my mother added.

Johnny had fallen in behind me, and the four of us stood by the backstop while the last of the crowd filtered away towards the picnic area. We were a team. More than our schoolmates and more than any team I’ve been a part of since. I held the ball out to my father. He took it without a word. We stared at each other, and on his face was a look I will remember forever. He turned that ball around and around in his palm, looked at my mother, at Johnny and then back at me, nodded, sighed deeply and pulled me into a deep hug that ended with a solid whack on the back. My mother looked at me in the same silence while Johnny stared at me with that pure open gaze.

“Way to go, Spaz,” he said quietly.

A
s the small OPP plane whisked us high over the farmlands north of Toronto, I gazed out the window and down at the shadows spilled around the base of hills. They reminded me of home. I found myself walking the soft brown hills of Bruce County sometimes as though they were my life, casually, reverently almost, the pitch and wallow of the topography a mute comfort to feet grown accustomed to different soil and different land. Growing up. I’d learned through the years that all of us grow up and out of the land of our births. At least, the lucky ones do. It graces our feet with permanence, its grit and promise tattooed indelibly on our heels, salvation and geography intermingled like blood, making returnings as vital as memory.

Prowling those rolling heights and hogbacks is like stepping back into myself. I used to watch those hills from my window. I remember how they reacted to every change in light, every nuance of weather, and every mood and emotion of my boyhood. I used to believe they sang to me then, sang me sweet songs of growth and life, of breezes rife with whisperings of distant lands and peoples, of an earth rich and bountiful, and songs of minor gods who inhabit the places only the wind can reach. They sing me different songs today. Songs in a lower register, inaudible almost. Songs of sorrows and purple moods, of changes, of loss, and of a boyhood whose vastness evades me because sometimes it seems that the more we move into our adulthood, the more we move away from things like magic, adventure and hills that sing. Still, I would come. I would come to listen for the ancient voice of those hills. I would come for the reconnection to the belief that the land is a feeling, a dance we learn, a song. I would come and gaze away towards the west, towards three hundred and twenty acres that once was my entire world. A farm that spawned crops, love and a friendship framed forever by a game invented by the very spirit of our boyhood.

We didn’t win the Most Valuable Player award. That went to Connie Shaus for a capable job at third base. When it was announced at the barbecue that evening, Johnny and I were shocked at first but we laughed about it later. Alvin Giles and his farmer’s sense of fair play, we figured, deemed her efforts more valuable than our own simply because she had to try harder. Our level of play was second nature. An instinct and reflex born behind the equipment shed had elevated us beyond a childhood approach to the game. That and a deep desire to silence the catcalls and put-downs of our peers. But we knew. We knew we’d succeeded for ourselves and we walked away from the tournament that day being most valuable to ourselves and each other. My mother and father beamed all evening. We knew, Johnny and I, that we had a pair of fans who would always be eager to applaud our efforts.

He never spoke much about the absence of his parents. I guess when you grow up like Johnny did, absences become a familiar
part of daily living, something you learn to negotiate your way through like tying your own shoes. Now and then he’d mention something of his life, something cryptic, infused with bitterness and sorrow, and the energy would retreat from his eyes, their blue becoming the melancholic blue you hear in slow jazz ballads or see between the rolling clouds that come before the thunders. When we dropped him off that night the Gebhardt house was dark again. He’d never learned the comfort that comes from a lighted walk and rooms aglow with welcome. Never felt the warmth of anticipation for the lives awaiting your step at the door. No, Ben Gebhardt’s days ended early with the sodden haze of drink, while his wife, loyal to a fault, would collapse with him seeking the solace of dreams, where life was romantic, gentle and easy and her man was still the fair-haired boy with laughter in his eyes.

I tried to imagine how it must have felt to him back then, entering their dark world alone, creeping through that house using silence as a defense against the railing of his alcoholic father, reading his way into sleep and the security of his own frail dreams. I never could. But in my prayers each night I offered a simple entreaty to God for the safety and well-being of my friend and perhaps, too, for a gift of light in his darkness.

We moved into that first summer of our friendship effortlessly. School ended. We made our polite good-byes to the new friends that baseball provided us, closed our desks and wandered out into the fields and steams of Bruce County. I worked alongside my father as usual and Johnny joined us as often as he could, generally showing up around noon on the old Schwinn, pumping his thin legs like crazy topping the Conroys’ hill and waving as he turned up the gravel road towards our house. He wasn’t much of a hand for chores but he tried. Like most folks unfamiliar with farms, he’d mince his way across the barnyard with careful placings of the feet as though cowpies were land mines. My father would wave us off early those afternoons, so we’d head for the willow tree to read, or jump on our bikes for a swim in Otter Creek or wander through three hundred and twenty acres exploring the small woods and creating adventures.

We still played baseball behind the shed. As those endless summer evenings stretched before us, we would run, hit and throw with exuberant abandon. He’d call to me from home plate as we practiced base running, “Come on, Kane, it’s the bottom of the ninth and we need you home!” I think I ran faster then, spurred on by the love of baseball, friendship and the idea of home.

He told me about magic. About how it exists all around us, infusing everything with its life-giving energies. “No abracadabra, Josh,” he said, “just magic. All around us. Always.”

So we looked for magic that summer. We found it in the wood duck chicks we watched feather and grow and fly, in the way the light diffused and colored on its way through the depths of our diving hole on Otter Creek, in the feel of a cow’s teats when you milk by hand and in the taste of the wind redolent with rain. Inventing baseball was only the beginning. We learned that it’s possible to invent the world. All you ever need are eyes open to magic and mystery, ears attuned to the sublime and the marvelous, a heart desiring of more and a spirit gilded with an expectant joy.

“Like Indians,” he said.

Laughing Dog and Thunder Sky. If I missed the importance of the ritual, I understood the power of the bond. For me it never required blood itself, the prick of flesh or elaborate solemnity. It was a heartsong, a concerto of notes and rests, swells and pauses in the meter of friendship. Our pledge had already been effected in the blending of our lives, in a shared response and a common purpose. Had our blood never mingled, the bond would still have been the same — unspoken, unritualized, but real. I understood this in its Christian context more than I did through Johnny’s Indian methods. Brothers in the blood. A promise nonrefundable, inextinguishable, eternal.