A Stranger in the Kingdom (35 page)

“You walk off this team now, you're never coming back, Stub,” Charlie called after him. “Stub Poulin! You hear?”

Stub kept going.

Charlie shrugged. “Okay, have it your way, buddy.”

He beckoned to Pine Benson's younger brother, Robbie, the Outlaws' utility infielder, who ran eagerly onto the field.

The Memphremagog fans continued to scream and hoot; but Reverend Andrews, still in his street clothes, began taking his six allotted warm-up pitches and paid no attention to them at all.

 

“Looky, pa!” a little kid in the first-base bleachers shouted. “There's Jackie Robinson!”

This broke the tension, and everyone within earshot, including Reverend Andrews, now finishing his warm-ups, laughed.

“Hush up,” the kid's father said. “That man's the preacher at the church across the street. You hush, now.”

But the boy waved and shouted out to the mound, “Hi, Jackie!”

By now everyone was laughing—some, I think, to see how slowly Reverend Andrews threw for such a big man. His pitches just drifted in, though I noticed that the last two or three acted oddly. Charlie grinned and winked at me. He closed the fist of his throwing hand and tapped his knuckles. Then he opened his fingers and fluttered them up and down like a trapped bird.

So that was it. Reverend Andrews was a knuckleball pitcher!

There was not much laughing on the Memphremagog bench or in their bleachers for the next five minutes as the minister set down their next three men on seven pitches. The first two struck out on what looked like six consecutive knucklers and the third lifted a high foul into the sunset, which my brother pulled out of the third-base bleachers in the best running catch of the day.

“Two runs!” Charlie shouted over and over again to the Outlaws as they came running in for their last at-bat. “Two runs are all we need. The order is: Benson for Poulin, St. Onge, Kinneson, Andrews for Kittredge. If you want to bat, that is, Walt.”

The minister shrugged. “That's up to you, Charles. It's your team.”

“If Royce or Robbie gets on, you won't have to anyway,” Charlie said. “I guarantee it. This time, boys, old Charlie K is going to put one out of here. I mean I am going to
park
it. That imported Frenchman started running out of gas two innings ago. Last time up I was way out in front of him. Besides, the keg's empty. We've got to win this inning or parch to death.”

With these and similar exhortations, my determined big brother revved up his team, walking up and down in front of the bench, clapping and laughing and joking so that you'd have thought we were ten runs ahead instead of behind by one and going into the last half of the last inning.

Robbie Benson grounded out weakly to second on the first pitch. That left the Outlaws two outs away from only their third defeat of the season.

Royce St. Onge, pie-eyed from beer, headed toward the batter's box. Charlie grabbed his arm. “Listen, buddy. Get on base. I don't care how you do it, but do it. Then camp there.”

Royce looked at my brother through glazed eyes. He swayed a little and finally he nodded. He crowded the plate more than usual, and on the second pitch he laid down a perfect bunt, catching the third baseman flat-footed. Boozed up as he was, though, Royce couldn't beat the throw and was out by a step. That brought Charlie to the plate and the crowd to its feet.

The great crowd was thundering. The Folding Chair boys were up, Plug Johnson was pounding on his trusty leather cushion, and Athena Allen was jumping up and down on the bleachers and screaming for Charlie to hit a home run. I could think of nothing but how desperately I wanted my brother to park one in the street or, better yet, up against the brick block and tie the game for his team and our good friend the minister and our town.

Charlie gave the crowd a cocky grin and stepped into the batter's box. Just as the big rangy Frenchman got set, my brother theatrically raised one hand over his head to call time. He shifted his feet, tapped his spikes with his thirty-eight-inch Louisville Slugger, and grinned again, this time at the pitcher. He stepped back in the batter's box, and the Canadian threw a fastball straight at Charlie's head.

The next two pitches were let-ups over the outside corner. Charlie tried to murder them, and fouled each pitch back into the screen. My father shook his head. The Kingdom crowd fell deadly still.

Again Charlie backed out of the box. Again he smiled at the pitcher. He stepped back in and leveled his big bat belt-high across the plate and wagged it slowly, once. I dare you, he was saying. I dare you to put one right there, right down the center of the old platter. To me at that moment, my big brother looked invincible. But the Frenchman apparently thought differently. He just smiled that contemptuous smile, kicked high, uncoiled, threw.

It was the pitch my brother had been waiting for all afternoon, and he swung from the heels as hard as I have ever seen a batter swing, and he missed the ball completely.

The Memphremagog crowd was screaming so loudly I barely heard Reverend Andrews shouting. The minister ran up to the batter's box, where Charlie was still down on one knee from the momentum of his tremendous whiff.

“Run!” shouted the minister. And from our bleachers came shouts of “Run! Run!”

Charlie leapt to his feet and spun around. The catcher was racing toward the backstop, where the baseball lay at the foot of a support post. My brother dropped his bat and tore down the baseline, crossing the bag a split second before the ball smacked into the first baseman's mitt, and the Outlaws had a life after all.

Now it was up to Reverend Andrews.

I knew that our minister could handle a baseball bat. I'd seen him hit fielding practice for the Academy team, one-handed, with a glove on his left hand. I'd seen him drive balls deep into the outfield with one hand. But that was with the leaded fungo bat. And I also knew that he batted cross-handed. He had learned that unorthodox technique playing stickball as a boy, Nat had told me. So I was not surprised when he stepped into the batter's box and gripped the bat with his left hand on top of his right hand. The crowd did not appear to notice, because Charlie was dancing around wildly off first and clapping his hands to draw the pitcher's attention.

You might think that my brother, after the ignominy of reaching first on a dropped third strike, and in view of the Outlaws' back-to-the-wall situation, would have taken a more conservative lead. (A maxim of my father's comes to mind: “Three steps off first, six off second, four off third on the grass.”)

But Charlie was now a good
five steps
off first base, dancing and jeering. My heart was in my mouth, he was bound to get himself picked off and run his team right out of the ballgame. The pitcher, still in his set position, looked in at his catcher. My father crouched over the catcher intensely. Reverend Andrews was bent over slightly, his broad shoulders bulging out of the too-small uniform top he'd put on at the last minute.

Quick as lightning the pitcher whirled and made a perfect throw to first base, catching Charlie a good six steps off the bag.

It was exactly what my brother had been waiting for.

Instead of sliding back into the first baseman's tag, the instant the Frenchman's back foot moved off the rubber Charlie broke toward second The first baseman swiped his glove down at nothing, then panicked and threw the ball into left field. Charlie never stopped running. He rounded second and was three quarters of the way to third by the time the Memphremagog outfielder had the ball.

Later, replaying the game, as they replayed every game, my father and Charlie disagreed about what the outfielder should have done. Charlie said he should have run the ball in himself, all the way home if necessary. Dad said he should have thrown it to the pitcher. But whatever the fielder should have done, he should
not
have tried to peg my brother out at third, because even a good throw wouldn't have gotten him, and the throw the fielder made, far from being a good one, sailed ten feet over the third-baseman's head into the bleachers.

Charlie never broke stride. He crossed home with the tying run to a tremendous ovation from a thousand or more fans. Somehow, my flamboyant big brother had managed to go from goat to hero in less than a minute!

But the Frenchman was furious. The first pitch to the minister was straight at him. He hit the dirt, and the cheering of our crowd changed to a rumble of outrage. My father strode out to the mound and said something to the pitcher, who merely shrugged and turned away as Dad returned to his station behind the plate.

Dad looked at the ball, which the catcher had retrieved from the screen. He tossed it to me. It had a deep gash in it from where it had smacked into the wire backstop. Dad fished in his ball bag and came up with another.

Reverend Andrews got set again. He did not seem perturbed over the beanball. He adjusted his inverted hands and adjusted his feet, still in his street shoes. The Canadian kicked high and pitched. . . .

“The crack of good straight-grained ashwood meeting horsehide squarely is a unique sound,” my father ended his article on the game in that week's
Monitor.
“No matter how many thousands of times you have heard it, it still comes with the suddenness and something of the inexorable violence of lightning. Yet the crack of the Reverend Walter Andrews' bat was not especially loud. And the ball did not seem to travel particularly fast. It rose out of the infield almost leisurely, and continued to rise, catching the last rays of the setting sun, in a great soaring parabola—the kind of ball experienced outfielders merely shrug at as it goes over. Those of us who have seen long balls hit before on the common waited for it to strike the brick front or carved upper facade of the shopping block and rebound back into the street. We waited in vain. The ball was still climbing when it passed out of sight over that building . . .”

“Mister Baby Johnson!” Dad said as the Reverend Andrews rounded first base.

And then, as the minister touched second, “Fair ball.”

Sheer pandemonium broke out as the Outlaws and hundreds of their fans rushed toward home plate to greet Reverend Andrews.

It was one of the happiest moments of my life to that point, as happy as if my brother himself had clouted the already legendary home run.

It was the last truly happy moment I can remember from the summer of 1952.

 

“Wake up, Kinneson.”

Someone was shaking me. For a panicky moment, I didn't know where I was.

“It's after midnight,” Nat said, giving my shoulder another shake.

I must have been sleeping very hard because I still felt fuzzy-headed. When I'd arrived at the parsonage around nine o'clock for our appointment with Pliny's ghost, Nat was nowhere to be found and the house was totally dark. I hadn't dared wait on the haunted porch, so I sneaked up to my friend's room, where somehow I'd managed to fall asleep while waiting by the window.

“Where were you, Nat?”

“Out with Claire. Keep your voice down, my father's working in his study. What are you doing here?”

“Don't you remember? Tonight's the night we're supposed to wait for Pliny's ghost.”

“Come on, Kinneson. You don't really believe that story, do you?”

Something, I had no idea what, had happened to change Nat's mind about catching Pliny's skeleton and burying it. But why hadn't he told me? I was bewildered and annoyed.

“Well, one thing's for sure. It'll never show up if we don't believe in it.”

“Like Peter Pan, eh?”

Crouched beside the bedroom window, Nat and I could see all the way down the street to the north end of the common. Except for one short string of colored lights left on by mistake over a game booth and the dim reflection of Reverend Andrews' study light on the slate flagstones leading up to the parsonage porch steps, the village was totally dark.

The only sound was the low throb of the tin dust blowers, hunkered like invisible gargoyles on the roof of the American Heritage furniture mill. Even the falls behind the hotel were almost still, a thin inaudible ripple over the granite flume that had been a raging torrent just three months ago. Kingdom Common was as quiet as only a small town after a big event can be.

Then off in the distance, faintly yet distinctly, came the long mournful wail of the 12:45
A.M.
southbound highball, hooting at the trestle north of town. A few seconds later we both started. As the train approached the crossing between the hotel and the north end of the common, a siren blasted into the night. Mason White's patrol hearse shot out of the driveway of the undertaker's parlor at the foot of the knoll and bounced over the railroad tracks scant seconds in front of the hurtling freight.

The hearse accelerated like a stock car on a straightaway. The blinking reflection of its blue light raced along the storefront windows. Then the first of four diesel locomotives was on the crossing, blocking out our view of the sheriff's speeding vehicle.

“An accident?” Nat said.

“I doubt it. Knowing Mason, he probably just wants the village to see he's still on duty. Elections are coming up in the fall, remember.”

Nat chuckled. “You're learning, Kinneson. Slowly but surely, you're coming along You may still amount to some—”

And that is when all hell broke loose. A fiery orange tongue of flame erupted in the street directly in front of the parsonage, accompanied by a booming reverberation Even over the clank and tumble of the speeding train I recognized the report as a gunshot. I was vaguely aware of glass shattering below us. This was no ghost and no prank—somebody was firing at the parsonage!

A figure ran off the porch steps into the yard. A sharper report barked out, not so loud, and I heard a man curse. A light came on at Elijah's cottage. Across the hall, Claire cried out in alarm.

Nat and I ran downstairs and onto the porch. Reverend Andrews was standing by the gate in the fence, holding a revolver in his hand. It was pointed straight at Resolvèd Kinneson, standing in the middle of the street with his shotgun.