Fathers & Sons & Sports (23 page)

Two or three more times Paul worked him close to shore, only to have him swirl and return to the deep, but even at that distance
my father and I could feel the ebbing of the underwater power. The rod went high in the air, and the man moved backwards swiftly but evenly, motions which when translated into events meant the fish had tried to rest for a moment on top of the water and the man had quickly raised the rod high and skidded him to shore before the fish thought of getting under water again. He skidded him across the rocks clear back to a sandbar before the shocked fish gasped and discovered he could not live in oxygen. In belated despair, he rose in the sand and consumed the rest of momentary life dancing the Dance of Death on his tail.

The man put the wand down, got on his hands and knees in the sand, and, like an animal, circled another animal and waited. Then the shoulder shot straight out, and my brother stood up, faced us, and, with uplifted arm proclaimed himself the victor. Something giant dangled from his fist. Had Romans been watching they would have thought that what was dangling had a helmet on it.

“That’s his limit,” I said to my father.

“He is beautiful,” my father said, although my brother had just finished catching his limit in the hole my father had already fished.

This was the last fish we were ever to see Paul catch. My father and I talked about this moment several times later, and whatever our other feelings, we always felt it fitting that, when we saw him catch his last fish, we never saw the fish but only the artistry of the fisherman.

While my father was watching my brother, he reached over to pat me, but he missed, so he had to turn his eyes and look for my knee and try again. He must have thought that I felt neglected and that he should tell me he was proud of me also but for other reasons.

It was a little too deep and fast where Paul was trying to wade the river, and he knew it. He was crouched over the water and his arms were spread wide for balance. If you were a wader of big rivers you could have felt with him even at a distance the power of the water making his legs weak and wavy and ready to swim out from under him. He looked downstream to estimate how far it was to an easier place to wade.

My father said, “He won’t take the trouble to walk downstream. He’ll swim it.” At the same time Paul thought the same thing, and put his cigarettes and matches in his hat.

My father and I sat on the bank and laughed at each other. It never occurred to either of us to hurry to the shore in case he needed help with a rod in his right hand and a basket loaded with fish on his left shoulder. In our family it was no great thing for a fisherman to swim a river with matches in his hair. We laughed at each other because we knew he was getting damn good and wet, and we lived in him, and were swept over the rocks with him and held his rod high in one of our hands.

As he moved to shore he caught himself on his feet and then was washed off them, and, when he stood again, more of him showed and he staggered to shore. He never stopped to shake
himself. He came charging up the bank showering molecules of water and images of himself to show what was sticking out of his basket, and he dripped all over us, like a young duck dog that in its joy forgets to shake itself before getting close.

“Let’s put them all out on the grass and take a picture of them,” he said. So we emptied our baskets and arranged them by size and took turns photographing each other admiring them and ourselves. The photographs turned out to be like most amateur snapshots of fishing catches—the fish were white from overexposure and didn’t look as big as they actually were and the fishermen looked self-conscious as if some guide had to catch the fish for them.

However, one closeup picture of him at the end of this day remains in my mind, as if fixed by some chemical bath. Usually, just after he finished fishing he had little to say unless he saw he could have fished better. Otherwise, he merely smiled. Now flies danced around his hatband. Large drops of water ran from under his hat on to his face and then into his lips when he smiled.

At the end of this day, then, I remember him both as a distant abstraction in artistry and as a closeup in water and laughter.

My father always felt shy when compelled to praise one of his family, and his family always felt shy when he praised them. My father said, “You are a fine fisherman.”

My brother said, “I’m pretty good with a rod, but I need three more years before I can think like a fish,”

Remembering that he had caught his limit by switching to George’s No. 2 Yellow Hackle with a feather wing, I said without knowing how much I said. “You already know how to think like a dead stone fly.”

We sat on the bank and the river went by. As always, it was making sounds to itself, and now it made sounds to us. It would be hard to find three men sitting side by side who knew better what a river was saying.

t began with listening to the Brooklyn Dodgers, about 1939, when I was ten years old. The gentle and vivacious voice of Red Barber floated from the Studebaker radio during our Sunday afternoon drives along the shore of Long Island Sound. My mother and my father and I, wedded together in the close front seat, heard the sounds of baseball—and I was tied to those sounds for the rest of my life.

We drove from Connecticut to Ebbets Field, to the Polo Grounds, to Yankee Stadium. When I was at college I went to Fenway Park and to Braves Field. Then, in 1957, I left the East and moved to Michigan. At first, I was cautious about committing myself to the Tigers. The Brooklyn Dodgers had gone to Los Angeles, of all things, and whom could you trust? Al Kaline? Rocky Colavito? Jim Bunning? Norm Cash? I went to Tiger Stadium three or four times a year, and I watched Big Ten college baseball frequently, especially in 1961 when a sophomore football player named Bill Freehan caught for Michigan and, as I remembered, hit .500. The Tigers signed him that summer.

All summer the radio kept going. I wrote letters while I listened to baseball. I might not have known what the score was, but the sound comforted me, a background of distant voices. If rain interrupted the game, I didn’t want to hear music; it was baseball radio voices that I wanted to hear.

Baseball is a game of years and of decades. Al Kaline’s children grew up. Rocky Colavito was traded, left baseball, became a mushroom farmer, and came back to baseball as a coach. Jim Bunning turned into a great National League pitcher and retired. Norm Cash had a better year at thirty-five than he had had in nearly a decade. And Kaline kept on hitting line drives.

And Jane and I met, and married, and in 1972 the sound of baseball grew louder; Jane loves baseball too. The soft southern sounds of announcers—always from the South, from Red Barber on—filled up the house like plants in the windows, new
chairs, and pictures. At night after supper and on weekend afternoons, we heard the long season unwind itself, inning by inning, as vague and precise as ever: the patter of the announcer and, behind him, always, like an artist’s calligraphy populating a background more important than the foreground, the baseball sounds of vendors hawking hot dogs, Coke, and programs; the sudden rush of noise from the crowd when a score was posted; the flat slap of a bat and again the swelling crowd yells; the Dixieland between innings; even the beer jingles.

We listened on the dark screen porch, an island in the leaves and bushes, in the faint distant light from the street, while the baseball cricket droned against the real crickets of the yard. We listened while reading newspapers or washing up after dinner. We listened in bed when the Tigers were on the West Coast, just hearing the first innings, then sleeping into the game to wake with the dead gauze sound of the abandoned air straining and crackling beside the bed. Or we went to bed and turned out the lights late in the game, and started to doze as the final pitches gathered in the dark, and when the game ended with a final out and the organ played again, a hand reached out in the dark, over a sleeping shape, to turn off the sound.

And we drove the forty miles to Tiger Stadium, parked on a dingy street in late twilight, and walked to the old green and gray, iron and concrete fort. Tiger Stadium is one of the few old ballparks left, part of the present structure erected in 1912 and the most recent portion in 1938. It is like an old grocer who wears a
straw hat and a blue necktie and is frail but don’t you ever mention it. It’s the old world, Tiger Stadium, as baseball is. It’s Hygrade Ball-Park Franks, the smell of fat and mustard, popcorn and spilled beer.

As we approach at night, the sky lights up like a cool dawn. We enter the awkward, homemade-looking, cubist structure, wind through the heavy weaving of its nest, and swing up a dark corridor to the splendid green summer of the field. Balls arch softly from the fungoes, and the fly-shaggers arch them back toward home plate. Batting practice. Infield practice. Pepper. The pitchers loosening up between the dugout and the bullpen. We always get there early. We settle in, breathe quietly the air of baseball, and let the night begin the old rituals again: managers exchange lineups, Tigers take the field, we stand for “our National Anthem,” and the batter approaches the plate….

Once I went to an old-timer’s game, a few innings of the great players of decades past played before the regular game. The Cincinnati team from 1953—some fifteen members of it—played against a potpourri of retired players from other teams.

The generation of ballplayers slightly older than me, the ballplayers of my childhood and youth, magically returned in their old uniforms and joked and flipped the ball and swung at the slow pitches that the old pitchers lazed up to them. Mickey Vernon played first base, who had played major league ball in the thirties, the forties, the fifties, and the sixties. Carl Erskine
pitched. Johnny Mize swung the bat again. Tommy Henrich at fifty-nine stood slim and erect in left field as he had stood for thousands of afternoons in Yankee Stadium. A ball sailed over Gus Bell’s head in center field. He plodded after it, his gait heavy and ponderous and painful, while an old catcher dragged himself all the way to third and stood there puffing and gasping. It was grotesque, all of it, like elephants at the circus that waddle and trudge in ballet costumes while the calliope plays Swan Lake.

Yet there was an awkward and frightening beauty to the tableau, as the old men performed stiffly the many motions they had once done nimbly. An old third baseman underhanded the baseball toward the pitcher’s mound, as he trotted into the dugout, so that the ball rolled to a stop on the dirt near the rubber; how many thousands of times had he made that gesture in the long summers when he was twenty and thirty?