Shoeless Joe (13 page)

“Okay, let’s roll,” I say.

He hesitates for a few seconds. His feet stutter toward his jeep. “I’ll leave a note.” A pause. “No, I won’t.” And he moves to the Datsun.

“On the way I’ll tell you a story.”

“About Moonlight Graham?”

“What I know about him, and Shoeless Joe Jackson, and my father, and the kidnapping of Jerome David Salinger.”

We are happy as children with bats over shoulders, gloves dangling, on their way to a sandlot. I release the brake and let the car roll down the moon-dappled hill.

3. The Life and Times of Moonlight Graham

Ten miles later, at the side of the road, the dome light of my Datsun bathing us in a pale yellow glow, we huddle over the road map like spies.

“We’re going to Chisholm, Minnesota,” I say. “Is that agreed?”

“Something has dialed us to the same frequency,” says Jerry, looking at me, his brows furrowed, shaking his head as if I have just pulled a string of Christmas-tree lights out of my mouth. Rather than me talking, as I have promised, Jerry for these past ten miles has been marveling that when he heard the ballpark announcer intone “Go the distance,” he knew with incontestable certainty that he was to travel to Chisholm, Minnesota, the place where Moonlight Graham died.

“Now you know how I felt when the voice said ‘Ease his pain,’” I tell him. “I knew it was you I was to contact. It was as certain as a brand burned into my arm.”

“But there’s more,” says Jerry.

“More?”

“‘Fulfill the dream.’ Did you hear that?”

“No. Who said it?”

“The announcer.”

“Not to me.”

“No. To me.”

“Oh.” I actually feel a tiny twinge of jealousy, green as a worm, wiggling deep in my center.

“What does it mean?” says Jerry. “This fellow Graham is dead, isn’t he?”

“He is.” I drag out the program and check the information I scribbled down. “August 25, 1965, Chisholm, Minnesota.” I want to go on and say, “You haven’t listened
that
carefully. Shoeless Joe Jackson had been dead longer than that.” But I don’t say anything, for I really am a little jealous that the wonder I am a party to has been sprinkled over Salinger’s gray head. Let him find out for himself. I run my hand down and touch my stomach area; the muscles are taut as cowhide stretched over a baseball.

“Then where do we start?” says Salinger, his voice so sincere that my jealousy moves several inches in the direction of guilt.

“You’re the writer. I’m just a corn farmer,” I say, and try to smile enigmatically like Karin’s square-jawed orange cat when he stands by my chair and taps my leg with his heavy paw, tentatively, like a mother testing bath water.

“Do
you
know who Moonlight Graham is?” Jerry asks.

“Only what you know—a baseball player who was patted on the head by a dream. A man who played one inning of baseball for the New York Giants during the 1905 season. He never came to bat. He was just a substitute fielder for one inning.”

“How can he be important?”

“That’s what we have to find out. It’s kind of exciting, isn’t it?”

“But how do we find out?”

“Well, we could be in Cooperstown, at the Baseball Hall of Fame, in just a few hours. That might be a good place to start.”

“But one inning …”

“They have records there on everyone who ever played in the majors, and cabinets full of minor-league records. Do we keep on driving? Or, we can find a place to stay, catch a few hours’ sleep. I have a state-by-state listing of Motel 6’s in the glove compartment; they’re inexpensive and clean …”

“I’d like to keep going,” says Jerry.

“I know how you feel. If I were walking, I’d be a foot off the ground. It’s like just falling in love—you want the sensations to last forever. You don’t want to go to sleep because you know that no matter how good you feel, in the morning it won’t be as good as it is right now.”

Salinger nods. “I’m very good at reading maps,” he says. “Something I learned in the army.” He hefts my five-year-old
Rand
McNally Road Atlas
, dog-eared and covered with ice-cream stains. From under his goose-down vest he produces a square-tipped yellow marker.

“I’ll act as navigator,” he says. “That is, if you don’t have any objections.”

“Start by finding Chisholm, Minnesota,” I suggest. He flaps pages, flutters indexes, lowers his face until his ample nose almost touches the map.

“Here. Way up here. Beyond Duluth, not that far from Canada. Desolate country. He must have been a logger or a miner.”

“In the same general area as International Falls,” I say. “The coldest part of the U.S.A. Why would a man from Fayetteville, North Carolina, go way up there and stay?”

“He might not have stayed. Maybe he just died there. Maybe a son or daughter took him up there to live his last days. He was eighty-five when he died. I bet he lived all his life in the South.”

“It is kind of exciting, isn’t it?” And we grin at each other like kids clutching shiny quarters—his inscribed “Fulfill the dream,” mine engraved “Go the distance”—heading for the ice-cream store. “Point me toward Cooperstown,” I say, “and as we drive, I’ll get around to telling you that story I promised.”

I do tell the story, and some of it I even repeat, as the adrenalin continues to flow. Salinger, though I think he is listening, seems preoccupied. He draws yellow lines on the map, and I follow them.

My eyebrow throbs. I decide to bait. Jerry.

“You never talk about writing,” I say. “You’ve never brought up the subject on your own, not even once.”

“And what do you do?” counters Jerry. “I don’t hear you babbling on about the joys of barn cleaning, or pouring anhydrous ammonia on your stubble, or whatever else it is you do.”

“That’s different. It was Annie who got me to rent the farm. It was Annie who got me to buy it. Not that I don’t like it. But I don’t know enough about it to talk about it all the time. I talk about baseball, though, and about my stadium. How many times have I told you about my stadium?”

“Don’t ask,” says Salinger. “You’re worse than a kid wanting to show off a new toy.”

“That’s what I mean. You and I, we do something worth talking about, but I talk and you don’t. I mean,
everybody
talks about what they do. Hell, have you ever had a plumber or a TV repairman at your house? They yap on and on about the jobs they’ve done—the sinks they’ve unplugged, the vertical-hold buttons they’ve replaced. My father owned a farm, too, but he didn’t know or care much about it. He was a plastering contractor, and his every conversation was dotted with words like scratch coat, sand finish, scaffolds, hawk and trowel, cement, lime, and stone chips. Even on the farm he used to talk plastering in his sleep. ‘Move those scaffolds,’ or ‘More mud, dammit!’ he’d holler out while he was dozing on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon.

“I could talk a good game of life insurance when I was in the business. Why, I sweat endowments, and I could work Twenty-Pay-Life into any conversation, even one about baseball. I hated the job, but I still talked about it. Now if I were like you and did something I really loved …”

“Writing is different,” says Jerry. “Ordinary people don’t understand. Even other writers don’t understand.”

“But that doesn’t hold up. That doesn’t stop other people. Mechanics talk about widgets and glodrobs and units of compression, and get off on the looks of incomprehension they get in return.”

“Writing
is
different,” Salinger insists “Other people get into occupations by accident or design; but writers are born. We have to write. I have to write. I could work at selling motels, or slopping hogs, for fifty years, but if someone asked my occupation, I’d say writer, even if I’d never sold a word. Writers
write
. Other people
talk
.”

“How do you feel about your books being banned? At least
Catcher?
”

“Are they still doing that?”

“You mean you don’t care?”

“I stopped caring years ago. Someone once said, ‘Any publicity is good publicity,’ and I guess I believe it.”

“They do still ban
Catcher
, here in the United States and in Canada too. There were a couple of cases recently that made the papers. One in Michigan and one just across the border in Ontario.”

“I think it’s quite charming,” Salinger says, his eyes twinkling. “In these days when anything goes in literature, movies, and even TV, to think there are some places so isolated, so backward, so ill-informed as to what’s going on in the world that they can still get all hot and bothered about something as innocent as
Catcher
. I mean, if there was ever a crusader against sin, it was Holden Caulfield.”

“It doesn’t make you angry then?”

“Oh, I wasn’t pleased years ago, but now it’s like browsing in a cool antique store full of Mason jars, big iron stoves, and wooden churns. Maybe banning or burning my books could become an annual event in these little uptight communities, like re-creating the first flight at Kitty Hawk.”

Stopping only for fuel and coffee, we navigate a series of back roads that meander along lakes shaded by evergreens, and these eventually lead us into Cooperstown in midafternoon.

At the ticket office I say, “I’m Ray Kinsella. We’re doing some research on an old-time ballplayer named Archibald Graham.”

The cashier is not interested in anything but our money. “The library’s around back,” she intones, as if she has said it a hundred times today, and she probably has. But I am still too manic to be affected by her indifference.

“This is J. D. Salinger,” I say, pointing to Jerry as if he were a trophy I was delivering.

“Yeah?” says the clerk, her face coming alive. “Really?” She looks at both of us for the first time, smiling.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She extends her hand to Jerry. “You used to work for Kennedy, right?”

“Indeed I did,” says Jerry, his eyes flashing across mine, mischief rearranging the kindly lines of his face. To keep from laughing, he turns away.

“Did I say something wrong?” says the cashier.

“He was very fond of Jack,” I reply.

We walk through the museum and around to the library, which has high ceilings, cold walls, and soft carpets.

It is a ghostly feeling, standing chest-deep in history here at the Baseball Hall of Fame. We tour the museum until our ankles swell. Salinger has never been here before. I have. I guide him back over the years as if he were a time traveler. We are both red-eyed and unkempt. My eyebrow is swollen and unsightly, the skin around it saw-blade blue.

Among the larger relics present is a turnstile from the Polo Grounds in New York—one of the same ones that counted the 2000 fans who watched Moonlight Graham’s brief appearance that June day in 1905. It is with reverence that I touch its pocked silver surface, as if I were in a basilica reaching out tentatively to finger the face of a holy statue.

We ask to see the historian and are ushered up a long curving flight of stairs. Clifford Kachline appears and greets us warmly. He is a slight, soft man, pale as newspaper, but there is an aura of warmth about him and he puts us instantly at ease.

There are rows and rows of dun-colored filing cabinets, and Mr. Kachline digs into the
G
’s and extracts a single sheet of paper from the file of Archibald Wright Graham. The form was completed in 1960 in an old man’s heavy handwriting. From it we learn that Graham was married September 29, 1915, to Alicia Madden, that he attended the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. After the question “If you had it to do over, would you play professional baseball?” is scrawled an emphatic
yes
. His length of residence in Chisholm, Minnesota, is listed as fifty years. But most interesting of all, on the bottom line the form is signed,
Dr.
A. W. Graham.

While we study the form like archeologists gaping at a newly exhumed mummy, Kachline goes from filing cabinet to filing cabinet, interweaving cross-references as if following a trail of dropped corn kernels. He waves a piece of paper over his head as he disappears around a corner; a copier whirs; he returns and hands to me, tenderly as a nurse passing a new child to its mother, the box score of Moonlight Graham’s only major-league game:

N
EW
Y
ORK
W
ON
E
ASILY

New York, N.Y., June 29—New York
scored another easy victory
over Brooklyn to-day.
Attendance: 2,000. Time: 1:55.

And there are so many strange and wonderful bits of information—things no one but baseball fanatics would care about, like Lena Blackburne’s Mud. It is a special mud trucked all the way from New England, from Lena Blackburne’s farm, and used to rub up new baseballs before they are put into play. And the fact that the Louisville Slugger bat is named for an 1880s Louisville baseball star named Pete Browning. And that bats, which were originally made from hickory, are now made from mountain ash.

There is even a poem in the Hall of Fame, in honor of the legendary Chicago Cubs’ double-play combination of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance: