Shoeless Joe (17 page)

Then, as I approach the Graham Apartments for the third time, a door closes softly and a figure moves smartly down the steps of the southernmost entrance and turns in the direction of the town—toward me. There is no doubt in my mind that it is Doc Graham—I’ve seen a picture of him at eighty, in the 1959 Chisholm High School yearbook, which is dedicated to him. “Because most of all you are our friend today, as you have been the friend of our parents and grandparents before us … His mind is a storehouse of Blue Streak campaigns and memories of his own baseball career. Our school doctor, whose studies have won him national renown …”

He is about seventy-five, I decide in the split second I have for decision making. He is stooped a little, but his body is still lithe, an athlete’s body. He is wearing a black suit, the white shirt underneath open at the collar. His eyebrows are thick, and each could be the feather of a white bird. There is a fringe of neatly trimmed white hair, like a halo, around his head. He walks briskly, as if he has a destination in mind; he holds an umbrella, gently as he might a fencing foil, and swishes it vigorously with each step. It is as if he has stepped out of an issue of
The Ranger,
the Chisholm High School yearbook.

“Doc?” I say, as he draws abreast of me. “Doc Graham?”

He stops and raises his head to look at me. His eyes are bright and reflect the stars overhead. He is already smiling, narrowing his eyes, trying to see me clearly, trying to decide who I might be: whether or not he delivered me, and whose son or nephew I am.

“Moonlight Graham?” I whisper.

“Well now, you must be a fan of the game to know about that,” he says.

“I’m Ray Kinsella,” I say. And I suppose that wouldn’t be a bad epitaph for me: “He was a fan of the game.”

“You’re not from around here,” he says, measuring me carefully.

“No. From Iowa.”

“I’ve been there. Took the train down to Iowa City once—to the medical center. They have fine equipment there. And once to Council Bluffs, the Blue Streaks were in a tournament.”

“Baseball?”

“No. Basketball. Baseball’s not that big here. Season’s too short. Football’s the game around here. But you learn to adapt. Any game becomes important when you know and love the players.”

“I’m from near Iowa City. I farm a little and I own a baseball field,” I say as I swing into step beside him. We head north toward Lake Street.

“Who are you again?” Doc says, eyeing me shrewdly.

“Ray Kinsella. I’m interested in baseball. I want to ask you some questions.”

“Then it wasn’t an accident that you were waiting on the street for me?”

“I’d been out walking. I had a feeling that you might appear …”

“Appear? That’s a funny word to use. How could you know I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight? ‘You’re flopping around like a fish,’ Alicia said to me, and she was real happy when I got up and got dressed. ‘Going to go for a walk,’ I said to her, but she’d already turned over and gone back to sleep.

“I had this feeling, in there when I woke up—a pulling, like there was a magnet somewhere drawing me slowly toward it. Are you a magnet, Ray Kinsella?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps we were just meant to talk for a while.” We turn the corner and head east on Lake Street; the newspaper office is across the way, and I think of Veda Ponikvar’s portrait of Moonlight Graham, which until today slept in the shadows on top of the filing cabinet. Or did it? As we walk, I note subtle differences in the buildings and sidewalks. Some of the newer houses on Second Street appear to have been replaced by older ones. There are business signs along Lake Street that weren’t there yesterday. Can it be that I am the one who has crossed some magical line between fantasy and reality? That it is Doc who is on solid turf and I who have stepped into the past as effortlessly as chasing a butterfly across a meadow?

I glance up at the water tower that watches over the town like a benevolent alien. It shines in the moonglow like a giant thimble, but there is no writing on it, while yesterday it advertised the Minnesota Museum of Mining.

“You must have had to go back a ways to dig up that name,” says Doc. “I haven’t been called Moonlight Graham for nearly fifty years. It was one of the things I left behind when I came to Chisholm. Kind of like putting my toys away in a box in a closet. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I’ve talked to about my playing days. It was somebody else who dug up that I’d played for the Giants. I never mentioned it to anybody. Did a big story on me in the newspaper. It was kind of embarrassing; I mean, if you’re a fan, then you know the truth about how much I played.”

“I know,” I say. I want to tell him about the line of statistics on the scoreboard at Fenway; I want to tell about it being his listing in the
Baseball Encyclopedia
, but I’m not sure I can. The
Baseball Encyclopedia
wasn’t published until 1969.

I want to ask what year it is. But how can I do that without giving myself away? But maybe I can manage it. “That was quite a World Series last fall!” I say, and wait, hoping I will be able to pick up on his reply.

“You can say that again,” says Doc. “I don’t know when I’ve ever been prouder of the Giants. How about that Willie Mays? Did you see that catch? I went back to the movie theater three times to watch it on the newsreel …” He chatters on about Dusty Rhodes and his incredible pinch hitting, and Sal Maglie’s pitching. It is the 1954 World Series he is talking about. I have been dropped, soft as a falling leaf, into a starry June night in the summer of 1955, Doc’s seventy-fifth year.

“And how did you get a name like Moonlight Graham?” I ask, for some reason picturing him running wolflike across plains of scrub brush and stands of silver willow, the sky the color of deep blue velvet peppered with stars, the moon a white wheel, spinning like a spaceship.

“Why don’t we walk down to the school?” says Doc, stopping abruptly, as if an invisible wall has appeared in front of him. “We can sit in my office and talk.”

“I have no objection,” I say.

We turn around and walk west in the direction we have just come from, past Second Street, and turn south on Third.

The school is not at all as it was yesterday. The new brick building of which Chisholm’s residents are justifiably proud is only a glint in some architect’s eye. Doc fumbles out a key, and the ghostly odors of an old schoolhouse wrap themselves around us—chalk, erasers, varnish, running shoes—so real they seem to float in the air, and I am prepared to duck my head or hold my hand high, as I might when walking through a room filled with cobwebs, where at any instant a bat might hurtle by.

We walk up the hollow stairs, and Doc opens a varnished door that has an opaque glass inset. He seats himself behind a desk about as neat as the bottom of a wastebasket, motions me to the black-leather sofa a few feet away. He takes a sheet of paper from his desk, expertly rips an inch or so off the corner with his teeth, and begins chewing.

“Healthier than tobacco,” he says, winking a bright eye at me.

I glance around the walls of Doc’s office until I find a calendar. It is indeed 1955.

“Well now, about my nickname.” He lets fly with a spitball that hits the back of the sofa a few feet from me and hangs where it strikes, like a white fly.

“I went out to the ballpark one night, late at night like this. Long before there were night games. I don’t even remember what town it was in. We were on the road, had been for a week or so. It wasn’t when I was with the Giants; it was the minor leagues, maybe Manchester in the old New England League. It was a night like this, when I couldn’t sleep. They put us two to a room in those days, two to a bed, and every time Ernie Squim, my roommate, turned over, that old brass bed sagged and squawked as if someone had stepped on a cat’s tail. Ernie could fall asleep as he was pulling up the covers. Stocky devil he was, a catcher with legs like railroad ties and buttocks like one-hundred-pound hams. Well, it was humid and so dark I felt like one of the corpses we kept floating in big glass vats up at Hopkins, where I was studying. I was just suffocating, and Ernie was laying there in just his white shorts, the rest of him covered in long brown hair. The only thing I ever knew could wake Ernie up was if I got out of bed. I’d go down the hall to the john and he’d be wide awake when I came back, his tiny brown eyes glistening in the dark. He wouldn’t say a word, just roll over and be asleep before I even laid down again.

“Well, I got out of bed and the closest clothes handy was my baseball uniform, hanging right where I took it off after our game. I pulled it on, the bed moaning and Ernie jigging around, tossing his mask and running after foul pop-ups in his dreams.

“I eased out the door and down the hall with its faded plum-colored carpet, and on down the stairs. The tall clock in the lobby was varnished, had Roman numerals and advertised cigars on its glass front. It said three A.M., and I guess even the night clerk had gone to sleep, for there was no one around the desk. The front door was locked and I had to turn a latch to open it, and then leave it open after me.

“The air was cooler outside and smelled kind of silvery, like a lawn that’s just been watered. I walked across the street, the gravel clicking under my feet; the wooden sidewalk sounded hollow and I was standing under a streetlight, one of those kind that look like a bulb screwed into a black sombrero. I paced up and down under the light for a while. I was tired, but the thought of that room kept me outside. There was a moon, and a sky full of stars. There were clouds stumbling across the sky, too, moving fast, considering there was hardly any wind down where I was. While I was standing there with my neck bent back, a dark cloud galloped across the moon.

“And then I heard Ernie Squim’s voice: ‘Graham, what the heck you doing standing out there in the moonlight?’

“I looked up, but I couldn’t see him. I knew he’d be bent over with his nose up against the metal-smelling screen on our window, and I also knew that when I woke up in the morning and looked at Ernie, he’d have a black smear on the end of his chunky nose.

“‘The moon’s under a cloud,’ I called back, but quietly. I’d get a five-dollar fine if the manager found me outside the hotel this late.

“‘Don’t tell me I don’t know moonlight when I see it,’ Ernie boomed.

“‘Go back to bed,’ I said.

“‘And you got your uniform on,’ he insisted. ‘What are you doing playing out there in the moonlight?’

“Just to keep him quiet I said, ‘I’m going for a walk.’

“‘Who the hell’s that out there?’ said a voice from another window.

“‘It’s Graham,’ shouted Ernie Squim.

“Somebody else banged their window down like a gunshot.

“I started walking away, my spikes making chewing sounds on the wooden sidewalk.

“‘What’s all the yelling about?’ said somebody else. It sounded like Luke Watson, the shortstop.

“‘Archie Graham’s going out to the ballpark to play in the goll-danged moonlight,’ another voice said.

“As I walked away, the cloud slowly uncovered the moon, like a magician peeling his silk handkerchief off an orange.

“The voices and laughter from the hotel faded away. Well, I thought, if I have the name, I may as well have the game, and I turned the corner of the silent street and headed for the baseball field.”

“And forever after?”

“Moonlight Graham, they called me. You know, I’ve been a lucky, lucky man. I’ve always done the things I’ve enjoyed most—doctoring and playing baseball.”

Chisholm, Minnesota, was founded by a man named Archie Chisholm, a Scot who came from Ontario, Canada. Longyear Lake, the picturesque body of water divided by the highway at the town’s outskirts, was named for a pioneer of that name, and not by or for an Indian. And Ed Wheelecor, a former mayor of Chisholm and a close friend of Doc Graham’s, whom I interviewed, came to northern Minnesota in 1916 because he was delivering his sister to Buhl, Minnesota, five miles south of Chisholm—delivering her all the way from England to become the bride of a Methodist preacher. “I never had any intention of staying in America,” said Ed. “I was going to go right back to England after the wedding. It’s funny the tricks life plays on you.”

It is indeed. I wonder if there are soft-spoken voices who deliver assignments to all of us at various times, and if my problem is one of hearing too acutely. It is nice to think that I have company—that others dance to the muted music I hear. And I wonder what brought Archibald Wright Graham, M.D., to Chisholm, Minnesota, in 1909. A young man with a degree from an outstanding medical school, with a wealthy family in the South: What trick of fate brought him to a frontier mining community?

Doc turns on a square white hotplate, and when the coils burn a tomato color he sets a badly chipped bluish enamel coffeepot on the burner and cooks a pot of coffee. It arrives black and scalding. I do little more than blow on mine—I like much cream in my coffee. Doc, all the time chattering to me, downs his coffee in two long swallows. As I watch him, I remember a voice from the previous day: “He must have had an iron gullet. He poured coffee down the way you empty a water glass into a sink. And always black.”

Then I ask about why he came to Chisholm.

“I’ve always had friends at the medical centers in Rochester, and I was there one summer and not feeling so good—just a cough that wouldn’t quit, and I couldn’t seem to get a suntan. ‘Why don’t you go up to the Range?’ somebody said to me. ‘The air is pure, and they have the best water on earth.’ I thought, why not? So I took the train. ‘Just give me a ticket for as far north as the train goes,’ I told the clerk, and I landed right here in Chisholm.

“It was 1909, the year after the big fire here, and the town was rebuilding; the whole area smelled of new, sawed lumber. And I guess I got better.” He stops to laugh a gentle, ironic laugh. “I’ve been here for forty-six years. I got on at Dr. Rood’s hospital, and the air was clear and dry, and the cool weather keeps you on your toes. I never could handle the humidity down home. And then I met Alicia. She was from Rochester. I could have gone there lots of times to work at the clinic, but by then I’d settled into the school job and I knew everybody in the community and everybody knew me … Did I tell you I’m supposed to be a great cousin, or something, to this Billy Graham fellow who preaches on the TV and in Yankee Stadium?” Doc Graham lets go with a spitball that whaps against the black sofa like a ball hitting a catcher’s mitt. “Did you know his grandfather was named Crook Graham?” He laughs again. “Some young fellow from the university in Minneapolis came up here once, and he had it all mapped out. Claimed my daddy was a second cousin of Crook Graham. Now I don’t know what relation that would make me to this evangelist, or why anyone would care. I’ve always been too busy for that sort of thing, though Alicia’s a good Catholic and my family wasn’t very happy when I married her. That fellow from the university wanted to know what I thought of my famous tenth cousin or whatever. ‘You must be awful desperate for testimonials, to come to a shirttail relative like me,’ I told him. I don’t think he liked that very well. He was tall and pale and wore a black suit and tried to act solemn. Didn’t look to me like he found religion very joyful—that’s the one word I figure should be associated with it …”