Shoeless Joe (23 page)

At breakfast, Salinger fries the bacon, Eddie tends the coffee. “Haven’t you got any eggshells?” Eddie wants to know. “Real coffee has eggshells in it. That was the way Ellen did it. Every morning of our married life, she brewed up a pot of coffee—one of them gray enamel jobs the pot was, not like this thing.” He nods contemptuously at the glass-and-plastic wonder that premeasures water and coffee and even makes the brew strong or weak according to the push of a button. I am cooking the eggs, grease spitting onto the backs of my hands, for I have the burner turned too high.

“All I’ve got are these,” I say, pointing to the glistening white shells I’ve split open on the edge of the pan.

“Have to be dry,” says Eddie derisively. “You save ’em. Let ’em dry in the warming oven. And they have to be brown, only eggs from brown hens are any good in coffee. You dry ‘em and crumble ‘em and toss a handful in with the grounds, and you watch ‘em boil, and roll around in the pot.”

“Joe DiMaggio sold this coffee maker on television,” I say, as if trying to give it some legitimacy.

Moonlight Graham is tending the toaster, while Karin, in a cardinal-colored dressing gown, standing on a chair, butters the toast and stacks it on plates. Someone speaks to me, but I barely hear, for I am thinking of the story of Marilyn Monroe returning from a trip to entertain the troops in Korea—returning to an unhappy Joe DiMaggio, who had not wanted her to go.

“There were thousands and thousands of soldiers everywhere I went,” Marilyn said. “You never heard such cheering …”

“Yes, I have,” replied the Yankee Clipper sadly.

The phone rings. Annie answers it on the upstairs extension and yells down that it is for me. “Take over the eggs,” I say to Richard, who has been drawn downstairs by the bacon and coffee smells.

“Ray,” Mark says in his professional voice, “it’s good to have you back. We have some business to discuss. Have you thought any more about our last offer?”

“I told you what you could do with it before I left. Why should I change my mind?”

“Oh, no reason,” says Mark, as if he knows something I don’t know.

“The place is not for sale.”

“We’ll up the ante twenty-five thousand dollars,” says Mark.

“No.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to come up with some cash rather quickly then.”

I feel as if I’ve reached for my wallet and found the pocket empty.

“How so?”

“I guess you haven’t seen Mr. Scissons since you got back?”

“I have. He’s right here, sitting at my table.”

“Oh, really?” says Mark. I look sharply at Eddie. He becomes intent on watching the coffee dribble into the squat receptacle beneath the machine. “I guess he doesn’t have the nerve to tell you,” Mark goes on. “We’ve optioned your mortgage. At the end of sixty days, we own it. So unless you bring it up to date and keep it up to date, we have the legal right to foreclose. If you read your contract, you’ll find that the full amount of the mortgage becomes due if you fall even one day behind in your payments. We wouldn’t foreclose, of course, unless you left us with no choice. So I suggest you think hard about the offer we’ve made you.” I can see Mark twirling his mustache as he says this, with Bluestein in the background rubbing his hands together and cackling. I proceed to tell Mark, spitting the profanities out like bullets, that I am uninterested in his offer, now or ever.

As I hang up the phone, I turn to Eddie Scissons. “Why?” I bellow.

“They made me,” whispers Eddie, sitting down on one of the maple chairs that surround the oval table.

“How could they make you? You don’t need the money.”

“They know things,” Eddie says helplessly. His hand shakes violently as he tries to raise his coffee cup to his lips.

I have about as much chance of cracking the New York Yankee starting line-up as I have of bringing the mortgage payments up to date. My impulse is to march Eddie to the car, drive him back to his apartment, or to the Friendship Center, and never see him again. But I know that for some reason I need him here, that he is part of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle that has so altered my life.

“Whew,” says Annie, bounding down the stairs, making motions of knocking water out of her ears. “You haven’t cussed like that since you stuck your tongue on the wire fence two winters ago.”

I grab a slice of toast and a handful of bacon strips as I head for the door.

“I thought you knew what I done,” says Eddie in a voice that for the first time sounds his age, “and that you brought me out here to hurt me.” He looks beaten. What can Mark and Bluestein have used to blackmail him? It can only be something I already know; or is there more to Eddie Scissons’s past than even I have guessed?

“I’ll be working on the field,” I say. “Anyone who wants to can help when they’re finished with breakfast.”

That afternoon, while the others are working on the field with varying degrees of enthusiasm, Annie and I drive to Iowa City. A check of Johnson County land-title records shows why my brother-in-law is so anxious to acquire my land. A perusal of county maps shows why my little farm is so important. On the county map, the land is divided up neatly as a checkerboard, and when I take one of Karin’s yellow crayons and color in the quarter-sections owned by Bluemark Properties, Inc., it looks like a giant crossword puzzle with only a few black squares. My farm is one of the black squares. I note the names of the owners of the other privately owned land and phone them. “Yes, the farm’s been sold recently,” they all tell me. What Bluemark Properties, Inc., has acquired is 64 quarter-sections, or 16 sections, or 10,240 acres of prime corn-growing land. That is, they have all but one portion—my farm, which sits on the little map like a blue-black plum in a field of golden peaches.

For the last couple of years, Mark has been extolling the virtues of what he calls Computer Farming. And I can imagine what he said as he and Bluestein started buying up the farms. “I can tell you for a fact, we won’t have any trouble with this one,” he would have said to the boardroom full of shadowy men in three-piece suits. “This one is owned by my sister and brother-in-law. He’s a little weird—so deep in debt he’ll be happy to sell.”

I can visualize what they want to do. You don’t need fences around corn. Farmhands will roll the barbed wire up on giant wooden spools, the staples crying like shot animals as they are wrenched from the wood. Then the posts will be pulled and stacked, to be sold in areas where farming is less sophisticated. The houses and outbuildings will all be torn down—bulldozed and hauled away, making the plains as flat and silent and lifeless as they were 150 years ago. The farm will be run from one concrete bunker the size of an electrical-transformer station. One man will sit in bluish light in front of a television screen that every fifteen minutes provides updated information about market prices, weather forecasts, legislative happenings, planting, spray and harvest advisories, USDA news, and dozens of other topics—data fed into the computer on a continuing basis. When he wants information, the Computer Farmer simply dials a special telephone number and punches the proper code on what is called a Green Thumb Box. Mark has told me about it again and again, his beady eyes blazing like those of a zealous evangelist. At a command from the single pale figure, posed vulturelike over the computer screen, battalions of combines can be unleashed to gobble up the crops and spew them into trucks to be wheeled to market—all neat and clean and sterile and heartless.

“But you owe the land something,” I complained weakly to Mark. “It’s not just a product. Not plastic and foam and bright paint imported from Taiwan or Korea, meant to be used once and discarded.” But my words went unheeded, and I can see the ghostly accountants, technicians, and bankers lurking behind Mark, counting money and reinvesting profits.

“You have to be touched by the land,” I cried. “Once you’ve been touched by the land, the wind never blows so cold again, because your love files the edges off it. And when the land suffers from flood or drought or endless winter, you feel for
it
more than for yourself, and you do what you can to ease its pain.” Mark stared at me, uncomprehending, seeing only the money breeding incestuously, diversifying, multiplying; whereas I saw the silent tides of corn, lonely and alien in their own vast land.

But this morning on the phone, Mark’s voice had risen in an anxious whine, and there was controlled desperation in his sales pitch—the same desperation I sometimes felt when I had failed to sell a life-insurance policy for over a month and could picture creditors marching in front of my apartment, carrying picket signs, chanting. As I check the maps again, I realize that I have been backed into a position of power, like a weak team aided by a spate of errors made by the champions.

Syndicates like all business transactions to go smoothly: A project is either complete or it is not. They will be irate, hopefully even vengeful or violent, if Mark and Bluestein cannot deliver on their promises. If I can hold my land, remain free, it could begin a chain reaction that, like opening a row of cages in a zoo, would free half of Johnson County, Iowa, from this computer-farming syndicate. Mark, Bluestein, and their associates have a sinister master plan for the whole area, and our little quarter-section is like a fly back-stroking in their crab bisque.

I have Annie phone her mother. Violetene, as she was named by her Alabama-born mother, is a great source of information. She sits in her parlor among her religious pictures and African violets, rocks, reads her Bible, and absorbs whatever is said around her, like a velvet dress collecting lint. She often does not understand what she hears, unless it is gossip of the most malicious kind, or a story of terminal illness—
catheter
is one of her favorite words—but she can recall whole conversations from years in the past, particularly if she was in some way slighted. She has always insisted that I call her Violetene, I suppose out of fear that I might call her Mother.

Annie asks about Mark’s plans for our farm. “Mother, he spent all day Sunday with you, surely he must have talked about it. Of course Ray is here, and of course I’ll tell him whatever you tell me.”

She has to remind her mother several times that she will go to hell if she lies, before she reluctantly lets go of what she knows. It turns out that Mark himself is having serious financial problems; he and Bluestein have overextended themselves. Possession of our farm is holding up an agreement to lease all their Iowa landholdings to a Texas conglomerate.

My charges are restless when we return.

“I don’t think I believe you really have games out there,” says Moonlight.

Salinger eyes me skeptically, but remains silent. Eddie still carps about the $4000 I spent on the tractor. Then, in the next breath, he apologizes for selling the mortgage.

“Give me some time,” I say to Moonlight. “Just pretend you’re on holiday for a few days. Give it ten days. If you don’t at least get to see a game in ten days’ time, I’ll personally drive you anywhere in Iowa, so you can try out for a …”—I stop with the word
real
hanging like a corn kernel on the tip of my tongue. When I look at Salinger he has a half-smile on his face—”another team,” I finish the sentence. “But look, I’ve bought pork chops for supper.” I thump down a brown parcel on the tabletop.

As usual, it is Karin who alerts us. Two days have passed. We are sitting at the oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen, playing hearts. Eddie suggested it, and the rest of us complied. Richard and Moonlight are competitive, wailing loudly when fate is unkind to them, for hearts is a game relying heavily on luck. Eddie, too, is competitive, hating to lose, but he hides his feelings, only the occasional cross glance betraying him. I let luck take its course: I follow suit, never count cards or try to surmise who holds which cards. Salinger doesn’t care whether he wins or loses, but I have the feeling that he is memorizing gestures, such as Richard’s furious expression of indignation when the queen of spades is dropped on his doorstep.

Karin comes pounding down the stairs. “Daddy, the lights are on,” she says. I go to the back door, from which I can see the sky awash with yellow. From above, the stadium must look like a volcanic crater boiling lazily, waiting for something to happen.

We march single file toward the stadium. Karin leads the way, high-stepping like a majorette, followed by Moonlight, Richard, Eddie tapping along with his serpent-head cane, Salinger, and then me, with Annie holding tightly to my hand and looking breathless—as strange a parade as anyone would care to see assembled: my child shining like a jewel; Moonlight Graham adrift on the sea of time; my brother who might be me or I him; Eddie limping along, his hair frosty beneath the floodlight sun; Jerry, a world-famous author, walking among us without pretension. I wonder what each will experience: who will see the wonders of the night, and who will see only an empty field eerily illuminated by a single battery of floodlights, where moths crash into the bright bulbs like determined kamikaze pilots.

The stars seem to float like flowers in a bowl only yards above our heads as this motley procession winds along behind the third-base stands. As we climb the bleacher in left field, I can see that Jerry is smiling, and I wonder how much of it is his own joy and how much is for me. He must be incredibly happy to know that I am not a fraud. Moonlight holds a long hand out in front of him, palm up, like a baby reaching to explore a bug.

“It wasn’t like this today,” he says, his eyes feasting on all he sees: the White Sox taking batting practice, players throwing along the first- and third-base sides. Eddie Cicotte is warming up in the corner just below us, his fast ball whapping into the catcher’s mitt, sending up a small explosion of dust each time it hits.

Then it is my turn to be brushed with wonder. Annie clutches my arm as I gasp involuntarily. “The catcher,” I croak. We all look at the white-uniformed young man crouching crablike in the White Sox bullpen. But only Annie and I, and perhaps Salinger, if he remembers any of my stories, realize the significance of his being a solid, tangible person and not a shade that might have been outlined and cut from fog, using a baseball bat as a knife.