Shoeless Joe (26 page)

Later, while the game is on, while Moonlight Graham patrols the right-field grass as Salinger watches contentedly, while my catcher, whom I haven’t been able to approach, crouches behind the plate, while Eddie Scissons sits alone in voluntary exile about five seats from Karin and me, I hear a car cross the cattle guard and head up the gravel lane to the house. Moments later, Mark and Bluestein appear at the corner of the grandstand. Mark waves his arms animatedly to attract my attention, Bluestein holds a clipboard on which he is making notes.

The game stops. The players politely move out of the way as the interlopers move toward left field.

“I thought I made it clear that you weren’t welcome here,” I holler down.

“Can you come down here? We want to talk to you.”

“Do you like it here?” asks Bluestein, his eyes glittering amber like a dog’s. I can feel the cold winds of winter peeking over the horizon as I stare around at this piece of land that I love more than anyplace else on earth—this place where I have been happy.

“Yes, I like it here,” I reply, “but I won’t grovel for you. You blackmailed Eddie into selling me out. I want to enjoy what time I have left here without you snooping around and gloating.”

“We want to make a deal,” says Mark.

“So you can stay on the land,” adds Bluestein.

“We’ll leave the house. You and Annie can live in it free for as long as you like. No rent. It will make your responsibilities lighter while you find a new job.”

“And the baseball field?”

“This?” says Mark, waving his arm around to take in the whole field.

“You have to leave it, too.”

Mark nods to Bluestein, who scribbles on the clipboard.

“Do you realize what this land is worth?” says Mark.

“Over twenty-two-hundred dollars an acre,” I reply.

“Isn’t it about time you grew up?” Mark explodes. “You sit up there,” and he points toward the bleacher, “like the world can’t get at you. You build this whole stupid …” His face reddens as he struggles for words. “You’re virtually bankrupt, and we’re offering you a way out—because I love my sister.”

“Because you’re afraid of your sister.”

“You’re totally ungrateful,” booms Mark. “No. This monstrosity will be the first thing to go, and I’ll drive the bulldozer that levels it myself.”

Behind him Bluestein draws a large
X
over the calculations he has made on the clipboard.

“Then we have nothing more to say,” says Mark, and I feel cold, as if I have just pronounced my own eviction notice, which indeed I probably have. I also feel the wind from the cornfield pushing against my back. I stand up, and, with a fanning motion of my arm, spray my orange drink out in an arc that the wind carries over Mark’s and Bluestein’s heads, stippling their $300 suits. They both yell in anguish. Then Karin, who has been sitting silently beside me, rises and tosses her own drink in their direction; but her arm is not strong enough, and the drink pours directly over the fence. Bluestein partially fends off the deluge with his clipboard.

“You’ll be sorry,” he shouts up at us.

Karin hugs my leg and I tousle her red curls. I laugh to think that I have just about reached my maximum level of violence by pouring orangeade on an accountant.

Then Mark’s voice roars up at us. “And he’s a fraud.” He points at Eddie Scissons like a tent-meeting evangelist pointing at the devil. His mustache curls as he speaks.

Eddie has been sitting, leaning on his cane, his chin resting on his hands, which are cupped over the serpent head.

“He never played in the major leagues. Not only that, but he hardly played in the minors—one year, part-time, for a Class D team in Montana, over sixty years ago. And he’s been passing himself off around here for forty years as a Chicago Cub, the oldest living Chicago Cub.

“You’re supposed to know all about baseball,” Mark yells, turning his wet wrath toward me again. “I don’t even follow the game, but ten minutes in the U of I Library and I found out
all
about
him
.” He points accusingly at Eddie again.

Eddie is shrinking before our eyes, as if he were an inflatable toy and Mark’s words were pins. I can almost hear the air escaping.

“You promised you wouldn’t tell,” says Eddie, in a bland, defeated voice. “You said if I cold you the mortgage you’d never tell Ray, or anyone.”

“You’re a joke,” Mark rages. “Everyone knows about you, except Ray here. They humor you because it would be too embarrassing to call you a liar to your face. ‘Crazy old Eddie,’ they say, ‘he likes to think he played baseball for the Cubs.’”

Eddie turns his face away.

“It’s all right, Eddie,” I say. “I knew. I’ve known all along, and it doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter to your friends.” I wave my hand to take in Jerry and Karin, and then, with a more expansive motion, I take in the whole ballpark.

“You promised,” Eddie says hollowly.

I remember my own indignation after I discovered Eddie’s secret. After I’d talked to him on the street in Iowa City that windy March afternoon, I had hustled off to the nearby Iowa City Public Library to find a copy of the
Baseball Encyclopedia
and check out Eddie’s statistics. I’d had an uneasy feeling that something was not right, for he had spoken of playing in Wrigley Field in 1908, ‘09, and ‘10, and I knew without looking it up that that was at least five years before Wrigley Field was built, and that in those years the Cubs would have played in West Side Park. It seemed like a natural-enough mistake, though, if Eddie was indeed as old as he said he was.

But I marveled at the idea of the oldest living Chicago Cub. It was like finding a mummified baseball in an attic, yellow as if varnished, hard with age, but with a long-dead star’s signature staring out, bright and real as the day the player signed it. I felt as if I’d stumbled onto a priceless autograph, something I could cherish, hold on to, hold back from other baseball fanatics as if it were a 1932 Smead Jolley baseball card with an advertisement for Turret Cigarettes on the back. Something as elusive as the perfect game, or a .400 lifetime hitter. A collector’s dream.

At the library, I took the
Baseball Encyclopedia
from the shelf and turned to the Pitcher Register, and I remember the disappointment and then the anger I felt as I found that no one named Scissons had ever pitched in the major leagues. I tried the Player Register, in case I had misunderstood about his being a pitcher. But I also drew a blank there. For whatever reason, Eddie Scissons had been lying to me. I closed the book sadly and headed for home.

I told Annie about him, but mentioned only that he had a farm for rent, not that he was a fraud when it came to playing for the Cubs.

But I understand Eddie Scissons. I know that some of us, and for some reason I am one of them, get to reach out and touch our heart’s desire, like a child who gets to pet the nose of an old horse, soft as satin, safe as a grandfather’s lap. And I know, too, that when most people reach for that heart’s desire, it appears not as a horse but as a tiger, and they are rewarded with snarls, frustration, and disillusionment.

I imagine Eddie Scissons has decided, “If I can’t what I want most in life, then I’ll pretend I had it in the past, and talk about it and live it and relive it until it is real and solid and I can hold it to my heart like a precious child. Once I’ve experienced it so completely, no one can ever take it away from me.”

“How can you let him get away with it?” Mark shouts up at me, his fists clenched like a politician making a damning point. “You claim to know so much about baseball, claim it’s so pure and wonderful. How can you let him worm his way into your game? How can you tell him it’s all right? How can you forgive him for all he’s done?”

And I wonder how I can. But I know I can. Fact and fantasy swirl together. “Worse men than Eddie have been forgiven by better men than me,” I reply.

Much later I hold Annie in my arms, loving her, experiencing a whole separate world that makes me think of the thrilling isolation I feel when I walk through our cornfield between the high whispering rows.

“Whatever happens, I’m with you, Champ,” she says, and erases my anxiety with her soft, sweet love.

The days pass, and each evening, as if time is controlled by a computer, perhaps in some distant dimension, the phantom baseball park superimposes itself on my labor of love as the sun dissolves into the horizon, tinting the clouds flamingo pink.

We watch the games, our usual group. Not one of us has said a word to Eddie about what happened. It is as if we don’t mention it because to do so will make it real. Eddie is paler and more silent, his hands tremble noticeably even when clutched tightly on the head of his cane. Some evenings Richard sits with us a while—”Like watching a TV screen full of shadows and static,” he says—and eventually walks away, a perplexed expression on his face, like that of a pagan watching, but not comprehending, a religious ceremony.

The catcher has been on a hitting rampage the last few games. He is more than adequate behind the plate. “He’ll be with us for a while,” says Joe, grinning happily. “You have good judgment when it comes to catchers.”

But I still can’t bring myself to face him. As with most of life, anticipation has been nine-tenths of the actual event. I sense that the catcher has some reservations about me, because after each game he exits through the gate in center field almost before the stands begin emptying. Breathing a sigh of relief each time the confrontation has been delayed, I walk across the field with Joe Jackson, Happy Felsch, and Swede Risberg, and a number of us end up squatting, or sitting Indian style, on the magic grass of left field.

Salinger tells the ballplayers the story of how I am soon going to lose the farm. “What would happen to all of you if this ballpark is razed, leveled, planted in corn?” he asks.

They exchange knowing glances, but remain silent.

“Some of us waited a long time for this chance,” says Shoeless Joe.

Joe was the first of the Unlucky Eight to die. He was sixty-four in December of 1951, when his heart finally gave out. Freddy McMullin went in ’52; Buck Weaver in ’56; Lefty Williams in ’59. Happy Felsch died in ‘64 in Milwaukee; Eddie Cicotte in Detroit in 1969 at eighty-four. Chick Gandil lived to be eighty-two, and Swede Risberg outlived Gandil by nearly five years, dying in Red Bluff, California, in 1975, at age eighty-one. The Swede was indeed a hard guy.

“Why can’t you make a living on a farm like this?” someone asks, and I explain that I am equipment poor, and interest poor, and that my income has not kept pace with the price of land or the price of fuel, which has tripled while my income has remained stable.

“What can we do to help?” says Lefty Williams. “I was born on a farm in Missouri. I got a strong back and I’m pretty handy with my hands.”

Several others nod. “I farmed some, too,” says Buck Weaver.

“I’ve hoed a few acres of cotton myself,” says Shoeless Joe with a smile.

“It’s not the work that’s killing me, it’s paying for the equipment,” I begin, but am cut off by Lefty Williams.

“How about horses?” he says. “Your machines do the work of ten men with horses, but here you sit with more men than you can use. Sell off your machines, pay off your loans, buy up a few horses, and we’ll do your work for you.”

“I remember horses,” says Eddie Scissons. “I grew up on a corn farm in Nebraska. This used to be my farm. Harrowing, disking, plowing, planting, picking. I’ve done them all.”

“Johnny, the catcher, he was raised on a dirt farm in North Dakota,” says Shoeless Joe, looking right at me. “Bet he’d be willing to help out.”

My head is filled with a wild vision of these men, these spirits, out in the dew-cool Iowa dawn, breaking the land, seeding and harrowing, the black reins wrapped around their wrists, cussing their teams on across the black fields, each man still dressed in his baseball uniform.

I see them rumbling in on wagons, the setting sun behind them, the wagon boxes overflowing with golden corn. I see them tending the fields by day, like members of some religious group who are forbidden to use worldly machines, and at night filing into my baseball park for a rendezvous with stalled time.

Their voices are ripe with excitement.

“It would be like rent,” says Joe. “You done this for us.

We’ll pay you back.” There is a current of assent.

“But can you do that?” I say. “I’ve never seen any of you anywhere except on the field. What do you become when you walk through that door in center field?”

The silence that follows is long and ominous. I feel like I have just stomped across an innocent children’s game, or broken a doll.

“We sleep,” says Chick Gandil finally.

“And wait,” says Happy Felsch.

“And dream,” says Joe Jackson. “Oh, how we dream …” He stops, the look of awe and rapture on his face enough of an explanation.

The magic has been broken. The other players edge toward the gate in center field.

“I remember horses,” says Eddie again. “You fellows have a right good idea.”

“Let’s go to the house,” says Salinger, taking Eddie’s arm and turning him around.

There is an aura of mystery, a definite difference about the game to be played tonight. The opposing team, gray and ephemeral as dandelion fluff, does not consist of the usual opponents, who often appear to be identical to the players from the previous game, with only a change of uniform and adjusted batting stances.

Fittingly, it is Eddie Scissons who first notices the difference.

“That’s Three Finger Brown!” he says, pointing to the shadowy pitcher warming up on the sidelines. “Check his number! Check his number!” he shouts. Eddie forgets that players didn’t wear numbers in Three Finger Brown’s era.

“Look at the infield!” Eddie crows. “Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. Do you boys have any idea how lucky you are?”

It does seem to me that the cloudlike infielders have the bear-cub insignia grinning from their ghostly uniforms. But what kind of game is it?

Shoeless Joe avoids my questions when I lean down to talk to him. He doesn’t reiterate what I already understand—that there are things it is better not to know—but changes the subject, discussing, among other things, Moonlight Graham’s .300 batting average since he joined the team.