Shoeless Joe (30 page)

“You had to make a choice,” he says quietly.

Most of the players have gathered below us on the left-field grass and stand staring up, silent, as if waiting to hear a speech.

I kneel on the step below Karin, my hands wavering above her in indecision. Her nose and one side of her face have been severely scraped by her fall. Blood trickles from her nose, across her cheek and down her neck. She is becoming bluer and her cough is faint, as though she is in another room. Her arms appear pale through her tan, her freckles look as if they are resting on snow.

I glance over my shoulder to see that Bluestein has taken off his $300 pale-green velvet corduroy jacket and is wordlessly holding it out toward me. Our eyes meet, and for an instant we share the grief of losing a beloved child; our other pursuits, whether they be baseball or land acquisition, become insignificant. Jerry takes the jacket and covers Karin gently, as if she were made of flower petals.

Though it seems like hours, only a couple of moments have passed. Annie is probably only now reaching the phone, may at this moment be calling the ambulance. I am beginning to feel that I have made the wrong decision, and consider clutching Karin in my arms and running for the car, starting on a mad drive to Iowa City.

Then I feel compelled to look at the baseball field. In order to do that, I stand up and walk a few steps up the bleacher. What I see is Moonlight Graham loping in from right field, lithe, dark, athletic: the same handsome young man who played that one inning of baseball in 1905. But as he moves closer, his features begin to change, his step slows. He seems to be come smaller. His baseball uniform fades away and is replaced by a black overcoat. His baseball cap is gone, supplanted by a thatch of white hair. As I watch, his glove miraculously turns into a black bag. The man who without a backward glance walks around the corner of the fence—a place where none of the other players will venture—is not Moonlight Graham, the baseball player of long ago, but the Doc Graham I spoke with on that moonlit night in Chisholm, Minnesota, when I flew softly across the dimensions of time.

As he walks toward us, I recall how a former nurse of his said that he
never
carried his black bag when they went on a call, but insisted that she carry it.

“What have we got here?” he says matter-of-factly.

“She fell,” we all say together, even Bluestein.

“This child’s choking to death,” says Doc, and picks her up with one hand under her shoulders and the other under her knees. He seats himself on the bleacher, shaking himself a little to get his coat out of the way. He turns Karin face down, with her head pointing toward the floor. He supports her chest with one hand, while with the heel of the other he delivers a series of sharp blows between her shoulder blades. Annie and Gypsy come running back.

“Who?” says Annie.

“A doctor,” I reply. I can see some of the pain retreat from her face.

Doc repeats the process, and I can suddenly see Karin’s diaphragm expand as she sucks in air. Doc reaches around and pries her mouth open, releasing a sizable piece of hot dog and bun.

As he turns her over, I can see the blueness disappearing from her face as she continues to breathe deeply. Doc peels back each eyelid in turn, stares at the pupil for a few seconds, and lets the eye close.

“Looks to be okay,” he says. “She should be coming around in a minute or two.” He re-covers her with Bluestein’s jacket.

“The ambulance?” says Annie.

“Won’t do any harm to have her checked, but I’d bet she’ll be fine.”

The relief that washes over me is like a flood of warm water.

His medical work done, Doc looks around him. He scratches his head. His eyes light on me and hold. “Why, you’re the young fellow who was waiting outside my house the other night!”

“Ray Kinsella,” I say. “My daughter.” I point to Karin, whose eyelids are beginning to flutter. “My wife.” I point to Annie. Then, for no reason I can fathom, I introduce everyone, even Abner Bluestein.

“Well now, it’s lucky I happened on the scene, Ray Kinsella. That little girl wouldn’t have lasted very much longer.” I look at him, smiling from ear to ear, and I recall someone saying of Doc, “He was always the first at the side of an injured player in any sport.” But I wonder how much he has sacrificed to save Karin’s life. It seems to me that he will never be able to walk back onto the ballfield as Moonlight Graham. He has violated some cosmic rule that I vaguely know exists, and do not even attempt to understand.

I reach out and take his hand, holding it with both of mine. “Thank you,” I say.

“Now you were the fellow who was talking about a baseball wish, weren’t you?”

“I was.”

“You drop down to the school one day, Ray Kinsella, and we’ll talk some more about that. Not that I believe you could do it at all. I’d best be getting back,” he goes on. “Alicia will be expecting me.” He walks briskly around the corner of the bleacher, into the dark summer cornfield.

Karin blinks her eyes and raises a small brown hand to rub at her head. “Oh, honey, we’re so glad you’re okay.” Annie and I are both kissing her small freckled cheeks.

“Boy, Daddy, you counted at that fat man just like you do when I don’t eat my turnips,” she says excitedly.

I have spent close to two hours explaining to Richard what has happened to me since the voice of the baseball announcer first boomed out, “If you build it, he will come.”

But finally I arrive at the spot where I become bogged down like a car stuck in sand. “Richard, what would you do if you … You know, Dad played some semipro baseball … in Florida and California. What if he made the big leagues?”

Richard sits on the other side of the insect-legged table in his camper. The tension lines between his brows are deep as ditches as he frowns at me in the orangey light.

I stumble on. “What if you had a chance to meet Dad—to meet our father?”

“You mean you’ve brought him back to life, like you brought Shoeless Joe Jackson back to life?”

“Not me, but somehow … but he’s out there, Richard. Not like we ever knew him. He’s twenty-five years old and he’s catching for the White Sox, and he has his whole life in front of him and doesn’t know about us.”

“But I can’t see it—your ballfield,” says Richard, “though Gypsy can, and I know she wouldn’t put me on about something like that.”

In the front of the camper, the part that rests over the cab of the truck, I can see Gypsy’s slight form curled up on the bed like a child, like the remnants of a thirteen-year-old who ran away from her parents’ home in Kellogg, Idaho, and discarded layers of her identity in secret places all across the face of America, in the process becoming very wise.

The silence is long, and I am beginning to feel ill at ease when Richard says, “I’d go to him. I don’t know what I’d tell him, but I’d become his friend. Ray, people toss around the phrase ‘Heaven on earth,’ but it seems to me you’ve gotten a lock on it. Play it for all it’s worth.”

Heaven on earth, indeed. I think of virtually nothing else for the next day. Karin is home, a bit subdued, her bruises and scrapes still visible. The near loss has affected us all; we each seem to be more concerned about the other, after having had our mortality waved in front of our faces.

At the ballpark, Annie snuggles against me, her small hand inserted flat inside my shirt, her fingers warm on my chest. Gypsy leans close to Richard, whispering to him a play-by-play of the action taking place on the field. Often she jumps delightedly and cheers, then slides back down next to Richard and stares up at him with her ironic smile, so full of love, and tells him what has happened.

Salinger has appeared preoccupied all day, and his eyes are far away tonight as he sits and hums absently, tapping one large white hand on the knee of his jeans. What he is humming makes me smile, for it is the tune Richard and Karin use when they chant the song of the carnival: “Mothers bring your daughters. Fathers bring your sons. The world’s strangest babies are here. Buy your ticket and come on in.”

Late in the game, Salinger suddenly taps me on the arm. “I’ve had a dream,” he says when I turn to look at him. “I know how things are going to turn out.”

“Things?” I say.

“The farm. Listen! It will be like this …” He moves down and sits in front of us, his back to the game, so he can deliver a lecture, like a professor with five graduate students who has been assigned an amphitheater for a classroom.

“It will be almost a fraternity, like one of those tiny, exclusive French restaurants that have no sign. You find it almost by instinct.

“The people who come here will be drawn …” He stops, searching for words. “Have you ever been walking down the street and stopped in midstride and turned in at a bookstore or a gallery you never knew existed? People will decide to holiday in the Midwest for reasons they can’t fathom or express.

“They’ll turn off I-80 at the Iowa City exit, drive around the campus, get out and stroll across the lawns, look at the white columns of the Old Capitol Building, have supper at one of the tidy little restaurants, then decide to drive east for a while on a secondary highway. They’ll watch the hawks soaring like Chinese kites in the early evening air. They’ll slow down when they see your house, and they’ll ooh and aah at the whiteness of it, the way it sits in the cornfield like a splotch of porcelain. They’ll say how beautiful it is, and comment on how the flags snap in the breeze. At this point, they won’t even realize that the flags fly over a center field. They’ll be hypnotized by the way the corn sways in the breeze.

“They’ll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it, and arrive at your door, innocent as children, longing for the gentility of the past, for home-canned preserves, ice cream made in a wooden freezer, gingham dresses, and black-and-silver stoves with high warming ovens and cast-iron reservoirs.

“‘Of course, we don’t mind if you look around,’ you’ll say. ‘It’s only twenty dollars per person.’ And they’ll pass over the money without even looking at it—for it is money they have, and peace they lack.

“They’ll walk out to the bleacher and sit in shirtsleeves in the perfect evening, or they’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere in the grandstand or along one of the baselines—wherever they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes, in whatever park it was, whatever leaf-shaded town in Maine, or Ohio, or California. They’ll watch the game, and it will be as if they have knelt in front of a faith healer, or dipped themselves in magic waters where a saint once rose like a serpent and cast benedictions to the wind like peach petals.

“The memories will be so thick that the outfielders will have to brush them away from their faces: squarish cars parked around a frame schoolhouse, blankets covering the engine blocks; Christmas carols drifting like tinseled birds toward the golden wash of the Northern Lights; women shelling peas in linoleum-floored kitchens, cradling the unshelled pods in brindled aprons, tearing open corn husks and waiting for the thrill of the cool sweet scent; apple-cheeked children and collie dogs; the coffee-and-oil smell of a general store; people gliding over the snow in an open cutter; the dazzling smell of horsehide blankets teasing the senses.

“I don’t have to tell you that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time with America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers. It is the same game that Moonlight Graham played in 1905. It is a living part of history, like calico dresses, stone crockery, and threshing crews eating at outdoor tables. It continually reminds us of what once was, like an Indian-head penny in a handful of new coins.

“I’ll bet some of the men will be dragging along little women in flowered housedresses and high-heels who will see nothing and whine about sitting on a backless bleacher seat for two hours. And, occasionally, a woman will pull along a pale, sink-chested husband, or one squat as a rosebush who looks like a bulldog with a cigar clenched in his teeth, who gave up the sports page for the Dow Jones Average when he was twenty-one; and while she watches and thrills, he’ll read the financial pages of the
Times
or the
Trib
and be soothed as a pacifier soothes a baby. But mostly, the arrivals will be couples who have withered and sickened of the contrived urgency of their lives …”

As Jerry speaks, a car turns off the highway and, in the twilight, zippers up the long driveway toward the house. It is a black Chrysler with the scorched-gold license plate of New York State.

“You talk a good dream,” I say to Salinger.

Behind me I hear cars. Richard and Gypsy will be there selling tickets to the ballpark. Near their trailer, farther up the driveway, Karin will sit at a child-sized table, her orange cat curled around her ankles, chanting the carnival litany, and above her will be the garish canvas signs. She will offer the newcomers passage to the exhibit, but they’ll shake their heads tolerantly and walk on toward the baseball stadium, where the lights blaze furiously.

“I dream of things that never were,” says Jerry.

I spot a car with Ohio plates; in the dusk, its occupants resemble Wandalie and Frank, the holdup man and the waitress from Cleveland.

I am smiling convulsively. Whoever controls the strings must be chuckling, treating me like the heroine in the
Perils of Pauline
. By midnight, if the cars keep arriving, I’ll have more than enough money to bring the mortgage up to date.

“I’ll go and see what those cars want,” says Gypsy.

“What cars?” says Richard.

The game tonight has been a double-header, and, when it is finally over, Richard and I walk out on the field. My fists are clenched, my tongue a piece of rock chipping against my teeth. As we make our way toward the plate, I feel like a schoolchild commanded to an audience with the principal, who, until now, has been only a rumor. Richard and I stand close together, side-by-side like the figures representing the Gemini astrological sign.