Somewhere I Belong (30 page)

The crowd went silent.

“Why'd he miss?” I asked.

“That's what I wanna know,” Uncle Jim said.

The crowd buzzed in discontent. I was beginning to think Ruth
wasn't the baseball hero people had made him out to be. Aunt Mayme leaned toward Uncle George and said, “Have you ever seen Babe Ruth strike out?”

“Never.”

“Maybe he's just trying to put Settlemire off,” Uncle Jim said.

“Look at the score,” Uncle George said.

I was close enough to see the serious look on Settlemire's face and Ruth's steady, confident unconcern. I was starting to get the impression that Aunt Mayme was right—that maybe Ruth was just fooling Settlemire. Something told me that the King of Homeruns was going to show Boston's pitcher with the next swing of his bat. I sure didn't want to return to Prince Edward Island and announce that I had seen Babe Ruth strike out.

The man behind me stood up and shouted, “Hey, Babe, show us
what you got.”

From the bleachers across the field, someone hollered, “Yeah, Babe, blast one outta here!”

Ruth adjusted his ball cap and glanced at the crowd. He gripped his bat, shoulder height, and stared hard at Settlemire.

Settlemire buried the ball in his glove and took a single step back.

The park went silent.

I held my breath and grabbed Larry's arm.

Settlemire's arm went back, he raised his knee, put out a foot, and heaved the ball. It soared toward Ruth. Ruth stepped into the pitch and the ball connected with an ear-splitting crack. It flew over Settlemire and Taitt, in the outfield, and disappeared over the trees and the houses behind them.

“It's outta here!” Stonewall Jackson said.

We all went wild. There was such a din that even Uncle George
covered his ears as we stood and cheered. A group of boys that had been hanging out at the gate chased the ball out onto the street. We found out, later, that it had landed on Franklyn Street, four blocks away.

At the bottom of the sixth inning, just before sunset, Lou Gehrig took his turn at bat and hit a homer into the gloom. In the end, the Everett Blues lost to the Boston Red Sox 12 to 2. But we didn't care. We had come to see Babe Ruth and would have watched him play street ball in a back alley with crab apples and a stick. I couldn't wait to brag about it to the guys back home.

By Uncle George's calculations, the baseball game had raised the ten
thousand dollars he had hoped it would; of this, Ma was to receive one thousand dollars. As an added bonus, Aunt Mayme had bought Larry and me each a new baseball and Babe Ruth had signed them after the game. Three days later, Uncle George drove Uncle Jim, Larry, and me to North Boston Station and made us promise to come again soon.

As sad as I was about leaving Everett, I realized how lucky I had been to see Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and two of America's best baseball teams in the same park I had played in since I could remember. Uncle Jim called the game “one of them lifetime experiences,” and it surely was. Even more importantly, Ma would tell us, years later, that if it weren't for the generosity of all those famous ball players and the money she had received from that baseball game in Glendale Park, she would not have been able to keep us kids together. She would, later, use it to buy us a farm on Prince Edward Island, when I had really hoped that she would take us back to Everett.

I felt confused as I boarded the train for Prince Edward Island. As much as I had yearned for home these past months, now I wasn't sure where “home” really was. Everett was familiar, but it also felt crowded. And now that I had so much responsibility on the Island, my old life felt kind of empty and my old friends seemed sort of childish. In my new life on Prince Edward Island, the good outweighed the bad most of the time. Especially when I thought about how Pat Jr. was now becoming
my best friend and when I pictured Maggie MacIntyre's pretty face
smiling at me as I led her out of that well. Then there were Uncle Jim, Granny, Gert, Thomas, and Lu. But as the train pulled away from the station, feelings of apprehension about what I was to face there set in.

It was mainly Old Dunphy that had me worried. I knew I wouldn't be seeing him all summer except at Sunday Mass. Apparently he wouldn't even be dropping around Granny's for his dinners every other Friday.
Even so, I would have to face him in September. More than that, I
would be stuck with him until the end of ninth grade, when I would finally be leaving for Charlottetown to finish high school. And judging
by how angry he had been over the castor oil and the cider in the
water pail, those next two years promised to be worse than anything I had experienced until then. And I had dragged Pat Giddings Jr. in on it and got him in trouble too. The fact that Larry had finished ninth grade and would be going to Prince of Wales School in Charlottetown meant he wouldn't be there to keep an eye on the situation. My only hope was that the summer vacation would be long enough to cool Old Dunphy down.

When we pulled into Montague Station, the first thing we reported to Ma was Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig's home runs. Nobody said anything about their team losing. Ma didn't ask. The first thing Ma reported back was that Mr. MacPhee had completed his investigation. It seems that he had already made up his mind when Jaynie Giddings had got on the telephone to him. She had got word about Old Dunphy's improprieties at the church picnic—about the way he had hovered around Bridget MacGee at the fish pond, how he had put a hand on her. Jaynie reported every second-hand detail that she had received over the party line. And now the school inspector had made it official: Mr. Dunphy was being replaced by Genevieve MacCormack; he would be transferring her from Boughton Island to Northbridge Road School in September.

“Permanent leave of absence—that's what they're calling it,” Ma
said. “They want to make it sound like maybe his polio is acting up. He seems a bit young for a permanent leave of absence, but I suppose they want to let the man maintain some dignity. It sure is a delicate way of saying he's fired.”

The next thing I knew, Granny was pressing Uncle Jim's Eaton's catalogue suit, and he and Larry were putting spit 'n' shine to the jaunting wagon. And as I stood by the fence spiffin' up Lu, a single cloud drifted overhead. The sun's rays lit it up like a shining orb and cast warmth across the barnyard. It reminded me of the last time I saw Dad.

Acknowledgements

A number of people whose memories dated back to the Great
Depression helped with my research. I would like to thank Phyllis Carr, Gertrude Giddings, my father, Paul Landrigan, Joe and Ella Landrigan, Eleanor McKinnon, Rita and Neil Lanigan, and Senator
Archibald Johnstone. I am grateful for the assistance of UPEI's
Robertson Library, the Prince Edward Island Archives, the Nova Scotia Archives, the Lunenburg Public Library, Dalhousie University's Killam Library, and the Archdiocese of Boston.

I am also indebted to Russell Barton, William Kowalski and the Nova Scotia Writer's Federation Mentorship Programme, David Adams Richards and the Humber School for Writers, and Edward Rich for helping me through the process of turning a true story into a work of fiction.

I would like to thank the readers whose thoughtful feedback
helped develop the characters and keep the story arc on track. They are Veronica Butler, Debra Forget, Ellen Gordon, Theresa
Gilman, Ellen Hunt, Karin Janigan, Jill Keddy-Smith, Mary Knickle, Janet E. Landrigan, Valerie Morrison, Gill Osmond, John Payzant, Tela Purcell, Linda Thompson and Christine Welldon.

I would also like to thank Penelope Jackson and Marianne Ward, whose skillfull editing made this book much better than it would otherwise be, and Matt Reid, the results of whose imagination and artistic talent grace the cover.

Finally, I would like to thank my publisher, Terrilee Bulger, and
Acorn Press Canada. Publishing is a risky business nowadays.
Thanks so much for taking a chance on Somewhere I Belong.