The Brothers K (100 page)

S
taring hard at the candles, the shyest man among us had sucked up the courage to speak first. “I’m no ninety-pound weakling,” Uncle Truman said. “But the first time we shook, that fella and me,” he pointed at the blue box, “he about crushed my hand to ribbons. He was that strong.”

With that, Truman blushed red as the roses and dipped to his beer like a shy toddler to its mother’s neck. And I never heard him speak again all day.

Bet half surprised me with an old Memory Verse: “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

This seemed to create some emotion among the Adventists, but things still felt a little abstract to me. Then Freddy came out with this:

“Something Papa once told me, which he learned as a kid from his dad, Everett Senior. It’s been on my mind all week. ’Cause most of you know that Papa, he lost—” Her voice faltered. “He lost his dad too when he was about my age. Anyhow …” She drew a huge breath. “A hitting tip, this supposedly was. And Papa warned me it was nonsense. Except the thing is, he said, when you lose your dad young, even his nonsense—” Her voice stopped again. “Even his nonsense starts to make sense, and maybe even to help you. That’s what he told me. So here’s some of Papa’s nonsense, for my brothers and sister and me.”

Another big breath.

“He said there are two ways for a hitter to get the pitch he wants. The simplest way is not to want
any
pitch in particular. But the best way, he said—which sounds almost the same, but is really very different—is to want the very pitch you’re gonna get. Including the one you can handle.
But also the one that’s gonna strike you out looking. And even the one that’s maybe gonna bounce off your head.”

The general reaction to this speech was incomprehension, though toward the end some listeners began to shoot Freddy sympathetic glances:
Oh dear
, their faces said.
The girl is babbling. Crazy with grief, the poor thing
. But Peter, Natasha and G. Q. Durham all nodded when she’d finished. In fact, Gale looked moved to the verge of tears. But then he’d looked that way all day.

Uncle Marv spoke up next. “But Smokey Chance, as I liked to call’m,” he said, “never bounced a pitch off a head in his life, except by accident.”

“If you call stickin’ your noggin in front of a fastball on purpose an accident,” Aunt Mary Jane put in.

“Using the bean,” Marv said. “Using the bean to get Laura and Hugh together. That’s what I call it.”

There were baffled smiles from those who didn’t know the old family story, and patient sighs from those who did. The smell of roses was overwhelming.

“He hurt people on purpose, though,” Johnny Hultz said. “Hurt our feelings, that is. First time I faced him up in Tacoma I poked a wrong-field double, and was cocky enough to think it wasn’t pure luck. So the next ten or twelve or, let’s be honest, thirty times I faced him, he popped and grounded and fanned me silly. And talk about the pitch that gets you looking! Papa T threw third strikes that left you standin’ there like a fencepost by the side of the road.”

Tony Baldanos—now an ex-Tug and aspiring photographer—said, “Best pitcher I ever caught. Best pitching coach I ever watched work. Best coach or baseball mind, period. Present company included.” He gave his ex-manager, John Hultz, a pointed little smile.

“But even Hugh,” said Papa’s friend Roy, “couldn’t teach me how to fly-fish.”

“He taught me,” Freddy said, giving Roy a poke.

“Me too,” I said.

“Some people are just unteachable,” said Coach Hultz, smiling back at Tony.

G. Q
. Durham tried for the day’s only soliloquy, but it just didn’t pan out.

“My job with the Cornshuckers, down in Oklahoma,” he began, “was to analyze junk, and if possible use it. ‘No offense,’ I says to Hugh Chance, first time we met, ‘but that’s why you’re here. White Sox say
you’re junk, Senators say it, and I wouldn’t wonder but what you’re thinkin’ I’m
junk
yourself. But I say bullroar, Hubert! I say ballplayers are the car, not the engine. And when the engine stops runnin’, you don’t junk the car. You fix it. That’s why you’re here.’”

There were smiles over this beginning, from those who didn’t know Gale. He was waving his beer around, foaming and overflowing it. But I’d seen at once that he wasn’t trying to be funny. He was furious. Furious with grief. “‘Hubert,’ I told him, that very first time, ‘you
reek
. Bum arm, diaper stench, bad attitude and all, you reek so bad of baseball I don’t see how you walk down a street on legs. Seems to me you ought to
roll
…’”

Then the tears did start rolling, and Gale’s face and speech fell to pieces as he added, “But what I never, I wish I … I never had a son o’ my own, you know. An’ you were the—he was my … if there was one thing on this earth I never wanted, it was to outlive my Hubert!”

With that he fell against Irwin and began to sob like a distraught child. And Irwin, with his wooden face, just stood there, stiffly holding him. Then Peter said, “I’d like to offer a little prayer.”

Heads bowed fast, if only to escape the sight of poor Gale.

“I wouldn’t dare imitate a certain style,” Peter began, staring at the blue box. “The loss of what’s inimitable—that’s what we’re here to mourn. But … but here’s the prayer part now, and this is a quote. Give us grateful hearts … our Father …” His voice broke on the last two words, as did most everyone’s self-control, till we were pretty much all trying to hold each other together. “Give us grateful hearts,” he croaked. “And make us ever mindful of the needs of others. Through Christ, Papa’s and Mama’s Lord, amen. And through love for each other, amen. And through our sufferings, if that’s what it takes, and our romances, our good housekeeping and our ballplaying, our friendships and our enemyships. Whatever works best, our Father. Make us mindful through that. It’s time to eat now. That’s where you’d end this prayer, Papa, so that’s where I’ll end it too. There’s nothing much left to say but the obvious anyhow. Which is we loved you. And always will. Amen.”

“Amen!” sobbed Gale.

“Amen,” Irwin murmured, still expressionless, but still stiffly holding him.

Amen.

“Do
not be so anxious after doing something,” said Krishna. “Sorrow follows happiness, then happiness follows sorrow. One man thinks that it is men who slay each other; another that it is Time, or Fate. This is the language of the world. The truth is—”

“The truth is,” Yudishthira shouted, “that like a straw mat concealing a deep pit, your dharma is too often a mask for deceit. You may be God incarnate, but in a hundred years I could not exhaust the tale of your felonies if I spoke day and night!”

“Be calm,” Krishna said. “The wind is not stained by the dust it blows away.”

“I am calm!” roared Yudishthira
.

—
Mahabharata

I
n November 1971, Peter moved into a dive of a boardinghouse right in downtown Camas, then applied, and was accepted, for a graveyard-shift job at the Crown Zellerbach papermill. “What’ll you be doing?” Mama asked when he first mentioned the job.

“Loading car-sized rolls of paper onto train cars with a giant forklift,” he said.

“You could be injured, even killed,” she told him.

“So could the guys who’ve been working there for years,” he replied.

“They’re used to machinery. You’re used to books.”

Peter shrugged. “That’s why I took the job.”

“Listen to me,” Mama said firmly. “I think I see what you’re up to. But you’re not your father, and you’re not his replacement. You’ve helped us through a terrible time, and I’ll always be grateful. But you’ve got your own beliefs, Peter. And your college, I hope, to finish. You’ve got your own life to live. So if you took that job for me, or the twins, or Irwin, you can just go quit right now.”

“I listened, Mama,” Peter said, smiling. “Now it’s your turn, okay?”

She scowled, but kept quiet.

“You’re right about books. They’re what I know. And I probably will go back and finish my degree sometime. But when I was growing up here, I didn’t just skip out on church. I skipped having a hometown. I skipped the woods when they were standing, and swimming in Lackamas Lake. I skipped the Wind and the Washougal. I tried to skip the tedious things too—like dirty dishes, and the weeds in the flower beds. I still can’t fix a toaster. Can’t tune a car. I was sincere in all of this. I really believed that traveling light was the fastest way to truth, and that plugs, points and toasters were for those without spiritual longing, those with nothing better to do. But the things I skipped kept getting bigger, till somehow it even made sense to me to skip having brothers and sisters, and Papa and you. ‘One-pointedness’ is what I called it. And I was sincere even in that. But last spring, in India, I found out very suddenly that every single thing I’d skipped had left a blank place inside me. Not a sharpened point, or an emptiness. Just a dull, amorphous area that couldn’t see or feel. By seeking a dharma that began where Camas ended, I had packed up and moved to a nowhere. Which left me pretty well useless. So that’s why I’m driving the forklift, Mama. Not to replace anybody. Just to fill in some blanks. To begin to be from a somewhere. Is that okay with you?”

Mama didn’t nod or smile. It was just too soon. When any of us said or did anything she thought Papa would especially like, those became the very things that sent her reeling. But she did manage to murmur, “It’s very much okay with me.”

M
yshkin E. Lee was born in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, on November 30, 1971, and within a week (so his ecstatic father informed us) became a prodigy in both literature and art.

The claim was not entirely groundless. Within a week of his birth Myshkin really did begin to communicate directly with his incarcerated pop—via finger-paintings. The way he did it, though, was by hanging half asleep in a cloth sling while Natasha dabbled his limp limbs in dabs of paint she’d scattered across a big sheet of butcher paper. The tiny hand-, foot- and dimpled knee-prints thus created were just the literature Everett longed to read, however. So when he began to perceive—and to lecture his fellow cons upon—the “obvious deliberation” and “idiosyncratic flair” his son poured into his “work,” even the most irascible of them finally learned to nod at the paintings and say fine, what the hell, okay, Everett, the kid’s a bleeding prodigy.

In a p.s. to one such “letter,” Natasha spontaneously added a life-sized full-on blue-and-green finger-paint print of her belly and breasts, just to show Everett what birth and lactation had done to her, shape- and size-wise. According to one reliable eyewitness—Moonfish, by name—the erotic dream and nocturnal emission this work of art inspired in my brother blasted a hole through the cinderblock above his cot, and five lonely Mexicans made a clean escape back home to their señoritas.

T
hough he’d recovered his speech, his health and a slightly thicker version of his old physique, Irwin’s old spark and sparkle just weren’t coming back. He never went anywhere unless we coaxed him. He never instigated a conversation, and when we tried to, he usually gave monosyllabic replies. He remained unemployed, possibly unemployable, and for two months after Papa’s death just sat around the house. Then, in January 1972—without a word to anyone but Peter (from whom he borrowed the tuition money)—he suddenly signed up for two different welding classes at the local community college.

“That’s good!” Mama and Linda both told him. “Welders make good money.”

Irwin didn’t agree, disagree, or try to explain. He just began, entirely on his own, to study woodstoves.

For weeks he did nothing but read up on the things—every single evening, far into the night. Linda didn’t seem to find this obsessiveness much preferable to the nothingness that preceded it. I felt relieved just to know he
could
read.

After a few weeks of this study he began to leave the House at dawn and spend entire days loitering around a couple of small Portland woodstove manufacturers. He also started scrounging—again with funds borrowed from Peter—for secondhand welding tools, reject sheet metal and a lot of inscrutable, clunky-looking equipment. Back home in the evenings he still ignored his family completely. But he no longer just sat there: he doodled on a sketch pad now, hour after hour, drawing a lot of strange-looking diagrams and stove designs.

His welding classes still had several weeks to go when—again consulting no one—he cleared off Papa’s old workbench in the back of the garage, assembled his inadequate welding tools and materials, and began trying to piece together his first crude stove. I was living with Amy in a cabin up the Columbia, and still found it almost impossible to visit the vacuum Papa had left back home, so Irwin’s progress, or lack of it, went unremarked by me. Mama and the twins didn’t pay much attention either, except to say over and over that they hoped he didn’t blow himself up. Peter’s thought on the stoves was that, practical or not, anything that helped reacquaint him with gross reality was to the good. As for Linda, she’d gotten pregnant again (a huge surprise to everyone but Bet and Everett), and the prospect of providing for two kids and a stove-obsessed automaton had sent her scrambling back to school for a general equivalency diploma, with hopes of a realtor’s license somewhere down the line. Her situation also began to put an edge on her previously rather spongy personality. When Irwin failed to even respond to her request that he watch Nash during her school hours, for instance, she began to just stick Nash in a stroller, roll him wordlessly into the garage, and let his screams bring Irwin out of his work stupor. The funny thing was, once Irwin fitted Nash with a little pair of industrial earplugs and handed him a few tools to pound on his stroller with, he’d sit there babbling and banging and watching his dad for hours.