The Brothers K (18 page)

Be that as it may, in March 1963, when Reynolds Metals announced a plan to raze and burn all the old dairy buildings, Papa borrowed Roy’s pickup and trailer, got to the barns before the bulldozers did, salvaged a huge heap of cow-kicked, weather-beaten lumber, and hauled his mysterious booty into our backyard. He spent all day Sunday sorting and stacking it, and after dinner went out again, to make eight knee-deep holes in the lawn with a posthole digger. When my brothers and I asked what he was up to, he mumbled, “Buildin’ project.” When we asked what kind of project, he grunted, “Shed.” When we asked what kind of shed, he muttered, “Wooden.” Obviously, he didn’t feel like talking about it. But this shed was the first thing he’d tried to build since clear back before he
crushed his thumb. And in the following weeks, every night after running, he worked on it till he was ready to drop, pulling rusty nails out of boards, cementing eight pressure-treated fifteen-foot four-by-fours into the postholes, framing in three walls, nailing up the old cedar siding. So naturally we were curious. And naturally our fourfold questioning got pretty obnoxious. The interesting thing, though, was that the longer Papa slaved at his mystery shed, the more cheerful he grew, and the more uncharacteristically skilled at treating our badgering as a kind of mental Ping-Pong game, poinking back silly answers as fast as we could fire off questions:

“Come on! What’s this shed
for?”
Everett asked (for the fifth or sixth time) the night we helped him nail on the roof.

“It’s an Indian burial lodge,” Papa answered, “for Cleveland’s whole team.”

“Not really!” Irwin cackled.

“No, not really,” he said, driving a nail home. “Really it’s a walk-in closet to hide my cross in, so the neighbors won’t have to watch me out here dyin’ on it.”

“Don’t tell them pests and yo-yos,” I said. “I’m the one who’s been helping the most. So tell me. And tell the
truth.”

“Oooooh,” went Papa, the tenpenny nails dangling like galvanized fangs from his mouth. “The
troof!
Ofay. Here id is. Dis sed, Kade, is a healf fpa, a houf of worfhip, an inftitufun of higher learning, an’ a cuftom-fented guefthouf for Irwin’f buddy, Uncle Marf.”

While Irwin howled, Peter said, “I don’t want to bother you, Papa, so I won’t ask what it is. I’d like to know. But only when you feel like telling us.”

“That’s so thoughtful,” Papa said, “that I’ll tell you right now. This structure, Peter, is going to be an extremely bush little baseball stadium. Unless you ask me again while pretending not to. Then it’s gonna be your inheritance.”

P
apa’s shed, when it was finished, was twenty feet long, sixteen feet wide and twelve feet tall. It had north, south and west walls—all of them windowless and doorless—and on the east end there was not only no window or door, there was no wall. The “floor” was the dying grass and granite-hard, kid-packed dirt of the backyard, with a few dog-maimed plastic soldiers, lost marbles, Barbie doll limbs and chunks of totaled Tonka trucks inadvertently thrown in for texture. There were no shelves inside his shed, no benches, no furniture, not even a nail to hang a coat
on. There was a view: out the open east end you could see the blistered backside of our garage and, above that, a row of eight identical frosted bathroom windows on the second floor of the Fir Haven Apartments (a yardless, treeless, chicken-cooplike structure named, I guess, for the old-growth Douglas firs they’d cut down in order to build it). And there was light: a pair of naked 100-watt bulbs dangled from opposite corners of the ceiling, casting the kind of garish light that made you want to confess to crimes you hadn’t even committed. There was fragrance too: despite the missing wall, the smell of antique cow crap was so intense inside that it was a relief to step out and smell unadulterated Crown Z papermill stench instead.

To sum up, Papa’s shed, when it was finished, was three-quarters of a large, malodorous wooden box without heat, without paint, without charm, and without ostensible purpose. Which was why I felt forced, the first time I stood in it alone after dark, to conclude that what I’d taken to be Papa’s new lease on life might in fact have been a quiet but complete loss of sanity. The odd thing was, this notion didn’t much bother me. Having spent half my life studying the things that schoolteachers, church preachers and papermill and aluminum plant owners considered “sane,” I figured Papa’s sanity couldn’t do us any more harm than everyone else’s sanity was already doing.

Laura Chance got pregnant quick as could be, “IF NOT QUICKER!” as her brother Uncle Marv liked to joke, the infant in question turning out to be my oldest brother Everett Marshall Chance, named after his granddad of the same name born January 21, 1948. So as the Good Book promised, the Lord took one Everett away, but soon gained Himself another. Meanwhile the proud young dad had turned Pro!

Still known as Smoke, Smoke alias Hugh Chance started out with Medford in the Single A California League, which was weird since Medford was in Oregon not California. But at least somebody down there finally coached him how to throw a slider, which once he got the hang of he had a fine season with inspite of him being the youngest man on the team. Going 11 and 6 with a 3.46 ERA, winning five
straight games at the end of the season, young Smoke also hit .298 with six home runs as a combination pitcher/pinch-hitter that year. Which brings up the touchy subject of:
Why on Earth didn’t his lunkhead coaches switch the Big Fella
to the
outfield
to
keep that booming bat
in the
line-up?,
the answer to which remains a mystery depending on who you ask. Why leave a .298 power hitter playing pitcher where he bats one game out of five is one side of the coin, for sure. But how do you tell a kid with great speed and control who just went 11 and 6 and won five straight to quit pitching is the other side. HOME-RUNS WIN BALLGAMES! says one train of thought. BUT HAY! PITCHERS WIN PENNANTS! says the other train.

My brother Everett tries to whitewash the situation into black and white by having fits to this day over what a great outfielder Papa would of been if he’d of been an outfielder. But to me this seems like one of these Why Should The Chicken Cross The Road? kind of deals. Look at Everett himself for example. Here sits a five-foot-six-inch-a-hundred-thirty-pounder who goes on trying to play CATCHER for gosh sakes instead of something realistic like second base for his size, all because of his childhood dream of growing up to catch Papa in a Pro Game! And he calls himself smart and logical! “I’M STILL GROWING!” he screams at me all the time. “AND ANYHOW YOUR HERO YOGI BERRA IS ONLY FIVE FOOT SEVEN!” he screams, as if he too is some sensational freak of nature. But why am I even saying this, Mr. Hergert? You had Everett. You know what he’s like. Everybody’s a big baseball genius except where it comes to themselves is concerned. So Papa stuck with pitching.

In 1948 the White Sox moved Hugh, Laura and tiny Everett clear across country to Stenecktadee New York in the Triple A International League, which Papa says sounds real nifty like they played ball over in Europe and Japan and what not. But what the old International League really was, he says, was a lot of twelve hour bus rides through the moose-infested swamps of New Hampsure, Maine, Quebeck Canada and I don’t remember where all where you ended up pitching in blizzards and black-fly attacks while thirty or forty bored hockey fans swore and threw beer cans at you in French. You hurled your guts out up there though, Hugh says, since you knew if you got sent to the showers you’d either catch Athelete’s Foot or the hot water would be busted or both.

Meanwhile back in Skenechtudee the young baseball-widow of a wife was going even crazier than our hero, what with boredom, fussy
little Everett, not knowing anybody in those parts, and missing Hugh all ganging up on her. About the time she figured she was losing her marbles however she found out she was only pregnant again, this time with young Peter Arthur Chance causing the stomach problems, whose birth in Pullman Washington the following Off-season came six weeks premature November 31, 1948.

Pete was healthy enough for a four-pounder and has since grown into the best ballplayer in the family except maybe Papa as well as the brainiest of the bunch. But the premature delivery business was quite a strain on the young parents at the time. “THIS TWO SONS IN ONE YEAR STUFF HAS GOT TO STOP!” the pooped-out Laura told her tall husband afterwards in a statement quite typical of how well known she was becoming both to Hugh and other ballplayers for her dry sense of humor. No sooner had she said it though, then she got pregnant AGAIN! So maybe God’s sense of humor was even dryer!

Backstepping to the baseball side of things, Skenechtadie was a cellar club Hugh’s freshman season there, and at 9 and 13 with a 4.85 ERA the young prospect more or less just horror-showed his way through the worst year of his baseball history while the last year of money of his guaranteed salary petered out his fingers like so much water under the bridge. Meanwhile the teams’s coaches and players tore at each others’s throats, two managers got fired, and Hugh got beaned twice, once by his own roommate in batting practice, during which he broke his wedding finger because of the ring in one of several fistfights, thereby reeking havoc with his pitching and hitting both. His won-lost record and ERA were second-best on his club that year, but what a club! So in 1949 Hugh got browbeated by the Brass into a stinking one year contract with no raise.

1949, though, turned out to be the sunshine on the other side of the coin there in Stenecktedy, thanks mostly to a new scout in the Sox organization known as Mr. Luigi. A native of Brazil or some such place, Mr. Luigi was an odd little man of strange ways and habits who knew foreign ballplayers like the map of his hand, and Hughs’s whole life cheered up for the better when the little oddball sent up eight new players with names like Manual, Cheechee, Oriolio and Jesus pronounced Hay-soose which he’d dug out of such unherd of places as Cuba, Hadey, The Dominion’s Republic and either Porto or Costo Rico, I always forget which. Of course there English was terrible if it even existed, but they were sensational ballplayers compared to all the big slow white guys and Canadians who stank it up for Skenachtudie
so bad the year before. “Who needs English when you’re winning your first AAA league title?” was what Hugh wanted to know. “Besides which our Spanish wasn’t so hot either!” as the fair-minded Laura points out.

Several of Luigi’s Brown Legions as they came to be known as went on to become Big League Stars, including Rodrigo Something-or-other the great shortstop for The Cubs, I believe, and the catcher Benito Lhosa would of too, Hugh says, if he hadn’t of had only one eye. As for Smoke himself, he claims he still had no change-up, no knuckler, no sinker, no forkball nor any of the tremendous junk he later developed except the slider, and he pitched no better than he did the horrid 9 and 13 year before. Yet on nothing more than sheer guts, willpower, control, brains, talent, youth, grit, determination, plus much better coaching and a whole different ballclub, the fireballing youngster’s Won-Loss Record skied to 14 and 2 by late July, with a 1.99 ERA that led that hitter’s league by about seventeen miles!

Then it came. The Call from the Big Time!
Come on Upstairs and start your first Major League Game
in
September, Big Fella!
cried the Chicago White Sox Braintrust over the phone to Hugh one unforgettable summery evening, I don’t recall the exact date. So wouldn’t you know the Korean War would crank itself up into something serious, and right at that moment young Hugh would get himself drafted!

Of course old Marion Becker Pacifist Chance had an unholy cow when this news ripped home to Pullman. WHERE IS JOHN WILKES BOOTH WHEN WE REALLY NEED HIM? she kept shouting somewhat nastily. She also carried around a big sign on her bicycle bumper (she couldn’t drive a car and still can’t as of yet) that cried
U.S. OUT
OF
NORTH AMERICA!
till somebody slashed her tires all up. Meanwhile Hugh was mailed off to Boot Camp, and Laura, little Everett and teenytiny Pete had to move back to Pullman and live with Marion, what with money shortages and Laura being royally pregnant again.

But poor Laura! Not only did the return to Pullman mean sitting around slaving over a hot stove, two babies, vacuums, ironing and such while pregnant all day, she also had to listen to every last one of Marions’s cows! “FIRST THEY SLAUGHTER MY HUSBAND! THEN THEY CHEAT US OUT OF OUR PENSION! THEN THEY BUTCHER MY SON!” Marion would shriek in Laura’s ripely pregnant direction as if Koreans were already dancing up and down in young
Smoke’s dead brains. Even in an English accent, this sort of talk was not the ticket for a happy healthy pregnancy, so it was during this period that Laura got in the habit of drownding out Marions’s cows by praying rather loudly to herself right there in front of everybody, asking God, Jesus and so forth for strength to ignore her mother-in-law’s cows and save Hugh and her babies from danger, death and the like, which she still does to this day. It was also during this period that Laura started never missing church religiously, which is interesting to notice since it was yours truly inside her, since out of us four brothers I’m the only one who can stand church so far.

The good news, though, was that before Hugh even finished Boot Camp Laura’s fervied prayers for his safety were answered! All Uncle Sam wanted him for, it turned out, was to play ball on an Army baseball team! Strange and wonderful are the ways of prayers and Armies!

O
ne day along about the time the big league teams were moving out of Florida and Arizona and up into the cold with the rest of us, Papa and Roy drove home from the mill an hour early, and out of Roy’s pickup unloaded the first really good clue as to the nature of Papa’s building project: a load of clean topsoil, which they heaped right in the center of the shed’s floorless floor. I knew at that moment that Papa was building a pitcher’s mound in there. And I took some joy in this discovery. My joy was guarded, however, by a dozen or so unanswerable questions which the mound raised, like welts, in my mind. For instance: