The Brothers K (26 page)

A
t the very first six o’clock no-Papa supper we had bowed our heads and sat there for some time before we realized that Papa’s chair was empty, and that no prayer, no trusty little footbridge, was forthcoming. If she’d been incredibly wise I think that Mama would have let that spontaneous, unified silence serve as our prayer. What she did instead was open her eyes, scowl at Papa’s chair for a moment, then clear her throat and announce that grace-saying would, in his absence, be a duty shared by all. Like a poker player, she dealt first to her left. As a result, for three nights running Everett and Peter and I maintained the tried-and-true tradition of the pell-mell request for
gratefulheartsourFather
. Then the duty shifted to the other side of the table, where Freddy, Irwin and Bet lurked, with weird devotion in their hearts, and God-knows-what in their muzzy little brains.

Winifred’s turn came first, and began most inauspiciously: wearing an involuntarily red face and a voluntarily sullen scowl, she whined, “Dear Jesus, oh,
Mama!
I don’t know how!”

“Say any prayer you like, sweetheart,” Mama said reassuringly.

Freddy gave it a moment’s thought—or more likely a moment’s no-thought—then squeezed her eyes and fists shut, reeled off a deft rendition of “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” and wrapped it up in a style touchingly reminiscent of Papa by chanting, in a single exhalation, “An’
blessPapaWinnieEvertKadePete MamaDawmaBet’n’GomorrahAmen”
(listing us, as always, in order of personal preference). Opening her eyes again, she turned to her idol, Irwin, hoping for a word or look of approval. When instead a delighted but thunderous peal of laughter came crashing down on her head, she burst into tears.

Mama managed to shut Irwin up and calm Freddy most of the way down, but by the time she’d done so Freddy had figured out that “Now I Sit Me Down to Eat” might have been more appropriate for the occasion, so she wanted to give it another shot. Mama sighed, and I’m sure would have told Freddy to save it for next time if Everett hadn’t started grumbling about his food getting cold. Unfortunately for all of us, Mama
seemed to think she was omnipotent at times, or at least refused to back away from such preternaturally difficult tasks as teaching Everett to stop grumbling. Zapping him with a pointed scowl, she gave Freddy the go-ahead.

I noticed that Freddy looked hard at Papa’s empty chair before scrinching her eyes shut. And in light of what followed, I think she must have been contemplating some of the changes that had come over him the past year: how often he was still sweating and blotchy-faced with fatigue when she kissed him goodnight, for instance; or how his hair had begun to silver, as though he was exposed daily to a snow that did not fall upon the rest of us. Be that as it may, what she blurted out this time was “Dear Jesus.
Papa hurts.”

And you could feel the words fly through the room like an archer’s arrow, piercing hearts. For a moment there was silence. Then we grew aware of the wind and the pouring rain outside, and realized in slow unison that Papa was out there in it, exhausted from his day’s work at the mill, yet so “hurt,” so wounded by his life that he was able to take solace in a bucketful of rubber-coated baseballs. I believe, today, that the ability to find such solace is a wonderful thing. But for some reason it struck us all as pure tragedy that winter night.
“Papa hurts,”
Freddy repeated, and a second arrow pierced us. “And he doesn’t look or smell right either,” she added. “So
please
, dear Jesus, whatever it is that’s hurting him, make it go away!”

She hesitated a moment, checked our faces, decided she’d succeeded, and mumbled, “Amen, I guess.” And no one laughed or even smiled at this. In fact the person most likely to—Irwin—was on the verge of tears.

That was the first night.

T
he truth is, Papa was hurting less and less. He’d been running six miles every other night for months now. His nicotine fits had faded. And though his pitching was still crazy and he still swore about it, he would just as often whistle, or joke with himself, or even sing as he pitched—and I’d noticed that there was less and less correlation between his sound effects and the accuracy of his pitches. Normal baseball results no longer seemed to matter to him. If he was throwing strikes which the dead thumb twisted into wild pitches, the hell with it, he’d whistle anyway. The truth is, as the weeks passed Papa seemed to take increasing pleasure
in everything he did in the shed. Even the swearing and wall-punching eventually began to sound like something he enjoyed. He got better at them too.

This gradual change of focus made a deep impression on me. If Papa had known that Everett and I were out there spying on him, the effect wouldn’t have been the same: his knowledge of our presence would have reduced his shedball into a hackneyed lesson in “Never say die!” But because he believed he was alone, his efforts were not just an athletic Aesop fable. They were a genuine, two-sided battle—like a ballgame is supposed to be. They were Papa’s two-sided struggle to reconcile who he had been (the finest athlete a lot of people had ever seen) with who he had become (a millworking, shedball-playing father of six). And the key to that reconciliation grew more evident every day.

I could call it “detachment,” or “purity of effort,” or “a refusal to judge by results.” But as I watched from the hedge I felt no need to squeeze it into a formula. I was learning not by words like these, but by the nonsensical songs and babblings and sound effects that accompanied Papa’s destinationless pitches out into the night, that there are genuine alternatives to the black-and-white categories into which most of us dump our lives. I was learning not by thinking, but through a father/son osmosis, that winning and losing, success and failure, are like the chalk strike zones I’d watched Papa draw. There was no question that shedball wasn’t aimed at the Bigs, or even at the bush. It was just an oddball backyard hobby built upon the shards of Papa’s old baseball dreams and accomplishments. But while many ex-ballplayers hoard their shards, sucking on them and staining their lives with them the way Papa had done with his Lucky Strikes, Papa himself had finally crunched his shards underfoot, found a new and pure kind of effort to make, and commenced punching walls, swearing, joking, whistling and living his life as if the past had passed. And in the present he was surviving. Perhaps even thriving. He didn’t know. It wasn’t his business to know. His business was to simply keep making the effort.

T
he next Papa-less night at grace time it was Irwin’s turn. And he too was moved by the emptiness of Papa’s chair and by another spring rainstorm to put in a word to the Powers That Be on Papa’s behalf. Unfortunately, he chose as his elocutionary model our stalwart pastor, Elder
Denzel D. Babcock. Bowing his head, flaring his nostrils, drawing a deep breath and gripping both temples in his big right hand, he squinched his eyes shut and suddenly boomed,
“LORD!”
And when Mama lurched halfway out of her chair, it was only a matter of time before Everett, Peter and I went off like champagne corks.

“Of course I believe in You to the
hilt!”
Irwin emoted. “You know that as well as I do!
Better
than I do even! You know
everything
, Lord. I’d be the dead last of Your servants to question that! …”

His style had a certain Jimmy Stewart-ish sincerity to it. But sincerity at triple volume is something else again. Though Bet and Freddy were gawking at him with admiration, or at least awe, the rest of his congregation was in serious trouble: there was a sound like paper tearing in the back of Everett’s throat; Peter had covered his face with both hands; I was panting like a dog having puppies; and somebody’s stifled hysteria (Mama’s!?) was shaking the table so violently that milk was sloshing down the sides of all our glasses. Then Irwin let it all hang out:

“… But out in the
darkest, blackest
streets o’ Camas Washington tonight, Lord, out in that godawful
cold
and
wind
and
rain
, a solitary man is runnin’ his lonely
guts
out! …”

(The twins remained enthralled, but Everett had turned sea-anemone purple, Mama’s head was bent so low her neck looked broken, I was making the noises of the puppies being born, and Peter was sliding down out of his chair like wax running down a candle holder.)

“… And WHY?” Irwin bellowed. “Why is that man out there in the
cold
and
black
and
dark?
I’ll tell You why, Lord! He won’t admit it. Not to us. Maybe not even to himself. But the reason that man is out there tonight is he’s tryin’ to
fight
and
claw
and
scratch
his way back into
baseball
, Lord! We see it plain as the nose on our faces! And that is why I
beseech
thee Lord God Christ Almighty! That is why I am on my knees …” (He flung his chair back and plunked down on his knees.) “That is why I am saying that it’d be
great
thing, just a
dandy, dandy
thing, if You and Your Father decided to help that
lonely! wet! running!
man win his long dark fight.
Thank
You Lord! Amen!”

Bet and Freddy burst out in wild applause. Peter vanished under the table. Everett choked, reached for his milk, accidentally knocked it over, then let his face plop down into the puddle. Mama jumped up and ran to the kitchen closet—I thought for a mop—but instead she just shut herself inside, and an eerie rasping, sobbing laughter began leaking out through the door. My newborn puppies and I threw back our heads and
howled. Irwin just sat there grinning, perfectly pleased with all of our reactions.

O
ne cold damp evening in early March, Peter slipped out of the house and joined us in the hedge. He looked embarrassed as we made room for him: espionage went against his noble nature. He’d been as interested as us in Papa’s new hobby from the start, but being a private person himself, he had more respect for Papa’s privacy.

To my surprise, Everett didn’t tease him. Maybe he was as curious as I was to hear what Peter would say. We watched fifteen or twenty pitches without saying a word. Unlike Everett and me, Pete was a hard-core ballplayer, and so felt no need to speak. After a while, though, I saw him cock his head, scowl, and turn toward the laundromat parking lot—where what sounded like a horse was clomping across the asphalt toward us. “Hey!” it called out way too loudly. “Where
are
you guys?”

Peter stuck a hand out. In crawled Irwin.

It was Winnie’s first visit too. His reason for refusing to spy had been that the Bible says “Honor thy father.” But Everett had finally convinced him that spying on Papa’s secrets
was
doing him a kind of honor. “Cozy little spot you got here!” he said, wiping some greenish hedge gunk off the side of his face.

“Whisper!”
Everett told him.

“Who’s watching the twins?” I asked.

“Mama’s got ’em in the bath.”

“Was that a fastball or curve?” Peter asked.

“That was the slider,” Everett said.

“Too straight for the slider,” Peter argued.

“Too slow for a fastball,” I said.

“We call it the Hangman,” Everett explained, “because it hangs. It’s the best he can do, Pete.”

“I see,” said Peter.

“I don’t!” Irwin blurted. “How can he play ball without the trusty ol’ slider?”

“He’s
not
playing ball!” Everett snapped. “Can’t you see? He’s farting around in a manurey old shed. And keep your voice down.”

“He’s not farting around,” I said defensively. “He’s staying in shape.
He’s doing something besides smoking. He’s keeping his head on straight.”

“Which is more’n I can say for us!” Irwin said. “Ha! We’re fuckin’
nuts
, hunkerin’ out here in a filthy ol’ hedge!”

Irwin’s cussing always sounded forced to me. He hated cussing, normally, but he loved Everett and Everett cussed, so around his oldest brother Irwin did what he hated out of love. “Go back inside if you don’t like it,” Everett told him.

kerBlamm!
A pitch got away from Papa and slammed the bare garage wall.

“Mmnffmunffle!”
went Irwin the same instant: it would have been a full shout, but Everett had lunged over and covered his mouth just in time.

“The Heater!” I whispered, feeling as proud as if I’d thrown it.

“But watch,” Everett told them. “He usually tries the Kamikaze next.”

Peter and Irwin shifted around for a better view, and sure enough, out into the light flew what looked like another Heater—till it snapped, like a yo-yo on a string, down into the dirt in front of the plate. Peter let out a soft whistle.

“Like a Whiffleball in a head wind!” Irwin said, when Everett let his mouth out.

“Does he ever control it?” Pete asked.

“One in six is a strike,” Everett told him. “Three in six are WPs.”

“What are WPs?” Irwin asked.

“Wombat Poops,” said Peter.

“Winnie Peckers,” Everett said.

“Wild Pitches,” I told him, but by then he just snorted and refused to believe me.

“How do you s’pose he throws it?” Peter wondered.

“We think it’s some sort of two-fingered fastball,” Everett said.

“Could be a scuffball,” Peter said. “Or even a spitter, the way it moves.”

Throughout our long spying careers, Everett and I hadn’t even considered these nefarious possibilities—but Everett immediately began nodding his head sagely, so that Peter would think we had.

“Looked like a fuckin’
beanball
to me!” Irwin blurted.

“You’re too
noisy,”
I whispered.

“And too full of ‘fuckin’s,’” Everett said. “You don’t hear your older wiaer brothers talking that trash. What kind of Christian are you?”