Waiting for Teddy Williams Page 5

  “All in the fullness of time, boy,” the Colonel’s voice said as E.A. started to drift off, feeling happy and thrice blessed and dreaming of revenge and baseball.

  7

  MOST VISITORS to Kingdom Common quickly realized that more ardent Red Sox fans could not be found anywhere else in New England. Three signs within the village limits proclaimed the relationship between the baseball fans of the Common and their beloved team.

  Approaching the village from the south on old Route 5, you could not miss the large sign with tall black letters that said, WELCOME TO KINGDOM COMMON, THE CAPITAL OF THE RED SOX NATION. Strangers skeptical of this claim had only to drive another quarter of a mile to the long rectangular green at the heart of the village, with the baseball diamond laid out at its south end, and lift up their eyes not unto the steep hills surrounding the town but to the huge green bulletin board, twenty feet long by fifteen feet high, atop the bat factory, known locally as the Green Monster of Kingdom Common. During the off-season, the Green Monster announced, in white wooden letters a foot and a half high, such uplifting tidings as “236 Accident Free Days” or “Have a Safe New Year” or “Congratulations to Porter Kittredge, Proud Father of an Eleven Pound Future Power Hitter.” But from early April until however deep into the fall the Sox held on before being eliminated by bad luck or injuries or mismanagement in the front office, the giant announcement board looming over the mill was used as a scoreboard.

  The Green Monster of Kingdom Common was tended by Moonface Poulin. In a box about the size of a kitchen wood-box, located behind the sign, Moonface kept his wooden letters and numbers. Nearby lay his tall, homemade, spruce-pole ladder. True, Moon’s grasp of Sox data was more impressive than his spelling. He had never figured out, despite constant reminders, that Chicago was not spelled with two g’s or that the e between the first and second syllables of the Oakland Athletics was superfluous. But Moon more than made up for these unorthodoxies with his unhurried, deliberate style, his quiet aplomb, and his impenetrable, stately demeanor when posting the scores. Even Gran, one morning in the summer of E.A.’s tenth year, watching Moon’s expression out her kitchen window through Gypsy’s rifle scope, could not discern from his features whether the Sox had won the critical rubber game in a three-game series with the Yankees the night before until the numbers went up. NEW YORK 12 SOX 1.

  Gran was so delighted by her team’s humiliating defeat that she inadvertently pulled the trigger of Grandpa Gleason’s rifle. The 30.06 went off inside the kitchen with a thunderous detonation, shattering the window. A hole an inch and a half in diameter instantly appeared in the middle of the letter x in SOX on the Green Monster. Whereupon Moonface won the everlasting admiration of the entire village by simply continuing about his business, which was to add, without missing a beat, YANKS TAKE SOUL POSS. OF 1ST PLACE.

  Yet even in those palmy summers when the Sox were on a tear, the tidings that blazed forth from the Green Monster of Kingdom Common, however encouraging, were viewed by villagers in the context of a sobering third message, this one lettered in red on the abandoned water tank near the railroad trestle over the river just upstream from Gran’s meadow. It said BOSTON RED SOX WORLD CHAMPIONS—1918. And no news that Moonface Poulin could ever relay to the Kingdom from the scoreboard atop the bat factory could counteract the stark truth that the Sox had not won a World Series since then.

  “I am a vengeful fella when need be,” the Colonel was telling E.A. on the day Gran shot the Green Monster. “I’ll endure so much and then no more. John Bull found that out over at Fort Ti. So did the York Staters who proposed to annex Vermont. When the time comes to act, I’ll be all action. Don’t you ever misdoubt it.”

  “Two years have gone by,” E.A. said. “Two years have gone by since I first asked you to do something about Dan Davis. I don’t recall seeing any action yet.”

  Lately Dan had been threatening again to dozer down Gran’s barn with his Blade. But the Colonel had not seen fit to do anything about it, and now fall was in the air once more. At the far end of the Common the Outlaws were getting ready for their last game of the season. They were playing Pond in the Sky for the league championship.

  Across the street in front of the drugstore, Old Lady Benton said, “There. Do you see that, Reverend? He’s talking to that statue again.”

  “That’s bad,” the Reverend said. “It’s unnatural. Holding conversation with a graven image.”

  E.A. wanted to holler across to the Reverend, was it right and natural to ask Gypsy Lee to put on a long, dark Delilah wig and nothing else but her G-string and call the Reverend her big manly Samson and chase him around her bedroom with a pair of scissors? Not that the man of the cloth had that much hair to start with.

  Now Old Lady Benton was saying, “Allowed to patrol the village at all hours of the day and night. Where’s his mother, I’d like to know?”

  E.A. imagined that the Reverend would like to know the same thing.

  “That pair over across there,” E.A. said to the Colonel, “is about as bad as Devil Dan. Maybe worse. Can’t you help me with them, at least?” He looked up, past the Colonel’s extended sword, broken off at the point, at the bronze face under the three-cornered hat. As usual, his old friend was gazing down the common to where the Outlaws were taking BP.

  “What is it?” the statue said in that place just behind E.A.’s forehead where only E.A. could hear him. “What is it you want now?” As though he didn’t want to be bothered. Or, worse yet, as though he’d already done something for E.A. and the boy was returning to the well once too often.

  Though it brought him into fall view of the Reverend and Old Lady Benton, E.A. stepped directly into the statue’s line of sight. “I’ll tell you what I want. I want you to cause Devil Dan Davis to fall off his machine and get run over by those big treads, cleats on them the size of ax blades. And”—raising his voice and glaring across the street—“I want you to cause the Angel of Death to slay his first-born. And locusts to descend on his vineyard.”

  The Colonel thought for a minute. “Why would you wish for all that misfortune to befall one man?”

  “Devil Dan said Gypsy Lee was a hoor and that made our place a hoorhouse and he wouldn’t have a hoorhouse next door where R.R had to look out at it every day. And that Gran’s barn’s going to fall over onto his property someday, and he intends to dozer it down first.”

  “Does he now?” the Colonel said with more of an edge to his voice. Ethan knew the Colonel was not happy to have a direct descendant of his, even a WYSOTT Allen, called a hoor.

  “I will reflect about all this,” the statue said.

  “Why do you need to reflect? Weren’t you a soldier? I want vengeance and I want it now. Before he knocks down our place. Not afterward, when it’s too late.”

  “I said, I will study on it. Now skedaddle on down to the ball diamond. Those Outlaws need you to shag foul balls, keep score. They shouldn’t even be playing this game. They should have clinched the league ten games ago. There was no call to let the race drag on so. The rumdummies are apt to throw it all away now. Just like the Sox, losing that game to those York Staters last night. Your grandma was right to fire a ball through that tally board.”

  “The state should step in and take him away,” Old Lady Benton said.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” the statue said to E.A. “I might send someone to help you out.”

  “With Devil Dan?”

  “No. Dan is a no-’count pismire. With your baseball.”

  “How’ll I know who he is?”

  “You’ll know.”

  “Your only begotten son, no doubt.”

  “Misbegotten is more like it. Now see here. If he shows, don’t listen to him on anything but baseball. Other than baseball, he’s just another loser. But on baseball, listen like your future in the game depends on it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because it does. Now scat. They’ll be starting up that contest in another few minutes and I don’t
want to be distracted. Why I should care is more than I’ll ever know.”

  8

  JUDGE CHARLIE KINNESON, who umpired the Outlaws’ home games, was meeting with the team captains at home plate. E.A. sat on the Outlaws’ bench on the third-base side of the diamond, just in front of the small wooden grandstand, copying the names of the Pond in the Sky players into the Outlaws’ scorebook. The scorebook was green and flat and dog-eared and stained with beer and Coke and chewing tobacco and mustard, and it dated back one year, to when the Outlaws had lost the championship game to the team they were playing today. The players were mostly the same this year for both teams. Gypsy and Gran, who had come over to the game in Patsy, sat behind E.A. in the first row of the bleachers.

  The Pond captain, who was also their pitcher, came over to the bench to get his team’s scorebook, in which E.A. was now penciling the Outlaws’ roster. A bespectacled beanpole, he looked like the illustration of Ichabod Crane in the matched set of Washington Irving volumes that the American literature prof from Middlebury College who summered in Lost Nation Hollow had given Gypsy for dressing up in white and reciting from Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems while she did a striptease.

  “What’s this all about?” Ichabod said. He was a substitute schoolteacher in the off-season, E.A. had heard. “Who’s this kid? What’s he doing with my book?”

  “Scorekeeper,” Earl No Pearl said.

  “He’s too young to keep score.”

  “Ask him a baseball question,” Gypsy called out from the bleachers.

  “What?”

  “Ask him any baseball question you can think of.”

  E.A. saw the sneer come across Ichabod’s face, saw his lip curl. “Winningest pitcher in baseball history?” Ichabod said.

  “Denton True ‘Cy’ Young, five hundred and eleven wins,” E.A. said, continuing to write. “Here’s one for you. Pitcher who threw the first perfect game in major-league baseball?”

  “What?” Ichabod said.

  E.A. looked up and gave him the sneer right back. “I thought you were supposed to be the schoolteacher,” he said. “Cy Young again. May 5, 1904.”

  Gypsy laughed. “Atta boy, E.A.”

  Judge Charlie K, strapping on his umpire’s chest protector, clapped his hands together twice and called out, “Let’s get this show on the road, gentlemen. Play ball.”

  An inning into the championship game, E.A. knew that it was going to be a pitcher’s duel. Earl didn’t have much to go with his fastball, but he threw so hard E.A. could hear the ball hum from where he stood behind the backstop to keep score and shag foul balls.

  The beanpole substitute-schoolteacher pitcher from Pond in the Sky wasn’t as fast as Earl. Nobody in the Northern Border League was. But Ichabod came from the side and was sneaky-quick and crafty, with a big, sweeping, yellowhammer curve ball that kept the Outlaw hitters off stride. Though he’d never gone to school a day in his life, E.A. disliked schoolteachers in general. During the Outlaws’ games, if he wanted to see a schoolteacher all he had to do was look up at Old Lady Benton, camped out with her binoculars in her green rocker. He did not need to watch a teacher pitch.

  In the bottom of the second, with no score, Porter Kittredge hit a high foul ball over the backstop. E.A. dropped the scorebook, grabbed his glove, and made a diving catch. The crowd cheered. “Ain’t you a man and a half, E.A.,” Gran called out sarcastically. “Ain’t you the grandstander, though.”

  “Nice catch, Ethan,” Judge Charlie K said as E.A. tossed the ball back over the chicken wire. “If I’d made a few more like that one back in my playing days, the Sox might have come calling on me.”

  At the end of the fifth the score was 1–1. That’s when E.A. spotted him again. Though he hadn’t seen the drifter for two years, he recognized him immediately. He was leaning against the last remaining elm tree on the common, twenty feet behind the backstop, under an oriole’s nest. He was wearing a Red Sox cap and the same ratty suit jacket, once-white shirt, uncreased khaki pants, and battered work shoes, with a cigarette butt in the corner of his mouth and a bottle twisted up in a brown paper bag sticking out of his jacket pocket. As E.A. watched, the drifter took the bagged bottle, unscrewed the cap, drank, screwed the cap back on, and stuck the bottle back in his pocket. All without taking his eyes off the game.

  E.A. waved. The drifter nodded. E.A. wished he’d say something. About how much he’d grown in two years, or about his diving catch of Porter’s foul ball. From the diamond came the loud crack of Earl’s bat. Another foul ball, very high. It descended into the elm tree, glanced off several limbs, and narrowly missed the oriole’s nest. Ethan ran to it and got his glove on it, but it was harder to catch a ball falling out of a tree than people might think. The baseball ricocheted off the heel of his glove onto the ground near a trash barrel. The white ball lying there reminded Ethan of the official baseball the stranger had given him on the night of his eighth birthday. He was afraid the man was going to ask about it. Hurriedly, he reached down with his glove, picked up the foul ball, and returned to the backstop. Earl flied to center for the third out of the inning.

  Between innings E.A. went around the backstop to give the ball back to Judge Charlie K. “Keep it for a souvenir, Ethan,” the judge said. “I’ve got more than enough.”

  E.A. ran over to the bleachers. “Hold this for me, ma, will you?” he said, handing the ball to Gypsy. He jerked his head toward the oriole’s hammock. “Almost hit the bird’s nest.”

  “Well, I’m glad it—” Gypsy started to say. She stopped, stared at the drifter a moment, looked back at E.A. “I’m glad it didn’t,” she finished.

  “I was hoping it would,” Gran said. “I could never stand orioles.”

  E.A. returned to his station behind the backstop.

  “Ethan.”

  The drifter’s voice was as harsh as E.A. remembered it. He’d moved a few feet out from the elm tree. “A dead ball like that? Pick it up with your throwing hand. Not your glove.”

  E.A. wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “You always pick up a dead ball with your bare hand,” the man explained. “That way you don’t have to take it out of your glove before you throw it. Saves time.”

  E.A. realized that the drifter was referring to the foul ball that had fallen out of the elm tree. He didn’t sound critical. He sounded like a man stating a point of information to another man. The drifter nodded at E.A. as if to say, okay, now you know. Then he took another swig from the bottle in the brown bag.

  Out of nowhere, here came Deputy Warden Kinneson, big hat jutting forward, marching toward the stranger. E.A. did not often see the deputy on foot. Generally he sat in his cruiser outside of town on the county road, waiting for someone to go thirty-six miles per hour on a wooded, unpopulated straightaway.

  The deputy’s official blue hat bobbed along. E.A. hoped the orioles would let fly all over it.

  “You there. In the baseball cap,” the officer said. “There’s no drinking on the village common.”

  The drifter was just lifting the bottle to his mouth again. He took a drink, and his ice-colored eyes did not leave the ball field, where the Outlaws were hustling out, the Pond townies hustling in. He watched the two teams dispassionately, like a man watching ants at work.

  “You hear me, mister? You don’t put that bottle away, I’ll have to write . . .”

  The deputy’s voice trailed off. He took a step back, then another, then turned and walked quickly away. The drifter sloshed what was left in the bottle and lifted it to his mouth and knocked it back, then flipped the sack with the bottle inside end over end into the green trash barrel. Once again his eyes were back on the common, on Earl taking his warm-up pitches.

  The championship game stayed tied through the eighth inning. In the top of the ninth, Pond in the Sky pushed a run across, and it began to look like a repeat of last year. A dispirited silence had fallen over the grandstand, over the green lined with pickups and cars. The drifter had left for an inning,
but now he was back with a fresh bottle. This time there was no bag wrapped around it. When Pappy Gilmore started out the bottom of the ninth with a foul onto the church lawn, E.A., retrieving the ball, saw the label on the drifter’s bottle. Crackling Rose. Like the cover song Gypsy sometimes sang at the hotel.

  E.A. watched the stranger watch the game. He was noticeably taller than Earl. A really big man.

  “They can’t seem to get to old Ichabod,” E.A. said to the drifter as Pappy took a ball outside.

  “Would that be the pitcher’s name? Ichabod?”

  “His name is Horace Guyette. But they call him Teach on account of he’s a substitute schoolteacher in the off-season. I call him Ichabod. For old Ichabod Crane in a storybook a fella gave Gypsy.”

  Pappy swung at Guyette’s sweeping curve and missed.

  “He keeps them off balance with that big yellowhammer hook,” E.A. said. He wanted to impress the drifter with knowing what a yellowhammer was.

  “They need to lay for his fastball,” the man said. “You can’t tell what pitch he’ll start you off with. But anytime he misses with the curve, the next one is almost always a fastball. That’s the pitch your team has to lay for.”

  Pappy took another ball, a curve inside. Pappy couldn’t drive the ball anymore, but he was more patient than the other Outlaws and got his share of walks and singles, loopers over the infield or seeing-eye grounders.

  “You mean you have to guess what the next pitch’ll be?” E.A. said.

  “A good hitter guesses a lot,” the man agreed. “But in the case of old Ichabod, there’s not much guesswork to it. The last pitch he thrown? To that old man? It was a curve that missed. Now watch. This one will likely be the heater.”

  It was. Twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, Pappy would have parked Guyette’s fastball over in the street in front of the brick block. Now all he could do was foul it back into the screen.