Brittle Innings

60

Henry led me into the roadside brush: the blackberry vines, the pokeweed, the mimosa seedlings, the no-name stickery shrubs that snagged your cuffs and sent macelike burrs to hitchhike your socks. The rain’d slackened, thank God, but our shoes sank-often with sucking PLOOPs-both in the jumbled vegetable mulch and Alabama’s oozy pasta-sauce clay. I began to think I’d gone off my nut to ride to this muddy natural chessboard of weedy rubbish and cut-bank arroyos, especially with a set of crutches. I had a train ticket back to Oklahoma-so why’d I let Henry pied-piper me to the redneck boonies? “Where we goin, Henry? Henry!”

He just forged ahead, a driven upright bundle of backwoods energy-like a bear, or a Sasquatch, or a mad semi-human spawn of the land. The rain, more drizzle now than gullywasher, held all nasty winged insects out of the air, but the fight to keep up without sinking kept me from relishing their absence.

“HENRY!”

He looked back. “A dry side-channel of Tholocco Creek-our destination. We’re nearly there.”

The “dry” side-channel, when we reached it, had water in it-not a full beck’s worth, but enough to put a cold squelch under your toes.

Anyway, squelching along in this tall gully, Henry led me to his hideaway: an earthen house tunneled into the bank of a drought-emptied creek. This shelter may’ve begun as a small cave, but, if so, Henry’d dug it out deeper and wider over the past two years, honeycombing the red earth with chambers. He’d also covered the creekbed doors with wild azalea, Allegheny hawthorne, and pine boughs. Nutlets from the hawthorne floated in the runoff sluicing down the cut. We waded into the earth house’s flooded entrance, then replaced the damp foliage that’d hidden it. A second chamber lodged higher and drier, and in that room, with coffee-can lanterns to see by, we spent most of the rest of the night.

Henry sat braced against one wall with his knees drawn up to his chin. I sat shivering on my duffel, my crutches stacked in front of me.

“Why have I brought you to this dank retreat?” Henry said. “I don’t doubt you must wonder.”

After looking around-at the coffee tins, the mats, the baseball equipment used for ornament-I said, “You could’ve given ol Worthy Bebout some decorating tips.”

“I did.”

“Well, he must not’ve listened.” Why’d Henry brought me here? Despite its homey touches, it would have been a fine place for him to crack open my skull with a rock and feast on my brains with his fingers-if he’d been a meat-eater. Even in his eighteenth-century reign of error, though, he’d liked nuts and berries better than animal flesh, and his time among the Oongpekmut had corrupted his vegetarianism only a bit. But for the chill on my body, the clammy damp of my clothes, I might’ve enjoyed the coziness of Henry’s Tholocco Creek warren, his coffee-can lanterns throwing shadows around, the mizzle outside hardly even hearable.

“Your father deserted you, Daniel, as mine did me. He fled from and forgot you, as my maker fled from and sought to forget me. Your sire-as did mine-renounced any part in your making and defaulted on his obligation to educate you.”

“Dick Boles taught me how to play ball.”

Henry shut up. He’d caught himself up in a riff of jazzy comparisons, though, and my tribute stunned him. He shook off the stun: “No small thing. No inconsequential pedagogy.”

“But what were you driving at?”

“Recently, your father died. You may have smoldered these past several years with unspoken anger, but you have not yet mourned your father-as I, early in my second life, grudgingly mourned Victor Frankenstein.”

“So?”

“So the process must eventually occur in you too, Daniel, or much of what hereafter befalls you, or occurs as a result of your own enterprise, will curdle on your palate.”

“All right. How do you do it?”

The question caught him off-guard. “Do what?”

“Mourn.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.” He crawled away from the wall and nodded into a farther chamber. “Follow.” And he led me on a duck-walking tour that took us to a kind of dug-out viewing room. Here, when he set down the candle holder he’d brought, I saw a peculiar human shadow-like a straitjacketed Egyptian king-stretched out on the chopped-down shipping crate of an upright piano.

When Henry lifted his candle to show me the makeshift bier, I saw these words stenciled on the crate: MENDELSSON / Ship to 486 Mims Street / Opp, Ala. The letters danced in the candle flicker. The figure atop the crate resembled a mummy. It was a mummy. And it would’ve been the strangest mummy I’d ever seen, even if I’d never seen one before-which, as any fool could guess, I hadn’t. And forget that that mummy embodied the remains of a whacko Swiss chemist a century and a half dead.

I leaned into my crutches and reached out to touch the corpse-it looked barely five and a half feet from soles to crown-of Henry’s creator. The wrapper encasing it was a patchwork of smooth white pieces of horsehide-beaucoups of scraps stitched together with thousands of S-shaped seams. Henry’d made the sleeping jacket from the scrubbed, rubbed, and flattened skins of discarded CVL baseballs. Some of these horsehides were smudged with infield dirt, or pocked with bat marks, or roughened like old suede-but the shroud as a whole, under Henry’s lantern, shone ivory. The lovely weirdness of it made my nape hairs tingle.

“Out of Alaska, Daniel, I trekked into Washington with my dead creator (newly retrieved from a volcanic cave miles from Oongpek) slung over my shoulders. I bore him much as Aeneas bore his aged father, Anchises, out of the burning shell of Troy.” Henry closed his eyes. “Sang that hero,

‘Come then, dear father, up onto my back.

I will bear you on my shoulders-you will be

No burden to me at all, and whatever befall us,

One and the same peril will face us both,

And there will be one and the same salvation!’ ”

Henry opened his eyes. “Of course, as I came southward through the American Northwest, a thaw set in. Limbs once as firm as stone lost their durity, tending towards a malleable and aromatic decay. I confined them in the skins of animals-a dead elk the vultures had not yet begun to pick, a bison felled by drought-and remade Frankenstein’s protective case each time I moved. During my last off-season with the Hellbenders, I made the sheath you see here. Denuding each ball and laying out its leathern wings wanted tedious labor. The needle-hooks I broke were virtually uncountable.”

Henry gave his father an admiring look. “Don’t you think he makes a handsome long pig, even though we feast on him only through our eyes?” He seemed to expect an “Amen!”

“Sure,” I said. And Henry’s stitched-up daddy definitely was a sight.

“Kneel here, Daniel.”

I obeyed, mostly because the ceiling pressed so low that kneeling under it, even with my injuries, came easy. I propped my crutch against the piano crate.

“Take my father as your own. Revile him for his paternal failings, or grieve in silence for your heretofore unwept loss. Or do both together. Sometimes we must rage in order to reflect, inveigh in order to vindicate.”

As I knelt there, Henry blundered softly out. In a way, taking Henry’s daddy for my own and treating him to a prayer of curses may have helped some. In another way, it didn’t seem to help at all. After a while, my brain’d turned into a shifting globe of axle grease. I leaned my head against the crate and tried to let go of the whole sad jam-up inside me.

Nothing came.

Out of politeness, or maybe pity, I stayed with Henry for two more days. Sleeping in a bunker a couple of dozen feet from his horsehide-jacketed daddy gave me an even creepier feeling than rooming with Henry had. It worried me I had a train ticket home, but Henry had only this creek-bank hole in the ground, fancy as it was, and no real prospects for a better life.

“What’re you gonna do?” I asked him on Wednesday night.

“I continue to owe Buck Hoey’s widow and children a debt.”

“You can’t creep around Highbridge trying to do them daily good turns. You’ll get caught.”

“I wish to redeem the crime-nay, the condign retribution-that befell Hoey and prompted his family’s current suffering.”

“But you never meant to kill him.”

“Perhaps I did. I meant to do… great harm.”

“Well, you’re a big son of a gun, and trying to fix broken glider chains, or drop off bags of groceries, or cut wood for em-Henry, it just aint gonna do.”

“My recidivism condemns me utterly.”

That remark-the way he sat, his head in his hands-worried me. I could see him quitting, flinging himself off a cliff, even if the act maimed rather than croaked him. What a cross. He was suicidal, but couldn’t die.

I rummaged in my bag and found the letter he’d written me. I quoted from it: “ ‘In this much longer incarnation, by many accepted and by many others acclaimed, I have killed but once, Daniel, and then for love.’ ” Henry didn’t even look up. “Not for revenge, you said. For love. Evolution you call it here.”

“Sophistries. Carrion comfort.”

“So what’re you gonna do?”

“What I must.” Henry lifted his head. “Continue. Begin anew and continue.”

“Turn yourself in. Then maybe you’ll see justice done.”

“Justice? I came to consciousness, Daniel, in its cynical and selfish abrogation.”

“You’ve seen it done. We won the pennant, didn’t we? You and I got called up.”

Henry stared at me like I’d just proposed to end the war by sending the Japs my mama’s favorite oatmeal-cooky recipe. Then he smiled-I think-and shook his head.

“Daniel, the electric chair would merely recharge me. Your species cursed and harassed me during my first career on this earth. It owes me one, I think.”

Henry ate hawthorne nuts from a stoneware cereal bowl. I cracked some early wild pecans we’d gathered. Outside, the call of a shivering Alabama screech owl echoed over the empty channel of the Tholocco. Henry pulled off his left shoe and turned it upside down next to his cereal bowl.

I raised my eyebrows.

“To ward off ills otherwise sure to follow,” Henry said. “I am entitled to my superstition.”

On Friday morning, I stood on the blacktop on my crutches, my duffel at my feet and Henry hidden in a nearby pine copse. It wouldn’t’ve done for him to ogre around in broad daylight. I was waiting for a chance to thumb a ride into Troy. In Troy, I planned to connect with my train out of Highbridge and to ride it to Memphis, where another carrier would pick me up and haul me across Arkansas to Oklahoma.

I had a pasteboard sign-TROY OR BUST-around my neck, and a stoic look on my farm-boy face. The ban on pleasure driving and the absence of cars made me begin to think I’d do better to set off crutching it, but finally a truck-loaded down, as my luck required, with dozens of stacked crates of live chickens-came grinding towards me from the southeast. The middle-aged driver pulled over and waved me towards his passenger side. He saw my crutches and got down to help me.

“You a wounded sojer, kiddo?”

His hair-the color of fresh-made doughnuts-rose in a greasy pompadour from his forehead, and his ratty pin-striped shirt lacked its top two buttons. He’d rolled its sleeves up to his elbows, where the twisted-over cuffs gave it a funny space-suitish look. I didn’t want to lie so I lied not to lie, if you can follow my logic. I tapped my throat with one finger and lifted one of my crutches.

“Awright then. Climb on up.”

We stuttered off, the reek of doomed chickens hanging over that truck like a moving canopy. The driver told me his name, who he worked for, how many kids he had, how much he admired and respected young fellas like myself who’d sacrificed life and limb to fight the Nips and the Huns. By the time we hit Troy, he’d invented an Army unit for me, a romantic battle or two, five or six heroic wounds, and a faithful sweet-heart back home in… well, wherever I was from.

He drove me straight to the train station. He helped me down, carried my bag inside, and, at the ticket counter, shook my hand with a solemn, prime-the-pump rhythm. When he let go, I found a dollar in my palm.

“Nothin can repay yall for yore wounds, kiddo, but that’s, well, that’s a… a token. Okay?”

I nodded.

The trains from Troy to Memphis and from Memphis to Oklahoma teemed with young guys in uniform. I was dressed in civvies, and everybody aboard naturally assumed-correctly-I’d hurt myself in a frivolous schoolboy game, not in the training camps of Georgia or on the battlefields of Europe. So the dogfaces ignored me, and I felt lucky, privileged even, to be ignored.

Mama Laurel, Miss Tulipa, and Colonel Elshtain met me at the station in Tahlequah. On first catching sight of me, Mama commenced to cry her eyes out. She grabbed me and pulled me to her, my crutches be damned. She clung to me like a burr, then shoved me out to arm’s length and gave me a sappy smile.

“At least you won’t have to go off to war,” she said. “At least you won’t have to die.”

“Mama, I done already done both.”

Colonel Elshtain sniffed, but Mama and Miss Tulipa hugged me, flooding me with the stinks of woman sweat, prairie grime, and drugstore gardenia water.

I liked it.