Brittle Innings

6

Darius drove us to McKissic House, the team boardinghouse where Mister JayMac, for part of everyone’s monthly salary, put up all the single men on his team. In McKissic House, this entire summer, I’d eat my meals and spend my nights when the Hellbenders didn’t have an away game.

Cripes, I thought when our bus growled up the semicircular drive. How great, not to have to wear down my shoe leather looking for a place to rent-especially with Camp Penticuff so close and wartime housing so tight that roomers doubling up with relatives or friends matter-of-factly read the obits to get a jump on likely vacancies.

Because Mister JayMac owned a dozen or more old mill houses in the Cotton Creek area of Highbridge, he’d taken that worry off all his players’ shoulders. Men with wives and kids in town, I learned later, rented these tarboxes from Mister JayMac for at least six months, April through September, his minimum lease. In October, he’d offer his vacant houses to military transients, but with the stipulation they clear out at the end of March so married Hellbenders could reclaim the premises in time for the new season. In a military town with beaucoups of demand for rental properties, he had a high-handed marketing approach, maybe even a greedy-seeming one, but Mister JayMac didn’t care about the money he could make-he could do that renting to either GIs or players-but about the welfare of his immediate employees during each CVL season. So most of us looked at Mister JayMac not as a robber baron but as our very own Daddy Warbucks.

Only two-thirds of the Hellbenders made the trip all the way from McKissic Field to McKissic House. Darius drove first to the Cotton Creek neighborhood, where six men rented houses, and dropped them off. Buck Hoey, the wiseguy shortstop who’d bellyached about the first baseman who hadn’t come to practice, hopped down last, near a blue frame house with more shrubs and a prettier paint job than any house around it. When Hoey got off, I relaxed a bit.

As for McKissic House, it hunkered back from Angus Road, on a woodsy stand of acreage on Highbridge’s southeastern corner, floating among the magnolias and the leafy pecan trees like a man-of-war. It had cupolas, turrets, gables, a widow’s walk, and a pair of outside staircases for fire escapes. It wasn’t Tara, though: no columns. Also, Mister JayMac’s ancestors had built it after, not before, the War Between the States.

The front half of the house smacked your eyes out. It had a wrap-around porch with fresh-painted balusters and a half dozen or more rocking chairs. It had shutters and a huge oaken door with a stained-glass fanlight above it. It had plum-colored draperies in the windows and umbrella ferns in hanging baskets. The whole place shone white, like some kind of lighter-than-air marble.

Coming around the drive, though, you saw that the back part of McKissic House didn’t keep up appearances. No shutters on the sides. In places, boards overlapped on a fallen slant. Paint had cracked or curled or flaked or flat-out vanished. One tricky back wall had a two-tone color, light above and dark below, like an unfinished kitchen cabinet nailed to a barn’s weathered side. I still liked what I saw. It outdid any place I’d ever lived. It had such size and so many build-ons I imagined myself prowling through it for weeks, finding hidden passages, secret nooks, the decaying skeletons of roomers who’d lost their way and starved to death. McKissic House spoke to the strangled poet in me, stirring a wormy sort of dread into my blood. Could I last a whole summer in one of its closed-in rooms?

“You new boys,” Mister JayMac said from the bus’s step well, “make yourselves to home, best yall can. Supper’s at five-thirty, team meeting an hour later. Darius’ll settle you in. Tomorrow, spot challenges and an intrasquad tussel of big-time importance.”

Mister JayMac got off, climbed the wide fan of steps into McKissic House, and went inside. Everybody else but Darius, me, Euclid, and the other three rookies piled out after him.

“Shoo,” Darius said. “Kizzy’ll give you somethin befo dinner. Yall gots to be hongry.”

Ankers, Dobbs, and Heggie got off the bus and jostled up the steps. I held my seat.

Darius said, “You deef as well as dumb?” He regarded me in the rearview.

I shook my head. I thought Darius would coddle me a tad, give me a little encouragement. Instead, he shut the Brown Bomber’s door and jammed the bus into gear. He bounced it off the gravel drive, through a lane of pecans and dogwoods, and past one of McKissic House’s shabby pine-board fire escapes to the backyard. To keep from cracking my head on the bus’s tin ceiling, I hung on for precious life.

Darius braked by a screened-in porch on the side of the house, not far from an old carriage house. The porch’s fly-blown screen had tears in it; its splintery steps, just off the kitchen, canted this way and that. The house’s rain gutters had rusted through; sections hung loose, like chutes at a gravel quarry. The eaves, if you looked up from under, had neat little holes bored into them, like somebody’d corkscrewed hooks in there, to swing mum or begonia pots from. Carpenter bees had drilled the holes, though, not a flower-mad lodger. The only decorations between the porch and the carriage house were a compost heap, some rusted-out metal pans, and a tractor cannibalized for war scrap.

Through the porch screen, I could see a long row of kitchen windows. Through those windows, the yarny-looking gray head of a colored woman bobbed back and forth behind a counter. The woman’s face had caved-in cheeks, bulgy lips and eyes, and a beaklike nose. Her hair had braided rat tails coming down behind her head and over her shoulders to the front, a more squawlike than a mammylike do. From the bus, her head seemed to lack a body; it rolled here and there in the kitchen’s steam and clatter.

“Kizzy,” Darius said. “She either feed you or use you in a pie. Whynt you see which it gon be today?”

Just then, though, I saw Mister JayMac strolling through a big victory garden toward the old servant quarters behind the main house: a neat little bungalow. It had hydrangea bushes with smoky blue flowers big as cabbages, and a red-tile roof that made it look more Spanish than Suthren.

“Office back there,” Darius told me. “Office and bedroom. Him and Miss Giselle got to have they privacy.” I watched Mister JayMac amble, thinking Darius might say more, but he added only, “Git out, Danl. Go on. Git.”

I stood up. I’d reached my “home.” Never mind I had no notion what to do now or even how to make my feet move.

“Holy Jesus,” Darius said. He came down the aisle, grabbed my arm, and dragged me off the bus and up the decaying steps into the kitchen. “This young man hongry and speechless,” he said. “Feed him, Kizzy, but don’t spec no thanks.” He slammed on out of the kitchen through a swinging door more like you’d see in a restaurant than in an old Victorian home.

Euclid came through another door from the dining room and the parlor beyond, where Hellbender ballplayers, from kids like me to grizzled codgers like Creighton Nutter, were listening to the news and debating the capture of Attu in the Aleutians.

“Stupid,” somebody said. “Shoulda let the Japs have it. Two-bit icy rock aint worth one GI’s life, much less five hunnerd’s.”

“You betcha,” a second player said. “Troops up there’d be more use here to home kicking striking miners’ butts.”

“You don’t know squat, Fanning,” somebody else said. “My dad mined coal. If not for baseball, the mines’d have me too.”

And so on. I remember the argument because my dream of Umnak and the tidal wave of Marsden plates clattering down still sprocketed through my head. I could close my eyes and relive the nightmare in milky black-and-white.

Euclid gave me his Plastic Man comic book. He climbed up on a stool next to the wood stove and asked for something to eat. Kizzy poured him a fruit jar of buttermilk and gave him a plate of tomato slices with a crumbly chunk of cornbread.

“Danbo too, Awnt Kiz,” he said.

“Whynt you eat in the dining room wi the other mens?” Kizzy asked me. “Got a full spread out there.”

I shook my head. They’d ask me questions, just like that farm boy Ankers at McKissic Field had done, and the silence I gave them back would irk or tickle them in troublesome ways.

Kizzy (if she was Euclid ’s aunt, she had to be Darius’s too) had hands like long ash-colored mackerels. She sliced me a chunk of cornbread and sloshed me a glass of buttermilk even bigger than Euclid ’s fruit jar. I wolfed the cornbread and the buttermilk standing at a dough-rolling counter in the middle of the kitchen, sweating in the heat pouring off the wood stove. The kitchen’s wallpaper-calico-gowned ladies and top-hatted men on old-timey bicycles-peeled in strips, steamed away by heat and the fumes from boiling kettles of greens or tea.

“Meetin in parlor, six-thuddy,” Euclid said. He put a dollop of strawberry jam on his cornbread and wedged the whole chunk into his mouth. “Yo hea?”

Kizzy gave me all I could eat, including a bowl of greens with some pepper sauce and a piece of cold chicken, and shoved me into the backyard with my comic book and a baseball-sized green apple.

“Iw caw you fo supper,” she said.

I sat in the rusty metal seat of the junked tractor reading Plastic Man and shooing away noseeums. From the parlor, I could hear dance music on the radio, jokey arguments over a hearts game, a soap opera, more war news. I dozed, tuckered from my train ride. I woke and thumbed back through Euclid ’s comic. I dozed again. Next time I woke, I got down from the tractor and explored the house’s spread-out grounds. I stood clear of the bungalow out back, out of respect for Mister JayMac and Miss Giselle’s privacy, and maybe the simple fear he’d shotgun me if I bothered them. Eventually, I dozed off again.

“Danbo,” Euclid said. “Suppa.”

I didn’t want to, but I ate with the other players boarding in McKissic House. Counting me, sixteen fellas crowded the long table. Lon Musselwhite, the team’s six-foot-four left fielder and the biggest man in the dining room, had the seat of honor next to the kitchen. (Musselwhite was team captain.) The chair at the table’s foot, more a throne than a piece of furniture, stayed empty, even though Kizzy had set it a place. I guessed it was for Mister JayMac, who’d show up when he felt like it. Reese Curriden, the third baseman, and Q. U. Parris, a pitcher nicknamed Quip, served us, toting bowls of vegetables and plates of meat in from the kitchen so Kizzy wouldn’t drop dead trying to do everything alone.

“Don’t fret,” Reese Curriden told us newcomers. “This is just a get-acquainted deal. Yall’ll get your shot next week.”

“KP,” Quip Parris said. He was short, blond as wheat, and triggered like a clock spring. Soon enough, I learned he saw himself as the linchpin of the pitching staff. He hailed from Raleigh, North Carolina. His initials stood for Quintus Uriah, which explains why everybody called him Quip.

With nearly all the food on the table, Musselwhite rapped his spoon against his tea glass and said, “Yall please bow.” Everyone bowed. Kizzy came back in with three banana cream pies on a rack of lacquered dowels. She sighed loudly. “Sweet and holy Jesus,” Musselwhite said, “thy blessings on the lady that prepared these victuals, the victuals themselves, and all who aim to eat em. Give us strength-also victories over our CVL enemies, as Thou dost give our fighting forces victories over the Nips and Krauts. Amen.”

“Amen,” said everybody at table.

“Pass them ol field peas,” Musselwhite said.

Bowls began shuttling around. Kizzy finally got to squeeze her rack of meringue-topped pies onto the table.

“Okay, fellas,” Musselwhite said, “innerduce yourselves.” He served himself field peas, tomatoes, fried squash, okra, butter beans, green beans, and mashed potatoes. He grabbed off several biscuits and forked up a breaded pork chop, a slice of ham, a batter-fried chicken breast. I followed suit.

Players introduced themselves. In addition to Reese Curriden and Quip Parris, we heard from Clarence “Trapdoor” Evans, Burt Fanning, Lamar Knowles, Charlie Jorgensen, Sweet Gus Pettus, Vito Mariani, Jerry Wayne Sosebee, Rick Roper, and Percy “Double” Dunnagin. Us newcomers to Highbridge included Philip Ankers, the farm boy who’d called me ugly; Jefferson Dobbs, alias Skinny; and Junior Heggie, shy and decent and maybe a tad smarter than the other two rookies.

Lon Musselwhite pointed his butter knife at me. “Okay, champ, who’re you?”

On one of her glide-throughs from the kitchen, Kizzy said, “He don’t talk, but you can caw him Danny Bowes.”

Boles, I wanted to correct her; not Bowes.

“Why the hell don’t he talk?” Musselwhite said.

“Maybe he’s taken a vow of silence,” Vito Mariani said.

“You figure him for another damned Papist?” Musselwhite said. “Uh-uh. He’s got Primitive Pentecostal writ all over him.”

“Darius told me he’s a born-again shortstop,” Quip Parris said, “with serious plans to excommunicate Hoey.”

“Hallelujah,” Lamar Knowles, the second baseman, said; he said it quietlike, but everybody heard him.

“Careful,” Rick Roper, a utility player, said. “Heggie may be out for you like Bowes is out for Hoey.”

Boles, I thought: Boles! I tried to talk. What I got was a loud gargle that shut me up quicker than a right jab to the mouth. I could feel myself reddening, burning like I’d plunged my whole head into a bucket of liniment.

Musselwhite had just started to speak when the biggest, nigh-on to ugliest, man I’d ever seen came lumbering in. He had to stoop to get under the transom between the dining room and the parlor. Like Ankers, he wore overalls. His overalls were the biggest pair I’d ever seen, enough denim to outfit every man jack in an Oklahoma oil field. He also wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a brown cap with a fancy H for Highbridge on it. His face was out of alignment somehow, like a pumpkin cut in two and put back together wrong. It even had the color of a blotchy pumpkin. He looked semi-Oriental. At the corners of his bottom lip, two pale scars rucked up, like lopsided buttons. His eyes brimmed with a yellow goo. He wiped them with the back of one meaty hand, then wiped that hand on his overalls. His bare feet reminded me of gray rubber galoshes, but they were only feet-a Titan’s feet, with horny calluses, ropy veins, and ingrown toenails.

The Titan pulled out the thronelike chair at the end of the table and lowered himself into it. Even sitting, he had a good foot on Musselwhite. A helluvan entrance. Ankers, Heggie, and Dobbs had frozen in place, with tea glasses or forks lifted to their mouths. Me too, I guess.

“Gentlemen, meet Jumbo Hank Clerval,” Musselwhite said. “Glad you could join us, Jumbo.”

“Thank you.” The big guy’s voice was like a ship’s gun booming over deep water.

“Meet the new guys,” Musselwhite said. “Ankers, Dobbs, Heggie, and Bowes. Bowes is their silver-tongued spokesman.”

“Call him Boles,” Parris said. “With an l.”

“Delighted to meet yall,” Jumbo said, glancing at us with what seemed like real curiosity. Despite the yall, he had a Frenchified accent, an odd lilt that rode the natural booming of his voice. Jumbo-how else could I think of him?-turned to me. “How do yall like Highbridge, Mr Boles?”

“Boles aint my spokesman,” Ankers said. “I am.”

“Actually, Mr Clerval, Danny cain’t talk,” Junior Heggie said, a hiccup in his voice. Everybody, including Jumbo and me, looked at Junior as if he’d belched at a piano recital. Not that I didn’t welcome his explanation; only that, being so bashful, he’d boggled us all just by speaking. “But I’m shore he can play ball,” he hurried to add.

“He looks like a player,” Jumbo said.

“He looks like a chitlin with ears,” Trapdoor Evans said.

I flushed tomato-red again. The whole table, except for Heggie and Jumbo, guffawed. In Jumbo’s case, I couldn’t tell if he hated jabs at people’s looks or if he had the sense of humor of a cast-iron pot. In my view, Evans hadn’t meant to hurt me; just to get off a funny saying, a josh.

“Too bad about your disability, Mr Boles,” Jumbo said. “I’m Henry Clerval. Muscles”-he nodded at Lon Musselwhite-“has an imperfect grasp of the etiquette of introductions.”

Mariani whistled, meaning, “Boy, he popped you, Muscles,” but Jumbo frowned at the other guys’ sniggerings.

“You’re a big one to talk about my imperfect Emily Posts,” Musselwhite said. “Coming down here with your cap on. You owe the house kitty a dime, Jumbo.”

“A dime!” the ballplayers all cried. “Ante up! Ante up!”

Jumbo’s yellow eyes darted. Bare feet were okay at Kizzy’s table, I guess, but wearing a cap indoors was a McKissic House no-no. Like you’d been raised in a pigsty. Jumbo yanked it off and pressed it down into his lap, out of sight. His hair was greasy black, with a shock of silver-white in the middle of his lumpy forehead and streaks of nickel-gray around his mangled-looking ears. Cripes, I thought, if you staggered into him on a pitch-black street, the fella’d give you about twelve quick heart attacks. Even the overhead lights and the ragging of his fellow Hellbenders couldn’t hide his weirdness. I was ugly, but this guy’d been put together in a meat-packing plant by clumsy blind men.

Everyone called Clerval Jumbo, including Musselwhite, and Musselwhite towered over half the guys on the team. It was scary, those two big palookas sitting there and Jumbo making Musselwhite look like a midget. I wanted to bolt for my room, but I didn’t have a room yet. About then, a line job at Deck Glider back in Tenkiller didn’t seem so bad a fate.

Although I didn’t get up and run, I had a devil of a time eating. Not Jumbo. He anted up his dime and dug in, paying no attention to the war talk, baseball gossip, and gripes about wages or family problems going on around him. He asked for, or picked off in the passing, every bowl of vegetables on the table. In fact, he wiped out the mashed potatoes, the field peas, the okra, and the squash. He drank a pitcher of water. He inhaled half a wheel of cornbread and a dozen biscuits. He cut one of Kizzy’s banana cream pies in two and knocked back half of it like it was a jigger of hooch. The last to stumble in, he finished chowing down first, then laid his greasy napkin aside and sazed cowlike and content around him.

“Please excuse me,” he said to Muscles in his bassoon of a voice.

“You’re excused.” Musselwhite gnawed on his second or third pork chop. “If there’s an excuse for you.”

Jumbo said, “Gentlemen,” then unfolded upward from his chair. He ducked out clutching his Hellbenders cap and made his way up the foyer staircase. The stairs creaked under him (but not much more than they would’ve for Junior Heggie or me); and he disappeared, leaving behind a fleet of empty bowls, his own slick china plate, and a table of half-amazed men. Not even the old hands, it hit me, had totally adjusted to either his looks or the shows he put on at mealtimes.

“The Great Thunderfoot,” Reese Curriden said.

“Hell, that’s Sudikoff,” Trapdoor Evans said. “Jumbo’s dainty next to Sudikoff. A regular twinkletoes.”

Sudikoff, a married fella, wasn’t there to defend himself. He was chief backup at first base, though: the graceful lummox who’d tried to fill in for Jumbo at practice.

I can’t recall much else about my first sit-down meal in Highbridge, not even if I got a piece of Kizzy’s banana cream pie, a treat renowned countywide. Jumbo’s performance wiped every later impression of that meal right out of my head.