My mother sank back in her seat, exhaling. “Well, I
never!
”
“It’s getting hotter,” said the lady elbow-next. “Think I’ll go for a stroll by the lake soon. It’s too hot to sit and watch a silly game today. Mightn’t you come along with me, missus?” she asked Mother.
It went on that way for five innings.
It was eleven to nothing and Big Poe had struck out three times on purpose, and in the last half of the fifth was when Jimmie Cosner came to bat for our side again. He’d been trying all afternoon, clowning, giving directions, telling everybody just where he was going to blast that pill once he got hold of it. He swaggered up toward the plate now, confident and bugle-voiced. He swung six bats in his thin hands, eying them critically with his shiny green little eyes. He chose one, dropped the others, ran to the plate, chopping out little islands of green fresh lawn with his cleated heels. He pushed his cap back on his dusty red hair. “Watch this!” he called out loud to the ladies. “You watch me show these dark boys! Ya-hah!”
Long Johnson on the mound did a slow serpentine windup. It was like a snake on a limb of a tree, uncoiling, suddenly darting at you. Instantly Johnson’s hand was in front of him, open, like black fangs, empty. And the white pill slashed across the plate with a sound like a razor.
“Stee-rike!”
Jimmie Cosner put his bat down and stood glaring at the umpire. He said nothing for a long time. Then he spat deliberately near the catcher’s foot, took up the yellow maple bat again, and swung it so the sun glinted the rim of it in a nervous halo. He twitched and sidled it on his thin-boned shoulder, and his mouth opened and shut over his long nicotined teeth.
Clap!
went the catcher’s mitt.
Cosner turned, stared.
The catcher, like a black magician, his white teeth gleaming, opened up his oily glove. There, like a white flower growing, was the baseball.
“Stee-rike two!” said the umpire, far away in the heat.
Jimmie Cosner laid his bat across the plate and hunched his freckled hands on his hips. “You mean to tell me that was a strike?”
“That’s what I said,” said the umpire. “Pick up the bat.”
“To hit you on the head with,” said Cosner sharply.
“Play ball or hit the showers!”
Jimmie Cosner worked his mouth to collect enough saliva to spit, then angrily swallowed it, swore a bitter oath instead. Reaching down, he raised the bat, poised it like a musket on his shoulder.
And here came the ball! It started out small and wound up big in front of him. Powie! An explosion off the yellow bat. The ball spiraled up and up. Jimmie lit out for first base. The ball paused, as if thinking about gravity up there in the sky. A wave came in on the shore of the lake and fell down. The crowd yelled. Jimmie ran. The ball made its decision, came down. A lithe high-yellar was under it, fumbled it. The ball spilled to the turf, was plucked up, hurled to first base.
Jimmie saw he was going to be out. So he jumped feet-first at the base.
Everyone saw his cleats go into Big Poe’s ankle. Everybody saw the red blood. Everybody heard the shout, the shriek, saw the heavy clouds of dust rising.
“I’m safe!” protested Jimmie two minutes later.
Big Poe sat on the ground. The entire dark team stood around him. The doctor bent down, probed Big Poe’s ankle, saying,, “Mmmm,” and “Pretty bad. Here.” And he swabbed medicine on it and put a white bandage on it.
The umpire gave Cosner the cold-water eye. “Hit the showers!”
“Like hell!” said Cosner. And he stood on that first base, blowing his cheeks out and in, his freckled hands swaying at his sides. “I’m safe. I’m stayin’ right here, by God! No nigger put
me
out!”
“No,” said the umpire. “A white man did.
Me. Get!
”
“He dropped the ball! Look up the rules! I’m safe!”
The umpire and Cosner stood glaring at each other.
Big Poe looked up from having his swollen ankle tended. His voice was thick and gentle and his eyes examined Jimmie Cosner gently.
“Yes, he’s safe, Mr. Umpire. Leave him stay. He’s safe.”
I was standing right there. I heard the whole thing. Me and some other kids had run out on the field to see. My mother kept calling me to come back to the stands.
“Yes, he’s safe,” said Big Poe again.
All the colored men let out a yell.
“What’sa matter with you, black boy? You get hit in the head?”
“You heard me,” replied Big Poe quietly. He looked at the doctor bandaging him. “He’s safe. Leave him stay.”
The umpire swore.
“Okay, okay. So he’s safe!”
The umpire stalked off, his back stiff, his neck red.
Big Poe was helped up. “Better not walk on that,” cautioned the doctor.
“I can walk,” whispered Big Poe carefully.
“Better not play.”
“I can play,” said Big Poe gently, certainly, shaking his head, wet streaks drying under his white eyes. “I’ll play
goody
.” He looked no place at all. “I’ll play plenty
good
.”
“Oh,” said the second-base colored man. It was a funny sound.
All the colored men looked at each other, at Big Poe, then at Jimmie Cosner, at the sky, at the lake, the crowd. They walked off quietly to take their places. Big Poe stood with his bad foot hardly touching the ground, balanced. The doctor argued. But Big Poe waved him away.
“Batter up!” cried the umpire.
We got settled in the stands again. My mother pinched my leg and asked me why I couldn’t sit still. It got warmer. Three or four more waves fell on the shore line. Behind the wire screen the ladies fanned their wet faces and the men inched their rumps forward on the wooden planks, held papers over their scowling brows to see Big Poe standing like a redwood tree out there on first base, Jimmie Cosner standing in the immense shade of that dark tree.
Young Moberg came up to bat for our side.
“Come on, Swede, come on, Swede!” was the cry, a lonely cry, like a dry bird, from out on the blazing green turf. It was Jimmie Cosner calling. The grandstand stared at him. The dark heads turned on their moist pivots in the outfield; the black faces came in his direction, looking him over, seeing his thin, nervously arched back. He was the center of the universe.
“Come on, Swede! Let’s show these black boys!” laughed Cosner.
He trailed off. There was a complete silence. Only the wind came through the high, glittering trees.
“Come on, Swede, hang one on that old pill.... ”
Long Johnson, on the pitcher’s mound, cocked his head. Slowly, deliberately, he eyed Cosner. A look passed between him and Big Poe, and Jimmie Cosner saw the look and shut up and swallowed, hard.
Long Johnson took his time with his windup.
Cosner took a lead off base.
Long Johnson stopped loading his pitch.
Cosner skipped back to the bag, kissed his hand, and patted the kiss dead center on the bag. Then he looked up and smiled around.
Again the pitcher coiled up his long, hinged arm, curled loving dark fingers on the leather pellet, drew it back and—Cosner danced off first base. Cosner jumped up and down like a monkey. The pitcher did not look at him. The pitcher’s eyes watched secretively, slyly, amusedly, sidewise. Then, snapping his head, the pitcher scared Cosner back to the bag. Cosner stood and jeered.
The third time Long Johnson made as if to pitch, Cosner was far off the bag and running toward second.
Snap went the pitcher’s hand.
Boom
went the ball in Big Poe’s glove at first base.
Everything was sort of frozen. Just for a second.
There was the sun in the sky, the lake and the boats on it, the grandstands, the pitcher on his mound standing with his hand out and down after tossing the ball; there was Big Poe with the ball in his mighty black hand; there was the infield staring, crouching in at the scene, and there was Jimmie Cosner running, kicking up dirt, the only moving thing in the entire summer world.
Big Poe leaned forward, sighted toward second base, drew back his mighty right hand, and hurled that white baseball straight down along the line until it reached Jimmie Cosner’s head.
Next instant, the spell was broken.
Jimmie Cosner lay flat on the burning grass. People boiled out of the grandstands. There was swearing, and women screaming, a clattering of wood as the men rushed down the wooden boards of the bleachers. The colored team ran in from the field, Jimmie Cosner lay there. Big Poe, no expression on his face, limped off the field, pushing white men away from him like clothespins when they tried stopping him. He just picked them up and threw them away.
“Come on, Douglas!” shrieked Mother, grabbing me. “Let’s get home! They might have razors! Oh!”
That night, after the near riot of the afternoon, my folks stayed home reading magazines. All the cottages around us were lighted. Everybody was home. Distantly I heard music. I slipped out the back door into the ripe summer-night darkness and ran toward the dance pavilion. All the lights were on, and music played.
But there were no white people at the tables. Nobody had come to the Jamboree.
There were only colored folks. Women in bright red and blue satin gowns and net stockings and soft gloves, with wine-plume hats, and men in glossy tuxedos. The music crashed out, up, down, and around the floor. And laughing and stepping high, flinging their polished shoes out and up in the cakewalk, were Long Johnson and Cavanaugh and Jiff Miller and Pete Brown, and—limping—Big Poe and Katherine, his girl, and all the other lawn-cutters and boatmen and janitors and chambermaids, all on the floor at one time.
It was so dark all around the pavilion; the stars shone in the black sky, and I stood outside, my nose against the window, looking in for a long, long time, silently.
I went to bed without telling anyone what I’d seen.
I just lay in the dark smelling the ripe apples in the dimness and hearing the lake at night and listening to that distant, faint and wonderful music. Just before I slept I heard those last strains again:
“—
gonna dance out both of my shoes,
When they play those Jelly Roll Blues;
Tomorrow night at the Dark Town Strutters’ Ball!
”
The Great Wide World Over There
I
t was a day to be out of bed, to pull curtains and fling open windows. It was a day to make your heart bigger with warm mountain air.
Cora, feeling like a young girl in a wrinkled old dress, sat up in bed.
It was early, the sun barely on the horizon, but already the birds were stirring from the pines and ten billion red ants milled free from their bronze hills by the cabin door. Cora’s husband Tom slept like a bear in a snowy hibernation of bedclothes beside her. Will my heart wake him up? she wondered.
And then she knew why this seemed a special day.
“Benjy’s coming!”
She imagined him far off, leaping green meadows, fording streams where spring was pushing itself in cool colors of moss and clear water toward the sea. She saw his great shoes dusting and flicking the stony roads and paths. She saw his freckled face high in the sun looking giddily down his long body at his distant hands flying out and back behind him.
Benjy, come on! she thought, opening a window swiftly. Wind blew her hair like a gray spider web about her cold ears. Now Benjy’s at Iron Bridge, now at Meadow Pike, now up Creek Path, over Chesley’s Field …
Somewhere in those Missouri mountains was Benjy. Cora blinked. Those strange high hills beyond which twice a year she and Tom drove their horse and wagon to town, and through which, thirty years ago, she had wanted to run forever, saying,, “Oh, Tom, let’s just drive and drive until we reach the sea.” But Tom had looked at her as if she had slapped his face, and he had turned the wagon around and driven on home, talking to the mare. And if people lived by shores where the sea came like a storm, now louder, now softer, every day, she did not know it. And if there were cities where neons were like pink ice and green mint and red fireworks each evening, she didn’t know that either. Her horizon, north, south, east, west, was this valley, and had never been anything else.
But now, today, she thought, Benjy’s coming from that world out there; he’s seen it, smelt it; he’ll tell me about it. And he can write. She looked at her hands. He’ll be here a whole month and teach me. Then I can write out into that world and bring it here to the mailbox I’ll make Tom build today. “Get up, Tom! You
hear?
”
She put her hand out to push the bank of sleeping snow.
By nine o’clock the valley was full of grasshoppers flinging themselves through the blue, piney air, while smoke curled into the sky.
Cora, singing into her pots and pans as she polished them, saw her wrinkled face bronzed and freshened in the copper bottoms. Tom was grumbling the sounds of a sleepy bear at his mush breakfast, while her singing moved all about him, like a bird in a cage.
“
Someone’s
mighty happy,” said a voice.
Cora made herself into a statue. From the corners of her eyes she saw a shadow cross the room.
“Mrs. Brabbam?” asked Cora of her scouring cloth.
“That’s who it is!” And there stood the Widow Lady, her gingham dress dragging the warm dust, her letters in her chickeny hand. “Morning! I just been to my mailbox. Got me a real beauty of a letter from my Uncle George in Springfield.” Mrs. Brabbam fixed Cora with a gaze like a silver needle. “How long since you got a letter from your uncle, missus?”
“My uncles are all dead.” It was not Cora herself, but her tongue, that lied. When the time came, she knew, it would be her tongue alone that must take communion and confess earthly sinning.
“It’s certainly
nice,
getting mail.” Mrs. Brabbam waved her letters in a straight flush on the morning air.
Always twisting the knife in the flesh. How many years, thought Cora, had this run on, Mrs. Brabbam and her smily eyes, talking loud of how she got mail; implying that nobody else for miles around could read? Cora bit her lip and almost threw the pot, but set it down, laughing. “I forgot to tell you. My nephew Benjy’s coming; his folks are poorly, and he’s here for the summer today. He’ll teach me to write. And Tom’s building us a postal box, aren’t you, Tom?”
Mrs. Brabbam clutched her letters. “Well, isn’t that fine! You
lucky
lady.” And suddenly the door was empty. Mrs. Brabbam was gone.
But Cora was after her. For in that instant she had seen something like a scarecrow, something like a flicker of pure sunlight, something like a brook trout jumping upstream, leap a fence in the yard below. She saw a huge hand wave and birds flush in terror from a crabapple tree.
Cora was rushing, the world rushing back of her, down the path. “Benjy!”
They ran at each other like partners in a Saturday dance, linked arms, collided, and waltzed, jabbering. “Benjy!”
She glanced swiftly behind his ear.
Yes,
there
was the yellow pencil.
“Benjy, welcome!”
“Why, ma’am!” He held her off at arm’s length. “Why, ma’am, you’re
crying.
”
“Here’s my nephew,” said Cora.
Tom scowled up from spooning his corn-meal mush.
“Mighty glad,” smiled Benjy.
Cora held his arm tight so he couldn’t vanish. She felt faint, wanting to sit, stand, run, but she only beat her heart fast and laughed at strange times. Now, in an instant, the far countries were brought near; here was this tall boy, lighting up the room like a pine torch, this boy who had seen cities and seas and been places when things had been better for his parents.
“Benjy, I got peas, corn, bacon, mush, soup, and beans for breakfast.”
“Hold on!” said Tom.
“Hush, Tom, the boy’s down to the bone with walking.” She turned to the boy. “Benjy, tell me all about yourself. You
did
go to school?”
Benjy kicked off his shoes. With one bare foot he traced a word in the hearth ashes.
Tom scowled. “What’s it say?”
“It says,” said Benjy, “C and O and R and A.
Cora.
”
“
My
name, Tom, see it! Oh, Benjy, it’s good you really write, child. We had one cousin here, long ago, claimed he could spell upside down and backwards. So we fattened him up and he wrote letters but we never got answers. Come to find out he knew just enough spelling to mail letters to the dead-letter office. Lord, Tom knocked two months’ worth of vittles out of that boy, batting him up the road with a piece of fence.”
They laughed anxiously.
“I write fine,” said the serious boy.
“That’s all we want to know.” She shoved a cut of berry pie at him. “Eat.”
By ten-thirty, with the sun riding higher, after watching Benjy devour heaped platters of food, Tom thundered from the cabin; jamming his cap on. “I’m going out, by God, and cut down half the forest!” he said angrily.
But no one heard. Cora was seated in a breathless spell. She was watching the pencil behind Benjy’s peach-fuzz ear. She saw him finger it casually, lazily, indifferently. Oh, not so casual, Benjy, she thought. Handle it like a spring robin’s egg. She wanted to touch the pencil, but hadn’t touched one in years because it made her feel foolish and then angry and then sad. Her hand twitched in her lap.
“You got some paper?” asked Benjy.
“Oh, land, I never thought,” she wailed, and the room walls darkened. “What’ll we do?”
“Just happens I brought some.” He fetched a tablet from his little bag. “You want to write a letter somewhere?”
She smiled outrageously. “I want to write a letter to … to …” Her face fell apart. She looked around for someone in the distance. She looked at the mountains in the morning sunshine. She heard the sea rolling off on yellow shores a thousand miles away. The birds were coming north over the valley, on their way to multitudes of cities indifferent to her need at this instant.
“Benjy, why, I never thought until this moment. I don’t know anybody in all the world out there. Nobody but my aunt. And if I wrote her it’d make her feel bad, a hundred miles from here, to have to find someone else to read the letter to her. She’s got a whale-boned-corset sort of pride. Make her nervous the next ten years, that letter setting in her house on the mantel. No, no letter to her.” Cora’s eyes moved from the hills and the unseen ocean. “Who then? Where? Someone. I just’ve got to get me some letters.”
“Hold on.” Benjy fished a dime magazine from his coat. It had a red cover of an undressed lady screaming away from a green monster. “All sorts of addresses in here.”
They leafed the pages together. “What’s this?” Cora tapped an ad.
“ ‘
HERE’S YOUR
Power Plus
FREE MUSCLE CHART
. Send name, address,” read Benjy, “’t o Dept. M-3 for Free Health Map!’ ”
“And what about
this
one?”
“‘
DETECTIVES MAKE SECRET INVESTIGATIONS, PARTICULARS FREE. WRITE G.D.M. DETECTIVE SCHOOL
——’”
“Everything’s free. Well, Benjy.” She looked at the pencil in his hand. He drew up his chair. She watched him turn the pencil in his fingers, making minor adjustments. She saw him bite his tongue softly. She saw him squint his eyes. She held her breath. She bent forward. She squinted her own eyes and clamped her tongue.
Now, now Benjy raised his pencil, licked it, and set it down to the paper.
There it is, thought Cora.
The first words. They formed themselves slowly on the incredible paper.
Dear Power Plus Muscle Company
Sirs,
[he wrote].
The morning blew away on a wind, the morning flowed down the creek, the morning flew off with some ravens, and the sun burned on the cabin roof. Cora didn’t turn when she heard a shuffle at the blazing, sun-filled door. Tom was there, but not there; nothing was before her but a series of filled pages, a whispering pencil, and Benjy’s Palmer Penmanship hand. Cora moved her head around, around, with each
o,
each
l
, with each small hill of an
m;
each tiny dot made her head peck like a chicken; each crossed
t
made her tongue lick across her upper lip.
“It’s noon and I’m hungry!” said Tom almost behind her.
But Cora was a statue now, watching the pencil as one watches a snail leaving an exceptional trail across a flat stone in the early morning.
“It’s noon!” cried Tom again.
Cora glanced up, stunned.
“Why, it seems only a moment ago we wrote to that Philadelphia Coin Collecting Company, ain’t that right, Benjy?” Cora smiled a smile much too dazzling for a woman fifty-five years old. “While you wait for your vittles, Tom, just can’t you build that mailbox? Bigger than Mrs. Brabbam’s, please?”
“I’ll nail up a shoe box.”
“Tom Gibbs.” She rose pleasantly. Her smile said, Better run, better work, better
do!
“I want a big, pretty mailbox. All white, for Benjy to paint our name on in black spelling. I won’t have a shoe box for my very first real letter.”
And it was done.
Benjy lettered the finished mailbox: MRS. CORA GIBBS, while Tom stood grumbling behind him.
“What’s it say?”
“‘
MR. TOM GIBBS,
’ ” said Benjy quietly, painting.
Tom blinked at it for a minute, quietly, and then said, “I’m
still
hungry. Someone light the fire.”
There were no stamps. Cora turned white. Tom was made to hitch up the horse and drive to Green Fork to buy some red ones, a green, and ten pink stamps with dignified gentlemen printed on them. But Cora rode along to be certain Tom didn’t hurl these first letters in the creek. When they rode home, the first thing Cora did, face glowing, was poke in the new mailbox.
“You crazy?” said Tom.
“No harm looking.”
That afternoon she visited the mailbox six times. On the seventh, a woodchuck jumped out. Tom stood laughing in the door, pounding his knees. Cora chased him out of the house, still laughing.
Then she stood in the window looking down at her mailbox right across from Mrs. Brabbam’s. Ten years ago the Widow Lady had plunked her letter box right under Cora’s nose, almost, when she could as easily have built it up nearer her own cabin. But it gave Mrs. Brabbam an excuse to float like a flower on a river down the hill path, flip the box wide with a great coughing and rustling, from time to time spying to see if Cora was watching. Cora always was. When caught, she pretended to sprinkle flowers with an empty watering can, or pick mushrooms in the wrong season.
Next morning Cora was up before the sun had warmed the strawberry patch or the wind had stirred the pines.
Benjy was sitting up in his cot when Cora returned from the mailbox. “Too early,” he said. “Postman won’t drive by yet.”
“
Drive
by?”
“They come in cars this far out.”
“Oh.” Cora sat down.
“You sick, Aunt Cora?”
“No, no.” She blinked. “It’s just, I don’t recall in twenty years seeing no mail truck whistle by here. It just came to me. All this time, I never seen no mailman at all.”
“Maybe he comes when you’re not around.”