Baseball I got. Companionship I had a glimmering of. But atonement swept past like water in a spillway. Henry stood up. His sutured calves drew my gaze as surely as would’ve a starlet’s gams.
“I’ve revealed these signs of my self-mutilation, Daniel, to impress upon you the length to which loneliness and a need to belong once drove me. I do not regret having performed my surgery, but I do regret the evidence of it. The scars don’t pain me in a physical sense, but the mere sight of them lays a bruise on my heart. I entreat you then to look away.
“Look away.”
I looked away. Henry gathered up his overalls and scooped himself back into them. I didn’t see him do this—I heard the rustle of denim and the muffled clicks of brass snaps.
37
O
n Sunday morning, when the
Brown Bomber
pulled into the parking lot at McKissic Field, the stadium and its barbecue pits had the look of a birthday bash in a military zone. Lots of Highbridgers had paraded off to church, but many hadn’t. We Hellbenders, Mister JayMac’s public piety aside, fell into the second group. We’d substituted a talk by Colonel Elshtain and some prayers on our bus ride for attendance at an honest-to-God worship service. Anyway, at the field, we saw folks standing in queue for the barbecue (which wouldn’t be served until one), vendors peddling all kinds of gewgaws, and several soldiers in battle dress standing guard along a cordoned lane through the lot to the place where Darius always parked.
As soon as we’d stopped, Mister JayMac spoke to us from the front: “President Roosevelt has spent the last two days at the Little White House in Warm Springs. Given the demands of the war, this’s been a hard time for him to get out of Washington—except for shipboard conferences with the rulers of our allies or his battle commanders. For reasons I don’t think require an explanation”—Mister JayMac wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief—“the President only rarely visits Georgia at the height of summer. He came for one day in August five years ago; usually, however, he confines his expeditions down here to the spring or fall. His presence this Fourth of July weekend bespeaks his strength as a man and his integrity as a patriot. It honors every soul born or resident in the South.”
“Holy cow!” Trapdoor Evans blurted. “That goddamn polio’s not going to be at our games today, is he?”
Colonel Elshtain stood. “He’ll be here for at least one of your games and maybe both. I’d suggest a more respectful form of address than ‘that goddamn polio’—should you have occasion, gentlemen, to meet him.”
“How about ‘Your Highness’?” Buck Hoey said.
“Criminy,” Muscles said. “We have to win. If we lose, we’ll shame ourselves in front of the President of the United States.”
“Losing won’t shame you,” Colonel Elshtain said. “Cracks like ‘that goddamn polio’ and ‘How about “Your Highness”?’ will far more effectively do that. Whether you personally find the man now in office an ornament to or a blot upon that position, it nonetheless remains that. . . .”
And blahblah, blahblahblah.
A couple of seats up from me, Turkey Sloan raised his hand.
“What is it, Mr. Sloan?” Mister JayMac said.
Sloan stood up. “Not too long ago, sir, I wrote a tribute to the Leader of the Free World, his administration, and the first family. To settle Colonel Elshtain’s doubts about Hellbender loyalty, I’d like your permission for me, Mr. Hoey, Mr. Evans, and Mr. Sosebee to recite it for him.”
“How long’s this gonna take?” Mister JayMac said.
“Not even a minute,” Sloan said. “Sir, you know I always write tight.”
“You do everything tight,” Hoey said.
“If you’re going to do this, Mr. Sloan, proceed,” Mister JayMac said. “It’s too hot to dawdle till Halloween in this four-wheeled inferno.”
Sloan made a humming sound, like a music teacher blowing on a pitch pipe. His pals stood up, at smirky attention. “ ‘The Battle Hymn of the Repugnant’ by Nyland Sloan, as performed by the author and his Disgusting Associates.” In the farce that followed, Sloan recited the first two lines of each stanza of his “tribute,” while Hoey, Evans, and Sosebee joined on every third-line chorus:
“Tip your fez
To the Prez?
Shout, ‘Glory Hallelujah!
’
“Whose New Deal’ll
Make you squeal?
Why, Frankie Rooz-ah-velt-ah’s!
“Cordell Hull
Is a cull
Who’ll downright coldly screw yah!
“Eleanor
We deplore.
Hey, buddy, what’s it to yah?
“We regret
Eliot,
Their sorry naval joon-yah!
“Let’s debar
FDR!
Make flea-bit Fala Pooh-Bah!
”
Taking the whistles and applause, Sloan and his Disgusting Associates bowed to this side and that. (Fala was Roosevelt’s Scotty dog and traveling buddy, a regular Fido Firstus.) Henry and I stamped and clapped along with the others. The colonel sank into his seat like a punctured bounce-back toy, rigidly facing front.
Mister JayMac shook his head and shooed us off the bus. “Beat it, yall! Quicktime!”
We filed down the aisle stamping our feet. As we jostled along, every player but me chanted “
Shout, ‘Glory Hallelujah!
’ ” or “
Make flea-bit Fala Pooh-Bah!
”
Mariani pitched the first game, and I started at short. Pregame ceremonies included a War Bonds spiel by a wounded vet, Mister JayMac’s welcome, and the colored accordionist Graham Jackson playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a black choir, dressed in phony plantation garb, sang the lyrics.
The President and his party hadn’t arrived yet; and few folks in the stands understood we expected such a distinguished visitor and sports fan, one of the men who’d kept pro baseball from shutting down for the war. Still, Mister JayMac refused to delay the doubleheader’s start.
Bottom of the first, I poked one down the right-field line with my new Red Stix bat. It felt good, that double, almost like it wiped from my past everything that’d happened on Friday night: my gin binge, the trip to The Wing & Thigh, my no-show at Phoebe’s house, and Henry’s cavalry-to-the-rescue routine. Charlie Snow drove me home with a single up the middle. In our first at-bat, in fact, we sent another six men to the plate and scored two more runs.
Between innings, I heard sirens screaming just outside the stadium. They came closer and closer, eking up higher in pitch and volume until yard dogs began to howl and many people in the stands covered their ears.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Frye announced over the PA system, “it’s the one hundred and sixty-seventh anniversary of this great nation, but the first time ever that the President of the United States has attended a baseball game in Highbridge or any other CVL city. All rise!” As if FDR was a judge and McKissic Field a courtroom.
I’d already made my way to my shortstop position. When our old military-band recording of the National Anthem began to play, I didn’t have to rise. The fans, though, buckled upward en masse, craning their necks trying to catch sight of the most famous man—forget John D. Rockefeller or Clark Gable—in the whole United States. The sirens outside the stadium stopped about the time the anthem’s rockets began to glare red and its bombs to burst in air.
Then, because the President hadn’t made his entrance by song’s end, Frye played it again. And a third time, with folks forgetting proper hand-over-heart protocol, before a guard of uniformed Marines and helmeted soldiers marched in over the brand-new ramp system. Behind them, some wheelchair outriders in suits appeared at the top of a plywood slope. They ushered in the waving President, a man until then bashful of exposing himself in such an “unmanly” state. On that Fourth, though, he rode, head high, to the caged box seat behind our dugout. Once the military guard had peeled off, in fact, I could see the Prez as well as, or better than, anybody else in the park.
I couldn’t believe it. Me, a kid from nowhere, standing maybe fifty yards from the only three-term chief executive in the history of our land. My nape hairs did the Wave decades before that cheer even got invented.
Know what kept rippling through my gray matter, though?
He didn’t see my first hit. What if I don’t get another?
Except for the smudges under his eyes and the dents in his cheeks, Mr. Roosevelt looked spiffy, a lot like Francis X. Bushman or some other silent-screen actor. Cool white linen suit, dapper straw snapbrim, fluffy polka-dot bow tie.
Someone had rigged a microphone at chest height—for a fella in a wheelchair, that is—and the President’s primary pusher—a Secret Service agent?—slipped him up to it. Ballplayers and fans alike had started cheering. The cheering swelled until it swamped the “home of the brave” finale of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Prez met the hullabaloo with head nods, his arms in the air like those of some raptured Holy Roller, his smile as wide as Tennessee.
The President’s “private” box filled up: military guards and Secret Service men, a bigwig or two from FDR’s staff, and, to my hefty surprise, Colonel and Mrs. Elshtain, Miss Giselle, and LaRaina and Phoebe Pharram. In his shirt sleeves, Mister JayMac himself climbed up on our dugout’s tarpapered roof and walked over to the Chief to shake his hand and welcome him to Highbridge.
Amid this tumult, Colonel Elshtain stood in the box rocking up and back on his toes and smirking like a Siamese with a goldfish tail showing between its lips. No wonder “The Battle Hymn of the Repugnant” hadn’t amused him.
The cheering didn’t die. Coloreds and whites alike cheered FDR, the coloreds from the bleachers seats or in their spots as groundskeepers, custodians, and snack vendors. A few people—mostly women—cried. The war’d turned FDR into a god for many folks, even conservative whites. The blacks liked him because his missus spoke out for fairness and entertained Negro leaders in the White House.
The President quieted us with some calm-down hand gestures and an attempt to use the mike: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you please . . .” That wide chin-up smile again. “By gosh, this is a splendid reception, and I’m delighted to be here. Indeed, my apologies for interrupting your game, coming in like the imperial Caliph of Baghdad. Goodness knows, today we celebrate American independence, not the bondage of our national pastime to my holiday travel schedule.”
He talked on like that for a minute and then gave up the mike to Mister JayMac, who summoned Graham Jackson and the plantation singers—favorites of FDR’s from his stays at Cason Callaway’s Blue Springs—back to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” again. That made five times we’d heard it in forty minutes, but our fans shouted “Play ball!” afterwards as loudly as they had every other time.
Mr. Roosevelt bumped up to the mike again: “Later today, ask your neighbors if they heard about the accident here at McKissic Field. When they say, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t,’ tell em, ‘An Opelika player leaned on his bat so long waiting for the game to resume that termites ate the handle out and he fell and broke his back.’ ” The President threw back his head and guffawed, then leaned again into the mike: “I love it! Don’t you just love it!” They surely did. We all did. Even the Orphans broke up, slapping one another on the back and catcalling Max Delaney, the hitter in the on-deck circle.
“If Delaney had an ounce of sense, he’d fall down and grab his back,” Curriden told me. “But the palooka aint got roach shit for brains.”
The Orphan manager, Lou Ed Dew, tried to convince Happy Polidori, the plate umpire, to scrap the first inning and start us over again. He seemed to think the CVL rule book forbid the playing of anything but a full nine-inning game after “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I edged closer to the Orphan dugout to pick up the details of this bizarre squabble.
“I don’t recollect that rule, Lou Ed,” Polidori said.
“It’s in there,” Lou Ed Dew said. “I’m pritty shore. I’d bet money. I think I would.”
“Would you be as certain if the Orphans’d scored three runs in the first instead of the other way round?”
“Shore. Shore I would.”
“That’d be about the foolishest rule ever devised by man then,” Polidori said. “A team could hire a band to play the ‘Banner’ ever time its boys had a bad inning out to field and guv up a run or six. I mean, musicians for the Boll Weevils or the Linenmakers could get rich.”
“Check the book, Polidori. Check the book!”
“I don’t have to.” Polidori lowered his mask and walked away from Lou Ed Dew. “
Play ball!
I mean,
Resume play!
”
Dunnagin took a fresh ball from Polidori and trotted with it over to Mr. Roosevelt’s box. “Sir, would you be willing to throw out the”—he pretended to count in his head—“the sixth or seventh ball of this game?”
“Would I?” FDR said. “By gosh, Mr. Dunnagin, I’d regard it as churlish—a missed opportunity—to refuse.”
Dunnagin flipped the ball to Mister JayMac and backed up about twenty paces. Mister JayMac handed the President the horsehide, and FDR rubbed it up like a New Englander shaping a snowball. He winked over one shoulder at Miss Giselle, then tossed the ball to Dunnagin, who reacted like the Prez had set his palm on fire. Then he thrust the ball up in the air. Our fans cheered their noggins off again. The organist cranked up a rowdy version—a
really
rowdy version—of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”
“Thow it to your pitcher,” Polidori told Dunnagin.
“This baby’s going home with me,” Dunnagin said. “One day a kid of mine might like to have it.”
“The league’ll have to fine you for misappropriating CVL property,” Polidori said. “The league’ll—”
“Screw the league,” Dunnagin said. “Toss Mariani a fresh ball, Mr. Ump.”
The game did resume. We Hellbenders played inspiredly, in the field and up to bat. I had two more hits in our opener, neither for extra bases, and fielded like FDR’s predecessor in office, a Hoover:
thwup, thwup, thwup!
I just sucked em up and howitzered em over to Henry.
It wasn’t close, but the President enjoyed himself. He knew Mister JayMac and Miss Giselle, he knew the Elshtains, he had field-level box seats behind the dugout. He had a Co-Cola, a bag of peanuts, and another Co-Cola. I wouldn’t swear to it, but he may’ve doctored that second Coke with a tot of something spiritous. A regular fella, for a Harvard man and a three-term president. It was pretty much a wonderwork I played as decent as I did, I spent so much time eyeing him sidelong and watching in literal dumfoundment how sprightly and pretty Miss Giselle—with her belief in, and hatred of, the so-called Eleanor Clubs—looked bantering with him.
In the bottom of the eighth, Henry, with only one hit to that point, polewhacked a curve off the fourth Orphan pitcher: a flabbergasting blast that cleared the outfield wall, the bleacher seats behind the wall, the parking lot outside, maybe even the Panhandle-Seminole Railway tracks slashing southeast to Camp Penticuff. People stood up to watch the ball soar. In the brief silence that fell over nearly every onlooker there, FDR’s high-tone tenor sounded in his open mike and vibrated in every speaker on the field: