The Best of Edward Abbey (51 page)

“Saturday,” Henry assured him.

“You sure it hain’t the Sunday?”

“No sir, Saturday.”

“Any child of mine plays that baseball game on a Sunday I’ll peel his hide off his back with a drawknife’n hang him by the ears with it to yon ole butternut—” He gestured toward a nearby half-dead butternut tree, its lower limbs long since amputated
for firewood. “—till sundown in July. Like I would a goldamn blacksnake. Till he stops wigglin. Ain’t Christian play games on the Sunday.”

“No sir it’s Saturday.”

Old Ginter relented. “They’re out at the pigpen sloppin the hogs, him and Leroy.” Leroy’s name suggested an afterthought. “Now you mind and let Leroy play too or by God Red don’t play neither. You hear me?”

Will and Henry glanced at each other in momentary despair. Will shrugged. They had no choice.

“Yes sir,” Henry said.

They turned and walked toward the barn, Henry avoiding where he could the freshest applications of chickenshit. “Now you mind my words now,” the old man shouted after them. They heard the resumed squawling of the woman inside the house and Ginter’s answering bellow.

Behind the barn they found Red leaning on the pigpen fence, watching his little brother Leroy inside. Red was a hugely overgrown lad, far over six feet tall and more than two hundred pounds heavy, dressed like his father in overalls and undershirt. He wore patched rubber boots on his feet; the barnyard was a swampy mire, irrigated by random streams from the spring above the barn.

Henry greeted Red with formal politeness; Red ignored him, ignored Will, who said nothing but stood close by, ready for trouble. Will never did talk much—but then, like Red Ginter, he didn’t have to. They stared at young Leroy.

Leroy was on his hands and knees inside the pen, creeping over the muck and dung toward a three-hundred-pound slime-coated sow. The sow lay on her side, eyes closed, giving suck to her litter of eight. Leroy was playing piglet. “Ernk, ernk,” he grunted, lowering his belly to the ground and wriggling forward, “ernk, ernk, mumma …” His broad pink harelip was twisted in what was meant to be a porcine smile.

Red encouraged him, but there was no glint of malice in his dull, pale eyes. “Keep a-goin, Leroy. You jine ‘em. And don’t settle for hind tit neither.”

Leroy squirmed closer. “Ernk ernk, mumma, gimme suck too.” He was barefoot; the ragged overalls he wore seemed two sizes too large for him. The reddish hair on his head was so thin, fine, and short he appeared nearly bald. “Ernk, mumma,” he crooned in soothing tones, “ernk, ernk …”

The great sow, lying peacefully in the April sun, at ease in the cool mud, opened one tiny red eye and saw Leroy inching toward her and her children. She grunted.

Leroy hesitated. “Ernk …?”

The sow grunted again in alarm, in annoyance, and scrambled heavily to her feet. Leroy rose up to his hands and knees. The sow squealed with anger and maternal outrage and charged, lumbering forward like a leather locomotive. Her brood hung swinging from her tough teats, unwilling to let go. Leroy jumped up, turned—”Nom nam nun of a nitch!” he yelled, running toward the boys at the fence. “I gotta get the nom nam outa here!” He leaped for the top plank, caught it and rolled over on his belly, falling to the ground outside. The mighty sow crashed like a truck into the fence, almost breaking through. But the planking, spiked to square railway ties sunk three feet in the ground, held up one more time.

Leroy got up screaming with rage, wiped the mud from his hands onto his overalls, threw a few stones at the sow—she ignored them—and limped toward the house, bawling for his Maw.

When Red, still bland-eyed and unmoved, gave him some attention, Henry explained the purpose of the visit.

“I play first or nothin,” Red says.

“That’s okay, Red, that’s where we need you.”

“I bat first too.”

“Well—you’re our cleanup hitter.”

“Bat first or nothin. Use my own bat too.”

“Well …” Again Will and Henry looked at each other. No choice. “Okay, Red. Now the—”

“And Leroy bats second,” Red went on.

“What?”

“If’n Leroy don’t play I don’t play.”

“Aw come on, Red, you know Leroy can’t play.”

“Them’s the rules, Lightcap. Leroy plays or I don’t.”

“He could be coach, Red. We’ll need a coach at first.”

“Leroy could be right field foul umpire,” Will suggested.

“You heard me,” Red says, picking up a bucket full of sour skim milk, potato peelings, corncobs, chicken entrails, turnip greens, chicken heads, eggshells, bacon rinds, assorted bones. He emptied the bucket into the wooden trough inside the fence. The huge sow shuffled in, snorting, and plunged her quivering snout into the swill. Red banged the bucket on her head to knock out the last bits and pieces of her dinner. Crunching on the bones and heads—best parts first—the sow gave the bucket no more response than the twitch of one hairy ear. The piglets hung from her udders, still suckling.

Henry and Will tramped homeward over the ridge, into the Big Woods, past the forgotten sawmill, through the gloom of the trees and approaching twilight. Mourning doves called from the shadowy depths. New bright fresh green spring leaves breathed in and out, in and out, silently, from the gumwood trees, the wild cherry, the beech and the locust and the poplar and the dogwood. A horned owl hooted from the darkness of a hollow sycamore, calling for its mate. Another answered from a faraway pine.

“You hear that, Henry?” says Will, as they paused before the split-rail fence that marked the Lightcap frontier.

“Hear what?”

“The owls.”

“The howls?”

“I said owls. What do you suppose they’re saying to each other, Henry?”

Henry listened carefully. The owls were silent. He threw one leg over the top rail, then his other. He waited on the far side of the fence, listening. The owls called again, first one, then after a few moments of thought, the second.

Will grinned at his little brother Henry; the bright teeth shone
in Will’s brown honest face. Will said, “They’re a boy and a girl owl.”

“Baloney. How do you know?”

“Because the first owl says, ‘Hoo hoo, wanna screw?’ And the second owl she says, ‘Hoo hoo, not you.’”

“Come on.”

“No joke, that’s what they’re a-sayin.”

“Bull-loney.”

They went on, down the hill into Honey Hollow. And poor Henry, nursing in silence the secret of his grotesque, repulsive, disabling mutation, thought of Wilma Fetterman climbing into the schoolbus, of Elaine Kennedy draping her splendid cash-mere-sweatered breasts over the back of her chair as she turned to tease him for a bit, of Betsy Shoemaker turning cartwheels in her cheerleader uniform at the pre-game pep rally. A pang of agony coursed upward through Henry’s aching core, from the misaligned piston-rod of his groin to the undifferentiated longing in his heart. Never, never with a girl. He couldn’t even get his fist in there. What was he supposed to do, make love to his own umbilicus? Pound a hole through his stomach?

The owls hooted gently after him through the green tender cruelty of April, down the hills of the Allegheny. The ghosts of Shawnee warriors watched them from the shadows of the red oaks.

A light rain fell Saturday morning, leaving pools of water on the basepaths, but the sun appeared on time at noon. Henry and Will and Paul filled burlap sacks with sand and paced off the bases. Chuck Tait came soon after with a bag of lime to mark the batter’s box, the baselines, the coaching positions. They built up the pitcher’s mound, chased Prothrow’s cows into deep left and right field, and shoveled away most of the fresh cow patties from the infield. They filled in the pools with dirt, creating deceptive mudholes which only the home team need know about. They patched the backstop with chickenwire and scrap lumber. The Fetterman boys came with their gloves and a new bat, then the
Adams brothers with their gloves and two fractured, taped bats. (Both were cross-handed hitters.) No sign of the Ginters. There was time for a little infield practice and Will batted high-flying fungos to Paul and Elman and Junior in the outfield.

Henry thought he was ready for his pitching duties; he’d spent an hour every day for the past year throwing a tennis ball at a strike zone painted on the barn door, scooping up the ball one-handed as it bounced back to him down the entrance ramp. Precision control, that was his secret. He only had three pitches: an overhand fastball, not very fast; a sidearm curve which sometimes broke a little and sometimes didn’t; and his newly-developed Rip Sewell blooper, a high floating change of pace which he pushed forward with the palm of his hand, no spin to it whatsoever, a tempting mushball of a pitch that rose high in the air and then drifted toward the plate like a sinking balloon. Weak pitches, all of them—but he had the control. He could hit the center of Will’s catcher’s mitt wherever Will called for it. And Will knew how to study the batter. They were ready, Red Ginter or no Red Ginter.

The Blacklick team arrived an hour late, Tony Kovalchick driving his father’s twelve-cylinder 1928 Packard sedan. The three smallest boys sat in the trunk, holding up the lid with a bat. Seven large blond Eastern European coal miners, fingering rosaries and wearing sacred silver medals around their necks, heaved themselves like wrestlers out of the front and back seats. Stump Creek surrendered the field to the visitors for a thirty-minute warmup.

Tony and Henry compared scorecards.

“Your guys are too old,” Henry complained. “Those are all highschool guys.”

“That’s our team,” Tony says. “You wanta play baseball or you wanta go home and cry?”

“Carci, Watta, Jock Spivak—those are all football players.”

“You got Will and Chuck, they’re varsity. And who’s this Red Ginter fella? Ain’t he the one got in the fight at the Rocky Glen Tavern last Saturday night? Near killed some guy?”

“Not Red, you got him mixed up with somebody else.” Henry pointed to a dark little fellow with a serious case of visual strabismus sitting on the Packard’s runningboard. “Who’s he? He’s not in your lineup.”

“That’s Joe Glemp. He’s our umpire.”

“Umpire? He’s cross-eyed!”

“Yeah, that’s right. Don’t make fun of him. He can’t play ball worth a shit, but he’s a pretty good ump.”

“You’re crazy. He can’t see anything but his own nose. Anyhow Mister Prothrow’s gonna be umpire.” Henry looked around; old Gilbert Prothrow was nowhere in sight.

“The visiting team always brings the umpire,” Tony said complacently. “You know that, Lightcap.”

“You’re nuts.”

“It’s in the rule book. Black and white.”

“Not in any rule book I ever saw. Let’s see this rule book.”

“Let’s see this Mister Prothrow.”

Henry looked again. No Prothrow in view. But there came the Ginters, Red and Leroy, tramping up the dirt road, Red carrying his giant axe-hewn home-made hickory bat on his shoulder. The one with the square shaft, like a four-by-four.

Henry and Tony made a deal. Joe Glemp and Leroy Ginter would work as umpires, one calling the pitches from behind the plate, the other calling the plays in the field, and changing places each inning.

Leroy was not persuaded, not with Red behind him. Leroy meant to play baseball. Henry had to bully little brother Paul into taking the field umpire’s position. He promised Paul that Leroy would soon get bored with the game, leaving a position open. Tears streaming down his rosy cheeks, Paul trudged slowly to his umpire’s place in the vacant area behind second base. The Stump Creek nine took the field, Red Ginter on first nonchalantly taking Chuck Tait’s rifle-shot throws from short, Henry on the mound, Will catching, the children at second, third, and scattered across the outfield among a number of grazing milk cows.

“Play ball!” hollered little Joe Glemp with surprising authority, masked and armored and hunkered down behind the broad back of Will Lightcap at home plate. Tony Kovalchick, batting right-handed, stepped into the batter’s box, tapped some mud from his cleated shoes, made the sign of the cross before his chest, and dug in firmly for the first pitch. He gazed with insolent coal-dark eyes at the pitcher.

Henry, glove in his armpit, rubbed the sweet new unhit Spalding ball vigorously between moist palms and surveyed his team. All were in place, crouched for action, except Leroy in deep right field yelling hare-lipped obscenities at a thoughtful cow. No matter; Tony would pull to left.

Henry faced him. Tony was short but fierce, lively, eager, the pitcher, captain, and manager of the Blacklick team. Henry noticed at once that Tony was choking his bat by three inches. He waited; Will gave him the sign, fastball wide and low. Henry wound up and threw the ball exactly where Will wanted it, cutting the outside corner of the plate.

“Ball one!” shouted Glemp the umpire.

Will held the ball for a few moments to indicate his contempt for the call, then without rising tossed it back to Henry. Tony crowded the plate a little more. Will asked for another fastball, high and inside. Henry threw it precisely where wanted. “Ball—” began the umpire, as Tony tipped it foul back over their heads. “One ball, one strike,” little Joe Glemp conceded.

He can’t see but he can hear pretty good, thought Henry, rubbing the ball like a pro. Will called for the sidearm curve, low and outside. Backing off slightly (weakness!), Tony swung and tipped the pitch off the end of the bat. Two strikes. Now we got him, Henry thought, he’s getting mad. Will called for the floater, mixing them up, and Henry threw it, Tony waited, watching the ball sail in a high arc toward him, and lost patience, and swung furiously much too soon, nearly breaking his back. He picked himself up, brushing the mud from his knees, and stormed darkly back to the visitor’s bench. Will flipped the ball to third, Sonny Adams caught it, dropped it, passed it to Chuck who
whipped it to Clarence Adams who caught it with stinging glove and passed it to Red and Red to Henry. One out.

A small fat Italian kid named Carci stood in the box, well away from the plate, twitching his bat nervously. He was a second-string center on the football team but proved to be afraid of a flying baseball, especially after Henry pitched his first fastball straight at Carci’s upper lip, as instructed by Will. Luckily for the batter he had a retractable lip. Luckily for the pitcher the batter was a placid, abstracted intellectual, not too bright, who made no protest. His manager had to do it for him. Tony Kovalchick rose from the bench shouting but accepted Henry’s apology for the wild pitch. He and Will struck Carci out with two more pitches, the batter drawing away from the plate as he swung, missing the ball by a foot. Two down.