The Boys of Summer (46 page)

The family was escorted to their pew at 1:15. Rachel was clinging to another of her children. Two men had to help Jack walk. He was crying very softly for his son, his head down, so that the tears coursed only a little way before falling to the floor.

A small chorus from Daytop sang “Bridge over Troubled Water” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” A solo flutist played “We Shall Overcome.” One is prepared for music at funerals, but then something happened that surprised everyone: Monte Irvin, Hugh Morrow, the people of the parish, who had known the Robinsons twenty-five years ago as neighbors. David Robinson,
who was nineteen, walked to the pulpit and read a eulogy. David had written it in a single afternoon and while riding to church that morning had asked his father if he could speak it.

“If you want to,” Jackie Robinson said.

“He climbed high on the cliffs above the sea,” David called in a resonant tenor, “and stripped bare his shoulders and raised his arms to the water, crying, ‘I am a man. Give me my freedom so that I might dance naked in the moonlight and laugh with the stars and roll in the grass and drink the warmth of the sun. Give me my freedom so I might fly.’ But the armies of the sea continued to war with the wind and the wind raced through the giants of stones and mocked his cries, and the man fell to his knees and wept.”

David wore a dashiki. He had finished his freshman year at Stanford. Soon he would travel through Africa. Jackie Junior had intended to buy the yellow MG and help David to a stake.

“He rose,” David’s voice called from the pulpit, “and journeyed down the mountain to the valley and came upon a village. When the people saw him, they scorned him for his naked shoulders and wild eyes and again he cried, ‘I am a man. I seek the means of freedom.’

“The people laughed, saying, ‘We see no chains on your arms. Go. You are free.’ And they called him mad and drove him from their village.…” The man walked on, “eyes red as a gladiator’s sword,” until he came to a stream where he saw an image, face sunken in hunger, “skin drawn tight around the body.

“He stood fixed on the water’s edge and began to weep, not from sorrow but from joy, for he saw beauty in the water. He removed his clothing and stood naked before the world and rose to his full height and smiled and moved to meet the figure in the water and the stream made love to his body and the majesty of his voice was heard above the roar of the sea and the howl of the wind,
and he was free.”

David hurried from the pulpit. His mother rose to embrace
him. Sobs rang through the old church; it was five minutes before formal worship resumed. But even as our small group drove back to New York, wondering how to make memorial, we had seen Jackie Robinson after the services, white-haired, dryeyed and sure, as when he doubled home two runs, walking among street people outside the church, talking perhaps of the hell of heroin, touching or being touched by children, and we thought how proud his first-born son would have been, not of the ball player but of the man, had he lived, if only the insanity of the present had given him a chance.

The Juniata River runs down Black Log Mountain, and through the Tuscarawas its gorge curves like a bow. All the factories are shut at Cuba Mills and Mifflintown, and downstream, when the Juniata sweeps along past Newport, the hurrying waters are clean enough to fish.

On the interstate highways that band Pennsylvania no signs announce mileage to the petrified village of Newport, where Billy Cox, the great third baseman, tends bar. Like Clem La-bine’s Woonsocket, Newport lies close to arterial roads, but bypassed. You drive west from New York into Pennsylvania Dutch country, and at Harrisburg the main routes press farther west and south. To reach Newport, you turn north along the Susquehanna until it forks just past Duncannon. The left fork is the Juniata River.

I had found everyone now but Cox, that odd, incongruous figure, hints of intelligence set in curious camouflage. The others remembered him as solitary, strange, gifted, troubled. Some reminded me that Preacher Roe had done a lot for Billy, by rooming with him and buoying his spirits. Pee Wee Reese called Cox the greatest glove and least likely-looking major league infielder he’d ever known. I can still see him going toward the line, the barehand side, and reaching across the wiry body, slapping that Whelan glove, capturing a two-base hit, and turning it into a ground out. “Five to three if you’re scoring,” Connie Desmond, the sportscaster, liked to say.

Even in the major leagues third base begins with the hard, wordless truths my father and I explored thirty years ago. You have to see the ball. You have to look the ball into your glove. But as you do, your face is bare to any sudden hop, and as you lower the glove, the way you must, you leave torso and groin unguarded.

It is the same in the majors. The fields are better, making truer bounces, but then the batters hit harder. The balance holds, and sometimes you want to cringe for a third baseman, but not for Billy Cox. With Billy crouched, motionless, staring down a hitter’s craw, the ball, not he, would be the victim.

Hoss Cox had a long face, thin hair and a sorrowful, inward expression. Along with the index-finger wag, for “Fuckit,” he put off serious talk. “Ah,” he would say, “don’t start that shit.” At times, when something odd, comical or ghastly happened, the long sad face transformed. He cocked his head and pursed his lips and seemed about to grin. “Look at this,” Hoss Cox’s expression said. “Look what the sonsabitches are up to now.”

When I telephoned, he explained carefully that he had left the job tending bar at the American Legion. His Cousin Gumby worked there now. He himself was at the Owls Club. ‘

“Elks?”

“Nah. Not Elks.
Owls.
You cross the bridge to the Gulf Station and you turn left.”

We made a date to meet at four o’clock on Thursday afternoon. I knew Billy liked the night. I packed a few things and the glove, the Wilson A-2000. Each Dodger had signed it. Fingers read Joe Black, Jackie Robinson, Preacher Roe. Only Cox was left to close the circle of nostalgia.

Newport sits among ridges and cuts in cold, handsome country, a town of perhaps fifteen hundred on the south bank of the Juniata. I crossed an old bridge and made the left at the Gulf Station. Near the end of a narrow street stood a two-story building, faced with dull, glossy slabs of mica. A sign etched in light gray read,
“social order of owls (private).”

Cox has not yet reported for work. “Wait for him over at the Newporter,” suggested the day bartender. “It’s half a block away.” The Newporter, a frame building three floors high, is the town hotel. The main entrance leads to a foyer feeding a wooden stairway. A registration desk and newsstand lie off to the right, in a bare square room that serves as lobby. Beyond, the bar was dark. Four men sat drinking quietly. A chubby blonde, with a farm girl’s face but pressing thirty, was sipping beer and giggling. An older woman watched her, with intent amusement.

I ordered Rolling Rock, a beer that calls itself the pride of Pennsylvania. Suddenly an old man, beyond the two women, called hoarsely, “Big Bill.” Cox had entered. He wore an open-collared plaid shirt and work pants. “Yeh,” he said to me. “Yeh. How ya doing? Need a room? Jack here, he’ll get you one. I come here to eat. Then I gotta work. Then we can talk. Maybe I’ll take ya up the hill like the other time, or maybe we’ll go to the Vets. Hey, Jack, a meat loaf. And another drink for him. He’s a writer from New York.”

“I grew up with Bill,” said the bartender, a short, stumpy man
in eyeglasses. “My name’s Jack Heisey. I knew him as a boy.”

“Don’t believe any shit he tells you now,” Cox said.

He has grown a belly and he was bigger than I remembered. He is no taller, of course, perhaps five feet nine, but above the new paunch powerful high shoulders hunched. Among Hodges, Snider and Robinson, you overlooked the power in Cox’s build.

“Hey,” he said. “Lookit this, will ya?” Cox extended his right hand. The middle finger ended between knuckles. The skin was smooth. It looked like a normal finger end, a dwarf finger, without the nail.

“What happened?”

Cox jerked his head back, and pursed his lips. “Dumbness,” he said, “dumbness. I thought the power mower was off. I put my hand in to find out. It got the longest finger. Started spurting blood. Didn’t hurt. I’m standing there with part of my finger on the grass looking at the blood, saying, ‘Dumbness, dumbness.’”

“When was this?”

“Last summer.”

“Can you throw? You ought to have a sinker now.”

“Yer right, but I don’t know. I ain’t tried to throw a ball since it happened.”

The blonde girl’s cry filled the bar: “Billy Cox.”

He started and drew back his head.

“Are you really Billy Cox? The third baseman? Who played for the Dodgers? Really? I use to watch you.”

“You was six months old.”

“Oh, Billy.” The girl sprawled away from the bar stool. She was wearing tight blue slacks and a white blouse. “Would you give me your autograph?”

Cox turned to his beer. “Can’t write.”

“I never met a major leaguer before.”

“I got to work a while,” Cox said to me, pointedly ignoring the blonde. “We can talk after. Jack here’ll take care of ya. Get ya a room. Private bath, if you want it.”

The girl pressed pencil and paper between us. Cox shook his head and signed his name.

“Here’s the meat loaf, Bill,” Jack said.

“Big Bill,” said the old man in the corner. He offered me a hand. “I’m Kenneth S. Smith.”

“Above your name,” the blonde said to Cox, “you have to write ‘love and kisses.’”

“No,” Cox said.

“Suppose I go out and buy a baseball and a pen.”

“Can’t get a baseball in this town no more.”

“Sure I can.”

“Hey,” Cox said, jerking his head. “You find a baseball left in this town, I’ll sign anything.”

The women walked out into Main Street, the blonde rolling in the slacks. Cox shook his head and said to no one, “Whoosh. She’s trying to get me in trouble.”

“She’s a secretary over to Harrisburg,” said Kenneth S. Smith. “The older one runs a bar.”

“I don’t want no trouble,” Cox said to me. “This here’s a small town. Everybody knows what ya do.”

In a few minutes the girl came squealing back. “I found it, I found it.” She carried a dollar baseball in a box and a yellow pen.

“Son of a bitch,” Cox muttered.

“It’s not much of a ball, miss,” I said.

“But it’s a baseball,” Cox said. “She found a baseball in Newport.”

“Now you got to sign ‘love and kisses,’ “ the girl said.

Cox pursed his lips and signed. The chubby girl put her arms around him and kissed his cheek. His eyes glinted with amusement.

“This happen every day, Willie?” I said.

“This is the first real ball player I ever met,” the secretary said.

“Over ta York,” Cox said, “Kenny Raffensberger lives there.”

The girl paced. Cox finished his meat loaf and put sixty cents on the counter. “When I get done, we get together,” he said. Jack Heisey called, “See ya,” as Cox left. The blonde stopped pacing. She clutched the baseball at a hip. “Hey,” she said to her friend, “let’s go on over to Enola or Duncannon and see what’s doing there.”

Jack Heisey said room Number 8, one flight up, came with a private bath. “Cost ya more, though. Five dollars.” I took the key and followed the wide staircase to a landing and an inked sign marked, “This way to public bathroom.” In Number 8 a double bed, covered with a tea-rose spread, stretched diagonally. The private bath was an unenclosed toilet in one corner of the room.

Downstairs a man in the lobby sat studying a television set that showed a basketball game among commercials. He had a long face and a thick chin. “Yes, sir,” he said to the announcer of commercials. “You’re right, sir. I
will
get some Kellogg’s bran cereal. I know, sir. It
is
good for my system. I should have it more.” He looked toward me. “You eat bran cereals?” he said.

I crossed into the bar where Jack Heisey and Kenneth S. Smith waited. Billy had told them I would be coming back, and they both began to speak, almost in turn.

“We had some good ball players round here,” said Kenneth Smith. “I oughta know. I managed the town team starting in ‘27. Charley Zeidders, he was fast. Les Bell. A pitcher named Red. They were the good ones.”

“Billy,” Jack Heisey said, “used ta stand down by the Pennsy tracks. If there was nobody to play with, he’d pick up stones and hit ‘em with a stick.”

“The day he come out for the team he was so skinny, his shadow looked thinner than a bat.”

“His mother died. The Cox kids didn’t have no mother.”

“The other fellers on the town team didn’t want him there. He was so small.”

“When he was ten, he fielded like a man.”

“I said, ‘He stays. The rest o’ you can go.’”

“But he got lonely. He was always getting lonely.”

“Over ta Marshall Field, that’s Agway now, Charlie Zeidders hit one out to left.”

“He didn’t never want to leave this town.”

“Billy said, ‘Gimme a bat. Come on. I’ll show ya who’s skinny!’”

“He was always quitting to come back.”

“Billy hit one clear outa sight to center.”

“We never seen a ball player like him in Newport or Port Royal.”

“Or Mifflintown.”

“We won’t see one like Billy Cox again.”

“The tannery; you heard about the tannery? When I first come here, people said, ‘Ken Smith, the tannery is where you oughta work. Secure. We got a mountain town, you know, and times get hard.’ Hell, I was a salesman. I traveled some. Bucks County. Seen New York. I was selling when the tannery got closed. Depression come and went. The tannery was dead. There was no call. You don’t tan leather goods with tanbark these days. Chemicals, that’s what it is.”

“Bill’s father worked the tannery. Fred Cox. When it closed down, he went to WPA. They never had no decent meals, them kids.”

“Billy kept playing baseball.”

“We had a common near the ironworks.”

“He’d pick up anything, off grass or rocks.”

“They closed that, too. Play an’ watch baseball was all we had to cheer us.”

“The Pirates signed him ta play over ta Harrisburg.”

“And he was proud.”

“He didn’t have no clothes. I ran the town collection. We gave him clothing and a send-off.”

“A month later he come home.”

“He got too goddamn lonely.”

“The next year I sent Red, the pitcher, too. He’d never make it, but he’d sit with Billy.”

“The Pittsburgh Pirates. Billy was their shortstop.”

“Shoulda played third. He played third for my team.”

“Fast company in Pittsburgh. He did fine.”

“ ‘Cept they was drinkers on that club.”

“He got to like it there in Brooklyn.”

“Poor guy come out of the war and had to play with boozers.”

“The Brooklyns let him go. The best third baseman anybody saw.”

“He shouldn’t be
here
now. Should be on top of the world.”

“The Brooklyns sent him to the other league. Then he come home. Showed me his legs. All swole and purple. Thirty-six and they was gonna teach him how to slide. ‘Fuckit,’ he said.”

“Jack,” said Kenneth Smith, “would you pipe down so’s I can tell this here man how Billy Cox played ball?”

The reasons for which Newport was built died along with the tannery and ironworks. A river bend no longer makes a town and jobs are so short at the Penn Central that only men with twenty years’ seniority survive recurrent layoffs. But Newport is not dying; the petrified village may even grow. It is a refuge for certain whites, raising young families, who talk about “the niggers stealing America.” No black man lives in Newport, Pennsylvania. None wants to come and none is asked. A few blacks who work for Bethlehem Steel have built a cabin near Lost Creek Gap, but the Newport elders say these aren’t bad ones. Hunting and fishing is what those fellers like, the elders announce in the barrooms. No boozing or womanizing. (But the blacks and the white secretaries have not yet found each other.)

As much as excellence and pride, the team was black and white together. Preacher Roe felt it and Joe Black, and this untinted friendship was the richest element in Carl Erskine’s career. But here was Billy Cox, who was not very good at talking or dealing with other people, not brilliant at anything truly but picking up ground balls, alone now in a prison of intolerance.

“The Vets,” he said. “Come in my car.” Kenneth S. Smith, past seventy, declared that he would have to go to sleep, but Jack Heisey announced that he would stay. Halfway up a midnight hill, windows of the VFW shone bright. Inside, twelve high stools rimmed the bar. A pool table filled the other space.

“Goddamn catcher’s mitt,” Cox said, picking up the Wilson A-2000.