The Great American Novel (44 page)

Finally there was not a ball that had been donated by the generous little boys of Port Ruppert whose cover had not been wholly devoured. On their haunches again, the panting, sweating little children waited while Walter Johnson and the Wise One moved along the foul lines, counting the skinned baseballs that had been dropped at the feet of the village elders.

The winner of the competition was a burly little fellow, no more than seven, who had eaten the covers off five regulation baseballs. Hoisted up on to Walter Johnson's marvelous shoulders, he was carried ceremoniously around the basepaths, while the villagers chanted,
“Typee! Typee! Typee!”

The next competition turned out to be not so amusing, or so successful, and left the villagers oddly dispirited, as though they might be wondering, “What's the matter with the kids these days?”

It was a hitting contest. The object fired down off the hill by Walter Johnson was not a baseball, however—there was no longer a single baseball intact on the entire continent of Africa—but a black, shriveled head, slightly larger in circumference than the nine and a quarter inch ball considered “official” in the big leagues. Invariably Johnson got two quick strikes past a youngster before he had even gotten the bat off his bare little shoulder; then he would throw him a head wide or low of the plate, and strike him out swinging. Now, from the way the spectators hissed and spat at the children from the sidelines, it would seem that to bring the meat-end of a bat into contact with what had once been the face of a tribal enemy, or traitor, appeared to them to be as easy as pie; the fact that the youngsters could not even rouse themselves to swing until they were already down by two strikes, bespoke a timidity that particularly enraged the menfolk. Yet, for all that the fathers barked angry instructions at the tiny little hitters, leaping high into the air and showing their filed teeth to communicate their disappointment, their offspring remained frozen in fear at the plate, even though Walter Johnson was clearly throwing nothing but half-speed pitches, and curves that turned so slowly you could virtually see the glum expression on the face as it broke down the middle.

Only the burly little seven-year-old who had skinned and eaten the most hides managed to get so much as a
piece
of a head, ticking an ear or an eyelid so lightly however, that after examination by the Wise One, the head was deemed undamaged enough to be thrown back into play. Nonetheless, he managed to stay alive in the batter's box longer than any of his little friends, and was thus declared the winner once again.

Now the tribesman whom Mister Fairsmith had come to call Babe Ruth—as much for his barrel-chested, bandy-legged physique as his power at the plate—was called out of the crowd of spectators to satisfy the expectations that the fledglings of the village had so miserably disappointed. And did he!
There
was the old sound of wood against bone! The moment the bat met the skull, you just knew that that old head was
gone.
What a night for the Babe! Fourteen heads thrown, fourteen heads smashed to smithereens.

No sooner was the exhibition over, than the village children, and even some of the men, surged forward to capture a sliver of cranial bone as a souvenir of the occasion.

And now came the ceremony of the virgins and the baseball bats. The tribe, stirred to a frenzy by Babe Ruth's performance at the plate, went silent as worshippers when the first demure native girl, with brass hoops dangling from her ears, and her shaved head covered by a Mundy baseball cap, was led slowly in from the bullpen and across the dark outfield by the Wise One. The women tending the fire reached out to touch the lithe naked body when she moved past the flames, and on the sidelines the spectators whispered excitedly to see the tears of joy in her large brown eyes. Under the direction of Walter Johnson—as gentle now with the maiden as he had been severe with the young boys—the girl arranged herself upon home plate, as she did so darting a shy glance toward the “hitter” in the on-deck circle. Then Walter Johnson gently pulled the oversized Mundy cap down over her eyes and the women of the tribe began to sing.

A jug of boiling water dipped from the kettle was used to wash down the plate after the initiate had taken her turn in the box. With a broom of twigs the Wise One brushed away every last grain of dust, and then examined the bat to be used next, giving particular attention to the handle, to be sure that it had been cleansed of the resin that Mister Fairsmith had encouraged the players to use in order to improve their grip in this tropical climate. From the meticulous hygienic ritual that preceded each deflowering—and too from the tender way in which Walter Johnson covered their eyes to prevent them from growing skittish, in the manner of fillies—it would appear that the girls of this tribe were a pampered lot indeed. Each bat was used but once and then discarded, yet another indication of the singular care and concern lavished upon the pubescent female in this remote corner of the world.

Then came the feast.

Gloves had been boiling in the kettle all the while the girls had been up at the plate. By now they were cooked to a turn, and when they were removed from the water and scattered about the field the villagers fell upon them with ferocity—in the end they did not even leave uneaten the tough lacing that edged the first-basemen's mitts. The eyelets through which the lacing was drawn they spit on the ground like so many pits, but everything else they devoured, thirty-six gloves in all: four right-handed catchers' mitts, four first-basemen's mitts (two left-handed, two right-handed), and eighteen right-handed fielders' gloves eaten by the men; ten left-handed fielders' mitts divided among the women and the children. The chest protectors were boiled for dessert, and while the adults sucked and chewed on the canvas, the children gobbled down the filling. Some of the tots were carried off to sleep still clutching tufts of hairy wadding in their little pink palms.

Long after the village was asleep, when only embers burned where the huge fires had illuminated the infield, Mister Fairsmith, hanging still from his post in the third-base coaching box, was stirred to consciousness by the noise of creatures scurrying back and forth across the diamond. In the dim light he gradually was able to bring his eyes to focus upon the crones of the village, bone-thin women, bent and twisted in the spine, who were scrambling and darting about like a school of crabs over the ocean floor. Combing the playing field, they had collected all the bats that had been discarded earlier on, and now with no regard for the sanctity of the ritual, for hygiene or for decorum, they proceeded to ape the ceremony of the virgins and the bats. Two and three together would roll in the dust around home plate, cackling and moaning, whether in mockery of the young virgins or in imitation, it was impossible for Mister Fairsmith to tell.

Then, with a blast of heat right up from Hades, the African dawn—and fast as they could, the old women departed, using the serviceable Louisville Sluggers for crutches and canes.

Across the field Billy still hung from his pole in the first-base coaching box. He too had escaped the kettle. But that was all he had escaped.

“Old … old-timers' day…” he called to his uncle, looking with a lopsided smile after the departing hags.

To which Mister Fairsmith cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “The horror! The horror!”

In the morning, with the sun really cooking, one of the village boys came skipping out to the field, apparently without any idea at all that the season in the Congo had come to an end. Or maybe he was hoping that even if his friends and their fathers had returned to the round of life such as had existed in the village before Mister Fairsmith and his bearers had emerged from the jungle, the Mundy manager might at least play a game of “pepper” with him. It was the boy Mister Fairsmith had christened Wee Willie, after Wee Willie Keeler, whose famous dictum, “Hit 'em where they ain't,” had taken a strong hold upon the youngster's imagination. He was exceedingly bright for a dusky little fellow, and in the week's time had even come to learn a few words of English, along with learning how to switch his feet and punch the ball through to the opposite field.

For several minutes he stood before the stake to which Mister Fairsmith was fastened, waiting to receive his instructions. Then he spoke. “Mistah Baseball?” He reached up and tugged at the Patriot League buckle on the manager's belt. “Mistah Baseball?”

Nothing. So he ran clockwise around the diamond, sliding into second on his bare behind, then into first, before approaching the white man hanging from the stake in the first-base coaching box. Looking up into the lopsided smile, he gave him the bad news. “Mistah Baseball—he dead.”

The canoe in which the two Americans were discovered was decorated on either side with what must have been the tribe's symbol for Death, a stick figure holding in one of his outstretched arms an oval shield looking something like an oversized catcher's mitt. The bodies had been wrapped from head to foot in the yarn off the two dozen balls whose hides had been eaten by the boys of the tribe. They were discovered (just barely this side of the afterlife) in a stream twenty miles from Stanleyville, from whence they were borne by friendly natives through the jungle to a hospital in the city. And there they lay for weeks and weeks, first Mister Fairsmith, then young Billy, about to land, like a called third strike, in the Great Mitt of Death.

When they could walk again, it was the older man who led the younger through the gardens. Every time they came upon a doctor or a nun, Billy would launch into a description of the marvelous night game that he and his uncle had witnessed in the interior. He told them of the nine girls who had come up to the plate to “pinch-hit,” he told them of “the Old-Timers' Game,” that had taken place just before dawn, but in that by and large the staff was composed of Belgians, they listened politely, without any understanding that the young American had lost his mind.

Thereafter, for so long as the Mundys made their home in Port Ruppert, Mister Fairsmith arranged for Billy and a nurse from the institution to be chauffeured out to the ball park on Opening Day, and for the two to be seated in a box directly beside his honor the mayor. That was the least he could do, for, loosely speaking, he was responsible for the boy's mind having become forever unhinged. Not, mind you, that Mister Fairsmith would have conducted himself any differently if he'd had to live through that nightmare again. True, a bright young man whose ambition had been to become a missionary in the service of Christ had lost his bearings in the world. But suppose, on the other hand, Ulysses S. Fairsmith had consented to allow African baseball players to slide into first after a walk … suppose he had been the one responsible for an entire continent of black men turning the great American game of baseball into so much wallowing in the mud … No, he could never have borne that upon his conscience.

*   *   *

To return now to the trial facing the venerable manager in his eightieth year, the hopeless '43 Ruppert Mundys—how could they disgust and horrify him even more than those African savages? Precisely because they were
not
African savages, but Americans! (by and large), big leaguers! (supposedly). For heathen barbarians to defile the national pastime was one thing, but American men wearing the uniform of the major league team to which Ulysses S. Fairsmith had devoted his entire life? That was beyond compassion and beneath contempt.

So far-reaching was his disgust that when they arrived (on separate trains) in a P. League town, Mister Fairsmith would not even stay at the hotel where he might have the misfortune of running into one of his players in the lobby or the dining room. Instead he went off as a guest to the home of the local evangelist, as much for the sake of religious succor as for the relief it afforded him to be out of sight of those degenerates impersonating his beloved Mundys.

“First African savages. Then the Emperor of Japan. And now, now my own Mundys. Billy,” he asked the evangelist, “how can God exist and sanction such as this?”

“The Lord has his reasons, Samuel.”

“But have you ever been to watch this team on the field of play?”

“No. But I read the box scores. I know what you are suffering.”

“Billy, the box scores are as nothing beside the games themselves.”

“We can only pray, Samuel. Let us pray.”

And so instead of traveling out to the ball park, where nothing he could say or do would change these impostors into Mundys, Mister Fairsmith would remain on his knees throughout the afternoon, praying that the Lord might accomplish the transformation that was beyond his own managerial powers.

Each evening, after dinner, Jolly Cholly traveled out from the hotel to tell Mister Fairsmith the results of that day's game. The minister's wife always prepared a plate of cookies to bring to the Mundy coach while he sat in a chair beside Mister Fairsmith's bed and, scorecard in hand, described the horrors of the afternoon, play by play.

Down in the living room, the minister asked his wife, “How is he taking it?”

“He just lies there, looking into space.”

“I'll go to him, when Jolly Cholly leaves.”

“I think you had better.”

At the door, the minister would say to the Mundy coach, “And who will be the starting pitcher tomorrow, Mr. Tuminikar?”

And as often as not, Jolly Cholly shrugged and answered, “Whoever feels like it, I guess. We sort of have given up on any kind of rotation, Reverend. Whoever wants the exercise, he just grabs his mitt and goes on out there.”

Carrying his Bible and wearing his collar, the minister would enter Mister Fairsmith's room.

“In victory,” cried the Mundy manager, “I was magnanimous. In defeat I was a gentleman. In Africa, I would have martyred myself rather than permit those savages to sully the national game. Why, why is this happening!”