We Are Still Married (16 page)

However, the Babe looked shaky, like a man who ate a bushel of peaches whole and now was worried about the pits. He's drunk, some said, and a man did dump a basket of empty beer bottles off the train, and boys dove in to get one for a souvenir—but others who came close to his breath said no, he wasn't drunk, only dying. So it was that an immense crowd turned out at the Wally (Old Hard Hands) Bunsen Memorial Ballpark: twenty cents per seat, two bits to stand along the foul line, and a dollar to be behind a rope by the dugout, where the Babe would shake hands with each person in that section.

He and the All-Stars changed into their red Sorbasol uniforms in the dugout, there being no place else, and people looked away as they did it (nowadays people would look, but then they didn't), and the Babe and his teammates tossed the ball around, then sat down, and out came the Schroeders. They ran around and warmed up and you could see by their nonchalance how nervous they were. E.J. batted grounders to them and hit one grounder zinging into the visitors' dugout, missing the Babe by six inches. He was too sick to move. The All-Stars ran out and griped to the ump but the Babe sat like he didn't know where he was. The ump was scared. The Babe hobbled out to home plate for the ceremonial handshakes and photographs, and E.J. put his arm around him as the crowd stood cheering and grinned and whispered, “We're going to kill ya, ya big mutt. First pitch goes in your ear. This is your last game. Bye, Babe.” And the game got under way.

It was a good game, it's been said, though nobody remembers much about it specifically, such as the score, for example. The All-Stars were nobodies, only the Babe mattered to the crowd, and the big question was Would he play? He looked too shaky to take the field, so some said, “Suspend the rules! Why not let him just go up and bat! He can bat for the pitcher! Why not? It wouldn't hurt anything!” And nowadays they might do it, but back then you didn't pick up the bat unless you picked up your glove and played a position, and others said that maybe it wouldn't hurt anything but once you start changing the rules of the game for convenience, then what happens to our principles? Or do we change those, too?

So the game went along, a good game except that the Babe sat sprawled in the dugout, the little black man dipping cloths in a bucket of ice and laying them on the great man's head—a cool fall day but he was hot—and between innings he climbed out and waved to the fans and they stood and cheered and wondered would he come to bat. E.J. said to Bernie, “He'll bat all right, and when he comes, remember the first pitch: hard and high and inside.”

“He looks too weak to get the bat off his shoulder, Dad. He looks like a breeze would blow him over. I can't throw at Babe Ruth.”

“He's not sick, he's pretending so he don't have to play like the rest of us. Look at him: big fat rich New York son of a bitch, I bet he's getting five hundred dollars just to sit there and have a pickaninny put ice on him. Boy, I'd put some ice on him you-know-where, boy, he'd get up quick then, he'd be ready to play then. He comes up, I want you to give him something to think about so he knows we're not all a bunch of dumb hicks out here happy just to have him show up. I want him to know that some of us
mean it.
You do what I say. I'm serious.”

It was a good game and people enjoyed it, the day cool and bright, delicious, smelling of apples and leather and woodsmoke and horses, blazed with majestic colors as if in a country where kings and queens ride through the cornfields into the triumphant reds and oranges of the woods, and men in November playing the last game of summer, waiting for the Babe, everyone waiting for the Babe as runs scored, hours passed, the sky turned red and hazy. It was about time to quit and go home, and then he marched out, bat in hand, and three thousand people threw back their heads and yelled as loud as they could. They yelled for one solid minute and then it was still.

The Babe stood looking toward the woods until everything was silent, then stepped to the plate and waved the bat, and Bernie looked at him. It was so quiet you could hear coughing in the crowd. Way to the rear a man said, “Merle, you get your hands off her and shut up now,” and hundreds turned and shushed
him.
Then Bernie wound up. He bent way down and reached way back and kicked up high and the world turned and the ball flew and the umpire said, “BALL ONE!” and the catcher turned and said, “Be quiet, this doesn't concern you,” and the umpire blushed. He knew immediately that he was in the wrong. Babe Ruth was not going to walk, he would sooner strike out and would do it himself, with no help from an umpire. So the umpire turned and walked away.

The Babe turned and spat and picked up a little dirt and rubbed his hands with it (people thought, Look, that's our dirt and he's putting it on his hands, as if the Babe might bring his own) and then stood in and waved the bat and Bernie bent way down and reached way back and kicked high and the world turned and the ball flew and the Babe swung and missed; he said
huhhhnnnn
and staggered. And the next pitch. He swung and cried in pain and the big slow curve slapped into the catcher's mitt.

It was so still, they heard the Babe clear his throat, like a board sliding across dirt. They heard Bernie breathing hard through his nose.

The people were quiet, wanting to see, hear, and smell everything and remember it forever: the wet fall dirt, the pale-white bat, the pink cotton candy and the gentlemen's hats, the smell of wool and the glimmer of a star in the twilight, the touch of your dad's big hand and your little hand in it. Even E.J. was quiet, chewing, watching his son. The sun had set beyond right field, darkness was settling, you had to look close to see—Bernie took three steps toward home and pointed at the high outside corner of the plate, calling his pitch, and the Babe threw back his head and laughed four laughs. (People were glad to hear he was feeling better, but it was scary to hear a man laugh at home plate; everyone knew it was bad luck.) He touched the corner with his bat. Bernie climbed back on the mound, he paused, he bent down low and reached way back and kicked real high and the world turned and the ball flew and the Babe swung and it cracked and the ball became a tiny white star in the sky. It hung there as the Babe went around the bases in his famous Babe Ruth stride, the big graceful man trotting on slim little feet, his head down until the roar of the crowd rose like an ocean wave on the prairie and he looked up as he turned at third, he smiled, lifted his cap, strode soundlessly across home plate looking like the greatest ballplayer in the history of the world. The star was still in the sky, straight out due northwest of the centerfield fence, where he hit it. The ball was never found, though they searched for it for years.

“Did you see that?” your dad says, taking your hand.

You say, “Yes, I did.”

Even E.J. saw it and stood with the rest and he was changed after that, as were the others. A true hero has some power to make us a gift of a larger life. The Schroeders broke up, the boys went their own ways, and once they were out of earshot, E.J. sat in the Sidetrack Tap and bragged them up, the winners he produced and how they had shown Babe Ruth a pretty good game. He was tolerated but Babe Ruth was revered. He did something on that one day in our town that made us feel we were on the map of the universe, connected somehow to the stars, part of the mind of God. The full effect of his mighty blow diminished over time, of course, and now our teams languish, our coaches despair. Defeat comes to seem the natural course of things. Lake Wobegon dresses for a game, they put on their jockstraps, pull on the socks, get into the colors, they start to lose heart and turn pale—fear shrivels them.

Boys, this game may be your only chance to be good, he might tell them. You might screw up everything else in your life and poison the ones who love you, create misery, create such pain and devastation it will be repeated by generations of descendants. Boys, there's plenty of room for tragedy in life, so if you go bad, don't have it be said that you never did anything right. Win this game.

I
T ALL BEGAN BACK IN MARCH, the month that shows people who don't drink exactly how a hangover feels, when the snow started melting in the yards facing south and flowed east downhill, and the chairman of the Lake Wobegon Memorial Day Committee, Clarence Bunsen, heard water running in his basement, dripping from the walls, and noticed a fifty-foot lake in the empty lot between him and the Lutheran church where Benders' house burned down in 1955, in the winter. I was thirteen years old that winter and remember it well. Right before the sirens went off, I had wished something exciting would happen in town, so I felt ashamed to go running up there and see hellish flames in every window flashing in the black smoke and bursting up through the roof and high in the air, the whole nice house burning to smithereens and those extremely nice Benders, including Charles, my classmate, standing by in stone-cold shock and confusion, but it was interesting to see, a real catastrophe similar to the miniature ones we made in the mud in the ditch every spring. All around the little town of Sandville and its square squat earth houses bunched around Route 66, the Hell River ran fast and furious through Sandy Canyon toward the Devil's Culvert, carrying barges loaded with various things and also fast skiffs and yachts, the biggest yacht belonging to the old rich guy Henderson who lived in the sand castle and who if he knew what we had learned in Sunday school would be darned nervous about his future, though that Sandville levee seemed to be protecting the folks pretty well. Men stood in a row along the top, cowpokes and blue and gray soldiers, and looked at all the water rushing by and said, “I ain't never seen her as high as this, not in a coon's age.” “Yup. But the levee feels sure enough solid, by cracky.” Over the roar of the river, how could they hear the Luftwaffe heading their way? They couldn't, of course, and when the gigantic mud bombs dropped out of the cold gray sky and their comfortable little world vanished under globs of the very substance from which it was made (cruel irony), I could feel the sadness come up from the ground under my feet. There is no love or justice in this life, my friend, just a passel of illusions on a sunny spring day that is shattered by sudden brutal death.
Alas! poor Sandville!
The Benders didn't die, though, they just left Lake Wobegon and the ashes behind and went to live in a town named something-field in Connecticut where her brother was a chiropractor, and the next September Charles wrote a letter to our class saying Connecticut was a swell state, they lived in a very big brick house, and he had his own sailboat, a lie if I ever heard one. I wished there were someone I knew faraway who I could lie to and say that we were rich. Everyone I knew knew us too well, our junky yard with lumber stacked in the mud, our half-finished house, our worn-out furniture, and what is the benefit of lying to impress people you don't know? I could put palm trees and passion flowers in that empty lot and make the lake of melted snow into a fifty-foot pool where long-legged naked girls skinny around in the clear blue water, and I could pick your name out of the phone book and send it to you, but where does that get us? All it was was a big cold puddle in the empty place the Benders left to go to Connecticut and get happy, but it worried Clarence sick, so he passed the Memorial Day chairmanship to his brother Clint, the Mayor of Lake Wobegon, who already was chairman of so many things he didn't think about it until a few weeks later.

The next day was warmer, the first of a series of warm ones. The Norwegian bachelor farmers sat on their board bench in front of Ralph's like a jury, watching and listening, chewing and spitting, bundled up tight. They saw Clifford appear in the front window of the Mercantile and take Lorraine's dress off and—she had no underwear on underneath, only pale-pink wooden skin, a shapely woman but the paint on her left breast was chipped and there were deep nicks in her slender waist—tack a blue cotton skirt to her and slip a white jersey over her head. Some boys came along from school at 2:30. There'd been a rumor in school that someone was hit by a car and killed in front of the Sidetrack Tap, but the bachelors said no. Ridiculous. To get hit by a car in this town, you'd have to wait awhile and then try to jump in front of one, but it'd probably just stop and they'd ask, how are you doing. What happened was that Mr. Berge walked out of the Sidetrack after lunch and, blinded by sunlight, walked into the side of Florian's car. Florian was driving slow. No harm done. Berge went back and had more lunch to calm himself down, and Florian proceeded out of town to St. John's to visit his friend Father O'Connell. Disappointed, the boys went to church and found the dam they had built to hold the lake was busted open, the lake had drained, the ships run aground, the story was over.

Memorial Day didn't pass Clint's mind until one evening in April when Mr. Berge said to him, “I wouldn't be surprised if we got more snow.” They were in the Sidetrack. Clint had dropped in to use the phone. He had a beer while he waited. He was calling Irene to say he'd be home in a minute but the number was still busy, so he had another one. “Hard to snow when it's sixty-five degrees out,” he said.

Spring is a miserable time of year for the mayor of a town that runs on the weak-mayor, stupid-Council system of government: the roads crumble under the wallop of warm weather and the uncompleted sewer construction thaws out and trenches collapse and pipes crack, costs rise, the sewer company sulks in its tent in Millet, and the Council sits and talks about whether or not to discuss whether to talk about when to discuss a way of deciding where and how to talk about making a decision, Yes or No, Now or Never, on the one obvious way to solve the age-old problem of shit, and the worst one was his sister-in-law Arlene Bunsen, elected in 1984 to fill the seat of the senile A. B. (Cully) Tollerud. A bad year. For years Clint had voted the old man like a dummy, but Arlene is independent, which is fine in theory but whenever she sees a page full of big numbers she gets all fluttery and yammers about whether it's
really
necessary and couldn't we
discuss
this further, get some advice, maybe find a book in the library, call someone at the University, send for an expert, have a referendum, form a special committee, and how do you explain to this lovely Christian lady that a community septic-tank system is going to cost $2,400 per household plus $150 annual usage fee, including construction, materials, and the $97,000 to Mr. Hansen for twenty acres of land for the drain field? Clint had spent hundreds of hours in agonizingly dull meetings negotiating with Hansen, his lawyer, two real-estate men, the assessor, two Mist County commissioners, the state pollution-control agency, the waste-control board, a consulting engineer, and some weasel at the EPA—and Hansen's property was where the drain field had to go and $97,000 was what they had to pay for it, so when Arlene asked one night, in a sweet and helpful tone of voice, “Wouldn't it be worth it to look for alternatives that might be more economical?” and the idiots in the folding chairs actually
clapped
for her, it weakened his faith in representative democracy. The second bottle of beer represented some faith restored.