Brittle Innings

46

Quitman’s Mockingbirds hit Highbridge for a three-game series, one game an evening from Wednesday through Friday. The day after Darius left, the day after we lost to Mister Cozy’s gang, the day after Charlie Snow died out to Camp Penticuff, the Mockingbirds flew in our faces for nine straight innings. Hit after merciless hit. Slash-and-burn base running that bled our will and gave our fed-up fans so many chances to catcall that fatigue set in. Eventually, any stray breeze creaking through the bleachers made more noise than our fans.

In fact, in the middle of the seventh, when Milt Frye asked for “yore prayers in memory of the brilliant Charlie Snow,” the stadium went stone dead. None of our fans’d known until then he’d died; their earlier calls to put him into the game, given Trapdoor’s play, had made perfect sense. Now a silence like surrender took hold. We’d fallen several runs behind, our star player had mysteriously “passed on,” and a mood of such cobalt blueness had hit our dugout we all felt sick to heart.

Our loss to the Mockingbirds, we learned the next morning, had dropped us three games behind the LaGrange Gendarmes, who’d beaten Marble Springs on the road. The Gendarmes would roll into town on Saturday for a double-header, and a singleton on Sunday afternoon. If we lost another game or two to losers like the patched-together ’Birds, the Gendarmes might haul down 1943’s CVL pennant before we could gear back up to stop em.

On Thursday, every Hellbender on the roster attended Charlie Snow’s funeral at the Alligator Park Methodist Church. Local fans overran the lawn. Most couldn’t get inside because pews were reserved for team members, their families, and a perfumed army of Snow’s female cousins, who’d just arrived from Richland, Georgia, his hometown. Even a few Mockingbirds, admirers of Snow’s style, showed up, and Mister JayMac, who’d put together and was maybe even paying for Snow’s obsequies, showed these ’Birds to some ladder-back chairs behind the main body of pews.

Besides the big female cousins (blonde middle-aged women in veils and pastel print dresses), the only other relative there to mourn Charlie Snow was his wife, Vera Jo, an ex-cocktail waitress he’d married in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1931. They had no kids. After the service, I heard the weeping Vera Jo tell Miss Giselle, who’d snugged Vera Jo up next to her for the walk to the cemetery, that Charlie’d refused to let her have a baby for fear it’d come a hemophiliac boy. Bleeders, he’d felt, had too briary a path to walk in this life; he couldn’t see helping to bring another one into it.

“I ast him, ‘Charlie, would you trade all you’ve got in the way of love and talent for everlasting nothingness?’ But he said, ‘I’m here; I have to make do. The never-was aint, and don’t. Why take the never-was and afflict it?’ He couldn’t see no other side. Now I wish I had me a whole troop of little bleeders to ease the long nevermore he’s gone off to.”

Vera Jo wept, Miss Giselle hugged her, and the cemetery, set about with water oaks, sycamores, and pecan trees, filled nigh to overflowing with repiners.

Muscles, Curriden, Sosebee, Hay, Sudikoff, and Dunnagin lowered Charlie Snow’s casket into the grave on harnesses of fresh yellow rope. The preacher held his Bible over his head and spoke a final benediction. The crowd broke up and threaded back into the sweltering daylight beyond the cemetery. Henry and I, who’d stood poker-spined near the pecan grove behind Snow’s burial plot, likewise started to leave.

“Psssssst,” hissed the pecan grove. “Psssssst.”

We turned, Henry and I. A shadow in amongst the dog-eared green whorls of the hanging pecan branches beckoned to us, pulling back as it did. Park gardeners had carpeted the grove with pine straw and trenched it with banks of white violets and well-pruned blackberry hedges, a retreat for the sorrowful. Some anonymous soul’d even placed some slab benches in there for the bereaved to perch their tails on.

Anyway, the crouched shadow in that chapel of pecan-bough whorls beckoned to us again.

“It’s Darius,” I told Henry in pure amaze.

We crept away from the other departing mourners through a break in the pecan grove. Darius, wary as a fox, had gone even deeper into it, at last turning himself at bay alongside the scabby bole of tree not much thicker through the trunk than he was through the chest. Beside that pecan, he raised a hand to halt us.

“Yall sit right there,” he said. “Pretend to rest.” He meant on a moss-grown bench. Henry and I sat down on it.

“Where’ve you b-been?” asked.

Darius, maybe ten feet away, laid his cheek against the scabbed bark of the pecan. He hugged it like a person. “I’ve done signed on with Mister Cozy and the Splendid Dominicans,” he said. “We play in Lake City tomorrow. Next summer I could be wi the Memphis Red Sox or the KayCee Monarchs. Playing, Mister Henry-not jes driving a bus. Playing.”

“Mister JayMac will find you,” Henry said.

“Why? Why’d he want to do that? Sides, I’m gon change my name and play a lot more spots than jes pitcher.”

“What about Euclid?” Henry said.

The question gave Darius pause. Me too. I hadn’t even thought of Euclid, Darius’s supposed little brother, and his’d been the first Hellbender face I’d seen upon arriving in town. Home games, Euclid acted as our bat boy, the only Negro kid in that position in the league. He didn’t go on the road with us (not counting his stowaway trip to Cottonton) because Mister JayMac had no control over his treatment in other cities. Euclid had a regular presence around McKissic Field, though, and split his time between Darius’s apartment and a trim little house near the farmer’s market where his mother-Darius’s mother, the onetime brown-sugar fancy woman of Mister JayMac-lived.

But Euclid had no McKissic blood in his veins. His mama, Detta Rae Satterfield, had conceived him with an official of the Railway Porters’ Union from Atlanta, a man as long gone from Detta Rae as Darius’s daddy and not a whit more missed. Just in her forties at Euclid’s making, she’d planned the child as the apple of her early dotage-but the manchild’s inbred rambunctiousness wearied her, and she’d begged both Darius and Mister JayMac to take him off, to act as stopgap providers and sponsors. They’d more or less agreed, with the understanding Darius would do the biggest part of the guardian work.

“Euclid’s got his mama,” Darius said. “Got Mister JayMac and a house full of white big brothers.”

“Have you told him you’re leaving?”

“Lord, Mister Henry, I haven’t had the chance. He’s gon be awright, though, if he jes git told I’m out there pitchin and hitting. You see him, Mister Henry, tell him that. Let him know I aint gone off to dodge him, I’m doing it to grab my life back from the ol McKissic yoke.”

“I’ll tell him,” Henry said. “Now, though, that yoke will rest even more heavily on him.”

“He’s awready got a yoke-his black hide-he won’t shuck off this side of dying,” Darius said.

A brown thrasher rattled about in the underbrush five or six feet from Darius, fluffing out the flecked white vest of its chest and tossing twigs and pine straw around.

“I’m deeply sorry bout Mr Snow,” Darius said. “He wasn’t no showboat. He had this easy stillness that spoke straight through everbody else’s jive and moonshine. That’s why I come today. To say good-bye-to Mr Snow and likewise to yall, if I could manage it.”

“You m-managed,” I said.

“Some stuff awready packed in a bag on my closet shef,” Darius said. “Mister Henry, could you fetch it out here after yall’s game tonight and set it on that bench? You could, I’d pick it up round midnight.”

“Is your apartment locked?”

“Nosir. Aint never been.”

“Then I’ll do it,” Henry said. “But what impels you to venture forth from McKissic House now?”

Darius seemed surprised. “Why, Mister Cozy ast me, he’s giving me a chanst at something I awways wanted a chanst at.”

“But you could’ve taken flight long ago.”

The interlocked wheels of the pecan leaves above Darius winched his gaze upwards. He searched all that lacy green for an answer. Then he squatted and trailed his fingers in the pine-straw mulch lapping his shoes. The sheer worn-outness of his hunker got to me.

“Better late than no time,” he finally said, peering at us up from under. “But why now? Good question, Mister Henry. I think it’s cause my life’s done crept into its brittlest part, like unto them innings when the whole thing could go either way-depending on jes when the crucial bonecrack happen, and to whom. I awmost waited past the snappin point. Mebbe I did. But if I beat it now, mebbe I’ll git past my brittle innings and play on through to a stretch that’ll heal me, that won’t jes shake me down to splinters and shards.” Then he sounded angry and near tearful at once: “Don’t give me no grief for coming so tardy to a notice of how damn feeble and rickety I’d got. Jes don’t. I’m moving now, aint I? I’m laying grease in my joints, oiling up for tomorry?”

Henry said, “So it would appear.”

“Then don’t yall chide me for what I cain’t nowise fix.”

“Darius, we don’t,” I said.

“And fetch me that suitcase, hear? They’s cash money in it, some clothes, a packet of eelskins.” Eelskins?

“Have no fear,” Henry said. “The deed is accomplished.”

“One other thing,” Darius said. “You still holding them fifty dollars what got bet on our game out to Penticuff, Mister Henry?”

“I believe I am,” Henry said, surprised.

“Well, I won that bet. I heard it said so over them PA speakers round the field. Anyhow, I could use the money.”

Henry took his wallet from inside his jacket.

“Don’t open it,” Darius said. “I could use it, but seeing how that game ended, hexed by them damn bats and dimmed by Mr Snow’s dying, I cain’t take it. Give it to Mr Snow’s missus. Say it’s a token from a admirer.”

“Very well,” Henry said. “I will.”

“God bless yall. And bye.”

Darius saluted and backed off. He rattled the underbrush-the blackberry vines, the pine straw, the tiny white violets-less noisily than the pesky brown thrasher still goofing around in there.