Michael Bishop: Brittle Innings

“Miz Hoey say you wen ouw wi Mr Hoey. Say Mr Hoey ain come back. Say, do you know wha hopn toom?”

“No. I don’t.” I pushed through the crowd, all too aware that soon Linda Jane Hoey and the local gendarmerie would discover the injured Hoey and deduce correctly that I had broken his legs and torn his tongue from his mouth. It seemed, Daniel, that the span of my ill-fated liberty among your own kind was ending; likewise, my hopes of finding an accomplishment and thus a meaning in my second life through the instrumentality of baseball. A welter of perplexities gripped me as I entered McKissic House, climbed the stairs, and burst into our garret.

First, Daniel, through wrath and violence I had nullified all my efforts to atone for the nefariousness of my first life. My brutal treatment of Hoey and my wicked incognizance of the depths of Giselle’s melancholia had evicted me from an unchartered society of human saints in which I had always assumed myself a member. Second, by these acts I had wronged my benefactor, Jordan McKissic, repaying trust with deviltry and throwing down by a type of roundabout homicide his marriage. Third, I had recklessly annulled the investments of both the Hellbenders and the Phillies,for my only choices now were giving up to the civil authorities or fleeing into the night.

Looking about my portion of our room, I found that Giselle had purloined some of my belongings: notebooks, letters, clothes, souvenirs of the Oongpekmut, etc. “ Part of you I take with me ” read a note on my bed. Indeed, these items she had perversely-aye, and poignantly-included in her self-immolation and her submersion. All were destroyed; their char drifted through the trash and bacteria in the pond, or lay sodden and lost in its ebony bottom ooze. I recalled the grinding wretchedness of my worst days, whether as Frankenstein’s bewildered get or as the heartsick widower of Kariak.

I wept, Daniel. Weeping, I folded into a bag those clothes that Giselle had not taken. I advanced upon the stairs. I heard the downstairs telephone ring. I heard someone seize the instrument and speak. Momentarily, this person-Vito Mariani?-cried out to the Hellbenders in the parlor, “They found Hoey in Alligator Park, but he’s dead, you guys! Poor ol Bucko’s dead!”

I hurried down both flights of stairs and quietly let myself out. Then I betook myself through the most sparsely populated regions of town-school yards, alleyways, pine copses-until it seemed unlikely that either my team-mates or the police would catch me and remand me to prison.

For all these reasons, Daniel, I have not visited you, nor reported to the club in Philadelphia. In my fugitive state, several agonies continually plague me, chief among them the murder-or murders-that I have committed. Also of scourging primacy are the heinous crimes inflicted upon the Hoeys and upon you, Daniel, as my comrade in hope. I might better have avenged you, I see now, by acquitting myself well in the major leagues than by savaging the man who debarred your own elevation there.

I am on the lam. This self-concealing style of life is not unfamiliar to me. Many years ago, I practiced it in the waste tracts of Alaska, becoming a creature of legend to the whites who journeyed through. Thus, the Oongpekmut called me Inyookootuk, the Hiding Man. I am again become Inyookootuk. In this role, my size notwithstanding, I have twice returned to Highbridge to befriend Linda Jane Hoey and her children, as I befriended the cottagers De Lacey in my first life. I leave canned food items on her threshold and chopped wood for her stove or fire grates in a box out back. These pathetic kindnesses do not redeem my crime or return the Hoeys’ dead provider; I draw from them, however, a selfish consolation.

In our minds, as well as in our acts, we all struggle for self-absolution. I do not believe in my maker, Daniel, for he did not believe in me. The God you worship seems at an unbridgeable remove. I would ask his forgiveness, but, as much as I wish to, I cannot regard myself as either his child or his ward. Therefore, sireless and alone, I devise salvific mental stratagems for myself, arcane apologia to justify and remit my sins. In the case of Hoey’s murder, I have settled upon two mitigating circumstances, the second more compelling than the first. How, you may ask, have I slipped the bonds of the Sixth Commandment?

– I had no intent to kill Ligonier Hoey.

– Retribution is a portentous duty, but a more noble one than vengeance.

You see, Daniel, in doing what I did, I sought less to injure Hoey (although harm was required) than to uphold you. Unhappily, the mechanism of this advocacy converted deliberate harm to unexpected death. Never, though, did I seek to extract it.

Does my argument appear a self-deluding sophistry? Perhaps it is. But oh! Daniel, I know that the murders of my original incarnation were but the fleeting aberrancies of a gentle nature twisted by others-chiefly, my hedging maker-into an alien cruelty. Then, rejected and despised, I killed five times for revenge. In this much longer incarnation, by many accepted and by many others acclaimed, I have killed but once, Daniel, and then, unintentionally, for love. Does this not prove that I have undergone an evolution worthy of your regard? Am I not your friend?

Faithfully,

Henry

P. S. This message comes to you by my evangel Euclid, whom, on my most recent visit to Highbridge, I found at his mother’s house. When you have read it, and digested all its implications, I beseech you to destroy it, preferably by flame. Fear not, however. We will meet again .

Like a rescue worker scratching through tornado wreckage, I reread Henry’s letter. Although Miss LaRaina’d left me some matches, and a wastebasket sat near enough to drop the packet in and burn it without setting the whole hospital afire, I put the letter back in its envelope and slid it under my mattress. What lies I’d been spoonfed, what mealy-mouthed crapola.

“Nurse!” I yelled. “NURSE!”

By the luck of the shift, I got the same slick honey who’d told me a doctor’d scissor-clipped the Saturday Herald so his Army Air Corps cousin could read the clip. Baloney. Bohunk Choctaw. Anyway, she came in with her boyish perky flip-do and her creamy butt-hugger of a uniform-looking cute, looking put upon-and eyeballed me like I was a bedrid stink beetle.

“You don’t have to shout, Danny. Push yore call button.”

“Miss Giselle burnt herself up. Henry threw Buck Hoey out of a tree. Hoey croaked. Henry’s scrammed. The Herald ’s run it all, but yall’ve pulled a damn ol hush-it-up on me.”

“Darlin, who you been talkin to?”

“Why in hell’d you try to keep it from me?”

“Talk that way, I’ll have to fetch some FiSoHex and scrub yore naughty mouf out.”

“Hells and damns you scrub. Flat-out lies you suck like Life Savers.”

That raised her dander. “I do as I’m told.” She flounced back to corridor headquarters.

When Phoebe came in, I waylaid her the same way. I stormed and bellyached. She drank in my rant as much through her eyes as her ears and squinted with tomboy skepticism.

“Well?”

“I liked you better tongue-tied.”

“I liked you better on the up and up, playing straight and letting the chips-”

“You mean the ch-ch-chips.” She ratcheted like a slipped bicycle chain. “Look, relax. Uncle JayMac, grief-struck like he was, and still is, didn’t want to dump any more on you than you’d awready got. Is that a crime?”

“But yall lied! ”

“Who squealed, Ichabod? Who told you?”