Michael Bishop: Brittle Innings

After looking around-at the coffee tins, the mats, the baseball equipment used for ornament-I said, “You could’ve given ol Worthy Bebout some decorating tips.”

“I did.”

“Well, he must not’ve listened.” Why’d Henry brought me here? Despite its homey touches, it would have been a fine place for him to crack open my skull with a rock and feast on my brains with his fingers-if he’d been a meat-eater. Even in his eighteenth-century reign of error, though, he’d liked nuts and berries better than animal flesh, and his time among the Oongpekmut had corrupted his vegetarianism only a bit. But for the chill on my body, the clammy damp of my clothes, I might’ve enjoyed the coziness of Henry’s Tholocco Creek warren, his coffee-can lanterns throwing shadows around, the mizzle outside hardly even hearable.

“Your father deserted you, Daniel, as mine did me. He fled from and forgot you, as my maker fled from and sought to forget me. Your sire-as did mine-renounced any part in your making and defaulted on his obligation to educate you.”

“Dick Boles taught me how to play ball.”

Henry shut up. He’d caught himself up in a riff of jazzy comparisons, though, and my tribute stunned him. He shook off the stun: “No small thing. No inconsequential pedagogy.”

“But what were you driving at?”

“Recently, your father died. You may have smoldered these past several years with unspoken anger, but you have not yet mourned your father-as I, early in my second life, grudgingly mourned Victor Frankenstein.”

“So?”

“So the process must eventually occur in you too, Daniel, or much of what hereafter befalls you, or occurs as a result of your own enterprise, will curdle on your palate.”

“All right. How do you do it?”

The question caught him off-guard. “Do what?”

“Mourn.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.” He crawled away from the wall and nodded into a farther chamber. “Follow.” And he led me on a duck-walking tour that took us to a kind of dug-out viewing room. Here, when he set down the candle holder he’d brought, I saw a peculiar human shadow-like a straitjacketed Egyptian king-stretched out on the chopped-down shipping crate of an upright piano.

When Henry lifted his candle to show me the makeshift bier, I saw these words stenciled on the crate: MENDELSSON / Ship to 486 Mims Street / Opp, Ala . The letters danced in the candle flicker. The figure atop the crate resembled a mummy. It was a mummy. And it would’ve been the strangest mummy I’d ever seen, even if I’d never seen one before-which, as any fool could guess, I hadn’t. And forget that that mummy embodied the remains of a whacko Swiss chemist a century and a half dead.

I leaned into my crutches and reached out to touch the corpse-it looked barely five and a half feet from soles to crown-of Henry’s creator. The wrapper encasing it was a patchwork of smooth white pieces of horsehide-beaucoups of scraps stitched together with thousands of S-shaped seams. Henry’d made the sleeping jacket from the scrubbed, rubbed, and flattened skins of discarded CVL baseballs. Some of these horsehides were smudged with infield dirt, or pocked with bat marks, or roughened like old suede-but the shroud as a whole, under Henry’s lantern, shone ivory. The lovely weirdness of it made my nape hairs tingle.

“Out of Alaska, Daniel, I trekked into Washington with my dead creator (newly retrieved from a volcanic cave miles from Oongpek) slung over my shoulders. I bore him much as Aeneas bore his aged father, Anchises, out of the burning shell of Troy.” Henry closed his eyes. “Sang that hero,

‘Come then, dear father, up onto my back.

I will bear you on my shoulders-you will be

No burden to me at all, and whatever befall us,

One and the same peril will face us both,

And there will be one and the same salvation!’ ”

Henry opened his eyes. “Of course, as I came southward through the American Northwest, a thaw set in. Limbs once as firm as stone lost their durity, tending towards a malleable and aromatic decay. I confined them in the skins of animals-a dead elk the vultures had not yet begun to pick, a bison felled by drought-and remade Frankenstein’s protective case each time I moved. During my last off-season with the Hellbenders, I made the sheath you see here. Denuding each ball and laying out its leathern wings wanted tedious labor. The needle-hooks I broke were virtually uncountable.”

Henry gave his father an admiring look. “Don’t you think he makes a handsome long pig, even though we feast on him only through our eyes?” He seemed to expect an “Amen!”

“Sure,” I said. And Henry’s stitched-up daddy definitely was a sight.

“Kneel here, Daniel.”

I obeyed, mostly because the ceiling pressed so low that kneeling under it, even with my injuries, came easy. I propped my crutch against the piano crate.

“Take my father as your own. Revile him for his paternal failings, or grieve in silence for your heretofore unwept loss. Or do both together. Sometimes we must rage in order to reflect, inveigh in order to vindicate.”

As I knelt there, Henry blundered softly out. In a way, taking Henry’s daddy for my own and treating him to a prayer of curses may have helped some. In another way, it didn’t seem to help at all. After a while, my brain’d turned into a shifting globe of axle grease. I leaned my head against the crate and tried to let go of the whole sad jam-up inside me.

Nothing came.

Out of politeness, or maybe pity, I stayed with Henry for two more days. Sleeping in a bunker a couple of dozen feet from his horsehide-jacketed daddy gave me an even creepier feeling than rooming with Henry had. It worried me I had a train ticket home, but Henry had only this creek-bank hole in the ground, fancy as it was, and no real prospects for a better life.

“What’re you gonna do?” I asked him on Wednesday night.

“I continue to owe Buck Hoey’s widow and children a debt.”

“You can’t creep around Highbridge trying to do them daily good turns. You’ll get caught.”

“I wish to redeem the crime-nay, the condign retribution-that befell Hoey and prompted his family’s current suffering.”

“But you never meant to kill him.”

“Perhaps I did. I meant to do… great harm.”

“Well, you’re a big son of a gun, and trying to fix broken glider chains, or drop off bags of groceries, or cut wood for em-Henry, it just aint gonna do.”

“My recidivism condemns me utterly.”

That remark-the way he sat, his head in his hands-worried me. I could see him quitting, flinging himself off a cliff, even if the act maimed rather than croaked him. What a cross. He was suicidal, but couldn’t die.

I rummaged in my bag and found the letter he’d written me. I quoted from it: “ ‘In this much longer incarnation, by many accepted and by many others acclaimed, I have killed but once, Daniel, and then for love.’ ” Henry didn’t even look up. “Not for revenge, you said. For love. Evolution you call it here.”

“Sophistries. Carrion comfort.”

“So what’re you gonna do?”

“What I must.” Henry lifted his head. “Continue. Begin anew and continue.”

“Turn yourself in. Then maybe you’ll see justice done.”

“Justice? I came to consciousness, Daniel, in its cynical and selfish abrogation.”

“You’ve seen it done. We won the pennant, didn’t we? You and I got called up.”

Henry stared at me like I’d just proposed to end the war by sending the Japs my mama’s favorite oatmeal-cooky recipe. Then he smiled-I think-and shook his head.

“Daniel, the electric chair would merely recharge me. Your species cursed and harassed me during my first career on this earth. It owes me one, I think.”