Michael Bishop: Brittle Innings

Henry ate hawthorne nuts from a stoneware cereal bowl. I cracked some early wild pecans we’d gathered. Outside, the call of a shivering Alabama screech owl echoed over the empty channel of the Tholocco. Henry pulled off his left shoe and turned it upside down next to his cereal bowl.

I raised my eyebrows.

“To ward off ills otherwise sure to follow,” Henry said. “I am entitled to my superstition.”

On Friday morning, I stood on the blacktop on my crutches, my duffel at my feet and Henry hidden in a nearby pine copse. It wouldn’t’ve done for him to ogre around in broad daylight. I was waiting for a chance to thumb a ride into Troy. In Troy, I planned to connect with my train out of Highbridge and to ride it to Memphis, where another carrier would pick me up and haul me across Arkansas to Oklahoma.

I had a pasteboard sign-TROY OR BUST-around my neck, and a stoic look on my farm-boy face. The ban on pleasure driving and the absence of cars made me begin to think I’d do better to set off crutching it, but finally a truck-loaded down, as my luck required, with dozens of stacked crates of live chickens-came grinding towards me from the southeast. The middle-aged driver pulled over and waved me towards his passenger side. He saw my crutches and got down to help me.

“You a wounded sojer, kiddo?”

His hair-the color of fresh-made doughnuts-rose in a greasy pompadour from his forehead, and his ratty pin-striped shirt lacked its top two buttons. He’d rolled its sleeves up to his elbows, where the twisted-over cuffs gave it a funny space-suitish look. I didn’t want to lie so I lied not to lie, if you can follow my logic. I tapped my throat with one finger and lifted one of my crutches.

“Awright then. Climb on up.”

We stuttered off, the reek of doomed chickens hanging over that truck like a moving canopy. The driver told me his name, who he worked for, how many kids he had, how much he admired and respected young fellas like myself who’d sacrificed life and limb to fight the Nips and the Huns. By the time we hit Troy, he’d invented an Army unit for me, a romantic battle or two, five or six heroic wounds, and a faithful sweet-heart back home in… well, wherever I was from.

He drove me straight to the train station. He helped me down, carried my bag inside, and, at the ticket counter, shook my hand with a solemn, prime-the-pump rhythm. When he let go, I found a dollar in my palm.

“Nothin can repay yall for yore wounds, kiddo, but that’s, well, that’s a… a token. Okay?”

I nodded.

The trains from Troy to Memphis and from Memphis to Oklahoma teemed with young guys in uniform. I was dressed in civvies, and everybody aboard naturally assumed-correctly-I’d hurt myself in a frivolous schoolboy game, not in the training camps of Georgia or on the battlefields of Europe. So the dogfaces ignored me, and I felt lucky, privileged even, to be ignored.

Mama Laurel, Miss Tulipa, and Colonel Elshtain met me at the station in Tahlequah. On first catching sight of me, Mama commenced to cry her eyes out. She grabbed me and pulled me to her, my crutches be damned. She clung to me like a burr, then shoved me out to arm’s length and gave me a sappy smile.

“At least you won’t have to go off to war,” she said. “At least you won’t have to die.”

“Mama, I done already done both.”

Colonel Elshtain sniffed, but Mama and Miss Tulipa hugged me, flooding me with the stinks of woman sweat, prairie grime, and drugstore gardenia water.

I liked it.

The CVL shut down at the end of the 1943 season. Mister JayMac hadn’t wanted it to, but only three of the league’s eight teams had turned a profit that summer-the Hellbenders, the Gendarmes, and the Orphans. The other five clubs had taken a bath. Mister JayMac might still’ve willed the loop to go on, but the loss of Hank Clerval and myself, along with Darius’s vamoosement and Miss Giselle’s self-pyrotechnics, had yanked the heart right out of him. When the owners met in Highbridge after the Yankee-Card World Series, they voted five to three to suspend the CVL until the war ended and able-bodied prospects again came into the talent pool. Mister JayMac’s vote counted twice-maybe three times-as much as any other owner’s, but you can’t force five smart men to bleed themselves bankrupt and so he had to bow to majority rule.

Over the winter, the Phillies, the Hellbenders’ big-league holding company, tried to spruce up their image-the elite of Philadelphia’s professional losers?-by sponsoring a contest to change their nickname. (What the hell was a Phillie anyway?) Thousands of people sent in entries, and Mrs John L. Crooks, a caretaker along with her husband of the local Odd Fellows Grand Lodge, won. Her suggestion was Blue Jays. This was more than thirty years before Toronto organized an American League club with that name, and the Phillies played under it for only a season. They also lost their young, wise-ass owner that winter when Commissioner Landis kicked William Cox out of baseball for betting cold cash on his own team.

Anyway, when Mister JayMac learned of the name change, he told Miss Tulipa in a letter he thanked God for the CVL’s decision to pack it in. “A blue jay isn’t a ballplayer,” he wrote. “It’s a defecating, marauding, squawking pest in a fowl’s deceitful glad rags, and I wouldn’t want a player of mine to have to bear that epithet, not to mention the tatty costume they’re like to design for it.” Phillies, though, he could live with, even if it meant something squishy like, well, humanitarian.

When I got home, Tenkiller seemed downright boring. I passed most of one day studying a pair of prewar Texaco road maps and underlining names-Muskogee, Eufaula, Cherokee-with sound-alikes back among the counties and towns of the CVL. Trail of Tears connections. Well, I had some links to it of my own. Mostly, that fall, I laid or limped about, taking in “Life Can Be Beautiful,” “Stella Dallas,” and other suchlike day-time crap on the radio.

Eventually, I tossed my crutches, but when I walked, I hitched around like a man with a fresh load in his drawers. No one hired me to bale hay, dehorn cattle, or set up wildcat rigs over in Stillwell. To Mama Laurel’s disgust, and even my own, I loafed. Tenkillerites knew I was loafing too; the town was too small for anybody local to suppose I was a poor wounded GI wrestling with the afterclaps of combat. I didn’t pretend to that condition either. Some of my Red Stix pals had entered the services, and I respected their sacrifice too much to try to siphon off any of their glory, potential or real.

By December, a family friend had helped me get on as a clerk at Funderburke’s Penny & Nickel Emporium, a notions and stationery shop where I could move at my own pace and had no heavy lifting to do. Deck Glider, Inc., ran full tilt, of course, but every job there had someone in it and a whole queue of applicants standing by. My salary at Funderburke’s fell ten or twelve bucks a week shy of the minimum janitorial salary at Deck Glider, but at least I had a job and folks stopped looking at me with pity or contempt.

I got a couple of letters from Phoebe that fall and a homemade Christmas card at Christmas. (She’d made the card out of construction paper and carefully scissored magazine photos-Santa Claus standing outside the Bethlehem stable with Oveta Gulp Hobby of the WACs, Alan Ladd, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the starting lineup of the ’43 Yankees.) The second of her two letters read this way:

Dear Ichabody Beautiful (alias Daniel Boles),

How are things in Oklahoma. OK, I hope. I’d tell you to keep an eye out for injuns but you ARE one, sort of-an injun not a eye, but we’re all eyes to ourselves, aren’t we? (Eye = I, if you can’t shred my wheat without a scorecard.) Sorry. School’s started here, and I hate it. I’m blinkng away sand ten seconds after Mrs Camson opens her mouth. My I’s turn to ZZZZZ’s.