W. Kinsella - Box Socials

The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Copyright © W. P. Kinsella 1996

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

An early version of Chapter One was published as a chapbook by William Huffer Standard Editions of Vancouver under the title, Chapter One: from a Novel in Progress , 1989

The Epigraph is reprinted from The Silver DeSoto by permission of Council Oaks Books, copyright © 1987 by Patty Lou Floyd

W. P. Kinsella asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007497515

Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007497522

Version: 2014-07-31

For my daughter, Erin Irene.

“We cannot let go the need to bear witness.”

– Patty Lou Floyd

Title Page Box Socials BY W. P. KINSELLA

Copyright

SECTION ONE: TRUCKBOX AL’S BIG BREAK

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

SECTION TWO: THE FULL SCHOLARSHIP ORPHANED GENIUS

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

SECTION THREE: THE LITTLE BOX SOCIAL

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

SECTION FOUR: BOB FELLER, HAL NEWHOUSER, AND JOE DIMAGGIO HIMSELF

Chapter Fifteen

Also by the W.P. Kinsella

About the Publisher

This is the story of how Truckbox Al McClintock almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League, but instead ended up batting against Bob Feller, of Cleveland Indian fame, in Renfrew Park, down on the river flats, in Edmonton, Alberta, summer of 1945 or ’46, no one can remember which, though the date in question has brought on more than one disagreement, which turned first to a shoving match, then to an altercation, and finally a fist fight, though not a brouhaha, the general consensus in the Six Towns area being that it takes more than two people to staff a brouhaha, the fist fight though, usually resulting in bent cartilage of someone’s proboscis, and blood spots on a Sunday shirt.

I was young and pretty small at the time, not much taller than my dog, Benito Mussolini, who, when he stood looking sorrowful, if the light was right, appeared to have a long, bald head, though in reality he was just a plain old soup-hound of unknown but varied ancestry, with whiskers that stuck out like a cat’s and bad breath.

‘We’re hillbillies,’ my mama said, on more than one occasion, ‘only difference is we know we’re hillbillies, and we won’t always be that way, unlike some we know.’ Mama hailed from South Carolina, and though she’d grown up prosperous, with a daddy who was a mining engineer, had had at least a passing acquaintance with hillbillies, up until the time she met Daddy.

The unlike some we know at one time referred specifically to three families, the Venusberg Stevensons, the more-or-less-Doreen Beach Sigurdsons, and the Red Sigurdsons, who were also known as our Sigurdsons because they lived in the general area of Fark, which was also the town my family lived in the general area of. Fark was about nine miles as the crow flies from New Oslo, a little further than that from Sangudo, and exactly eleven miles from Doreen Beach, which wasn’t a resort or even on a lake, as many surprised visitors found out each summer. Fark wasn’t big enough to be a town, and it was, Mama said, a cruel punishment for anyone to have to live in the general area of a town called Fark, the naming of which I’ll get around to later.

My family, the O’Days (my father was John Martin Duffy O’Day, my mother Olivia), had been forced into unsuccessful farming by the Depression. One of my grandfathers was an engineer, not the steam-engine kind, but the coal-mining kind, and a great-grandfather had owned a winery in the old country, and my daddy, John Martin Duffy O’Day, built fine houses, only there weren’t any fine houses to build during the Depression, so he sold his property in the city of Edmonton, Alberta, and bought a farm sixty miles more or less west of Edmonton, Alberta, which in the mid-1930s might as well have been six thousand miles more or less west of Edmonton, Alberta, because folks around the Six Towns area in general and around Fark, in particular, traveled by horse and wagon, or horse and buggy, or just plain horse.

The summer of 1945 or ’46 Truckbox Al McClintock garnered a certain amount of attention, which without too much exaggeration could be construed as notoriety, when at a sportsday, while playing right field and batting cleanup for the New Oslo Blue Devils against an all-Indian team from the reserve at Lac Ste. Anne, the game being played on a newly mowed field on the banks of the Pembina River, Truckbox Al managed to come to bat five times, and five times he hit the ball about fifty yards beyond the centerfielder, which meant that the ball landed in the yellowish and murky water of the Pembina River, where it bobbed away downstream getting smaller and less white as it did so. In his fifth and final at-bat it is said that he hit the ball clean across the Pembina River. That mammoth blow caused the game to be called though it was only the fifth inning, because the Indian team was out of baseballs, and as home team they were obligated to supply them.