Michael Chabon - Summerland

Peavine, Ethan learned, was a ferisher from a region of the Summerlands that, as Peavine put it, “brushed up to” Troy, New York. He had learned the fundamentals of his position during the summers of 1880, ’81, and ’82 by secretly observing the play of a catcher for the Troy Trojans, a human (“reuben” , was Peavine’s term) named William “Buck” Ewing. “These summers spent at the shoulder of the cool and elegant Buck,” Peavine wrote, “as fine a reuben as I have ever encountered, in the dusty green bowl of Trojan Field, remain among the happiest memories of all my long, long life.” When an outbreak of the grey crinkles devastated Peavine’s native mob, he had wandered west and taken up the mask, mitt, and chest protector for a mob of ferishers living at a place called Snake Island “an easy leap from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.” It was here, playing for the Snake Island Wapatos amid the cottonwoods and wildflower glades of the seventy-two-team Flathead League, that he had first begun, in his words, “to grasp the fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.”

“Eth?”

There was a knock at the door to Ethan’s bedroom. He slid the book under his pillow and sat up as his father opened the door and poked his head into the room.

“Breakfast is…” He frowned, looking puzzled. “Ready.”

Ethan saw that he had neglected to dispose of the magnifying glass. He was clutching it in his left hand, with absolutely nothing around him that he might plausibly have been using it to examine. Lamely Ethan held it up to the window next to his bed.

“Spider,” he said. “Really tiny one.”

“A spider!” said his father. “Let me see.” He came over to the bed and Ethan passed him the magnifying glass. “Where?”

Ethan pointed; his father leaned in. A circle of empty air wavered in the watery lens. Then, to Ethan’s surprise, a face emerged, grinning a yellow-toothed grin. A grey face, with a grey mosquito-stinger of a nose, equipped with a twitching black set of wings. Ethan’s tongue seemed to swell in his mouth; he could not utter a sound. He watched in horror as the creature winked at him , waiting for his father’s cry of alarm.

“I don’t see any spider,” Mr. Feld said mildly. He stood up again and the horrible grin vanished; there was nothing at the window but misty Clam Island morning.

“The wind must have blown it away,” Ethan said.

He climbed out of bed, pulled on a pair of underpants under the extra-large Hellboy T-shirt he slept in, and followed his father out to the kitchen, to confront the weekly sadness of flannel cakes.

His father set a tall stack in front of him and then sat down with a stack of his own. They were enormous things, Mr. Feld’s flannel cakes, each nearly the size of the plate itself, and there were invariably five or six of them that Ethan was expected to eat. During the week Ethan fixed his own breakfast – cold cereal, or an English muffin spread with peanut butter. This was necessary because Mr. Feld stayed up till all hours in his workshop. This in turn was because the night-time was when Mr. Feld felt the most inventive. Or so he said. Sometimes Ethan suspected that his father simply didn’t like to see the light of day. When Ethan got ready for school or, now that school was out, for a morning walk in the woods or a bike ride over to Jennifer T.’s, Mr. Feld was usually asleep. But on Saturday mornings, no matter how late he had worked, Mr. Feld always woke up, or stayed up, as the case might be, to cook a pancake breakfast for him and Ethan. Pancakes – she called them flannel cakes – had been a specialty of Dr. Feld’s, and the Saturday breakfast was a Feld family tradition. Unfortunately, Mr. Feld was a terrible cook, and his own flannel cakes never failed to live up to their rather unappetising name.

“Well,” Mr. Feld said, tipping the bottle of maple syrup onto his stack. “Let’s see how I did this week.”

“Did you remember the baking powder?” Ethan said, with a shudder. He was still feeling unnerved by the memory of the ugly grey face, with the pointed nose and wicked grin, swimming in the lens of the magnifying glass. “The eggs?”

His father nodded, allowing a large puddle of syrup to form. One of the unspoken but necessary ground rules for eating Mr. Feld’s flannel cakes was that you could use as much syrup as you needed to help you get them down.

“And the vanilla?” Ethan said, pouring his own syrup. He preferred Karo; he had seen a movie once of men in fur hats driving long, sharp steel taps into the tender hearts of Canadian maples, and ever since then had felt too sorry for the trees to eat maple syrup.

Mr. Feld nodded again. He cut himself a fat wedge, pale yellow pinstriped with dark brown, and popped it, looking optimistic, into his mouth. Ethan quickly did the same. They chewed, watching each other carefully. Then they both stared down at their plates.

“If only she had written down the recipe,” Mr. Feld said at last.

They ate in silence broken only by the clink of their forks, by the hum of the electric clock over the stove and by the steady liquid muttering of their old refrigerator. To Ethan it was like the tedious soundtrack of their lives. He and his father lived in this little house, alone; his father working sixteen hours a day and more perfecting the Zeppelina, the personal family dirigible that was someday going to revolutionise transportation, while Ethan tried not to disturb him, not to disturb anyone, not to disturb the world. Entire days went by without either of them exchanging more than a few words. They had few friends on the island. Nobody came to visit, and they received no invitations. And then, on Saturday mornings, this wordless attempt to maintain a tradition whose purpose, whose point, and whose animating spirit – Ethan’s mother – seemed to be lost forever.

After a few minutes the humming of the clock began to drive Ethan out of his mind. The silence lay upon him like a dense pile of flannel cakes, gummed with syrup. He pushed back in his chair and sprang to his feet.

“Dad?” Ethan said, when they were most of the way through the ordeal. “Hey, Dad?”

His father was half dozing, chewing and chewing on a mouthful of pancakes with one eye shut. His thick black hair stood up in wild coils from his head, and his eyelids were purple with lack of sleep.

Mr. Feld sat up, and took a long swallow of coffee. He winced. He disliked the taste of the coffee he brewed almost as much as he hated his pancakes.

“What, son?” he said.

“Do you think I would ever make a good catcher?”

Mr. Feld stared at him, wide awake now, unable to conceal his disbelief. “You mean… you mean a baseball catcher?”

“Like Buck Ewing.”

“ Buck Ewing? ” Mr. Feld said. “That’s going back a ways.” But he smiled. “Well, Ethan, I think it’s a very intriguing idea.”

“I was just sort of thinking… maybe it’s time for us—for me—to try something different.”

“You mean, like waffles?” Mr. Feld pushed his plate away, sticking out his tongue, and smoothed down his wild hair. “Come,” he said. “I think I may have an old catcher’s mitt, out in the workshop.”

THE PINK HOUSE on the hill had once belonged to a family named Okawa. They had dug clams, kept chickens, and raised strawberries on a good-sized patch that ran alongside the Clam Island Highway for nearly a quarter of a mile in the direction of Clam Centre. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Okawas were put onto a school bus with the three or four other Japanese families living on Clam Island at the time. They were taken to the mainland, to a government internment camp outside of Spokane. The Okawa farm was sold to the Jungermans, who had neglected it. In the end it was the island itself, and not the Okawas – they never returned – that claimed the property. The strawberry patch was still there, badly overgrown, a thick black and green tangle of shadow and thorn in which, during the summer, you could sometimes catch, like a hidden gem, the glimpse of a bright strawberry.