Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

When the men of our town were eventually given a mission and guided into the budding nightmare that was still just an unsettling dream in Fallujah, the women brought videotapes they’d made of the news reports, and in the Temple Mount they took turns watching the grainy footage or taping up computer printouts of wire articles. Once, some kind of regional administrative officer visited. He wore the strange cubic fatigues they all wore stateside and stood before us and asked if anybody had any questions. Faced with the sudden opportunity, the sudden presence of the one whose absence the wives had taken to bemoaning, everyone was startled into silence. After a while someone in the back asked in a small voice if the officer knew anything about when the men would be coming home, though we all knew he wouldn’t. At the next meeting the mothers parceled up care packages full of chewing tobacco and magazines and made lists of the things they’d ask next time, if they ever saw the man again.

All of which is to say that nobody — not the adults who worked the booths in the New Old City for the tourists, not the older kids, who had mysterious things to do that involved drinking and summer jobs, and certainly not the mothers — much wanted us around for the long summer months, and so didn’t mind one bit our annual, prolonged stay of boarding and verse lessons at the Hope and Grace Bible Camp (formerly a rickety collection of wooden vacation cabins) on Galilee Lake (formerly Baldwin’s Pond).

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There was no baseball diamond in the entire city of New Jerusalem. The story went that the community of Fundamental Christians (“ We’re Fundamental Christians,” Samuel Lincoln explained. “Back then all Christians were fundamental, so you didn’t have to say it”) that founded New Jerusalem did so largely in protest of the burgeoning mining and railway town to the east called Pittsburg, and principal in their complaints (after the brothel for the railroad men and the multiple purveyors of card games and spirits) was the Louis P. Stilton Municipal Ballpark, home of the rough-and-tumble Pittsburg Pickers, apparent corrupters of many a young Christian girl from the nearby Kansas State Teachers College. Whether or not this was the actual explanation for the continued absence of baseball from the town of New Jerusalem, it was at least true that it had never occurred to the powers that were of our New Jerusalem Christian Day School to build a baseball diamond or field a team, the only member of the Southeastern Kansas Independent and Home School Athletic Conference not to do so.

Strictly speaking, there was no baseball diamond at the Hope and Grace Bible Camp either. There was, however, the Dust Bowl: our space of cloddy soil and four honest-to-god bases and a six-foot-tall homerun wall of corn, kindly provided by the next field over, which had yet to be harvested. The previous summer’s Bible Camp had been full of near disasters (the crowning jewel of which involved an older boy named Calvin Jenks being discovered not only smoking marijuana, but doing so alone with a girl, herself apparently in what Elder Peters called a “near-Eve state of clothedness”), and it was perhaps because of this that we arrived that summer nine months after our fathers’ deployment to find that the church had miraculously invested in both a renovation of our mostly theoretical ball field and an official team manager, who turned out to be Brother Douglas Reeter himself. “IT’S THE DIVINE GRACE OF GOD COME INCARNATE,” big, jolly, slow-brained Hilton Hedis, who had no other volume than ear-blasting shout, said in awe that first day when we saw the field.

The Elders had turned two of the less trustworthy picnic tables on their sides twenty feet or so behind home plate, making a backstop. They’d taken what looked to be several fishing nets and strung them together, hanging them down from the high tree limbs that cast their shade onto the batter’s box. They’d also taken twenty or so bags of gardening soil and emptied them unceremoniously about forty feet from home plate, making a very messy pitcher’s mound. And finally, in the most incredible of all their additions, the Elders had built, via the stacking of many cinderblocks and two well-placed corrugated metal sheets, a pair of real dugouts.

That first day we found Brother Reeter, as Elder Peters instructed us to call him, with several nails in his mouth, standing in foul territory and pounding away at an arrangement of two-by-fours gathered at wild angles.

“I guess the carpenter’s our coach,” Samuel said, hugging his leather glove and spitting.

Ralph spat too and said leave it to the Elders to go out and get us a coach only to fix us with some grade-A Jesus luck, which is what we called luck that was likely to get you killed, like being picked to walk point on a security patrol, or being the Son of God, or having a dumb hick carpenter whom everybody hated for a coach.

“I DON’T KNOW,” Hilton blared, looking to Brother Reeter and then back at us, his eyebrows working, which meant he was thinking. “JESUS WAS A CARPENTER AND HE COULD DO SOME OTHER STUFF PRETTY GOOD TOO.”

Where was I during all this? I was on the top plank of the newly carpentered set of wooden bleachers, which none of the boys kicking dirt around home plate had yet caught on Doug the Reaper was crafting a mate for. I don’t think it’s true that my father wanted a boy. He was a kind, wilting, educated man who was taken to long moods of quiet melancholy and wistfulness. I had a better chance moving him to expression with an idea about a book I was reading than by making my throws pop into his glove in the warm evenings when he came home from work. If he minded much that I’d come out a girl, he never did let me see it, though it’s true that he taught me a mean sinking fastball. He used to play catch with my mother, before she died when I was eight, before she’d even had me, when they were just young married kids. I still have a picture of them as they stood lined up in the yard, my father crouched, squinting at something behind the camera, my mother scowling, the ball held trickily behind her back, ready to go into a windup. And it only occurred to me a couple years ago, once I had a house of my own, that it might’ve been her pitch that he taught me, that fastball with the slight downward movement. But anyway.

I was really mostly allowed as a de facto member of the ball team because my father was the commanding officer of our town’s Army company and, when his reserve unit wasn’t being called up to go to war, he worked as the floor manager in the pet food plant two towns over, which still employs most of the people around here. Everyone in New Jerusalem liked him because they thought he was fair. I was allowed more or less free range by the Elders, and the people in the town. The boys on the diamond (which is also to say, the boys in all my classes, the boys who were my friends) let me along with them in most things because both my legs were bound up in painful, complicated orthopedic braces and because when my dad was at home he was the boss of half of their fathers, until the reserves got called up to go to Iraq, and he became the boss of all of them.

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What do I remember?

The sun burning high and hazy in the sky above the green sea of the corn past the outfield, but not yet high enough to burn the color out of everything. It was maybe two weeks before the summer ball season started. The boys were one by one coming in from the field at the end of their morning practice, gathering on the other set of wooden bleachers. I had my braces off and was lying across the highest plank of my own bleachers. Two planks lower, Marly was lying with a forearm draped over her eyes, her cotton shorts and T-shirt scrunched up in a way that had caused a good number of fielding errors already.