Buckskin, Bloomers, and Me

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “They ain’t welcome here,” Maggie said to us, and then to other Bloomers: “They wasn’t invited.”

  Now I was ready to turn around and let these Bloomer Girls have their meeting, ’cause I don’t like to be where I ain’t wanted. Besides, I had left some meat on the bone of my steak, and since I knew all the Bloomer Girls were up here having their secret meeting, none of them would even notice me gnawing meat off the bone like a fellow would.

  As I was about to turn and leave, Pearl Murphy said: “Ruth invited them. That means they’re welcome.”

  Pearl played left field. She could run fast. Not as fast as me, but I wouldn’t bet ag’in’ her iffen she was in a forty-yard sprint against McConnell, but, of course, you could time McConnell on a forty-yard run with a calendar. Still, I wouldn’t have bet ag’in’ Pearl iffen you put McConnell on a quarter horse and give him a ten-foot lead. Pearl wasn’t no bad ballist, neither. She was sort of attractive, too, but nowhere near as sweet-looking as Ruth Eagan, in spite of her long limbs, which helped her run fast.

  Pearl’s comment started quite a commotion. Meaning what Pearl Murphy had just said in the offices of the Santa Fe’s Kansas Division, and not when she chased down a fly ball in left field, although, I recollect hearing whistles from men in the stands whilst she was doing that back when we played that game in Fort Scott. The whistles were coming from the spectators that day, as I recall. Russ Waddell, who had been hurling, was whistling, too, till Buckskin told him to knock it off.

  But what Pearl said, about us being welcome here since Ruth had invited us, got everyone talking all at once. Except me and Buckskin. Buckskin was getting his carrying bag adjusted so it didn’t feel so heavy. Knowing that a Winchester .45-90 must weigh nigh a ton, considering how heavy a box of .45-90 shells weighed, I wasn’t certain he could make that bag feel no lighter.

  I started to turn, ready to bolt to the door so I could escape before things got ugly, when Ruth whispered: “No.” I straightened in my seat and tried to listen to what was being said, even though everyone was talking real fast and real loud at the same time.

  I glanced at Katie Maloney, who was shaking her head. She started looking at her fingernails and, dang it all, if she didn’t look at ’em just how Buckskin had said women study their nails. She was our starting center fielder, and whilst she had dropped a routine fly ball during our game that afternoon, that didn’t happen too often with her. But today it had worked Mr. Norris into what Ruth Eagan called a hissy fit. Buckskin had tried to tell Mr. Norris that it could happen to anyone, that nobody was perfect, which only made our manager angrier, and he quickly pointed out that nobody on his team was even in the vicinity of perfect.

  Now everyone in the room was going at it, pointing fingers and making what most folks where I come from would call obscene gestures and using impolite language—and, mind you, I come from a railroad town. It looked like Maggie Casey might come to blows with Maud Nelson, but I wasn’t clear on what Maud called Maggie, ’cause you really couldn’t understand nothing being said by that time. The only woman keeping quiet was Carrie Cassady, who was so timid and quiet that Mr. Norris kept her on the bench during most games. He complained that he couldn’t even use her to hawk programs or sell things, ’cause she never said anything above a whisper. Buckskin said Carrie come from Salem, Ohio, which, he said, explained her shyness.

  A bushel of worry come over me, and I turned to Buckskin to say that we ought to do something before the Chanute constabularies come to arrest us for disturbing the peace, which would make Mr. Norris even more contrary. Imagine what would happen if we were in the calaboose and couldn’t make it to next ball game.

  Then there come an explosion like nothing I’d ever heard before.

  Chapter Nine

  Perry Mirror

  Perry, Kansas • May 31, 1906

  … There was a couple of small casualties during the game. Ben Underwood, while at the bat, was hit in the face by a ball and incapacitated for a little while, and Walter Duree was felled by a hard blow from a ball on the back of the head while running from third to home.

  Ruth Eagan had opened the door and then slammed it shut so hard that the glass window in the top part of that door shattered. Then she had thrown her purse across the room, and it hit the far wall. The slamming of the door sounded how I imagined a .45-90 Winchester would roar, till I actually heard one of them rifles sound off. Her purse had made a loud enough noise, too. Things got real quiet after Ruth did those things.

  That ain’t quite right, neither, but I’m too tired to rip up this page and start all over again. You see, after Ruth’s purse hit the wall, and the noise stopped echoing around in that cavernous room, it didn’t stay quiet, ’cause Ruth Eagan then cut loose with some foul language that made me turn and stare at her. My ears reddened.

  Ruth seen me and said: “What the …?” Well, perhaps I should not say what she said to me.

  I took a few steps back, careful not to step on no busted glass, then stood in pure shock as Ruth called her teammates some awful names, even if nobody associated with the Kansas City Bloomer Girls would have denied that Maggie Casey wasn’t what Ruth said she was. Ruth went right on, saying they—meaning her teammates—had been making such a fuss that it was a wonder the law hadn’t come up here, and that if somebody found out that we were holding a meeting in that there office that we’d likely all land in jail ’cause she had warned Sue Malarkey that folks in this part of the country don’t like people using a knife to pick a lock.

  Carrie Cassady pointed out: “People are trying to eat their supper downstairs.”

  It being so quiet after Ruth quit her tirade, we all heard Carrie so clear, you’d never know she was almost whispering.

  Ruth, she didn’t look happy at all, on account that she wasn’t. She sucked in a deep breath, let it out, and turned toward me and Buckskin.

  “I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you.” Her voice sounded hoarse, but considering how she’d been yelling, ’tweren’t no surprise. “Perhaps you should leave us alone as we get a few things straight here,” she suggested. By the time she’d put a period to that sentence, Ruth wasn’t looking at me and Buckskin no more. She was giving Maggie Casey a stare that brung to mind some faces I’d seen the Widow Amy DeFee give folks after they’d, in her villainous opinion, had slighted her. Made me feel kinda sick to my gut, comparing sweet Ruth Eagan to that vile, evil woman. “But they will be at our next meeting, and they will be welcomed,” Ruth said as we headed out.

  Buckskin’s shoes crunched on the glass, and the door squeaked as we slipped into in the hallway. It was a miracle the door hadn’t come off its hinges in its opening and closing. Buckskin told me to just keep moving as he headed down the stairs and out of the Harvey House that was still filled with people eating. As I glanced inside, I saw a boy who couldn’t have been no older than ten. He was grinning, ’cause most likely he had heard all kinds of words boys aren’t supposed to hear while eating supper and waiting to catch a train, which, I prayed, wouldn’t be the train we had to catch.

  * * * * *

  “What was that all about?” I asked Buckskin later that night.

  We was in our sleeping quarters, above Waddell and McConnell as the train rolled down the Santa Fe tracks.

  “Go to sleep,” was Buckskin’s answer.

  “I can’t sleep,” I told him, but about thirty seconds later, all that go-to-sleeping rhythm of the iron wheels knocked me out. I didn’t wake up till Buckskin nudged me and told me to hand him the chamber pot, which I did but didn’t like doing it none.

  * * * * *

  We made it through more forgettable games, Kansas towns all looking the same, but we still weren’t nowhere near as far from the Widow Amy DeFee and Judge Brett as I wanted us to be. In fact, we appeared to be inching way too close to Pleasanton for comfort. Of course, the whole state of Kansas was too close to them murdering fien
ds to make me feel safe.

  “I don’t believe it,” Russ Waddell muttered when we got to the edge of the Perry depot.

  I saw that across the street, a bunch of women were busy wrecking a business, armed with axes and hammers and farm tools. They were pounding on the timbers, smashing glass, and wrecking merchandise. I tilted my head to read the name of the business, since they’d already knocked the sign down partway. It read: Grinter’s Soda Fountain. A group of policemen stood nearby, holding their nightsticks but doing nothing to stop the women from destroying bottles of soda pop while knocking the tar out of the soda fountain, the chairs and tables, and just about everything in sight.

  Nelse McConnell spat tobacco juice onto a bug. “They swing pretty good,” he told Mr. Norris. “You might consider signing them. They look better than some of the petticoats we got playing with us.” He didn’t say petticoats.

  Buckskin told McConnell: “Best keep your mouth shut, Nellie.”

  I knew why McConnell sounded so perturbed. We hadn’t been playing worth a fip, but Buckskin kept saying that baseball was like life. You got your ups. And you got your downs. And you just need to ride through the bad times with your head up and your back straight.

  Katie Maloney come up beside me and said: “What’s going on?”

  It looked obvious to me that these women had some sorta grudge against the soda fountain. Nearby, a fellow in a Homburg hat and a plaid sack suit was scribbling page after page in his notepad.

  He glanced up and said: “They’re enforcing prohibition.”

  “The dickens you say,” said Maggie Casey, or words to that effect, Maggie having come up to the edge of the platform, too.

  The gent stopped taking notes long enough to say that he wrote for The Mirror, and that with Governor Hoch and Jackson, whoever he was (I learnt later that he was the state’s attorney general, and it was a good thing to know that when I bring back the Widow Amy DeFee later into this narrative), were cleaning up Perry.

  “It’s been the law of the land across Kansas for better than twenty-five years,” the reporter said.

  “I’ve never had a problem getting a shot of rye before,” Mr. Norris let him know.

  “Civilization,” the reporter said. “The corncribs and the hog pens went first here in Perry. We’ve put down sandstone at our street crossings, drained the mudholes. What the flood three years back didn’t clean up, we’re doing ourselves.”

  While the reporter was saying this, them women brung out boxes of bottles and then they started flinging them bottles back inside through the windows they’d already busted. You could hear them breaking on the floor and against the walls and busted-up soda fountain. Some fellows, standing on the street, watching, looked like their best friend had up and died.

  “Civilization,” Mr. Norris lamented, “can be a sorry thing.” He used a different word than sorry.

  “Town’s booming,” the reporter said. “We’ve got our own telephone company now, have moved the stockyards to the east side of town, and we even had a fire engine, but it got burned up three months back when Sallie’s restaurant caught fire. The fire station was next door.”

  He turned away from the ruction across the street and stuck his pencil over his left ear. “Hey, are you all the Bloomer Girls?” He didn’t wait for us to answer. “I’d be delighted to get an interview.”

  Nelse McConnell lifted his voice so that he sounded like some silly girl. “My throat’s so dry, I’m not sure I could say more than two words.”

  The reporter grinned. “Lady, Kansas might have outlawed ardent spirits in the previous century, but the day you find a newspaper office without John Barleycorn is the day there isn’t one single newspaper left in America.” He closed his pad, which he shoved inside a coat pocket, tipped his hat, and nodded down the street, away from what once had been a saloon that pretended to sell soda pops. Mr. Norris, Russ Waddell, and Nelse McConnell followed the reporter.

  Buckskin and me walked to the intersection, where we crossed the street on them flat stones all laid down, ’cause Perry had civilized itself.

  “There’s the hotel,” Buckskin said.

  * * * * *

  Once the ball game commenced, I don’t think civilization described the town of Perry. At least three hundred Perry folks come to the game on account that just about all the town’s businesses closed their doors to watch us play, including that elevator place, the lumberyard, and the hardware store.

  The first disagreement come over a song. Perry, or rather, Stone Elevator, prided itself on its band, and since that company brought a lot of money to the city, the umpire—a mason named Robbins—said it was all right for them to play a tune before we started playing baseball.

  A white-bearded man wearing his Union hat and a moth-eaten army blouse demanded that they play that song some gent named Key wrote during some fight in some war nobody had heard of that was called “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He got told that nobody knew that song, and the old man said that, by Jehovah, he knew it, and it was appropriate that it be played on this day ’cause when he was preserving the Union they played it before a baseball game at the Union Grounds in Brooklyn, New York, and that that had happened on the 15th of May in the year of our Lord 1862. But someone hollered right back at him that today was the 29th of May, and he was two weeks too late to have that tune played.

  Someone else put in their two cents, saying that “You’re a Grand Old Flag” was a good song that he had heard in some play called George Washington Jr. Another gent laughed and opined “Dixie” was a good song. That didn’t go over good at all, what with the speaker being a worker at the stockyards and a Texan to boot, whilst most of Perry’s players come from the railroad or Knapp’s sawmill and remained ardent Unionists, like most folks in Kansas.

  I recalled in the midst of this that the Gem City Quartet had sung real fine before one of our games, though I couldn’t recollect which game or where it was or even what they sang. Finally someone shouted that they might as well play some funeral dirge, since there wasn’t nothing left of Grinter’s Soda Fountain and there wouldn’t be nothing left of Perry, Kansas, before the year was out. By that time the band had started performing, but you couldn’t really hear nothing over the police whistles as those coppers who hadn’t done nothing to stop the destruction of a private business was doing all they could to keep that Texan from getting murdered.

  The various ructions delayed the start of our baseball game twenty-nine minutes.

  * * * * *

  Perry scored two runs in the first inning, which didn’t make Lady Waddell happy, ’cause the runs shouldn’t have scored. They wouldn’t have if Agnes McGuire hadn’t let a ball pass through her limbs, or Jessie Dailey—who was playing first base, on account Ruth was selling programs—hadn’t dropped the ball I threw her from second. Once she picked up the ball, she saw the runner rounding second and moving toward third, so she proceeded to throw it over the canvas fence our crew had erected.

  Katie Maloney cut that two-run deficit in half in the bottom of the second inning, when she singled up the middle —“There are a lot of hits up the middle,” Buckskin told me —and that hit scored Jessie Dailey, who felt that she’d made up for her error in the first inning by scoring a run after she had walked.

  Lady Waddell found his fastball and his shine ball—and we took some of the starch out of Perry’s ballists when Waddell put a fastball in some guy’s jaw, and then Buckskin, playing third, drilled some poor sucker in the back of his noggin while he was trying to score. Anyhow, Perry didn’t score again till the fifth inning, but that was on account that this sawmill fellow hit a really good pitch that scored this real tiny Union Pacific guy who wasn’t no taller than five-foot, which made it hard to pitch strikes to him. He walked, and that left Waddell complaining that there was no way a fellow that short worked for no railroad ’cause the UP don’t hire midgets.

 
; Pearl Murphy scored in the bottom of the inning on Katie Maloney’s double down the first baseline. We were all excited, ’cause we were playing good ball and had forgot all about that first-inning error.

  That excitement ended in the top of the sixth inning when Perry scored four runs. Mr. Norris decided that Lady Waddell, who had started out real sharp, wasn’t up to snuff, which might have been on account that he had consumed quite a lot of that Mirror reporter’s rye in the newspaper’s office, which had finally caught up with him. Mr. Norris asked me to pitch, but Carrie Cassady wanted to pitch, and Maggie Casey and some other Bloomer Girls said that was the way things were going to be. Now Carrie was a right-hander and didn’t have near the speed or curveball of Lady Waddell, even drunk, but Carrie kept the Perry boys off balance and they couldn’t do nothing at the plate.

  We scored two runs in the bottom of the eighth inning and had the bases loaded with nary an out, and that’s when things got real ugly ’cause the men—and even a few ladies—of Perry didn’t agree with the calls made by the umpire, that mason named Robbins.

  There is a rule —Buckskin showed it to me, ’cause he had the most current volume there is of the Constitution and Playing Rules of the National League—that says, and I copy as best I can: “Under no circumstances shall a captain or player dispute the accuracy of the umpire’s judgment and decision on a play.”

  Perry’s ballists didn’t pay that rule no mind, but Buckskin told me that Perry ain’t exactly in the National League. Neither is the National Bloomer Girls.

  There’s really no point for you to hear all them gory details about what happened. We lost, seven to four, but that’s on account that a fellow from that elevator place took over the umpiring duties, since Mr. Robbins couldn’t do nothing other than whimper, bleed, and drool.