The Art of Fielding

by Chad Harbach

  Schwartz held out his fist and Henry bumped it with his own, and Pella could tell from their somber, ceremonious expressions that their feud, or whatever you’d call it, had ended. Men were such odd creatures. They didn’t duel anymore, even fistfights had come to seem barbaric, the old casual violence all channeled through institutions now, but still they loved to uphold their ancient codes. And what they loved even more was to forgive each other. Pella felt like she knew a lot about men, but she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be one of them, to be in a room of them with no woman present, to participate in their silent rites of contrition and redemption.

  “Hey,” Henry said to her.

  “Hey.” It seemed strange not to hug, so after a brief fit of school-dance awkwardness they finally did. He smelled ripe, like an adolescent boy not yet attuned to the fact that he needed to wear deodorant. It’s because he’s been on the bus all day, she thought, and hoped this was true—hoped he hadn’t smelled this way since June. She held on to him for an extra second, long enough to detect an undertone of sticky Greyhound pleather in the scent of his skin.

  They’d arranged to meet here, at the Melville statue. The afternoon had been scorching, and the dog-day humidity had compressed itself into a drumming rain that now, just after dusk, was dwindling to an ambient mist. The lake, churned-up but calm, looked like fresh-poured cement. Already the days were shorter than they’d been in June.

  Two shovels, a cooler, a picnic basket, and a giant vinyl football equipment bag leaned against the weathered brick of Scull. They shouldered the gear and set off. Henry didn’t ask where they were going or why; maybe he’d figured it out, or maybe he’d forgotten to care. It could be hard to tell with Henry, and Pella didn’t know what effect the summer had had on him. When she’d called his parents’ house in South Dakota, she’d merely said, “We want you to help us with something before Owen leaves.” And he’d merely said, “Who’s we?”

  They crossed the Small Quad and then the Large in silence, walking four abreast. Contango sauntered along behind, eyeing the occasional darting sparrow with lazy suspicion. The grass of the practice fields had been burned khaki by the endless heat.

  “Let’s stop a moment. My arms are exhausted.” Owen set down the beer-laden cooler and took from Pella the picnic basket, which he’d packed. He opened the wicker lid and took out a bottle of scotch from her dad’s collection. “You first,” he said, handing it to her. She lifted it to her lips and took a long slow glug. It burned nicely all the way to her stomach. Great minds, she thought, patting the flask in her windbreaker pocket as she handed the bottle to Owen, who drank and gave it to Mike. And then to Henry, and back to her. When the bottle was half gone, they put it in the basket and moved on.

  Three rolls of sod had been laid over Affenlight’s grave, and though the grass had grown long and damp, the edges of the rolls were still visible. One of the spades had a flat, rectangular head, while the other’s was heart-shaped. Mike took the flat one and plunged it into a sod seam. The grass roots began to yield with a series of weak pops and groans as he leaned his weight on the handle. He worked his way around all three rolls. He and Henry lifted them off the grave and laid them aside.

  They worked mostly in silence, Mike with the flat spade, Henry with the heart-shaped one. Owen, his reading light clipped to the brim of his cap, held the battery-powered lantern and distributed cans of High Life from the cooler. Pella sat nearby on an upright headstone, drinking scotch and stroking Contango’s fur. The recent rain had softened the topsoil, rendering it easy to dig through, but beneath that the earth was pale and rock hard, and soon their progress slowed.

  Sometimes a cloudless swatch of sky would blow past the moon, and Pella could see the outline of Mike’s face in slightly sharper relief. It was strange the way he loved her: a sidelong and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention. Like their first meeting on the steps of the gym, when he’d hardly so much as glanced at her. With David and every guy before David, what passed for love had always been eye to eye, nose to nose; she felt watched, observed, like the prize inhabitant of a zoo, and she wound up pacing, preening, watching back, to fit the part. Whereas Mike was always beside her. She would stand at the kitchen window and look out at the quad, at the Melville statue and beyond that the beach and the rolling lake, and realize that Mike, for however long, had been standing beside her, staring at the same thing.

  A light rain began to fall. Henry stopped digging and leaned on his shovel. The hole was shin-deep. The dog had fallen asleep. “Let me relieve you,” Owen said, but Henry waved him off. The night was close and soupy, so that the rain didn’t seem to be falling so much as oozing out of the wet air, and the sweat that trickled down Mike’s and Henry’s cheeks and noses mixed with the ooze as well. Henry looked exhausted. Owen declared that it was time for a break; they sat on headstones and ate pâté-and-Triscuit sandwiches, drank more beer. Pella passed around her scotch. After that, Henry held the lantern while Owen and Pella took turns digging beside Mike.

  It wasn’t long before Schwartz’s spade banged against one of the metal runners on the casket’s lid. The unexpected contact sent a rude judder through his forearms, like fouling a fastball off the neck of the bat in cold weather. At the noise they stopped and looked at one another in the moonless dimness. Their plan wasn’t just a plan anymore. Schwartz felt more worried by the second. Not worried that they’d get caught; his worry, his fear, was more obscure. He was thinking about his mom. He looked at Pella, who nodded with fierce and possibly drunken resolve. “It’s okay,” she said.

  Schwartz had planned the excavation as scrupulously as he could. First they widened and deepened the hole to free the sides of the casket; then they dug out, at the head, a space large enough for Schwartz to climb down into and stand. He knew from the funeral-home director that the oak casket weighed 240 pounds; that plus Affenlight’s weight was a lot, but he needed to hoist only one end of it. He hunkered down in his deepest catcher’s squat, grasped the single metal handle at the casket’s head with both hands, and said a little prayer that his back would hold up. He drove through his heels, yanked with his arms and shoulders, felt the pain knife down his spine. Was this the origin of the word deadlift? Surely not, but it was the same motion.

  That first effort was needed to free the casket from the earth beneath. The second would be the tricky one; more a power clean than a deadlift. He dropped low, rocked even lower. He exploded upward, jerked his hands toward his chin. As the head of the casket moved upward, Schwartz let go, dropped his hips, maneuvered his hands and shoulder, just barely, beneath the casket’s bottom. Then it was a matter of walking it up to vertical, letting it tip over and lean, almost upright, against the far side of the hole. A little rain was falling. It wasn’t a ceremonious procedure—he could feel Affenlight’s body sliding inside the box—but at least it was getting done.

  Henry and Pella and Owen grabbed hold of the casket’s handles from above. They pulled from above while he tried to push from below. He’d imagined this part would be easier, but his friends weren’t strong, and their footing on the wet grass was poor. The casket moved inch by inch, and he bore its weight from below. “On three,” he said. “Owen, count.” And as Owen counted Schwartz got down as low as possible, grunted, gave a last Olympian shove. Henry and Pella and Owen stumbled backward. The casket slid over the lip of the grave and, now upside down, settled beside the hill of dirt they’d made.

  The rain had slowed again. Schwartz dug in his equipment bag for the sanitary gear he’d brought—facemasks, nose plugs, elbow-length rubber gloves. He handed a set of gear to Henry. Pella and Owen dragged Contango off to the opposite side of the cemetery. Mike could hear her laughter ring through the darkness; it sounded a bit hectic, but not worryingly so. He was glad she’d finally gotten drunk.

  He reached a rubber glove into the cooler and produced two cans of beer, handed one to Henry. They drained them at a long slow gu
lp.

  “Ready?” he said, and Henry nodded.

  With effort they flipped the casket over. Schwartz undid the buckles. As he raised the lid he held his breath and stood as far back as possible, head turned, letting the first wave of whatever would come out disperse itself into the humid night.

  “It’s okay,” Henry said. “We can do this.”

  Schwartz nodded. He wondered how Emerson had done it—whether Emerson really had done it, after all. It was one thing to hear President Affenlight tell the story, one thing to imagine Emerson kneeling in the dirt in his suit, tears in his beard, lifting the simple wooden lid off a simple wooden casket. Your mind stayed trained on the emotional, the intellectual, the symbolic. Emerson became a character in a play, and his act became a myth, a source of meaning. You didn’t think about what Ellen Emerson’s decaying body looked like, or how it smelled: you couldn’t think about that if you tried.

  Schwartz felt himself faltering. His face was still averted, and he wanted to keep it that way.

  “It’s okay,” Henry said. “It’s not so bad.”

  Schwartz, both heartened and abashed by the Skrimmer’s calm, turned his head. A shock ran through him, another current of obscure fear, but the shock passed, and Henry was right that it was not so bad—or at least it wasn’t so much worse than the viewing at the funeral. Affenlight’s body had slid toward the foot of the casket and was oddly, pathetically, contorted, but the embalming seemed to have held up through the hot summer, and the body seemed still to be his own.

  They lifted him by the lapels of his suit, the pockets of his pants. They lowered him into the huge vinyl bag Schwartz had pilfered from the VAC, and into which he had inserted steel bars to ensure that the body would sink. He zipped the bag shut. They pulled off their gloves and masks, tossed them into the casket, clapped it shut. Nose plugs still in, they slathered their arms in diluted bleach, hoisted the bag, and carried it down to the beach. Owen and Pella rejoined them at the water’s edge, where a long rowboat awaited them. Luckily the water was calm. They tied Contango to the little pier and rowed out into the lake, tacking this way and that because they were drunk and none of them knew how to row.

  81

  They were far, far out, dangerously far if you wanted to think of it that way, and even the few lights of Westish that pricked the distance seemed on the point of vanishing. Mike, who’d been doing the heavy rowing, grimacing in pain all the while, stopped and raised his oars from the water. Henry, behind him in the bow seat, did the same. The creak of the rowlocks ceased, as did the steady slosh of the blades, and all that remained was the slap of waves at the rowboat’s hull, the black sky all around.

  Pella sat in the stern, Westish at her back, the lake ahead, though most of what she could see was Mike’s sweat-drenched chest, the shrug and drop of his big shoulders as he tried to catch his breath. What a face, she thought. Let it never be bearded again.

  Alone at the prow sat Owen, his back to the rest of them. He looked out at the dark water, a hand laid softly on the material of the bag in which Pella’s father lay.

  They were drifting now, the rowboat’s nose tacking softly to port, to the north. It was time, and Mike was looking at her, waiting for her to say that it was time, but even though it was her dad and her idea, she realized that she was waiting for Owen. Owen would know what to do. She found a warm can of beer beneath her seat—they’d brought the beers but not the cooler—and cracked it and handed it to Mike. Mike handed that one to Henry, and she found another.

  Finally Owen turned around. He was wearing his Westish cap with the harpoon-skewered W, and behind the weak beam that streamed from his reading light his face was wet. He smiled, looked at Pella. “Would it be all right if I said something?”

  They rearranged themselves, Owen and Henry on one bench, Pella and Mike on the opposite one, her dad in between. Owen passed the bottle of scotch.

  “Perhaps we should bow our heads,” Owen said. “Don’t worry. I won’t invoke any bread-based religions.”

  They bowed their heads. The beam of Owen’s reading light passed over each of them, settled on the navy vinyl bag at their feet. “Guert,” he began.

  “At risk of becoming sentimental, let me say that you’ve been integral to my life for a long time. I read your book when I was fourteen, and it bolstered my courage at a moment when my courage was required.

  “When we met, three years ago, it was because you selected me for the Maria Westish Award—another reason I’ll always be grateful to you. Because barring that I would never have come to Westish, and I would never have met the people who are with me now. My own dear friends, as the poet said.

  “But it wasn’t until a short time ago that you and I became friends. And of course I regret that our time, your time, was so short.”

  Owen’s voice wavered. He closed his eyes, opened them again.

  “You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul—not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those who knew you.

  “Which is partly why your death is so hard for us. It’s hard to accept that a soul like yours, which took a lifetime to build, could cease to exist. It makes us angry, furious at the universe, not to have you here.

  “But of course your soul does exist, Guert, because you gave of it so unstintingly. It exists in your book, and in this school, and also in each of us. For that we’ll always be grateful.” Owen looked up, lifting the beam of his reading light. It passed over each of them again. He smiled. “And we miss your corporal form, which was also nice.”

  Pella was weeping like crazy, as quietly as she could. That stuff about making a soul—she wondered whether her dad had really said it, or whether Owen had derived it himself, as a sort of synthesis of what her dad believed. Either way it was remarkable, and she glimpsed for the first time how close they were, how their relationship may not have been a static, one-sided kind of smitten worship, as she’d lazily imagined it, but a real and powerful thing.

  She was shivering, and Mike put his arm around her. Despite the appalling heat of the day before and the day to come, despite the heat of the scotch she’d been drinking and drinking, both from Owen’s bottle and her own flask, the four a.m. breeze that came over the water felt cutting and frigid. It was time for her to say something, to do right by her father somehow, but it was impossible, there was too much to say and no way to say it.

  Owen reached across and handed her something. A piece of paper, folded into quarters. She unfolded it, but it was too dark to see.

  “Here.” Owen took off his Harpooners cap and, as Pella leaned forward, placed it on her head. In the beam of the battery-powered light she could see what he’d handed her: a typed copy of “The Lee Shore,” the short chapter of Moby-Dick that was her father’s favorite piece of writing, the source of his old password, and, not incidentally, the poetic epitaph of a brave and handsome man.

  She’d known it by heart since she was six, and once she’d started she didn’t need the page. When her dad recited it in lecture he did so with a stage actor’s vigor, shouting his way through the exclamation points, as if to remind the students that old books contained strong feelings. She couldn’t do that now, but in a hushed way she tried to do the passage justice. Mike squeezed her hand.

  When she’d finished, Mike took a pair of scissors from his pocket and cut slits in the bag, so that it would fill with water and sink. He and Henry knelt beside the body, cradled its length with both arms, and, very slowly so as not to capsize them all, scooped Affenlight up and over the side.

  82

  The four of them—five, including Contango—stood on a rocky stretch of beach that had been dragged by the Parks Department earlier in the summer and still showed sweeping parallel marks, like a fresh-raked infield.

  “Will you take the dog?” Pella asked Mike. “I have to get to wor
k.”

  Schwartz frowned. “You promised you’d take the day off.”

  She handed him the leash, winked at Henry with a cried-out eye. “You can have an off day…”

  She wrapped Owen in a long hug, they whispered to each other, and she padded off toward the dining hall, flip-flops slapping the packed sand.

  The clouds were dispersing, and the sun had poked above the lake. Owen was leaving for San Jose, en route to Tokyo, in a matter of moments. Henry desperately wanted to say something fitting, to thank Owen for being such a good friend and roommate, to tell him how much he was going to miss him, but now his own eyes were full and he couldn’t even squeeze out a Take care or a See ya around. Owen gripped his shoulder consolingly. “Henry,” he said. “You are skilled. I exhort you.”

  And then it was just Henry and Schwartz, standing there in their gritty T-shirts. The dirt on Schwartz’s face, and the mean-looking five a.m. shadow beneath it, reminded Henry of their first meeting back in Peoria. Schwartz’s widow’s peak had deepened since, and his shoulders and chest had thickened and settled into a kind of premature middle age. But his eyes still held that pure maple-syrup color, that light that drew people to him like moths.

  “What time’s practice?” Henry asked.

  “Not till seven.” Schwartz checked his watch. “If we hurry we can fill in that hole.”

  They made their way to the cemetery and shoveled the dirt back into what had been Affenlight’s grave. Once the sod had been relaid, the surface looked a little uneven, as if a mild earthquake had struck, but it seemed unlikely anyone would notice or care. They shouldered their shovels and headed back to campus.

  “Where’s your new place?” Henry asked.

  “Grant Street. Block and a half from the old one.”