Class A

by Lucas Mann

  I have been sitting in Tom Bigwood’s memorial seat for two weeks now, welcomed. The season is still in its infancy, but it feels old already, creaking with routine. I notice that Matt Cerione is in center field instead of Danny Carroll again, sheathed in unnecessary layers of skin-tight thermal wear under his uniform, unsure, it seems, how to deal with the adoring Little Leaguer who wants to hold his hand. Kalian Sams is in left field with a boy so much smaller, so much paler than him, gaping upward with a look that says, Who is this? Steve Baron is squirming at catcher next to a husky boy, only eight years his junior and with roughly the same amount of facial hair.

  Jimmy Gillheeney, a quiet, precise pitcher from Rhode Island, begins to warm up, and the kids are shooed off the field to tepid applause. From the PA booth, Brad welcomes two visitors from Clinton’s sister city.

  “All the way from Erfde, Germany”—his pronunciation is, as always, flawless—“here to watch our LumberKings play.”

  Betty waves to them. Others gawk. The German visitors are plied with American beer and smile politely when asked if they like it. The flag whips. Jimmy Gillheeney throws the first pitch. It is a strike and there is clapping. Betty smiles at her husband, son, daughter, friends, and says, “Oh, good.” Beyond the outfield fence, in the parking lot in right field, three teenagers burn garbage. Refuse, some broken planks of wood, some grass debris from a tidying of the infield. They stand around it and smile, threatening to shove each other into the flames to see what happens. They were supposed to finish burning before the game, but they didn’t and now there is smoke, like its own flag, drifting toward the river.

  There is nothing on the river right now. It is still. The only boat is tied to the dock and has been for twenty years. It was once called the Omar, and it pushed freighters down a productive Ohio River. Then it was turned into a party boat during the 1960s. Then Clinton bought it to look like the ones that used to be here. Now it houses summer stock theater.

  A man is walking a German shepherd on the path along the river. Two teenagers are making out on a bench, rubbing each other over sweatpants. Down the path, farther away from the field, there is the shuttered historical society that used to be a firehouse. It is open on weekdays from 9:00 until 11:00 a.m. The walls there, the ceiling even, are crammed with pictures of buildings and men and women with huge hats. One long picture shows the smudgy outlines of people dwarfed by a beached boat propeller bigger than all of them. It is there to show the size of the boats that used to churn the river. Sometimes the boats carried people, and sometimes they carried wood. Clinton borders the widest point of the Mississippi, and so you can fit five barges, side by side, from Iowa to Illinois. I didn’t know that; Tim and Tammy told me. The rest of the Baseball Family confirmed it in chorus.

  There’s a wooden sign between the historical society and the banks of the river. It is made to look old, but it isn’t. It says, “Clinton, Iowa: Gateway to Opportunity,” a reference that could take a passerby all the way back to 1855, right after Clinton was named Clinton. Up until then, it had been called New York, a name adopted by the man who built the first store among the log cabins, believing there must be gold in such fertile soil, that there was profit to be made and a city to build around that profit, and that the town should be named for the metropolis it would inevitably emulate. There are a lot of towns along rivers in Iowa with held-over mottoes from their beginnings. Most have gateway in them, or opportunity, or both.

  Clinton, Iowa, is the middle. The in-between. Railroad men, prospectors, those gambling with family wealth, planned the straightest routes connecting Chicago to the West, probing a still-new country, and Clinton, Iowa, was a stop on one of those routes, the very first place west of the Mississippi. People came to build the bridges and they stayed, made a place from nothing.

  The past was always referenced here. Even when the town was only fifty years old and lumber was booming, there was still nostalgia for that simpler beginning, just river and dark earth, all potential. In 1911, Patrick Wolfe, Clinton’s first local historian, wrote a wistful eleven-hundred-page ode to what his town once was.

  To the older members of the family, those unpretending old homes are full of sacred memories and tender reminiscences. Every nook and corner about them is filled with shadows and lights of the past wherewith “all houses in which men have lived and died are haunted.” Inconvenient, cramped and rugged as they were, about them rests the halo of the fireside, the family altar, the cradle, and possibly the deathbed of dear ones.

  Clinton’s inaugural railroad bridge was the second to cross the Mississippi, and in the wake of the Civil War it opened up the country. In pictures that people have shown me, their ancestors are standing by bridges, standing on trains, as though a metal giant can be a favorite member of the family, as though they are embracing.

  That is Great-Grandpa. He built bridges.

  That is the man I was named after. He built trains.

  In the stands, as the LumberKings get through the top of the first with no runs, fans tell the German visitors that maybe they’re all related, and the Germans say, “Uh-huh.” Immigrants from Erfde, after all, helped build the bridges. They came here, here specifically, not just to America or even the Midwest, but here, passports stamped with a final destination: Clinton, Iowa, out of every place that Ellis Island could lead to. Once the sound of their hammers on metal rang out along the river. Now a boy rides his bike in lazy swerves, and there is the sound of worn rubber on asphalt, the sound of a dog barking, the sound of wind.

  Clinton’s first sawmill came in 1855, built by a young businessman who flipped it for a profit in four years. A flood followed. There was Lyons Lumber Company, and then there was Clinton Lumber Company and then Lamb & Sons and then the Joyce Lumber Company and then W. J. Young & Co. Smaller factories squeezed onto the waterfront as well, failing or burning with another one rising before the ashes blew away. Everything was wood and dust and bodies, a thousand bodies in some of the largest sawmills, chopping, hauling, in staggered, synchronized movements like pistons or watch gears. They had their pictures taken seated on logs with the river behind them, rows of identical young men, posed to be proud and unsmiling like a baseball team.

  They killed the forests of the north in fifty years, processing trees in twelve-hour shifts until, somehow, there were none left, and fertile Clinton first understood what it was to be impermanent. Almost exactly a century ago, the last lumber was shipped out of this town, and the last office of the last lumber baron closed. Now that building carries a landmark plaque, another itsy reminder of the scope of what used to exist, facing a Domino’s and a KFC, the first-floor window welcoming visitors with a neon pink sign that says “Clinton Family Hair Care Center.” I like to go to the pawnshop down the street from the ballpark when I’m bored or ostracized from the locker room, to stare at objects that can’t glare back. I look for trinkets left over from what was once here, among the jingoistic lighters and the real guns and the toy guns that look the same. I don’t find anything.

  The now-empty river used to look as if it were made out of wood. It looked like a dance floor for giants. Logs were strung together, pushed south, and you could stand on the factory docks, see the timber come in, and know that it would be shipped in every direction, making cities that hadn’t been there before.

  The mills had baseball teams. More pictures on more mantels: men in gray wool uniforms with “Lamb” or “Lyons” stitched across their chests, holding bats against their shoulders.

  This is my grandfather. He cut three thousand miles of lumber in his life and had a good glove at second base.

  · · ·

  Branch Rickey, then the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, started the minor leagues as they are today. He was the first to take local agency out of the baseball formula. He went to small-town owners who owned small-town teams, and instead of buying individual players, homegrown stars, as it had always been done, he bought their land, their identity. He bought his first team i
n Montgomery, Alabama, quickly built his network into Texas, into Kansas, into Syracuse, New York. He funneled his prospects through all these places, hiding and protecting his investments until the day they played in front of a major-league crowd.

  Many, including some of his employees, called the system “Rickey’s chain gang.” Others evoked colonialism or the grueling factories of The Jungle. Bad conditions, low pay, lots of workers with no better option that would allow them to say no.

  Rickey preferred organic terms like “grow.” Better to grow your own than pay market value. Better to find a good seed, nurture it, own it from the start. The best of his crop would remain his, a few others would be sold off to rival teams for at least a little more money than he paid, and most would be cut, pruned off, the kind of business expense that you plan for and think nothing else of.

  Minor-league squads are still referred to as farm teams, bucolic, waiting for a clean harvest. Guys like Danny Carroll and Erasmo Ramírez are called, by some, farmhands, kids working the fields, nurturing a product that might be worth something. But it’s a muddled metaphor. These players are both the laborer and the crop. People wait for them to ripen like coffee or sugarcane.

  When the Depression ended and then World War II ended and baseball was still there, fans clambered into local stadiums to see victorious values reflected back at them. But the hometowns didn’t harvest the benefits of their local teams. The fans were rooting for a business proposition, one that owed as much loyalty to the company supplying them with players as the loyal thousands who urged them on. Clinton fans cheered for their Clinton Owls before the Owls became the Pirates became the C-Sox became the Pilots became the Dodgers became the Giants became the LumberKings. In each iteration, the players belonged to someone else.

  Branch Rickey was a lay preacher’s son, a storyteller, a sermonizer. He spoke of desperation as if it were opportunity. “What is the greatest single thing in the character of a successful enterprise, in the character of a boy, in the character of a great baseball player?” he asked in a speech that would be anthologized alongside Kennedy, Cromwell, Demosthenes. “I think it is the desire to be a great baseball player, a desire that dominates him, a desire that is so strong that it does not admit of anything that runs counter to it, a desire to excel that so confines him to a single purpose that nothing else matters.”

  Hank Contreras, a catcher who seldom plays, stands and watches the action from the top of the dugout. Erasmo Ramírez, newly arrived, joins him, listening. Hank points to things for him. I watch them watch. Nick Franklin leads off for the LumberKings. He swings at the first pitch and hits a line drive that skids hard on the center-field grass. He rounds first, stops, claps once. The crowd likes him already. He is cocky, not in a supercilious way, but one that seems deserved. We applaud. Tim gives his standard whistle of approval, piercing above the sound of everything else like a train horn out of a terrible old poem.

  “Casey at the Bat” is a terrible old poem, but it is a famous, unavoidable reference when talking baseball. It was said with pride, after the poem’s release, Love has its sonnets galore. War has its epics in heroic verse. Tragedy its somber story in measured lines. Baseball has “Casey at the Bat.”

  “Casey at the Bat” takes place in Mudville, which is entirely fictional but refers to a town in Massachusetts or California or Iowa, depending on which place you ask. Forget the character of Casey, forget the mounting rhythm of a ninth inning strikeout, the poem’s power comes from its combination of intimacy and vagueness. It was set in a field whose crowd roar echoed up mountains, down valleys, in the dells, in the flats. An impossible field that was in the middle of everywhere.

  The poem was written in 1888, when Clinton still had its lumber. Two decades later, the first corn-processing plant was built over the ash-softened dirt where one of the last mills burned. More industry grew through the decades. The train car shops of the Union Pacific railroad. And next to that, Allied Steel. And pulled back from the river, a little out of town, smokestack invisible to those of us in the bleachers of the stadium on a clear day, DuPont.

  DuPont closed in 2002 and sold its plastics plant to a new company that continued production with more machines, fewer workers. An article in the Clinton Herald in 2008, titled “DuPont Adds to Clinton’s Industry Hotbed,” served, despite its present tense, to commemorate the excellent neighbor, friend, cellophane producer, and employer of fourteen hundred that DuPont once was.

  Allied Steel closed in 1984, but its coal-tar corpse remained, 100,000 pounds of riverfront poison, shimmering, almost beautiful.

  The train car shops closed, too, in the ’90s. The trains stopped stopping; the shops were demolished.

  This isn’t a town of everything anymore, isn’t a town like Mudville, where Casey would have batted, but this isn’t a dead town, either. Something new is always built to envelop the absence when the previous thing disappears. This isn’t a story about absence at all, just change, ebb, slow erosion. It makes the poignancy that I feel when I look out beyond the field seem unearned, no complete bust to mourn, no newsworthy Ohio ghost town to gawk at. I tell friends in Iowa City, my university town with coffee shops and drag shows, the declining population numbers, and they shrug. I tell family back east, and I don’t even hear the exoticizing pity that I want in their voices, just, yeah, figures, just, Oh, sure, I’ve been to towns like that; I can see it now. That’s the kind of place everybody drives through sometime on the way to someplace else.

  On a hill a half mile inland, there is Ashford University, newer and bigger and better than the Franciscan University of the Prairies, the local women’s school that could no longer afford to operate and had to sell its tiny brick campus to Bridgepoint Education in 2005, which picked the name Ashford for its new, old school. Ashford has grown. Ashford has seventy-six thousand students, roughly seven hundred of whom attend the campus. The rest, online-only students, have never walked along the riverfront that I’m looking at, past the stadium and the fake lighthouse and the community pool. But they exist, somewhere. They pay. They log on to a home page that references a “peaceful and charming” collegiate experience, “nestled right alongside the Mississippi River.”

  Next year, The Huffington Post will run an exposé about Ashford, point out the details of its semi-presence that seems so commonplace here. There is a red door in the old brick building that says, “President’s Office,” but the door never opens. Call the president and your call goes to a room in a corporate mall in San Diego, an office with a glass door that says, “Bridgestone Education Inc.” Bridgestone is a publicly traded company worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and how much of the money has been allocated for employment and improvements at the faded brick campus on the hill in Clinton, it’s hard to say. There are no students lounging on a riverside campus now, nearby this stadium. I try to imagine them all here, a population nearly three times that of the current town, playing Hacky Sack beyond the center-field fence, the crew team painting synchronized ripples with their oars on the river in the distance.

  A week ago, everything was different for two days. Six thousand students and family members paraded through the downtown streets in cap and gown, taking proud pictures by the Mississippi. And basketball legend Bill Walton gave a graduation speech titled “Building a Winning Community” at the new football field that doesn’t have a team to play on it. And restaurants and stores and hotels were full. And somebody came up with the exact figure that $652,527 was generated because of one college-town weekend. And soon Ashford University, its CEO on the coast in San Diego, will be awarded Clinton’s annual Friend of Tourism Award.

  But back to the corn. Always this century’s biggest structure in town, Clinton Corn Processing Company grew into the absences along the river, bought out, then handed over in a merger with Nabisco, finally sold to ADM, “supermarket to the world,” ready to expand. A few years ago, on a spring day like this, I could have walked away from the stadium, headed south, watched cranes pass me,
carrying wrecking balls to be heaved into the wood and mortar of newly empty homes, making space for more factory, the crash echoing off the water and the empty buildings downtown the way a line drive single might echo off Nick Franklin’s personally monogrammed bat.

  A gap of browning grass borders the river on the south side of Clinton now. It used to be filled by a neighborhood, a school, a church, two bars, people. I drive there sometimes because the Baseball Family told me to, just to see the absence, to imagine what once was, what they describe to me. I meet a few of the residents still left, stare at one man’s T-shirt: “South Clinton: The Little Town Inside of ADM.” I wonder how much of an impression they can make on the company that their lives feel so entwined with, when ADM factories exist in two other Iowa towns and twenty other states and more than seventy-five countries around the world.

  Ever since Clinton was named New York, smoke—the productive kind—could be seen along this patch of riverbank. There are those who brag that Iowa land is the most in use in the country, hardly an acre of it wasted, and Clinton has always been useful. In the beginning, settlers burned husks to make the black dirt even more fertile. And how often did the lumber mills catch fire, one spark from a saw landing on the stacks of wood taller than any buildings around them? And every new factory that has come and then gone took in water from the river, sent smoke into the sky, an almost natural cycle, as if the machines were breathing.

  There’s smoke now, drifting toward us in the bleachers, thick and viscous continuity. Beyond that, the only part of this scene that looks the same is the stadium. In the old photographs from the first game, May 9, 1937, the fans wore wool suits and derby hats because it was an occasion, but otherwise they could be us now. This place has been deemed a landmark worthy of immunity to change.