Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  “Jesus Christ, Joe, you’re killin’ him.”

  All around him, people were trying to pry him off. They dug fingers into his forearms . . . but Grudeck flexed, and tightened his grip. It was then he heard Ruiz whimper and go slightly limp.

  “Joe, that’s enough, Joe! Joe, the guy’s out!”

  It was then he looked in Ruiz’s sick, broken, swollen face, and whispered, “Fa me? No, fa you. I could kill you if I wanted to, you big spic pussy.”

  And then he let go.

  The boos and curses came down on him as he walked to the dugout, ejected from the game. Stuff was flying. It was Seat Cushion Day and they came down around him like a flock of Frisbees. The crowd sound pounded through his head and heaving chest, and he felt almost as glorious as the day he starched Willie McCombs. He looked over at Ruiz. Still purple. Trainers around him checking his neck. He was sitting on the grass, all shaky like a just-knocked-out fighter. Which is what he was.

  Another Joe Grrewww moment.

  That night in a New York hotel room he flipped channels, catching all the sports news, and saw the highlight over and over. A suspension was coming, but everyone loved a baseball fight, especially a bloody one. Over the next day, the sports talk show hosts rehashed it all, bickering and yelling, attacking each other like Grudeck attacked Ruiz. Some complained there was no room in baseball for brushbacks, others argued pitchers had a “historical right” to move batters from the plate. Some cried that today’s hitters were a bunch of posturing babies too soft to take one for the team, others said a pitcher who drilled a batter had to expect to be charged. But there was something everyone agreed on: Joe Grudeck was right to defend his pitcher, Joe Grudeck was a stand-up guy, an old-school player, a throwback to the days when teammates stood up for each other and guys played with heart. Joe Grudeck beating Felix Ruiz’s ass . . . now that was baseball.

  * * *

  THE GRUDECK SEGMENT of the broadcast ended and the announcers moved on to other things.

  Grudeck clicked it off, sitting in his father’s recliner, imitation leather worn soft on the armrests from the oils of Chuck Grudeck’s hands.

  “Enshrined,” his mother said. “They say that like you’re some saint. If they only knew?” She gave a little laugh. Joey, her bad boy.

  If she only knew, Grudeck thought, letting the two girls from Syracuse visit and trouble his mind for a few seconds.

  “But I wish you could get them to stop using some of those pictures,” she said. “So violent. Can’t you get them to stop?”

  No, Grudeck said, he couldn’t get them to stop.

  “That’s what they loved about me when I was a player.”

  It was the Grudeck lore; last of the old school, the last of the Mohicans, like Sal always said. It was why he was revered in Boston, respected everywhere else. He was like a living ghost from a past most fans thought was better, when baseball was in black and white, and great ballplayers like Ted Williams went to war and liked fishing and were regular guys, just like them.

  “You always were such a good player, without all that,” his mother said, but the past tense of both their sentences hung in the air, forcing a long silence.

  “So . . . what are you going to do now?” Sylvia Grudeck finally asked.

  “Sal set up a press conference for later and I gotta do some radio and TV . . .”

  “No, Joseph, I mean like in the future,” she said. “What are you going to do now? Like with the rest of your life?”

  Chapter Seven

  Sally Mueller stood in her “ratty robe” at the kitchen window, and held a mug of tea up close to her chin. The warm moist steam rose and enveloped her face, giving comfort against the dry cold of the Otsego Lake morning. She covered the mug with her hands, letting the moisture soothe her skin.

  In winter—between the cold, the firewood, and the wet laundry—her hands got red and dry and chapped no matter how much lotion she lathered on them. Her hands made her feel she was aging fast. Time was disappearing and she had little to show for it. The word little bounced around in her head. She asked for so little. A little house, a little job security for her family, a little happiness. It all seemed so attainable, so American middle class. So little to ask for. And somehow, little by little, it slipped away.

  She tightened up the robe, a heavy old terry-cloth thing Horace gave her for a birthday a decade or more before. It was maroon then, bright, but had since faded to the color of dried blood. She blew the steam toward the window, hoping the heat would defrost the ice crystals that formed inside. They were beautiful, glassine mosaics of nature’s art—when they were outside. When they were inside, they reminded Sally how much she hated this house. As the crystals dripped away, the window cleared. Sally looked around the property: the bare, unpruned tree branches like varicosities against the gray sky; Horace’s frozen clothes and yellowed long underwear, hanging like inverted skeletons on the line; the dead stalks and sticks of the garden; Horace’s metal sculptures from his early days of blacksmithing littered the side yard and were entangled in overgrown grass, looking like rusted wheelchairs and walkers at some abandoned sanitarium. She looked down the narrow, rutted dirt driveway, always muddy in summer and rock-hard in winter, leading up from Chicken Farm Hill Road, then at the firewood stacked on the sagging side porch. The chimney above it was in need of repointing, the roof shingles around the chimney were thin and cracked, and like the weathered clapboard on the old house, leaked warm air out and let cold air in. Inside, the smell of stale smoke from Horace’s woodstove permeated everything. More than once, Michael’s friends got accused of sneaking cigarettes after hanging out at the Muellers’.

  Sally turned away and did the math in her head. How much to fix? How much more debt?

  She opened the kitchen drawer where she hid the bills, the wood-on-wood screech of cabinet resistance echoing her own trepidation to see the numbers in black and white. The stack, kept under three woven placemats and an assortment of ladles and cooking spoons, was thicker than ever. These relentless mailings by creditors must keep the post office in business, she thought. It was time to work, and the first order of organization was to cull the bundle of duplicate warning letters, and burn them in Horace’s stove. At least it was good for something. Next were the bills she had to pay: the cancelable services. The ones Horace would notice if plugs were pulled: electric, cable TV—not that he watched, but he would wonder about the silence. Then car insurance. God forbid Horace ever got pulled over in that pile of junk he drove and found the insurance lapsed. Then he would ask questions and more questions in that relentless way of his and Sally would have to admit how broke they were. Beyond broke. Behind in the mortgage, maxed out on credit cards, unqualified for a home equity loan because of bad credit and a worse house. Sally once tried to add a measly $15,000 or $20,000 to the mortgage, just enough to clean up her credit cards. She forged Horace’s signature on all the requisite paperwork, and took an afternoon off to meet the appraiser hired by Bank of America. He pulled in, scanned the outside, and never bothered to knock. Just like that, he was gone. She ran outside to stop him, but was left standing alone in gray dust kicked up by his tires.

  She knew what he was thinking.

  White trash.

  No two words scared her more. But here she was, in her cold kitchen in her ratty robe living below her modest expectations.

  * * *

  LIKE HORACE, SALLY HAD ROOTS in New York State farming. Unlike Horace, it was dead to her. Gone, and best forgotten. She lived what Horace often romanticized. She saw the body-bending effects of farmwork on her father, whose shoulders sloped more with each passing year, and the hump in her mother’s back, and the limps both had by their early sixties, hips fused and knees bowed from carrying sacks of seed and stacking hay bales and milking cows and loading feed and shoveling shit.

  Her job was the chickens, and she could still smell the henhouse; the chicken blood and excrement and rotten eggs seeped into soil and soul, and became entrenched
in your nostrils and gut. That smell, it stuck like the gluey goat manure in the traction ridges of your boots.

  Sally’s family had apple and pear orchards in the rural hills of Romulus, high above Cayuga Lake. Her father tried to convince her grandfather in the mid-1970s to give up the barn animals and fruit trees, and follow other growers into the wine business. The state tourism board was trying to make the Finger Lakes Region the Napa Valley of the East, her father said. The future was in grapes.

  Her grandfather resisted.

  “He wants to be a gentleman farmer, not a working farmer,” Grandpap complained.

  “The apples from Washington State are prettier, and prettier is what sells,” her dad would say. “Wine is the answer, but he’s too stubborn to see it and too old to change his ways. That’s what’s killing us.”

  Grandpap finally agreed to let her father experiment with grapes on limited acreage. Her father, taking what the land gave him, tried to develop a series of wines that were apple- and pear-based with a hint of grape, rather than the other way around. But the products lacked the refinement of the Cabernet Sauvignons, Rieslings, Pinot Noirs, Chardonnays, and ice wines of the region.

  The wine-tasting tourists were much different than the vacationers from the old Cayuga Lake cabin days, those machinists and bus drivers and cops and government employees from Yonkers or Albany or Schenectady or Syracuse, towing aluminum rowboats packed with tied-down plastic coolers and sleeping bags, ready to rough it in some “rustic” lakeside bungalow. The new tourists were Ithaca highbrows and Manhattanites and Park Slopers; the Arts & Leisure crowd. The wineries were another gallery, a place to envelop oneself in a culture foreign enough from white-collar life to count as an experience.

  In her awkward teens, Sally saw these people as erudite and sophisticated. These were New Yorkers, and Sally found herself feeling backward, clumsy, and poor in their company as they came to her farm to try, and reject, her father’s fruit wines.

  Sally worked the tasting room on weekends all through high school, filling plastic goblets like a bartender as the tourists sipped and meandered around, looking at old black-and-white pictures of her family working the orchards or the packhouse. Her favorite was of Grandpap, pipe and straw fedora, with one foot up on the running board of a ’51 Ford pickup with “Romulus Orchards” stenciled on the door.

  After years of trying, her father never did produce wines good enough for the Finger Lakes Winery Tour. Still, the signs on Routes 96 and 414 directed a sustainable number of seasonal tourists to their farm atop a hill on Marsh Corner Road, which intersected both county highways.

  The tasting room was a converted packing shed, Sheetrocked and painted rose. It was not a wine gallery, no glass tables or craft-period furniture. Just Sally, and her counter of plastic glasses, flustered and intimidated by New Yorkers in their weekend Ralph Lauren or downtown black, talking about balance and depth and pigmentation. She blushed as they asked questions she could not answer about process, or how their wines compared in composition, say, to the Johannesburg Rieslings. When she explained the wines were apple- and pear-based, she could hear the subtle derision that blunted their feigned interest.

  “Oh, that. You mean like Boone’s Farm? The stuff we used to drink in high school?!”

  “So, is it something you can drink with . . . ?”

  She stumbled through, feeling so . . . inferior . . . a word often whispered about her father’s concoctions. She knew what they were thinking. Upstate hick. Trailer trash, getting drunk on cheap fruit wine. Okay, so there were two trailers on the property—for seasonal help. But her family lived in a Federalist brick house, sturdy and meticulously kept by her mother. The surrounding farm, too, was always tidy, with no broken machinery left rusting in the fields. The barns and storage sheds were painted apple-red every few years, the fences bright white. Her dad had the long driveway paved once they started selling wines.

  But the wines were a failed experiment that left the farm not quite a winery and no longer a full orchard. Through Sally’s adolescence and teen years, her father and Grandpap fought over its future, often bitterly. All their hard work yielded only enough to meet loan interest. They had land, and all the money went to sustain it. Her father wanted to sell, but Grandpap refused.

  “This was my father’s land, goddamnit.’’

  So they stayed until Grandpap died. Her father, ambition soured and in debt, sold the operation to a Wall Street couple who, within five years, developed a Cayuga White that won Gold Medals at the New York Wine and Food Classic four years running and a dry Riesling that won twice.

  The farm was sold just as Sally went off to college, on scholarships and loans, and her parents moved to a small apartment on the backstreets of Skaneateles, where they got jobs in little lakeside tourist shops. She never returned home.

  All these years later, now sitting at a tin-top table in a drafty farmhouse with cold air whispering in the cracks, the failure of it all resounded in the walls around her. White trash. She graduated Cornell, had a good job managing the billing department of a medical group, wore nice clothes, and bought Michael everything every other kid had.

  Still, the words haunted her. She’d wanted something better, for herself and Michael, but . . .

  She shuffled the bills and said his name out loud. “Horace.”

  This house, this life. Sally remembered how it all started, more than twenty years ago. Horace was the farm museum archivist then, and they had a nice, affordable apartment on the second floor of one of Cooperstown’s massive Stick-style Victorians. Sally loved to come home, to park in the crushed-stone driveway and imagine the dark, imposing house was all hers. She would look up at the eaves and angular turrets, the decorative molding painted a brooding shade of hunter green, over gray shingles. Horace was doing research and writing, in what Sally thought was only a layover job between his master’s and PhD, and wherever that would take them. Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor, maybe back to Ithaca. Princeton? She could only dream. Then, one night he told her about a conversation he’d had with the museum’s blacksmith. Horace was researching a Conestoga wagon wheel exhibit, so he wanted to ask the blacksmith about wheel bands.

  “I walk in and we talk. After a while he says, ‘You’re a big man, so why don’t you do real work?’ ” Horace told her.

  “What a jerk,” Sally said.

  “No, he was just ball-busting,” Horace explained. “So I say, ‘I do real work. I analyze life back then and explain why things were done.’ ”

  “And he says, ‘Hah! You don’t have to be a professor to know that. For survival! That’s why it was done. You want to understand back then? Then put your hands into the fire. Leave the study to schoolgirls.’ And then he held up his hands. You should have seen them, Sally! They looked like he was wearing thick gloves of skin, layers of healed burns and cuts and cracks and calluses.”

  Sally remembered the admiration in Horace’s voice, and Horace was not one to fawn. The blacksmith was a Hungarian named Melle Kovacs, and Horace began to visit him daily and return home each night with another bit of his story. He was from the Puszta countryside and came from a long line of blacksmiths. But like Horace, he was educated, with a degree from Szent István University in agricultural sciences.

  “I learned much theory, but I never forgot the practice of making something lasting with my hands . . . this metal thing that would last for the ages, made the same way through the ages,” he told Horace. “Let me tell you something, my friend. I tried working in my field, horticulture and plant development. But those were sciences of patience, not energy. The blacksmith practices a craft of violence. It appeals to the man deep inside, the fire core. You hammer and forge and you have something to show for your work in the time it takes the metal to cool.”

  Horace told Sally he was intrigued, and when Kovacs offered to teach him the basics, he agreed.

  Sally asked why.

  “I don’t know; to do something different. Plus, the guy’s got a point
. I’m trying to understand history through study, locked away in a room full of books and articles. Maybe I can understand more by living it.”

  And just like that, interest quickly turned to obsession. Horace told Sally he spent his life doing too much thinking and not enough doing. I’m getting soft. I want to live my life as a creator, not some sidelines critic.

  For the rest of that summer, Horace spent his spare time in stealth apprenticeship, watching as the Hungarian wielded the hammers and tongs of the craft with hands impervious to the flying sparks of the fire or the bits of molten metal that assaulted them daily. It was primal man at his best, Horace thought, and the primitive tools spoke to him.

  Those tools, in the hands of a strong man, reduced one of nature’s hardest elements to exactly what mankind needed: a weapon, a tool, a horseshoe. Horace said when he worked with those tools—when his forearms were engorged with blood and his hair became soaked with cooling sweat and he felt his historian’s hands getting hard as blisters turned to calluses—that he realized old Kovacs was right. To understand history, to appreciate when life was hard, you had to live it. Mimic it, at the very least.

  “This is a more authentic life,” he told Sally.

  “To be a reenactor?” Sally wanted to say, but she kept quiet, hoping the phase would pass.

  Instead, Horace expanded his relationship with the tools. He learned about the weights and head speeds of hammers, the grip strength in the tongs and cutting force of the chisels. The tools felt like natural extensions of his arms and hands, and there was much to learn; knowledge in its most physical form.

  The historical papers now began to feel dead to him, like brittle autumn leaves, he told Sally. Yes, the history of farming in the Leatherstocking Region was a history close to him. Yes, it was his grandfather’s, and ancestors’ before. But not his. This work, this real work, could be his.