Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  To mitigate this unfriendly act, the cops told the rejected drivers to park up the street, in the Farmers’ Museum lot. From there, they could see the greens of the eleventh and twelfth holes at Leatherstocking, the hotel course, and the tees on nine and ten. Across Lake Street, on the hotel side, were the third green and the fourth tee and fairway. So not only was the street a mess, the parking lot was overrun by crowds hurrying to the best vantage points and standing on the museum’s rock walls to get a better view.

  Horace sat in traffic, and the Escort engine heated up and started to smoke oil. He lost patience at one point and swung around a line of cars into the empty oncoming traffic lane. Luckily, it was an old Cooperstown cop, not a New York trooper, that halted his progress.

  “Whoa! Horace. You’re going against the grain here,” he said.

  “Just trying to get to work, Billy.”

  “I know, but we got rules . . . Here, let me wave you up.”

  Billy motioned to the trooper up the street, who waved Horace forward.

  Another simple, successful act of defiance, Horace thought. He drove past the line of stopped cars on one side, and fans lining the walls on the other. But just as he got to the entrance, the crowd jumped down and ran in front of him.

  The trooper yelled, “Wait!” to both, then let the crowd cross, as Horace fumed. So many sheep, thought Horace, surrounded by the flock. When the trooper finally motioned Horace into the lot, the Escort backfired and left a noxious fart of blue exhaust in the faces of those still at curbside, which made Horace smile. At least something went right today, he thought.

  When he got out of his car, a few fans brushed past him.

  “Why all the bedlam?” Horace said.

  “Joe Grudeck! Joe Grudeck’s on the green!” said a middle-aged, red-faced guy.

  From the crowd, Horace heard calls of “Joe!” “Hey, Joe, over here!” People had their cell phones out, extended over their heads, to capture the moment. Some had binoculars. Horace thought the whole scene was silly, but it was the calls and chants of “Grrrewww”—which reminded Horace of how the dude-dads called Michael “Beasssst!”—that, for some reason, made him want to get closer.

  He strode, giantlike, across the parking lot, towering above the Red Sox T-shirt crowd in his leather breeches and coal-stained linen shirt; a stone-faced, shaggy giant of a man, a glowering curiosity of a man, slinging a long-handled splitting maul over his shoulder, just for effect.

  He thrust himself up on the wall, among the shorter, paunchy fans just in time to see their hero miss a long putt. The ballplayer, this Joe Grudeck, raised his face to the sky and shook his head, mocking himself, to the groan of the crowd. One of the other players stepped forward and slapped him on the back, which put Grudeck’s size in perspective. The other guy had to reach up, and Horace realized Grudeck was tall and broad, but he moved stiffly and without the athletic grace Horace expected. His body resembled the man Horace saw in the posters downtown, but with a few layers of thickness added, made more obvious by the strain of fabric in his synthetic golf wear.

  Grudeck sank the gimme putt and the crowd cheered. He labored to bend over and retrieve his ball, and stumbled a bit as he straightened up, and Horace detected a slight limp as he waved to his adoring fans. But it was a short acknowledgment; one quick hand raised and minimum eye contact with the hundreds staring at him. The men in his foursome clucked around him, feeling superior to those being held at a distance. But Grudeck put his head down and walked ahead, alone, a silent figure as indifferent to the people around him as Horace’s own stone Giant. Horace suddenly felt demeaned by watching, and had no idea why.

  * * *

  DRAPED ACROSS THE CLASSIC FIELDSTONE edifice of the museum was a banner that read “Come See Our Giants” and, just like Grundling said, there was a ridiculous cartoon sign of a shades-wearing draft horse and bull in the “Cool, Cool Cooperstown” motif. Both were wearing Red Sox hats. A separate sign posted on the ground said, “Come See a Real Giant,” and the farm’s own stone man was pictured, lying in his box with a superimposed Red Sox pennant coming out of his hand. The messages were tortuous on so many levels, Horace thought. Giants and Red Sox. Animal and human. Stone and real. It was flat-out stupid, and Horace felt embarrassed for his museum’s pathetic attempt at “coolness.” And yet, at the same time, it gave him a chance to revel in his anticoolness, as he told Grundling. He was the blacksmith. Recalcitrant and unapologetic.

  Grundling was out front, watching the crowd overrun the parking lot and run to the best vantage points to follow Joe Grudeck. Several of his co-workers, in nineteenth-century costume, were circulating through the lot, handing out flyers with discount coupons. Natalia was not among them, which made Horace happy.

  “We’re seizing this moment!” Grundling said.

  Horace almost didn’t say it, but the whole damn scenario was so . . . humiliating. He leaned in toward Grundling, close, talking directly into his ear.

  “Why are we groveling, John?” he said, sweeping his hand out over the fans. “For them? We’re begging them? Look at them, John! They think history is a home run, for fuck’s sake!”

  Grundling’s eyes darted from Horace’s face to the maul on his shoulder, and he took a step back.

  “I wish you’d play ball here,” Grundling said. “Now’s not the time to stand on principle. We need bodies through the turnstile.”

  “Goddamnit, John! There is never a time to not stand on principle,” Horace said, almost shouting.

  “We need the bodies! Any bodies. What don’t you understand about this?” Grundling said, hands up, exasperated.

  “Ah, so there it is! ‘Truth as a matter of majorities,’ the American way,” Horace spat. “We’re only as valuable as they say we are. America, the Mediocre.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” Grundling said, eyes back on the maul.

  “We’re whoring ourselves out, John, and I’m not sure I want to be part of it.”

  “That’s your choice,” Grundling said, taking another step back. “Nobody’s forcing you to work here. If you find what I’m trying to do so offensive, then by all means . . . go be a blacksmith somewhere else.”

  Horace could barely contain his rage.

  “That’s your answer? ‘If I don’t like it, leave’?” but he sputtered because Grundling had raised the stakes, then called his bluff. There was no “somewhere else” to be the blacksmith. Not full-time, with benefits, anyway. And they both knew it.

  Grundling didn’t push the point. Instead he softened, to placate Horace.

  “Look, Horace. I admire your passion, and you’re the most authentic reenactor we have . . .”

  “And a craftsman,” Horace said, slighted.

  “. . . and a craftsman,” Grundling echoed. “And a historian. Let’s try to get through this. Work the Giant tent for the next few days, give away the Joe Grudeck bats, and let’s try to teach some history and win some fans.”

  * * *

  THE MINI SOUVENIR BATS were stacked at the entrance of the Giant tent, “Made in China” stamped not-so-discreetly on each box. Horace ripped open the cardboard and marveled at the cheapness of the bats. The wood was flimsy pine, dentable with a fingernail, and the red stain uneven and blotchy. The Joe Grudeck signature was not engraved, but stamped in white paint that could have been smudged with a thumb.

  “Crap,” Horace said out loud. Crap that was an insult to all the durable artifacts in the museum, from centuries-old primitive iron tools to the American-made nineteenth-century contraptions like balers and threshers that still worked when prodded.

  Horace gave the presentation to the first group of these new fans without enthusiasm, and lost the small gathering of people almost immediately. They took their souvenirs and ran. Alone in the tent, he took one of the toy bats and snapped it in half, then shoved the pieces back into the box to cover up the crime.

  A second group and third group came and went, and shared with Horace their mutual disint
erest; they in the subject and he in them.

  He was alone with the Giant, like the sole mourner at a wake, when Grundling appeared.

  “I just learned there’s another round of golf later this afternoon,” he told Horace. “So the fans will be back. Hopefully traffic will pick up.”

  Grundling left, and Horace looked deep into the Giant’s face, into his open mouth, as if the gypsum throat held some rock-bound secret, some buried, ancient wisdom that evaded Horace. Somewhere, deep in that stone, was the sliver of an imprisoned soul.

  “Speak to me, goddamn you,” Horace said. “Go on, tell me.”

  And the Giant did.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “Behold the stone man!” Horace told the Thursday crowd, back in carnival barker mode. “Behold this mute sensation, as famous in his day as the men in the baseball shrine you’ve come to see. Like many of them, he is a dead relic; a museum curiosity. But the stone man tells a story that peers into America’s soul, certainly more so than any washed-up ballplayer. The stone man warns of false idolatry, of heathen gods, of the foolishness of the masses. He is a fallen celebrity—yes, perhaps America’s first—exposed as all hype, a fraud. But, in this, he serves as a cautionary tale.”

  He was reenergized. His mind revved and spun like a grinder’s wheel. It spat out stinging sparks of ideas to put a sharp, bloodletting edge on his delivery. Ah, bitterness, thought Horace, an unappreciated quality. One worth exploiting.

  Staring into the Giant’s stoic face helped him make sense of the Wednesday sighting of Silent Joe Grudeck. Grudeck’s deaf ear to the crowd, his detachment, reminded Horace of his own stone man—dead, still, and oblivious to those who flocked to him.

  But this Grudeck, he was alive, and his arrogance seemed purposeful, as if he held himself out as some kind of pagan god. His fans were blind to this; they worshipped his mute presence, despite being shit on.

  As the ideas sparked and caught fire in Horace’s brain, he took a walk through the Grudeck crowd, yes, for inspiration, and yes, to see what he had missed. A historian, like a detective, must uncover fresh evidence, and Horace saw it during his lunchtime venture. The parking lot had turned into a tailgate party of sandwiches and soda, people dipping into coolers outside their cars with license plates from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut. Men, women, and children in silly Red Sox shirts and hats. Like Barnum said, to be part of the spectacle. Just like 1869, outside the village of Cardiff.

  A new narrative screamed in Horace’s head; later he would speak of the parallels between the “awestruck nineteenth-century rubes who rode stages and lined the dirt roads of Stubby Newell’s farm” and “modern-day dupes in minivans who traveled great distances to stare wide-eyed at the bronze men at our own Hall of Fame.”

  “Long before your own ‘Joe Grrreww,’ or whatever you call him, there was the Cardiff Giant! The American Goliath!” Horace told them.

  He ignored—perhaps didn’t even notice—the headshaking and muttering in the crowd.

  “This guy’s crazy,” one Little League dad whispered to another. Horace heard that one, but plowed ahead.

  “Crazy? Maybe. But someone has to tell the truth.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” another dad said, and half the audience, wearing orange Nashua Indians shirts, left.

  “Choose ignorance!” Horace called after them. “Take another bat! Help yourselves . . .”

  But as Horace forged ahead about the abandonment of “God and country” in favor of “consumerism and city life,” one of the Nashua Indians returned to announce Joe Grudeck was now visible on the back nine, and the rest of the crowd ran out.

  * * *

  HORACE WAS HOME THAT NIGHT, alone, exhausted, and naked, stretched out on his bed. The summer humidity pressed in on him, a head-throbbing, smothering force that just exacerbated how trapped he felt. The house would be taken, because the debt at his salary was insurmountable. His conversation with Grundling—“go be a blacksmith somewhere else”—unnerved him. A precursor to another salary cut? Or downgraded to part-time, no benefits? Or fired altogether? Insecurity, the capitalist’s tool. Fuck Grundling. Maybe it was time to go. Start over. See what was in Ohio. Go west, just like in his day. Or maybe out to Rochester. Natalia was going back to teach in just a few days. Maybe he’d follow, see what happened.

  He’d find something. He said so, every day, in his own smithy presentation: The blacksmith is ancient, but he endured, because he is the epitome of self-reliance . . .

  He sat up and looked out the window at thousands of fireflies alighting on the long grass, flickering in the black night, and the beauty of the scene erased some of the darkness in his soul. He picked up his new phone and called Michael.

  Michael was supposed to leave on Saturday, but Grudeck’s autograph signing at Gone Batty was that afternoon and Michael wanted to meet him.

  “I thought we could spend Saturday night together, after I get out of work,” Horace said.

  “Okay, Dad, I’ll walk up after the store closes,” he said.

  “Come to the farm,” Horace said. “I’ll wait for you in the shop.”

  “Okay, but I can’t hang out long, Dad. Mom is packing up the car and we’re leaving at four in the morning, so I can make the team practice in the afternoon.”

  Horace, last in line. Behind Sally, behind his new team, even behind this fucking ballplayer, this Joe Grudeck.

  He lay back down in the dark, perspiring. He stayed that way for hours; still, on his back, his hair matted, sweat pooled on his sternum. Somewhere in the middle of the night, he again sat up and looked again out the window, but the lightning bugs were gone. He fell back again, trying to calm himself with his prayer of purpose. He drifted off to images of Michael and again heard the whisper of a child. “Dad.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS MORE GOLF, and more fans, on Friday. Horace stayed on the attack, in the name of “educating” and “challenging” them, as he told Grundling, who came to him with complaints.

  “Some of the people say it’s insulting. Dial it back, Horace. We’re not here to make enemies. And, really, I’m not going to tell you again.”

  “You won’t have to, John,” Horace said.

  But Horace continued, undeterred. Fuck Grundling. Fuck the fans.

  “Baseball wasn’t born here, my friends,” Horace told them. “What was born here was the cozy business relationship between beer and baseball that continues to this day. The Busch family, yep, the Budweiser people, owned thousands of acres of hops farms right here, and their summer estate was right up the street. So you can thank them for all the drunk idiots you see at games . . . this Bud’s for them. . . .”

  “Now let me ask you boys a question. What makes a hero?” Horace would say. “A ballplayer? Do they really do anything heroic? Do they rush into a burning building to save someone, like a fireman? Do they stop crime, like a cop?”

  Then to the fathers, “So you raised boys who think athletes are gods, and you come to our Pantheon to baseball, and buy souvenir junk like the suckers that paid two bits to see the stone man one hundred fifty years ago.”

  Grundling was back at closing time.

  “Suckers, Horace? Really?” he said.

  “It was said in the context of the Barnum quote,” Horace said.

  Grundling shook his head.

  “Okay. Whatever. But tomorrow’s the last day before the induction ceremony. There’s more golf, and we’re expecting a lot of fans.”

  Grundling looked long at him.

  “Are you up to this, Horace?”

  “Never better, John. Why?”

  “You seem . . . out of sorts,” Grundling said. “Everything all right?”

  Horace rejected his phony concern, and quoted Orwell.

  “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. I’m just giving the other side to the story.”

  “What?”

  “I am the voice of one crying in the wilder
ness—John the Baptist, John 1:23,” Horace continued.

  “Horace, I have serious concerns here,” Grundling said. “Just keep things cool.”

  “Ah, cool. There’s that word again,” Horace said. “I keep telling you, John, I’m the Anticool.”

  “You know what I mean,” Grundling said.

  “I do. I know exactly what you mean.”

  * * *

  HORACE HOPED SATURDAY would fuel his indignant energy, and it delivered. Traffic was miserable, the parking lot crowd was unruly, and, in the tent, his aggressive presentation was met with more derision. He saw several people shake their heads and throw side glances to each other. Perfect. He was doing his job, the way he wanted.

  “What a bunch of b.s.,” he heard one guy say as he left midway through.

  “Choose ignorance!” Horace said after him, happily.

  When he concluded the talk and asked if there were any questions, one father leaned down and whispered something in his son’s ear. A mischievous smile came across the boy’s face as he punched his hand in the air.

  “Yes?” Horace said.

  “Are you a homeless man?” the boy asked, and whole group laughed.

  Horace, so steady, said, “That’s a very, very good question, and I’m going to answer it,” in a tone that took the smile off the kid’s face and made the room go quiet. The father put his hands on the boy’s shoulders and started to turn him toward the exit.

  “Whoa! Where are you going?” Horace said. “Your boy asked a question. Now let me answer it. Let me educate him.”

  With all eyes on the man, he stayed put.

  “No, son, I’m not a homeless man. I’m a blacksmith. I dress like this because it’s hard, dirty work, and rural men in the nineteenth century usually had long hair and beards. Since this is a historic farm, we try to give our visitors an accurate picture of how people lived. Now, here’s another example of how people lived back then. Know what it is?”