The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  The gigantic native glowered upon hearing the good news, and spoke again.

  “Walter Johnson says that he is grateful. He says, however, that now that the issue of sliding has been raised, he wishes to make it known that he and his braves believe they have been deprived of still another opportunity to enjoy the pleasure and thrill of the slide. He says that players wish to know if there is any rule that forbids them from sliding into first following a base on balls.”

  Mister Fairsmith said, “You mean, after receiving a walk, they want to slide into first?”

  “It would appear from his tone,” said Fairsmith’s nephew, reaching for the catcher’s mask again, “to be on the order of a smoldering grievance, Uncle Sam.”

  “Now, that is ridiculous. The primary object of the slide is to reach the base without being tagged out by the fielder. As they surely must understand by now, if a batter in his turn at bat receives four pitches outside of the strike zone he is awarded first base. Consequently there is no need to avoid being tagged or thrown out; all that is required of the batsman is that he proceed to first base, where, merely by touching the bag it becomes ‘his’.”

  “You want me to tell him all that?”

  “Why, of course I do. And over and over, until he gets it into his head. Now, why are you putting that chest protector on again? Good Lord, son, don’t show fear, of all things.”

  “But—I’m frightened.”

  “Of a tribe of heathen black men?”

  “Of their spears, Uncle. Look!”

  Sure enough, the men of the village who had fallen back when Mister Fairsmith had rescinded the prohibition on sliding into first, were advancing again with spears upraised, ready to lunge, it would appear, if he should fail to grant this new request. Nonetheless, the Mundy manager said, “You will repeat my words to Walter Johnson. You will tell him that sliding into first after a walk is just plain foolishness and I won’t have it. I wouldn’t allow American players to do it, and I surely am not going to extend to a village of black Africans a prerogative that I would deny my own countrymen and kin.”

  When Walter Johnson had heard Mister Fairsmith’s message, he responded in a voice so thunderous that it caused the scrawny village dogs to go yelping off into the high grass. And then the women started instantly to yowl and screech in their bone-chilling fashion.

  “What now?” asked the exasperated American.

  “He says, ‘On what authority will Mister Baseball not allow us to slide into first following a walk?’ He demands to know the number of that rule in the Official Baseball Rules as recorded, amended, and adopted by the Professional Baseball Playing Rules Committee.”

  Chagrined as he was by this renewed outburst of wailing from the women, and distracted as he was by the spears pressing toward his throat, Mister Fairsmith was once again deeply gratified by all that Walter Johnson had remembered from his very first lecture on the Rules. Not only did he have a hopping fastball and fine control, not only was he an excellent hitting pitcher, but he appeared to have, in that head decorated with triangular scars on either cheekbone, a brain. “Well, of course,” said Mister Fairsmith, “my authority in this instance does not derive from a written regulation, and consequently I cannot give him the number of a rule. You must explain to him that what we are dealing with here is a matter of unwritten law, or custom, but one so universally respected as to have the force and effect of every last rule in the rulebook.”

  No sooner were these words translated, than the women, like a flock of squawking crows, rushed off to the far end of the village circle, and then swept back again, pushing through the dust a black kettle, five times the size of a beer keg. Meanwhile the children, who had disbanded in search of wood, were already carrying it to a spot at the outskirts of the village, where the older girls of the tribe had begun to assemble the branches for a fire.

  When his nephew pulled the catcher’s mask over his face, Mister Fairsmith instantly snatched it away and threw it to the ground. “Now, you must stop this nonsense immediately. I want to know what exactly is going on with these people. Why in God’s name are they behaving like this now? What did he just say to me?”

  “He—he said they were a proud race.”

  “Pride he calls it? The men with spears? The women screaming like banshees? And from the looks of it, preparations underway for an outright act of cannibalism? That isn’t pride in my book, and you may tell him as much!”

  “But, Uncle, he says that though they will follow to the letter the rules of the white man’s game, they refuse to be enslaved by arbitrary strictures designed to rob them of their inalienable cultural rights. By denying the men the right to slide into first after having been awarded a base on balls, you have grievously insulted their masculinity.”

  “To the contrary,” said Mister Fairsmith, while only fifty feet away the women set to scrubbing the interior of the immense kettle with sand and river water, “sliding into first after a walk is as sure a way as I know of for a ballplayer to compromise himself and his professional stature in the eyes of the spectator.”

  “Apparently,” said the youngster, after translating Mister Fairsmith’s remarks to Walter Johnson, “that isn’t the way they see it.”

  “Oh, isn’t it? In other words, a tribe of black men who had not even seen a ball or a bat prior to last week, is going to tell Ulysses S. Fairsmith, manager of the Ruppert Mundys, what constitutes professionalism in baseball?”

  “I think that is the meaning of the spears, Uncle, yes.”

  “Well, suppose you just make it perfectly clear to Mr. Walter Johnson here that if there is anything in the world I hate worse than a cheat, it’s a bully. I am afraid these people are really starting to rub me the wrong way, and I am a man who is known and respected throughout the world of sport for his patience.”

  “But, Uncle—what if they eat us! What if because you won’t let them slide into first after a walk, they put us into that pot and boil us alive!”

  “My dear young fellow, if despite all we have tried to teach them in this last week they want to continue to be loathed and despised by civilized men the world over, in the final analysis, that is their business. They’re the ones who are going to have to live with themselves, once the ‘fun’ is over. I, however, have a responsibility to my countrymen and to the game which is their national pastime. Surely, it must be clear to you now that where sliding is concerned, if you give these people a finger, they will take a hand. Allow them to slide into second, third, and home and they want to slide into first for no good reason. Allow them to do so on a batted ball and they want to do it after a walk. And where will it stop, I ask you? No, either I draw the line right here, at the cost of my life if need be, or else, simply to save my skin, I yield to force, I yield to just the kind of violence I detest with all my heart and soul, and give baseball over, lock, stock, and barrel, to these savages to pervert and destroy.”

  “Listen!” cried the young seminarian. “A drum!”

  Yes, somewhere in this village, the hands of a warrior had begun to thump out a rhythm whose ominous meaning was all too clear …

  “No,” said Mister Fairsmith, “I will not be the man who allowed baseball to become a primitive rite for savages. I would rather die a martyr to the national pastime, if such is the will of the Lord.”

  “But—” cried his young companion, “what about me?”

  “You?” said Mister Fairsmith. “I believed when I took you with me, that your ambition in life was to be a Christian missionary.”

  “It was! It is! But why should I die for baseball?”

  Mister Fairsmith raised his face to the African sun: “Father, forgive him, he knows not what he says.”

  * * *

  By midnight two fires burned. The one back of home plate had been ignited by an ancient bony creature of indeterminate sex, who seemed weighted to the ground only by virtue of the mask and the chest protector that he (or she) wore. The fire midway between the pitcher’s mound and sec
ond base appeared to be the special property of the women of the tribe, who throughout the evening had chanted a monotonous incantation in rhythm with the village drum, meanwhile feeding the flames with oil so that they reared high into the air, casting a red gleam over the entire infield. The outfield was lit by the moon and the stars. From beyond the black wall of foliage, there came a shrill, insistent piping, as though all the beasts of the jungle were being directed to seats in the treetops by the African night birds.

  The two white men were bound by their wrists and ankles to stakes driven into the coaching boxes, Mister Fairsmith at third, young Billy Fairsmith at first. They had been hanging there since noon.

  When the kettle was rolled by six naked warriors across the infield and hoisted up over the fire back of the pitcher’s mound, the villagers who had gathered two and three deep along the infield foul lines began to wail with excitement. They too were unclothed now, and all their protuberances seemed swollen to the bursting point in the flickering shadows; many bore white phosphorescent markings on their heels and shoulder blades, and when they leaped in place, their movements dazzled and confused the eye. As what didn’t?

  Two tiny boys—matchsticks with bellies—now appeared upon the diamond, dragging Mister Fairsmith’s ball bag. Hobbling behind, making signs in the air, came the creature in the mask and the chest protector. When the little boys had finally pulled the heavy bag up on the rubber, this creature—wise man? wise woman?—directed them to empty the bag of its contents. Meanwhile, the water crested and slid over the edge of the kettle and into the fire, the sizzle greatly exciting the villagers, causing them to wail as though in torment—though in fact they appeared from their sporadic leaping about to be in some savage version of seventh heaven.

  And now Walter Johnson strode out to the mound. He dismissed the tiny boys with a wave of the hand, and immediately took to examining the several dozen baseballs they had emptied on to the ground. It was a while before he found the one that most suited him. After rubbing it three times in his immense hands—“Omoo! Omoo! Omoo!” the women chanted—he passed it, with a deep bow and a friendly bark, to the Wise One in the mask and chest protector. The Wise One, ball in hand, hobbled toward the fire. Raising the ball once toward the villagers lined up along the first-base foul line—“Omoo!”—then to the villagers lined up along third—“Omoo!”—the Wise One went into a windup more elaborate than any Mister Fairsmith had seen in his entire career, and let fly the ball in the direction of the kettle.

  When the wailing had subsided, the boy children of the tribe ran out to the mound, where they squatted on their haunches around Walter Johnson. He addressed them in so fearsome a manner that several instantly wet the ground beneath them. Then each was handed a baseball, and just as the Wise One had earlier, threw it into the kettle. “Omoo! Omoo! Omoo!”With the mound empty of baseballs, the women moved in again, chanting in rhythm to the drum, and swaying now, as they watched the balls jump and spin like fabulous curves and knucklers in the roiling waters. From time to time a woman approached the fire, and dipping a net on a long pole into the kettle, extracted a ball. Walter Johnson tested the stitches with a thumb, and then directed her to return the steaming ball to the pot. In the end he took the pole himself and dipped deep into the kettle, collecting all the balls in the net. Then, swinging the pole three times over his head—“Omoo! Omoo! Omoo!”—he sent the boiled baseballs sailing into the air.

  As though unchained, the tiny boys broke across the diamond, two or three of them invariably leaping upon the same ball, biting simultaneously into the cover, teeth to teeth, nose to nose—and kicking all the while at one another’s shins in wild windmill fashion. When, finally, one or another of the boys had the ball to himself and firmly in his own grasp, he dropped to his knees to devour the covering with the ferocity of one who had been denied food for twenty-four hours; perhaps that was the case. Having eaten clear down to the yarn, the child then raced to the sidelines to deposit the carcass with one of the village elders—presumably his own grandfather—and sped off in search of another ball. Along the sidelines, the parents and relatives of the children shrieked directions at them, pointing and shouting to draw their attention to balls that remained unclaimed at the far edges of the diamond. For all their ardor, however, they were obviously amused by the ceremony, and the most ancient members of the community had to be held up on their feet, so wracked were they with laughter. To be sure, here and there spectators were covering their eyes with their fingertips—a gesture apparently signifying shame. These, it would seem, were relatives of the few youngsters who kneeled retching in the basepaths or rolled around the mound, in the full glow of the fire, clutching their stomachs and whimpering with pain.

  Finally there was not a ball that had been donated by the generous little boys of Port Ruppert whose cover had not been wholly devoured. On their haunches again, the panting, sweating little children waited while Walter Johnson and the Wise One moved along the foul lines, counting the skinned baseballs that had been dropped at the feet of the village elders.

  The winner of the competition was a burly little fellow, no more than seven, who had eaten the covers off five regulation baseballs. Hoisted up on to Walter Johnson’s marvelous shoulders, he was carried ceremoniously around the basepaths, while the villagers chanted, “Typee! Typee! Typee!”

  The next competition turned out to be not so amusing, or so successful, and left the villagers oddly dispirited, as though they might be wondering, “What’s the matter with the kids these days?”

  It was a hitting contest. The object fired down off the hill by Walter Johnson was not a baseball, however—there was no longer a single baseball intact on the entire continent of Africa—but a black, shriveled head, slightly larger in circumference than the nine and a quarter inch ball considered “official” in the big leagues. Invariably Johnson got two quick strikes past a youngster before he had even gotten the bat off his bare little shoulder; then he would throw him a head wide or low of the plate, and strike him out swinging. Now, from the way the spectators hissed and spat at the children from the sidelines, it would seem that to bring the meat-end of a bat into contact with what had once been the face of a tribal enemy, or traitor, appeared to them to be as easy as pie; the fact that the youngsters could not even rouse themselves to swing until they were already down by two strikes, bespoke a timidity that particularly enraged the menfolk. Yet, for all that the fathers barked angry instructions at the tiny little hitters, leaping high into the air and showing their filed teeth to communicate their disappointment, their offspring remained frozen in fear at the plate, even though Walter Johnson was clearly throwing nothing but half-speed pitches, and curves that turned so slowly you could virtually see the glum expression on the face as it broke down the middle.

  Only the burly little seven-year-old who had skinned and eaten the most hides managed to get so much as a piece of a head, ticking an ear or an eyelid so lightly however, that after examination by the Wise One, the head was deemed undamaged enough to be thrown back into play. Nonetheless, he managed to stay alive in the batter’s box longer than any of his little friends, and was thus declared the winner once again.

  Now the tribesman whom Mister Fairsmith had come to call Babe Ruth—as much for his barrel-chested, bandy-legged physique as his power at the plate—was called out of the crowd of spectators to satisfy the expectations that the fledglings of the village had so miserably disappointed. And did he! There was the old sound of wood against bone! The moment the bat met the skull, you just knew that that old head was gone. What a night for the Babe! Fourteen heads thrown, fourteen heads smashed to smithereens.

  No sooner was the exhibition over, than the village children, and even some of the men, surged forward to capture a sliver of cranial bone as a souvenir of the occasion.

  And now came the ceremony of the virgins and the baseball bats. The tribe, stirred to a frenzy by Babe Ruth’s performance at the plate, went silent as worshippers when the first
demure native girl, with brass hoops dangling from her ears, and her shaved head covered by a Mundy baseball cap, was led slowly in from the bullpen and across the dark outfield by the Wise One. The women tending the fire reached out to touch the lithe naked body when she moved past the flames, and on the sidelines the spectators whispered excitedly to see the tears of joy in her large brown eyes. Under the direction of Walter Johnson—as gentle now with the maiden as he had been severe with the young boys—the girl arranged herself upon home plate, as she did so darting a shy glance toward the “hitter” in the on-deck circle. Then Walter Johnson gently pulled the oversized Mundy cap down over her eyes and the women of the tribe began to sing.

  A jug of boiling water dipped from the kettle was used to wash down the plate after the initiate had taken her turn in the box. With a broom of twigs the Wise One brushed away every last grain of dust, and then examined the bat to be used next, giving particular attention to the handle, to be sure that it had been cleansed of the resin that Mister Fairsmith had encouraged the players to use in order to improve their grip in this tropical climate. From the meticulous hygienic ritual that preceded each deflowering—and too from the tender way in which Walter Johnson covered their eyes to prevent them from growing skittish, in the manner of fillies—it would appear that the girls of this tribe were a pampered lot indeed. Each bat was used but once and then discarded, yet another indication of the singular care and concern lavished upon the pubescent female in this remote corner of the world.

  Then came the feast.

  Gloves had been boiling in the kettle all the while the girls had been up at the plate. By now they were cooked to a turn, and when they were removed from the water and scattered about the field the villagers fell upon them with ferocity—in the end they did not even leave uneaten the tough lacing that edged the first-basemen’s mitts. The eyelets through which the lacing was drawn they spit on the ground like so many pits, but everything else they devoured, thirty-six gloves in all: four right-handed catchers’ mitts, four first-basemen’s mitts (two left-handed, two right-handed), and eighteen right-handed fielders’ gloves eaten by the men; ten left-handed fielders’ mitts divided among the women and the children. The chest protectors were boiled for dessert, and while the adults sucked and chewed on the canvas, the children gobbled down the filling. Some of the tots were carried off to sleep still clutching tufts of hairy wadding in their little pink palms.