Bat 6

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

  Wink’s mother pretended Shazam didn’t tilt her head way back and peek out from under the bandanna. She gave her the prize anyway. We had good manners not to say anything. I was going to (Lola), but I poked her not to (Lila). Three other people saw it and nobody said a word. We were being very good sports about Shazam coming in and taking over the place on the team that would have gone to me (Lola). Every time we turned around we had to be good sports on account of Shazam.

  Shazam looked at the prize wondering what it was. Then Wink went over to her and she said very mannerly down to her from her tall height, “Give it a shake.” And Shazam shakes it and the snow swirled around and her face went surprised. She never saw one of those usual objects before in her life.

  Wink and her mother both, they made her birthday cake together, it was chocolate inside and it had pure white boiled icing standing up in Mt. Hood peaks all over it, and the 12 candle holders were all different colors like flowers. And Wink blew out every one of the candles on one breath.

  At the end of the party she showed us the birthday present her mom made for her. It was a professional jersey for our Bat game and it had a great big number 5 on the back, just like Hank Greenberg on the Detroit Tigers, which is Wink’s birthday twin and her loverboy hero.

  The Barlow General Store kept their Christmas tree up till 4 days after Wink’s party. The needles fell all over the canned goods and Brita Marie had to do cleanup. Her dad paid her.

  The old men that sit at the woodstove in the store with the lame dog said this wasn’t the worst winter they remembered, it was way worse some other years. One of them that was in France in the war said us children never saw such a winter like they had over there.

  Men always talk about the wars, ladies always say let’s forget the fighting.

  We had 2 days of bare roads and Coach Rayfield had us go running before it snowed again. We had to run on the road that goes in front of the school, on up to where the fenced alfalfa field starts, and we had to round the corner fast, making sure we put our foot on the orange paint splotch on the road. We had to go all the way around behind the gray barn where the back road comes in, then way down to the Flying Horse gas station and back to the school. Where the gravel was slidy you could fall, lots of us had fallen, Audrey fell and her knee was so bloody she got it all over Darlene and Ila Mae who was helping her walk back down the road. Other times Coach made us run all the way past the goat woman’s house clear to the creek and back.

  Coach Rayfield meets us on the home stretch and runs the last part with us. He yells at us, “You got to have endurance. That distance between bases gets real, real long when you got a fast outfielder. You’re gonna feel real, real bad when that ball beats you to the base. You tired, Shazam?”

  “Yeah,” she says, puffing.

  “You gonna keep on running, Shazam?”

  “Yeah,” she says, puffing.

  He wanted everybody to have endurance like Shazam. And us 2 were extras besides.

  Us 2 went through the whole long winter without fighting even once about who had to crack through the ice in the dog’s dish in the mornings or about doing the ironing. Not once. For a reward we got new powder-blue angora sweaters for a Valentine gift, and there was lots of time left to wear them before the weather turned warm.

  Shazam, center field

  You never know one of them might sneak up behind your back like they done my dad I saw them. You always got to keep your eye out.

  Wink, first base

  Here is what I thought:

  1. We had a good group of 6th-grade girls and some OK boys too, we were lucky to be growing up in a nice place.

  2. It was fun being a wise man in the Christmas pageant, carrying the box of frankincense to the manger. Despite of what they say, it is all right for a girl to be a wise man, I am tall enough to be a good one. Ila Mae’s middle brother and Billy Shimatsu’s big brother and me did very good in bringing our presents, we all walked together and we none of us tripped over anything.

  3. I had a almost perfect party, on my birthday I share with my twin, the first baseman Hank Greenberg on the Detroit Tigers.

  4. I was so lucky to be the owner of Beautiful Hair’s sister’s super glove from when she was Most Valuable Player in 1945, she got it from their aunt that had it before the war. It is a antique glove and it was broke in so good and it is a historical object. I was so glad I did her chores for her all those weeks, even feeding their chickens and weeding the lettuce and radishes and peas over at their house. I earned that glove and I believed it would bring me good luck. I offered her money for her good-luck socks she wore when she played her Bat 6, but she would not sell them to me.

  5. I had been practicing sliding into base more than anybody else, I was the only one good at it. Ila Mae and some others only half-tried, they didn’t get down like me. Coach Rayfield agreed I could wear slacks on May 28. In the snowy weather I actually had daydreams of sliding into base and winning our game.

  6. But we might not win. I knew we would have disappointments in our lifes. I learned about disappointments from my birthday twin Hank Greenberg, the great first baseman on the Detroit Tigers of the American League.

  Here was his disappointment. He was driving in his car listening to the car radio and he heard he was not a Detroit Tiger anymore, he had been sent to play for the Pittsburgh team which are the Pirates, in a total different league, the National League.

  I thought about that disappointment of his life. And I promised I would be able to go through disappointments in my life, learning from Hank.

  In the 1945 World Series he hit a grand slam home run in the 9th inning and he won the Series for Detroit. He was the Most Valuable Player 2 times, in 1935 and in 1940.

  I was thinking how Hank is Jewish by his race and he is as good as any Gentile like me which is a Christian. It is inside what counts, if you try to be good like Jesus and if you have heaven in your heart.

  Hank Greenberg is also very tall for his age like me. He is 6 feet and 3½ inches in heighth and I am 5 feet and 10 inches. He went to fight for his country in the war. He went to China in a B-29. And lucky for me he came back alive. Hank batted in 138 runs in the year 1937. He hit 2 home runs in the same game 11 times in the year of 1938.

  But even so he did not win all the time. Life is not all winning.

  And that made me think of the next thing.

  7. Shazam was a very queer girl it is true. She had a sadder life than us. There was such a bad scandal about her mother I wouldn’t even say the words. And Shazam got real strange from having such terribleness. Therefore it was my philosophy on life that she might of been put here to test our goodness. God might be wondering if we could be good Christians even with Shazam in our midst like. She even put down her shepherd’s crook and walked right out of the Christmas pageant, it was crazy for a shepherd to just up and leave the hillside. We were lucky Ila Mae moved right in to fill up the empty space. It did not ruin the pageant.

  And every time I looked at Lola I saw how she had to give up her hope of being a starting player for Barlow for 1949 and she would remember it for the rest of her life. And all because of Shazam coming here.

  8. I voted everything would turn out OK and we had to be nice to Shazam. Like Coach said, Shazam was one of us now, and odd like she was she still deserved to be treated by the Golden Rule like everybody else.

  And besides, Shazam did not look so surprised all the time when you talked to her anymore, like before when she first came here she looked like you had caught her off her guard whenever you asked her something. By the time I was thinking this list of thoughts she was more used to us.

  9. And also, there is Jackie Robinson on the Brooklyn Dodgers, he is even a Negro. He was Rookie of the Year for 1947 and he stole more bases than anybody. In a way, that was even stranger than Shazam.

  10. Spring was coming, there was only about a foot of snow left on our ball field. Darlene’s dad that drove the snowplow part-time did not even go out to wor
k for five days after my birthday.

  11. Who was going to win that game?

  Susannah and Aki

  Susannah, left field

  I mainly have some things to tell about Aki because I was there and nobody else was. I was the first one that found out what mean things were still happening, even long after the war was over and everything was supposed to be normal.

  Aki never told these important things about herself, so somebody else has to. Including the reason why she didn’t get back to her home till time for 6th grade, when she belonged here from the very beginning.

  It is because my dad is the doctor that I found out. Otherwise they might have kept it a complete secret.

  Aki’s father and Jerry McHenry’s father were boys in school together. In McHenrys’ Store on the wall of the office in the back is a photograph of them in old-fashioned clothes standing beside a little short dogwood tree that is now so huge and enormous it has to be pruned so children can get in the door of the school. Aki’s mother was a schoolgirl here too. And she was Most Valuable Player in the Bat of 1930.

  Aki’s father took over his father’s orchard when he got grown up, and Aki was a baby here just the same as the rest of us. But her whole family got sent away to a camp for the whole time the war was on. Only us children didn’t even know about the camps, I think our parents tried to keep a lot of the bad things of the war away from us. We only found out later.

  We were going into third grade when the war got over in 1945. We were too young to catch onto it very much, but when it got over there was a whole crowd of people cheering all over the road in front of McHenrys’ Store and my mom and me were there, Kate and her mom were there too, I remember her red braids bouncing when we jumped up and down, the big tall crowd of people were celebrating.

  So the Japanese got out of the camps they had been sent to, and they could start their free lives again. Some of the families came back here and others did not. And I know why.

  One night in the middle of the night my dad had to go to the Shimatsus’ house down in Barlow, a brick had gotten thrown through their window and hit their baby in his crib. Some white person threw a brick at a baby.

  And the war had already gotten over.

  And the reason why. The reason why is that they just didn’t like the Japanese at all.

  My parents didn’t want to tell me, they thought I was too young to understand. But they couldn’t not tell me when I already knew about the middle of the night and the brick and the baby. Then my dad explained that many people did not like the Japanese for many years, even long before the war. For one thing, the Japanese were such hard workers. The whole family would work many more hours each day, that is their custom. By working so hard, they can make bad soil have good crops, and white farmers got mad at them for it, they didn’t like the competition.

  There were often signs and writing in soap on windows saying Japanese not wanted here, things like that.

  That little baby had to have stitches in the side of his face. Doesn’t it make your skin crawl?

  My father had to make the stitches.

  Well, Lorelei’s father wrote an angry letter to the newspaper down in River Bend about that. He always writes angry letters to the newspaper. It is probably very hard for Lorelei with her father being like that.

  So, Aki’s parents knew there were some people with bad feelings about Japanese people around here. The newspaper down in River Bend announced Japanese people might have bad things done to them if they came back. And it came true, that bad thing happened to the Shimatsus’ baby with that brick. The Mikamis wanted to keep Aki and her brother Shig away from such nasty things. So when they got out of the camp and could go free, they tried to live other places. But they got homesick for their orchard.

  So they came back. Aki’s dad and mom, and Aki’s old grandmother, who doesn’t hardly speak any English, and Aki and her brother Shig, which is in high school at the Consolidated.

  And Aki turned up by surprise, and so did her softball-champion mother. Aki’s mother told my mother confidentially: They wanted Aki to get to play the Bat in her only year to do it in her life, that is one reason they came back.

  There. I finally got to tell that part.

  We were all so sure it was such a good thing for our team Aki came back. I was such a shaky player, I even felt jittery trying on my Mountaineer cap. My friend Darlene played on the Barlow Pioneers team, her mom cleans for my mom, I knew it would feel odd playing against her. But me and Darlene had seen it coming. Everybody knew that in 6th grade you play against each other to learn good sportsmanship and get ready to be 7th graders together at the Consolidated.

  I don’t feel better after telling it, even though I was waiting all this long time for my turn.

  Aki, first base

  I didn’t want to take a turn at all. I thought it would be better if I let the other girls tell it. Then Peggy especially told me it wouldn’t only be not fair, it wouldn’t even be true if I didn’t do my part. Maybe she’s right.

  So I’ll go next.

  It was the cherry tree swing, mainly. My father constructed a swing when I was very small, and he hung it in the cherry tree closest to our house, and I swung on it all the time when we lived here in Bear Creek Ridge. Even though much of those old days was fuzzy in my memory for a long time, it’s clear now. I clearly remember my brother Shig pushing me in the swing when my feet couldn’t even come close to touching the ground.

  My father made it to swing very straight; it doesn’t swerve off to the side like many I’ve swung on.

  I would sit in my little childhood swing and put my elbows around the ropes and lean back and look up into the cherry tree. When I sat very still the jays flew screeching from branch to branch to branch, fluttering up the robins from their perches and making a big fuss. Sometimes a leaf dropped, making no sound. In blossom time petals fell on the ground around me. Sometimes they fell on me. In a way, I guess I was never so happy.

  I have tried to set things in order lately. They were so jumbled, I couldn’t tell which things came first. But now I think the swing was first.

  And then next, my grandmother, who has always spoken Japanese, almost no English, kept walking back and forth in the house, back and forth across the linoleum, and I walked with her. I thought it was a game.

  She kept saying, Shikata ga nai, shikata ga nai. And I said it back to her, and she picked me up and held me close to her and walked back and forth in the house carrying me and we were singing together:

  Shikata ga nai, shikata ga nai.

  This saying generally means don’t make a fuss, there is nothing to be done, you can’t help what is happening.

  I thought it was a song, but my grandmother was explaining to me that we had to go away.

  As first I didn’t understand anything about why we were going away. Even later there were so many things I didn’t understand.

  We left Bear Creek Ridge on May 13, 1942. Maybe it was the next day after my grandmother and I walked back and forth, or maybe it was two or three days after. Naturally, I didn’t know this date till later, because I was too young to understand a calendar.

  We rode on a train. The window shades in the train had to be closed, it was a rule of some kind. No one was supposed to look out the window, and I guess no one was supposed to see in. Someone tied a number tag to the buttonhole of my coat and I went to sleep and woke up in a completely different place, not my home.

  And every face I saw there was Japanese but the soldiers were not. The soldiers were keeping us safe, I was told.

  I wanted to swing in the swing my father had made, but we had gone away, and the grownups were so busy trying to do arrangements for us to eat and sleep, nobody listened to me about the swing.

  It’s silly now to think of, but I honestly didn’t know where the swing had gone. For years I remembered the small details of the ropes going up high and the wooden seat under my legs.

  This childish swing in the cherry tree was
a mystery to me for so long.

  We stayed in one crowded place for some time, I don’t know how long, and then we moved again and stayed for more than three years in a camp in the desert.

  I thought we had gone away from America. Actually, we were still in America, but I didn’t know that. I was so little I didn’t ask that question. So of course no one answered it.

  I didn’t really think it through all the way, but the tag someone had tied to a buttonhole on my coat must have seemed like a ticket to go to another country.

  I clearly remember my mom holding me warm in bed with some coats piled heavy on top of us when we were in camp. The stove in the barracks smelled bad and the wind blew icy cold in winter. My mom brushed the sand out of my hair, and she shampooed it, but sand always got in again, it was always in the wind. There is no wind like it here.

  We had one room for our family, but we didn’t eat our meals there. We ate in the mess hall, and the waiting lines were long. We passed the time playing jacks or hopscotch, and some older children taught me to play cat’s cradle with string. There were many children to play with all the time. It was so noisy in the mess hall, my grandmother would just hold her head in her hands and close her eyes. She would often say in Japanese, “Oh, potatoes. Oh, potatoes. Who grows these many tasteless potatoes? Oh, potatoes.” I agreed with her after a long while.

  Even though my father made a rock garden in front of the barracks, it was never a home, although all those years I thought it was our home. I got very mixed up about what home is.

  We had reading lessons in my cousins’ barracks with “See Dick and Jane run.” After we learned to read we had “See Ko run” and “See Min run” and “See Aki run” games outside, between the barracks.

  It feels as if we played ball every day, but maybe that is just a trick of my memory. By the time I was eight years old I had played every position on our team, and had subbed on other teams when I was needed. One time I slid into second base and got a bad abrasion on my left leg. It was oozy and I had to sit and watch my cousins and everybody else play till my leg healed. The weather was hot and dusty, and my mom washed the dirt out of my abrasion even though I would rather have the dirt stay in there because the washing hurt.