Bat 6

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

But my mom rolled her eyes. She did not have hardly any schooling on account of being poor. Now for me to have not hardly any on account of one bad apple, she said it was plain foolishness and my dad would just need some time to get unexcited over it.

  My dad called around other parents and tried to get them to say it was either her or us. He wanted everybody to agree on if she stayed we none of us would go to the Consolidated. He got on the phone with the Superintendent of Schools who said he could not forbidden a child to attend the Consolidated unless they got sent to reform school which that girl did not. My dad was so mad he hung up on him.

  Only Daisy’s and Ellen’s and Alva from down in Barlow’s parents agreed with my dad, and for 11 whole days they were arranging how to school us.

  Daisy would go to the Catholic School down past River Bend, me and Ellen and Alva could go too, even with it being a different religion. We would get to wear uniforms and they have mean nuns and nice nuns. Daisy said 7th grade has a nice one, and I got all mixed feelings about it. Uniforms would be pretty, but we would not see our friends, and our lifes would change.

  Then all our parents found out it would cost $245.00 for just one year of schooling down there. My dad said it was a outrage and corruption, and the final result of it was we will all get to go to the Consolidated after all.

  Well, my dad was not happy about it, he predicted that child would be nothing but trouble from here to kingdom come.

  It was the day after all that confusion ended, my mom said I was such a grouch I should just get on my bike and blow off steam and not come home till I could be nice at supper. So I did. I just kept riding and being mad, and this is what happened:

  I was riding down the road that goes past the Barlow Gospel Church, where the little bridge crosses the East Fork, and I just rode along and I rode along and about a half mile after the bridge I saw a bike laying on the crick bank where it curves to the west. Down the bank from where the bike was, the Barlow team pitcher, Ila Mae, was sitting beside the crick and she was sobbing and crying and carrying on, and I put my bike beside the other one and I went down the bank to where she was sitting there all alone crying, and this is what I found out.

  Ila Mae was on her way riding home from the Gospel Reverend, she had gone to see him for help and comfort. She was mad at him, she was mad at that number 7 Shazam, she was mad at herself most of all, and she was crying all down her T-shirt.

  What she told me was a true surprise and I would feel bad too if I was her. Ila Mae and Shazam had a conversation way last November when Shazam saw a Japanese first grader and she said that bad word that begins with a J. Ila Mae should of told somebody right away and then the tragedy of our Bat 6 game would not of happened because maybe Shazam would not be allowed to play in the game.

  Instead of telling somebody Shazam had race prejudice, Ila Mae told her not to say that bad word. “I told her she wouldn’t get to play in our game if she said that word. And I thought I was telling her we don’t have no race prejudice here. I thought I was doing that also.” Ila Mae was so crying mad, and she was digging in the mud with a stick, and she said, “I thought I was doing the right thing, and now it turns out I was doing the wrong thing, and I didn’t even know it, and I ruined the game for everybody, and I have to wait till I die to find out if God forgave me, and —”

  And I put my arm around her back and I said, “You didn’t know. You didn’t know what was the right thing to do, you did your best.”

  Ila Mae continued her mad crying and said, “And the Gospel Reverend says God forgives every single sinner there is, but he don’t know if God will forgive me right away. We don’t really know God’s forgiveness till we’re dead and then we find out did we get sent up to Heaven or down there to Satan. Then I asked him does God forgive Shazam too, and the Gospel Reverend said Not till she is a babitized Christian, and I’m so mad at her I don’t even care if she gets forgave by God, and that makes me a worse sinner than I already was.” And Ila Mae who pitched so good in that one inning we got to play was dripping in tears.

  “I didn’t tell the Community Council about that conversation way last fall, and it was bad of me not to. I kept it in my heart till I couldn’t keep it in no longer, and now I took my secret of it to the Gospel Reverend for help, he says he is always there for our help. So I told him about it in my hope to be forgave, and he tells me I won’t know till I’m dead!”

  I did not know anything to do. I stared into the water going over the little rocks and waving the grasses and I felt bad for all of us. We will all be in the 7th grade together over at the Consolidated High School in the autumn, and now was as good a time as any to be a new friend to poor Ila Mae. In fact, it was the best time.

  “I forgive you,” I said to Ila Mae.

  “What’s your name?” she said with her dripping face looking at me.

  “Kate,” I said.

  “Kate,” she said. She looked back down at the water. “I ran your base.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know who you are,” I told her. “You’re Ila Mae, you pitched real good.”

  And that compliment made her cry all over again. “We all feel bad,” I reminded her. “And like our coaches said, it will not ruin our lifes. We got our whole lifes to live.” I took my arm off her shoulder and threw a couple of little pebbles in the crick.

  Ila Mae wrote my name Kate in the mud with her stick. She said my hair is real pretty red and I said thanks. I think we are going to be friends. I would really love to have her come over to my house. We could make Popsicles in our freezer compartment and we could also put on my mom’s lipstick and leave kiss marks on the mirror.

  But when I think how I was so happy about the refrigerator at Christmas and now everything is so bad, I know it was really dumb to think a refrigerator could be so important. We have our new refrigerator and our Bat was ruined.

  Ila Mae and me are going to be excellent friends.

  Hallie

  I never saw a man feel so bad as my dad feels about not telling anybody what Shazam said in the pickup way last fall. He feels it is his fault “nobody knew in time.” Even when he went on his own free will to the Community Council and told in front of them all, and they said this was understandable, not to tattletale on a child if you weren’t even sure you heard what the child said anyway.

  He says, “I had the clue. And I kept it to myself. I did not do justice and I feel ashamed.”

  My mom and even my sister say not to be so hard on himself, but my dad walks around forlorn.

  Me, I feel bad too. Terribly bad. But I get comforted knowing Shadean and me get to work together for the Hirokos. I wonder if the Hirokos hate me for being on the same team with crazy Shazam. Mr. Hiroko might hate me and never even let on. You would never know just talking to him.

  Shazam

  It is easy for them all to be niceynice. They got everything they need they dont know how its like without no father and not have a real home.

  I dig the post holes straight no crooked ones it is hot out there. A Jap face tells me where to dig and stretches the wire tight with me. He is a boy boss I dont look in his face. Nobody has to work hard as much as me I get so hungry I could eat more than that little bitty lunch Grammama sends me along. He said did I want some of his lunch I said him no answer. Them Japs killed my father.

  His Jap name is Shig and he says These holes are good and straight Shazam. You did them real carefully good for you. I dont say nothing. Its hard to breathe but I do my work good.

  They made me do 200 hours of Community Service all hours of Jap families. First is the ones that first baseman gone to the hospital. I have to work till their whole deer fence is made all around their orchard on two sides by the woods where the deer live. I never seen no deer.

  The Community Council said to me did I understand and I said yes. I said yes so they let me go.

  They told my Grammama my Community Service hours she said how she is ashamed. I didnt say nothing to her neither. She gets her headaches.


  Aki

  When they told me on June 2nd that I had been lifted on a stretcher into the River Bend ambulance and that was how I got to the hospital and my mother had been with me the whole ride down the highway, I was surprised. I didn’t remember any of that. And then they told me on June 3rd there was a hubbub on the playing field on May 28th. Everyone said there was no need to be embarrassed, it’s not my fault, but still I was embarrassed.

  I can’t move my head because of all the braces around it.

  Everyone said I had a strange way of thinking about the accident. For one thing, I was glad Little Peggy had to be the Bear Creek Ridge speller in the county spelling bee. She won the county bee. Then when she went to the Oregon State Spelling Bee in the capital, she came in fifth. The word she missed was “commensurate.”

  And also that number 7 who hit me. They have asked me if I want to hit her back and I say no. I mean I write “No.” I’m not allowed to talk until the end of the summer. And I can’t shake my head in the brace.

  It was a bad thing for her to do, but like they say, forgive your enemies. It is true she didn’t have a good spirit about playing the game. But when they told me how mixed up that girl was I felt sorry for her. It would be terrible to have your father dead from a bomb. That whole war was very bad.

  And then there is my wired jaw. I can’t eat solid food. But it has advantages too. Many of the girls are out working hard picking strawberries in the hot sun, but I am sitting at home in bed with mashed strawberries put through a sieve and fed to me like liquid.

  Still, it hurts quite a lot. I get headaches and I have to suck a dissolved aspirin through a straw.

  My bedroom is full of dogwood both white and pink, and red, yellow, and white tulips, poppies of two colors, and purple anemones. Every time people bring me flowers my mother has to find more canning jars to put them in.

  One of the worst things is the girls who come to visit having to see our bad house. This is the most embarrassing. The walls are stained from the renters that weren’t careful. I don’t know why anyone would throw soup at a wall, but when we came back we had to scrape noodles off the wallpaper in the living room. And our cupboards without doors on them because they got pulled off. The girls pretend they don’t notice how bad it looks around here. They keep their eyes on the flowers they are bringing and they also keep looking down at the paper where I write the notes to answer what they ask me.

  My grandmother bows to everyone who comes to visit. She has bowed to people all her life, it is her habit. When the minister from the church comes, when Mr. and Mrs. Porter come, she bows to them. They’re getting used to bowing back.

  Mrs. Winters, the sixth-grade teacher at Barlow, came to see me, bringing a bouquet of gentians from her garden. She said that in her five years of teaching she had never seen such a thing as what happened in Bat 6. She said she felt terrible. She asked what she could do to make it up to me. I didn’t know. She said she felt it was somehow her fault for not knowing. I wrote her a note that said I didn’t see how it could be her fault. She cried. She and my grandmother bowed to each other coming and going.

  My grandmother bowed to the Barlow coach, Mr. Rayfield, and he stood in the doorway looking so uncomfortable and he bowed back to her. He looked as if he had never bowed before. He sat on the chair in my bedroom and told me how bad he felt, but mainly he told me I was a good ball player. He said, “Honest, if I’da known.” I already had a note saying “It’s OK” sitting right beside my bed, because I have to say it so often. But I wrote him a new one. It would have been rude to give him a wrinkled note that had been used so many times before.

  “No, it’s not okay,” he said to me. He looked so nervous. “Our center field, she went over the brink. I mean, look at you here. Look at you.”

  I couldn’t look at me, my head was immobilized in the brace.

  He gave my mother three jars of peach jam that his wife has made. He said to my mom, “Boy, I wish I’d seen you play back then. Back when you were MVP. I sure wish I’d been there.”

  My mom said, “Thank you.”

  He left still feeling bad.

  My mom is so mad. But she won’t let anyone see how mad she is. She won’t even let me find out. But I know anyway. How could I not know? Even her feet are mad, I can hear them being mad on the floor.

  Lorelei brought me a new Nancy Drew book and a snapshot her father had taken with his camera before I got hurt. There we were, the Mountaineers together as a team on the visitors’ bench, all ready to play our Bat 6. Lorelei said to me, “I halfway didn’t want to bring this picture and make you feel bad. But I brought it anyway to make you feel good.”

  It hurt so bad when I laughed, Lorelei felt terrible. I am not supposed to laugh until August, the doctor says. That was the operating doctor down at the hospital in River Bend who said that, not Susannah’s father.

  Susannah’s father came to the hospital each day at first, bringing my mother or father with him every time. Then when I came home he came every alternate day for a while.

  The get-well cards are extremely embarrassing. There are too much of them, in piles everywhere. The huge cardboard one from the whole sixth grade has everybody’s name on it, even all the boys. It is propped against the wall.

  And there is a special card from the whole Barlow Pioneers team with every girl’s name on it. That center-field girl’s name isn’t on the card.

  So many people volunteered to drive that girl up to our orchard five days each week and drive her home again after her eight hours of work on the deer fence are finished. Mrs. McHenry is one of the main volunteers, being so involved as she was with the team and the sixth grade and our orchard and our house. She felt the worst of anybody about what those drunk renters had done to our house.

  Shig told me Shirley is a hard worker and the post holes she dug with the post-hole digger were just right after she got the hang of it. And she is good at mixing the concrete, too. Of course Shig is mad, too, but he just goes ahead and works on the fence.

  Another embarrassing thing is how many prayers they say up at the church. Every single Sunday the minister prays for me to get well, just the same as he is praying for peace in Korea. Everyone who goes to church gives me the report on the prayers. I kind of wish they would stop.

  Still, I wake up in the night and I wonder why it had to be me.

  Little Peggy

  I personally wanted Aki to come right out and say — I mean write in a note — she was so mad at that crazy girl for hurting her and sending her to the hospital. I thought it was abnormal she was not really mad.

  I sat there beside her bed and I told her that and I’ve never gotten mad at Aki before in my life but I thought I was going to. I felt myself getting hot in my face, reading her note that said, “It’s not so bad. I’ll get well and I still have my friends and we’ll have a good time in 7th grade.”

  I started to say, “Aki, you’re crazy not to be mad at her —”

  And Aki wrote me another note then, and it had words I didn’t know, they are Japanese words, and then English words:

  “Shikata ga nai. There is nothing to be done about it.”

  And I said in excitement, “Aki, I know that. That’s not the point. Can’t you at least get mad?”

  And then she wrote me a note that mystified me: “That is the point.”

  And because I was mystified I just asked her how to say those words. And she showed me on the paper how to say them. I practiced them there in her bedroom and then I said good-bye and I got on my bike and went home.

  I never heard Aki say any Japanese words before that time. Or since, either.

  It’s so frustrating not to be able to understand how my best friend thinks.

  What makes me so mad to this day is how I didn’t say anything when that girl refused to shake Aki’s hand before the game. If I’d said anything right then. Even with Aki like usual not getting upset. If I’d said to Mrs. Porter — or to anybody — “that girl refused to shake
Aki’s hand.”

  I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.

  Brita Marie

  Shazam’s old grandmother is the one I feel sorry for. With her sadness about what her own granddaughter did. She’s all alone out there by the gravel pit, and Lord knows how she gets through each day.

  Shazam did not have any upbringing till she came over here to her grandmother’s. And she went and ruined things.

  That mother, Floy, came over here to visit again but she didn’t take Shazam away with her. Shazam has her Community Service to do, she could not leave town till that is done. And it looks like her mom is not adequate for upbringing anyway.

  It’s better if Floy isn’t around here. How could a person that sunk so low ever show her face in town? Her old mother would be worse off than before, with another mouth to feed.

  Wink

  Crazy Shazam is paying the price for her meanness, but the price ain’t high enough if you want my opinion.

  It is too bad her mother and dad never got married, it is not her fault she is a illegitimate. But that don’t mean she can hold a grudge on the whole Japanese race and bang the brains out of a girl on a ball field.

  Nobody speaks to her, she is a outcast. Nobody goes out by the gravel pit to see her, and Coach Rayfield made her turn in her red Pioneer cap which there’s a rule we get to keep for our whole lifetimes. Just think of that: All over Barlow and Bear Creek Ridge and even elsewhere there is old faded caps in people’s memory books, and Shazam ain’t got hers.

  Good. I’m glad.

  Lola and Lila

  The Community Council proposed a new rule for the Bat and all grownups had to go to either the Barlow Store or up to McHenrys’ and vote on it. From now until eternity, any act of bad sportsmanship in the Bat 6 game will make the game terminate on the spot with no winner.

  Those men on the Barlow Store porch with that crippled-leg dog watched everybody going in and out of the store for the vote, and they grumbled about kids today, “barbaric” was what they said. They acted like it was trespassing on the store porch when their radio was on the ballgames where they were listening to that Negro Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson stealing bases.