Silent Retreats

by Philip F. Deaver

  Baseball was different without interpretation, without Harry Caray or Dizzy Dean communicating it to you. You had to really watch. It was happening at some distance away. We were far down the left-field line, almost to the outfield wall, nearly a block away from home plate. The crack of the bat arrived a moment after the swing, the ball already lofting high toward right field, camouflaged by the shirts of patrons in the upper deck. Or on grounders the third baseman might already be reacting to his right, reflexively, as the sound of the hit just arrived.

  Vernon Law was on the mound for the Pirates that day. A tall straight man, kind of thin. Sitting almost out to the left field wall you could still hear the pop of his fastball in the catcher's glove.

  On a ball hit to left I remember watching Wally Moon, the handsome young Texan, rookie of the year three years before, who replaced the retired and venerable Enos Slaughter, reach back and lay the ball on the flat plane of green air. All I could compare the geometry and motion to was pool, the great green carpet of perfectly groomed grass like a pool table, flat, the smooth flight of the ball as though it were coasting not across the hot afternoon air but green felt, flat marble. The motion of his throwing was thrilling, how he reached back, stepped forward in a long low stride, the arm coming straight over the top, fast like the hammer on a pistol. The flight of the ball was low and fast—it skipped like a bullet on the infield dirt, the Blazer taking it on the short hop right at the bag. Big league, I thought to myself.

  My dad got up from the seat next to me in the third inning, asking if Bob or I wanted something, saying he'd be right back. Bob Swift stayed with me, one empty seat away. He'd lean over and fill me in on things, like for instance the enormous black man selling beer, sweating, his voice full and shouting, for fifteen years an institution at the ball park.

  I was enthralled. I stared through the binoculars at the players and the crowd. My dad's absence bothered me a little, but not terribly—sometimes I'd say something to him, forgetting he was gone. I stared until the heavy steel on my nose and against my eyes began to hurt, but I kept staring. The binoculars were very powerful, and because I'd used them on planets I could focus them as sharply as they could be focused. The creamy white and scarlet and blue and yellow of those old cotton uniforms was dazzling against the deep green of the grass field under the brilliant afternoon sun.

  There was one strange thing that happened that day. Using the binoculars, I followed a foul ball up and back into the crowd, watched the fans scramble and laugh and spill their Coke and popcorn. I watched one lady laugh at her friends, and the guy who got the ball turned and waved at Harry Caray in the radio booth, knowing Harry would observe on the air, "Nice catch by a fan down long the first-base line!"

  But suddenly, as I panned the crowd, there in my vision was my own dad—far away from me, he was standing along the concourse, leaning against a steel pillar, a beer in hand, watching the game alone from shadows.

  I remember my father very well in those times, at my ball games. He stood out by the railroad maple down beyond third base at the very field where my son plays now. The Illinois Central had put out a plaque, inlaid in a sort of gravestone, commemorating the planting of the tree on Arbor Day 1905, and my father would invariably be sitting on it during the games, if he could be there at all. A few times he had the old 8-mm Brownie with him and would level it at me. I've seen the films in recent days. I remember how I felt then, but when I see the pictures only one impression hits now: I was pretty little.

  As I've said, I was playing shortstop in those days. Later, in college, I played third. They don't now, and really never did, expect a shortstop to be a hitter. I console my own son with this to no avail. There was only one thing a shortstop need be able to do, and that was cover the ground. His area in the big leagues is seventy feet of real estate from behind second to twenty feet on the second-base side of third, and in addition he must be able to range into foul territory behind third, about where the IC maple is at the Pony League diamond, to rein in foul balls the third baseman ordinarily has no angle on.

  The third baseman fielding foul balls down the line has his back to the infield, must stop, turn, understand where to throw, and throw. The shortstop makes this play somewhat facing the infield, somewhat set to throw. When the shortstop fields grounders to his right, he must be able to throw overhand to first, putting a vertical spin on the ball, or else the ball will float. When he fields to his left, back behind second, he must throw sidearm, quick and snappy like a second baseman, or with the long whipping action if he is throwing from farther out. In turning the double play, he must choose which side of the bag to work as he pivots, according to how the runner coming into second decides to try to take him out, and also according to how the ball arrives from the second baseman or the first baseman, whoever initiates the play.

  In those Pony League days, just as in the days of American Legion, Skidmore played first because his father played first, and his father, Leonard Skidmore, was our coach. My father was a local doctor, and he'd played shortstop as a boy. He and Leonard Skidmore were good friends. Now my boy plays shortstop. So there you are. The infield has continuity through the ages.

  Another memory: I'm standing across the street from the Catholic church, on the vast green lawn of the Douglas County courthouse. Father O'Daniel is pacing his front side walk, reading his breviary. I sit against the old silver maple under which an earlier generation of kids in the neighborhood had fashioned a makeshift home plate. Unlike the IC maple, this tree is tall and old and many times broken by lightning meant for the steeple it sheltered. It's a workhorse, a government tree. Its limbs are white with the shit of starlings and pigeons, not songbirds. A bored ballplayer years before had chiseled "Honus Wagner was here" into the trunk. It was a lie and he chiseled on the north side, opposite the church, out of sight.

  "How's sixth grade?" Father O'Daniel shouts over to me after a while. "It's going okay?"

  "Yes, Father."

  He's the one I confess self-abuse to every Saturday afternoon. No telling what all those other people are confessing to him, who stand silently with me in the confession line along the back wall of the church. There was a show on Ford Theatre one night of a priest who had had a murder confessed to him, then couldn't help the police because of the confidentiality code of the confessional.

  Father O'Daniel had been in a car accident several months before, hurrying back to town to do a wedding after playing golf too long, and for what seemed like an endless number of spring Sundays he said mass on crutches, the altar boys, mostly eighth graders, helping him to the podium where he stormed after the parishioners to get them to contribute more, more for the new Catholic school he dreamed of.

  I served mass on weekdays that summer. I would go to his house on summer mornings. Together we'd walk across to the church, not saying much, and in the sacristy dress for the celebration. He muttered to himself in Latin, kissed the stole before putting it on. The wood floor creaked. I rinsed and filled the cruets with water and wine. Then he rang a little bell, and we walked onto the altar. Two little ladies and a farmer, the morning's congregation, rose to their feet. And the tone-deaf lady who provided the music let her rip from the balcony.

  Now, on the front sidewalk, he paced too quickly, trying to heal the leg and say his office at the same time. Two birds, one stone. Like Jackie Gleason, a little traveling music. Sometimes he took a turn and went down the narrow sidewalk between the church and the rectory. He'd been the local parish priest for thirty years.

  "Want me to pop you a few?" he said just when I was afraid he wasn't in the mood.

  "Yes, Father. If you have time."

  He came across Van Allen Street, book in hand. "Did you bring the 33?"

  "Yes, Father. The 30's cracked anyway." Father O'Daniel liked my "Larry Doby" 30, but he liked my "Duke Snider" 33 even more.

  He put his breviary on the courthouse pedestal, above a bronze frieze of a scene from the Civil War, Columbia leading the wounded Un
ion soldiers to safety. He was raised in Ireland and didn't play baseball as a boy. But he was a talented golfer and therefore could hit flies virtually straight up so high they made the well-groomed expanse of the courthouse lawn seem small. I remember very well the tininess of the ball against the blue sky, the thrilling speed it would gather in its fall from that great height, the occasional tricks of the wind, warm and humid. Major league infield pop-ups.

  Father O'Daniel raved and raved at how I could range under those fly balls and haul them in. The courthouse lawn was dotted with trees, particularly one very tall cottonwood and of course the silver maple. I learned to catch a fly ball even when it nicked a few leaves, or thocked off a solid limb and went a strange direction. I would chase it, dive for it. The ground was soft loam, sweet-smelling. The satisfaction of catching the ball before it hit the ground has stayed with me my whole life. Sometimes my boy will let one drop right in front of him. He only does it to drive me crazy but still I don't see how he can stand it.

  Actually, though I never told Father O'Daniel, the 33 was too big for me. I bought it at Western Auto one afternoon for him to use.

  "How's your mom?"

  "Great," I said.

  "How's your dad?" he asked me. He was my dad and mom's friend. He probably knew Dad better than I did. I often wonder . . .

  "I don't know how he is," I said. "I don't see him much."

  The pain I had in my arm in my baseball years was a dull ache, not the slack disconnected feeling when the rotator cuff goes in the shoulder, a pain baseball men will tell you is the beginning of the end. This pain of mine was above the elbow, inside the arm and toward the back of it, and it came I'm sure from the whipping action of throwing, which God did not design an arm, and particularly the elbow, to do. It especially hurt on those cold blue evenings of spring when the team was out there getting ready for the season but the season hadn't begun because it was too cold to play baseball. Many nights I couldn't sleep because of my arm, and I worried that it was the beginning-of-the-end pain. I couldn't have stood to be told that. Baseball was everything for me then.

  I was playing with other pains, too. Pony League was the first league in which spikes were worn, and at shortstop you get spiked in the various activities around second base, covering second on throws from the catcher when a runner steals, covering second on double-play balls hit to the right side of the diamond. I had been stitched in one knee for what seemed like the better part of the whole summer, strange as that may sound. I had chased a fly ball down the third-base line, beyond the IC maple in foul territory, a towering fly ball, chased it beyond foul territory out onto the access road—there was no fence then—I could not let this ball fall to the ground—and ran full speed head-on into two girls who were riding by on their bikes. We all went down in a heap and the ball landed among us.

  Every move I made that summer, it seemed, tore the stitches. And I had the usual strawberries on my butt and legs from sliding on the hard sandy base paths. The worst place to slide in back-country (that is, not professional) baseball is home, because invariably the dirt has eroded from around the plate, which has dried out and gotten brittle and extracts its pound of flesh as you slice yourself over it. And invariably the dirt of the back-country baseball infield is either gritty and sandy or like concrete.

  Another common wound is a swollen mouth, from bad bounces. If the infielder is getting swollen ears instead, bench him. He's not watching the ball. I tell my son, watch the ball.

  It was in that summer that I came to understand my father was an alcoholic, and so in those baseball summers there was also an oppressive pain of the spirit that seemed to invade everything. The films he took of me playing tended to hop a little sometimes, and the focus was dubious. Many young men, I know now, will recall the same experience—terrifying and humiliating. Your father would stand beneath the IC maple down by third, and he would embarrass you with distracting, weak, complaining taunts, some of which would bring a laugh from the other parents in the crowd. The time came when I dreaded that he would even show up.

  In my sophomore year in high school, after six years of handling all this the best I could, probably the culminating thing of my childhood happened. He had come to one of my games, as usual not falling-down drunk but too loud. That night I got home before he did after the game. I waited for him in the garage. I sat around, on the lawnmower, on a pile of drying logs, in a swing in the backyard, eventually on the back bumper of Mom's car. Waiting. He was taking too long to get from the same place I'd come from. I'd gotten a ride with someone else. I didn't know what I was going to say, but I'd decided I wasn't going to take any more of this shit from him.

  Finally the lights swept up the driveway. Instinctively, I retreated. I jumped and grabbed a crossbeam in the garage, and swung up into the dark upper reaches where we stored scrap lumber and extra shingles.

  He pulled in right under me. I noticed, watching him from above, how alone, and how tired, he seemed when he climbed out of the car. Like me, as it has turned out, my father was often alone. He pulled a box from the back seat and hid it carefully under logs at the back of the garage. Then he straightened himself, straightened his shirt, and shuffled out and across the gravel in his leather soles, into the house.

  It was a cache of Old Fitzgerald. I got my .22 and I set the box on the hood of the car and I reduced it to sweet-smelling glassy rubble, and put a couple of rounds through the windshield for good measure. I'd say six shots altogether.

  On the stairs in the house later that night, he caught me, me going down, him coming up. He'd slipped out there for a nightcap and made the discovery. "Watch yourself, Junior," he said to me. He had a hold of my shirt. "I'm not perfect. I never said I was." He didn't seem like my father as he said this. I looked right in his eyes and got a terrible feeling. He was giving me a warning from the underworld, one bad boy to another.

  Memory: The sun is going down. Irv, an older man, holds an old 34-inch Nelly Fox thick-handled bat, the handle wrapped with friction tape. Irv is wearing bib overalls, black workboots he scuttles through the dust in. I'm sitting on the bleachers, ball glove next to me. Home from college, 1966. Irv shouts at his boy, who is out in left waiting for the ball. "Keep it low," he says. "Just 'cause the guy hits you a high one doesn't mean you throw a pop-fly back in." He spits. "Low, son. Low." Irv gestures low. "Think of it," he says. "Shortest distance between two things. Keep it low."

  Now he lifts the bat to his shoulder. It has gotten four shades of dark darker since the lecture began. He smacks a hard line drive, left center. The boy comes across, takes it on the bounce, and fires it to the plate—you hear him grunt. He's six or seven years younger than me, maybe a freshman in high school. The ball hisses as it flies, skips once and slams against the green boards of the backstop behind the plate.

  "Hell of a throw, son." He smiles, the bat down again at his side, staring out toward the outfield. "That was a great throw."

  I applaud. I want into the action. Like all people in this town, when Irv looks at me it's with the searching-through-time look—can he find a face in my face that's a face he knows?

  "Wanna shag a few?" he says.

  "I'll take the cut-off," I tell him, and his son backs up to the fence as I trot out to shortstop. Left fielders need to hit the cut-off man.

  Now I'm standing on the field I played Pony League on, about eighty yards from the little field I learned on. A thousand evenings like this come to mind. I remember this diamond when it had no grass, was solid dirt, and the wind would always kick it up into your eyes. And I remember, with a lot of pain, the railroad maple where Dad would stand to watch my ballgames, and the commemorative stone beneath its now embracing shade.

  From there he'd point the old Brownie movie camera at me. In our home movies, blanching out with age, the leaves of this old tree when it was years younger wave in the foreground. "Gives it depth," the photographer would tell us from the dark on projection night.

  There were old white outho
uses on that end of the park, and I remember sitting in there on a one-holer looking at the splayed obstetrical graffiti and not knowing what I was looking at or if the drawing was for some reason upside down. The word fuck was frequently carved with pocketknives in the pine of the outhouses. Successive paint-jobs had miserably failed to cover over generations and tides of fuck going back who knew how far. I looked around from my position to see if the outhouses were still out there. They weren't.

  "You're Landen's boy," Irv says to me, points at me with the bat. He found my face. "Aren't ya?"

  "Yes."

  "We were real sorry," he says. He cracks a line drive to his son, down the left-field line.

  I fade over to the line and out, until I'm between third and Irv's son and have both hands in the air for the cut-off. The boy sends the ball to the plate. Before it gets there, his dad is yelling. "What are you doing? Everybody's running! You can't throw people out from there! Hit the shortstop! Hit him! His dad brought you into this world!"

  That kid, Irv's son, later married a girl named Missy Dodd.