Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  “Mrs Boles, I’m your son’s roommate, Henry Clerval,” Jumbo told my mother. “Daniel is fine.”

  Tell her I have larinjitus, I scribbled in my notebook.

  “Except, I’m sorry to inform you, he’s contracted a severe case of laryngitis,” Jumbo said. “Otherwise, his strength and vigor put the rest of us to shame.”

  Kizzy gave us both a scornful squint and strutted back to the kitchen, swinging her arms like a Munchkin. The parlor and game room were empty. Most of the other boarders had gone over to McKissic Field for a community softball tournament.

  I wrote, Say its temporary say its from cheering to hard.

  “Yessum. We won the last game of an otherwise frustrating road trip. Daniel played well.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Wherefore… why this subterfuge? Why not the truth?”

  Upset her, I wrote. She’d want to come down here.

  “When?” Jumbo said. “Why, quite recently.” He covered the mouthpiece again. “Under the aspect of eternity,” he told me, then spoke into the mouthpiece again: “Yessum, he plays hard, eats well, and sleeps a sufficiency.”

  Mama said something.

  “Yessum, plenty of sleep. Plenty.”

  I held up a new message: SayIll call later say Im writing a letter. That last told the holy truth. No one could call me a neglectful son.

  Jumbo gagged the mouthpiece with his hand. “She wishes to talk to you.” I shook my head. Jumbo slapped me with a look. “Yessum, he still has the use of his ears. No, no infection. No ear ache. A moment.” He passed me the tubelike earpiece. Static hissed at me, rough electrical surf.

  “Danny?” Mama said from hundreds of miles away. “Danny?”

  Jumbo leaned into the tuliplike cup of a speaker. “He’s listening, Mrs Boles.”

  “Danny… I miss… I miss you.”

  “And he you in return, Mrs Boles,” Jumbo said.

  “Thank you, Mr Clerver,” Mama said. “Danny, Colonel and Mrs Elshtain got plans to visit Highbridge this weekend. Come Sunday, it’s the Fourth. They’ll want to see you. I’m sending you a little something by way of Miss Tulipa. Look for it.”

  “Yessum,” Jumbo said. “He will.”

  “ ’Bye. Loveya. ’Bye now. ’Bye,” Mama said, her voice lost in the screak and gabble of the line.

  Jumbo took the earpiece from me and cradled it. “Lying to a devoted parent robs one of the regard of honest men. Perhaps you have cause, perhaps you do not.”

  And if I dont, I wrote, Im no longer a REAL PERSON???

  “Cut to the quick.” Jumbo trudged across the foyer to the stairs, then went up, his body windowed between the balusters like a person caught in the frames of a film strip. Like the creature in the Frankenstein movies.

  Anyway, I didn’t want to go upstairs with Jumbo-not yet, at least. He’d helped me with the telephone call, but he’d also accused me of lying, of not being a REAL PERSON. To hell with him, let him go.

  Tardily, I followed Kizzy into the kitchen. At her center island, she stood rolling out dough for a huge blackberry and dewberry cobbler.

  “Yo mama sweet to caw you, Danl. Course, mamas aint got much chice but to worry bout they chirren-s bred in, like a quail dog’s urge to pint.”

  Kizzy’d stayed late. Sometimes she did. The kitchen of McKissic House (so long as she didn’t have to scrub pots or throw-mop the linoleum) gave her a sharper sense of home, I figured, than the four-room box of shingles, tarpaper, and sheet metal, over by Penticuff Strip, where she lived. Her “chirren”-Muscles said she had seven-had all grown up and married. All but a no-account son or two had moved away, to Atlanta or Chicago, and these homeboys, depending on how you viewed the matter, either didn’t torment Kizzy any longer or flat-out ignored her. Kizzy’s husband, a man she still called Oliver Bob, had died during the corn harvest of ’21, under a buckboard driven by a rattlesnake-mean white farmer.

  I lit into scrubbing a pot tonight’s KP squad had left in the sink. I plunged into that pot up to my elbows. Above the sink, I could look through both a rippled window pane and the torn mesh of the screened-in porch.

  Through them I saw the carriage house. An ivory trellis guided a strangle of rose vines up it to a raised window with a crooked jamb and two broken shutters. Darius slept there, over a storage room for ball equipment, over the garage where the Brown Bomber ticked and simmered. What did Darius do up there when he couldn’t sleep-when the call of another life clanged inside him like a fire alarm?

  Kizzy said, “I told you Miss Giselle’s got no chirren. That’s true. She don’t. Cain’t have none. Once, thuddy-fo, thuddy-five years ago, she and Mister JayMac did have a chile. Come to em dumpling-fat, pink as a fresh red wriggler. But it took Miss Giselle bettern a day to have her, and when the baby do come, the secundines-what my mama cawed the foller-long-didn’t want to roller.”

  I revved my elbow, but kept my ear cocked to Kizzy’s story. She’d begun it soon as she’d noticed me peering through the honeysuckle-loaded gloom at Darius’s window.

  “The secundines, the afterbirth, it had to git clear. Somebody had to fetch it, not fo the bairn so much as fo Miss Giselle. That baby was turned jes fine, but Miss Giselle had her a fever skin, a shiny jacket o birth sweat. She got fluster-brained. She magined she was heping her daddy tree a possum over by Cotton Creek n likewise trying to hush this pair of hollering dogs.

  “ ‘Quiet!’ she’d caw. ‘Quiet, Cherie! Quiet, Smut!’ Then she’d go, ‘Shoot that night rat, Daddy! Please, you gots to shoot it!’ I didn’t midwife in them days, but Dr Sellers had me there wi Mister JayMac to hold Miss Giselle down. We pinned her, held her to, like hired mens at pig-sticking time. She thrished n thrashed, but we held er. Pritty soon, her cries got real groany, and her eyes rolled back, white as hard-biled eggs n jes as blind.

  “ ‘I’ve got to fetch that afterbirth,’ Dr Sellers told Mister JayMac. ‘Cain’t leave it in er like a rag in a pendix hole.’ He scrubbed his hands with lye soap n rinched em real good in grain alcohol, then set down twix the missus’s legs to pick at the blood organ what wouldn’t come of itsef. He fished for that broke-up thing n got it out in pieces over a battle o three, mebbe fo hours.

  “ ‘Doc,’ Mister JayMac say, ‘you’re damn like to kill er.’

  “ ‘Not if you hush up n set that lamp where it jes might do some good,’ Dr Sellers say.

  “Way it look at fust, baby gon live, but Miss Giselle bout set for morticianizing n hymns. Dr Sellers had dug in her deep and she was weak. It happened reversed around, though. That fat n wriggly gal baby took sick n went down like a orphan calf. She jes skinnied off n died. Mister JayMac cussed the doctor, flung some ol crockery bout, carried on like Job hissef. Miss Giselle, though, she improved, bloomed n flourished right up to the pint Mister JayMac had to say they gal baby gone.

  “Don’t think she flew off like Mister JayMac. Uh-uh. Aw by hissef, he’s upsot nough fo a whole family. Miss Giselle withered into her own quiet woman grief, but she didn’t go down, didn’t pitch over broke. Not at fust, anyhow. Then her bosoms flooded, like she’d had these kicking twins stead of a gal baby awready dead. Had so much milk she leaked into her bedclothes, her nightdresses, day clothes too. Mister JayMac tol Dr Sellers to do something. If he don’t, he gon pay.

  “So Dr Sellers hopped. He sweet-talked, soothed, and nigh on to comfort-coddled Miss Giselle, who lapsed anyways, turning back to fever sweats. With her mind on Canaan, her bosoms made even mo milk. Dr Sellers tol Mister JayMac her problem wi the placenter gon to steal any chanst fo other young uns, no matter what he try, no matter how hot Mister JayMac’s temper biles. Mister JayMac didn’t rant or nothing, jes ast the doctor to ease Miss Giselle’s bosom flow n bring her on back from her addlement.

  “Anyhow, Dr Sellers reckoned he could try whatever, now things gone so bad n Mister JayMac so deep in his melancholy. And what he did was, he brought these two hongry bluetick puppies in and put em at Miss Giselle ’s bosoms. These pups had freckle bellies n snouts so squashed
they looked like ugly ol men. When the doctor stuck em to Miss Giselle ’s teats to draw off her milk, they scrumbled n rooted n tormented that po fevered woman something furious.

  “Mister JayMac come home. He heard pups whining and his missus yipping pitiful under the nick o they milk teeth. He bulged right in n slung the doctor to the flo. Gashed him from chin to ear, used his belt to do it. Thew that man out the house, down the steps. Dr Sellers moved off to Alabama -Fairhope, I think. Miss Giselle, she stayed wounded. Couldn’t have no other baby, gal or manchile. Never understood fo the longest how she’d come to git sech scratches n pricks round her bosoms.”

  The inside of my pot shone like a cannon bore. My hands ached from the scouring I’d given it.

  “That’s a Highbridge story. A Mister JayMac n Miss Giselle story. I didn’t work fo them then, but I heard that story quick nough afterwards. Miss Giselle was among the last to hear, and she’s mebbe never gon stop suffering from what that fool doctor done after her gal baby born, then again after the po thing passed.”

  Crickets chatted and whistled on the screened-in porch. Outside, fireflies bobbed, turning their flashlights on and off. One lit up at the sill of Darius’s window, rose a foot or so, and got blotted out by the brighter light coming from the room behind it. Darius crossed in front of the window. For a second or less, the firefly scorched a point into his dark form. Kizzy stood at my side, both of us gawping at the buggy house, straining our vision through the screen. Honeysuckle leaked its easy smell into the yard, and the night hung down around us black as overripe muscadines.

  “That Darius,” Kizzy said. “He’s jes ashes n wormwood to Miss Giselle.”

  I looked at Kizzy.

  “Why?” she said. “Cause he’s Mister JayMac’s oldest living chile.”

  28

  The next day, after a light workout at the ballpark, Jumbo borrowed Mister JayMac’s Caddy-he did get perks no one else did-and drove off into Alabama again. Why? He had no living kin there, although he’d lied about that before (if he wasn’t lying now), and even a quick trip over and back could leave you panting. On a steamy Georgia day, I’d’ve rather played some more ball than go for a ride in a blazing-hot auto.

  Upstairs, I had lots to mull. Mama’d nearly found out I’d slid back into dummyhood again. To muddy the waters more, the Elshtains would arrive this weekend to visit the McKissics, and they’d easily discover what I’d tried to hide from my mama over the phone. Mama would find out from the Elshtains later, and although she might see, and even forgive, my lie as an attempt to spare her pain, she might also decide I should come home to Tenkiller for treatment and TLC.

  I didn’t want to leave Highbridge. Despite the South’s summer swelter, the torments Buck Hoey and friends had aimed at me, and a roommate big enough to scare a Marine, I’d begun to adjust. To the weird rituals of McKissic House. To my role on the team. I liked playing ball for the Hellbenders. I didn’t want to return to the mile-long apron strings and the boredom of my life in dust-bowl Oklahoma. I loved Mama Laurel, sure, but I’d truly begun scrapping for my manhood-a sense of my stand-alone self-in the CVL.

  While Jumbo prowled the oiled and gravel byways of Alabama, I had nothing to do. A few guys had gone to their part-time jobs at Foremost Forge or Highbridge Box & Crate. A few others had caught a trolley uptown to a matinee, and everybody else’d settled in to nap, play cards, or letter-write. I’d mailed Mama a letter just that morning. Cards, with no cricket chirps or dance-band music to play by, appealed to me about as much as a swig of bicarbonate.

  Upstairs, I had idle hands. So I fired up a cigarette, crossed my arms, and rocked on my heels like a tough in a gangster show. Humphrey Bogart? George Brent? Lloyd Nolan? I had to’ve looked like one of em, right?

  By degrees, though, I ambled across the room to Jumbo’s space: his humongous bed, his pine-plank-and-tin-can bookcase, his bedside wash stand and lamp table. I stood there puffing my Old Gold and eyeballing all this stuff. The book shelves I’d examined before. Along with new library books, they held poetry, novels, philosophy, history, and religious texts, many old and some in French or German.

  I walked around the bed, sat down on it by the bookcase, and opened something in French by a woman named Christine de Pisan. The book’s paper smelled like dried beetle wings-dusty sharp, I mean-and sour ink. I couldn’t decode a word, once past stuff like le and la and amour. It all just stymied me. So I shut old Christine and stuck her back in the bookcase. Something-boredom, curiosity-made me look back between my legs. Up under Jumbo’s bed I saw crammed what looked like a small boat, a kind of Eskimo canoe.

  Yeah, a kayak!

  I dragged the skin-covered frame out from under the twin plyboards Jumbo slept on. There was barely room for it in the space between bed and bookcase. I had to turn it longways and straddle it. It hadn’t slid all that easily either, probably because Jumbo’d loaded it with stuff through its central manhole. Dustbunnies furred its sides.

  The first thing I found in the cockpit was the mat he’d hung as a curtain until my angry fit in LaGrange. He’d folded it five or six times and stuffed it down into the manhole as a plug. I pulled it out and looked under it. There sat a loose bag of animal hides, tied at the neck with cords of sinew and knotted with little ivory beads. It smelled fusty-funny, in a way I can’t describe.

  No matter how I resisted, that bag felt like a dare, a dare to look inside it. Pulling a kayak out from under a bed hadn’t struck me as prying, but removing that folded mat had inched me towards a bad self-feeling, and the bag posed an even harder test of my honor. I’d stooped, so to speak, to snoopery, and Mama hadn’t raised me to pry. But Jumbo needed unlocking worse than his bag did; maybe untying it would open him too.

  Inside the bag, I found a journal bound in split and marbled leather, with a bundle of ribbon-tied letters between its last page and its back cover. The letter sheaf had the bulk of a small book. I studied it closely, but didn’t unknot the ribbon. The paper felt brittle, crisp as fallen leaves-I feared I might crumble some pages. At last, I withdrew the top letter, eased it from its envelope, and unfolded the first of four or five thin pages.

  The handwriting-with all its squiggles, smudges, and such-was in English, not some unspeakable foreign lingo. The first letter, addressed to an English woman, was dated “December 11th, 1798.” It said, “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.” It took a minute to decipher that sentence, but once I’d figured it out, I read it again and went on to the rest.

  The writer was a young “naval adventurer,” the captain of an English merchant ship sailing from a Russian port towards the North Pole. The man called himself Robert Walton, and he stupidly reckoned the polar cap a “country of eternal light,” despite the ice plains his ship would have to navigate to reach it. The English woman he wrote was his sister, Mrs Saville. In his fourth letter, which turned into a log of shipboard events, he said he and his men had seen a “sledge” on the ice. A manlike giant had mushed his dog team beyond them, out of telescope range. “This appearance,” Walton wrote his sister, “excited our unqualified wonder.” I guess so.

  Anyway, his mention of a giant made me think Jumbo’d hidden the letters because they reported on his ancestors. I figured Walton had seen an early forebear of Jumbo’s on the sled, maybe Great-great-grandfather Clerval.

  After four of Walton’s letters, I reached the opening of the life story of a fevered European rescued from the ice by Walton’s sailors. Walton had acted as this man’s secretary, writing down all he said, so even though you got the guy’s whole personal history, you got it in Walton’s handwriting. “I am by birth a Genevese,” the man told him, “and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic.” Of course, I didn’t care rip about his la-di-da family.

  So I refolded the letters and tied them up again with a ribbon such as could’ve decorated a ball gown for Napoleon’s Josephine. I was a
bout to jam this sheaf into the journal or log that’d held them, and to stuff the log back into the funny skin bag, and the funny skin bag back into the kayak-when a powerful urge to check out the log overcame me and I thumbed it open at the beginning:

  Here I commence a new life. In the wretchedness of the candle-end of my former existence, I hoped only to die. So far into the maw of ruthlessness and depravity had I fallen, albeit at the heartless prodding of my maker, that I now despised myself as the world did. I ached for death, for the surcease of unappealable extinction, and hopefully I commended my spirit to that bleak demesne.

  Of a sudden, after who knows how long or wherefore my unwelcome reprieve, I breathe again. My damaged heart thumps in the cave of my chest. My frozen limbs stir. My eyes, moments ago eclipsed by a primordial dark, lift into focus the Arctic stars and the sapphirine ice of a world that yesterday, or centuries past, I all too gladly fled and foreswore. Today, like Christendom’s fabled Son of Man, I am resurrected.

  This entry had no date, but it looked-old. It sounded old too. Reading it over, I could hear Jumbo speaking. So I also imagined him, once upon a time, writing them in a fancy hand-in English. He’d shaped his words a lot like Walton’s, almost like he’d used Walton’s for a model.

  I carried Jumbo’s log to the school desk at the head of my new bed, where I started copying Jumbo’s story into my bigger notebook. It seemed important to do this-the most important thing I could do to keep Jumbo whole in my mind while I cut him open and laid him out like a lab frog in my crabbed copybook hand:

  In homage to the merchant captain who set down in its entirety the story of my tormented maker, I indite in English this account of my final days as his creature. Of my new life subsequent to a perplexing resuscitation I also write. English leaps as readily to my brain, and thence to my hand, as does French. Did my brain once belong to a native of Albion? Whatever the case, I commence my new life with the fresh mental perspective afforded by the tongue of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton.