Steal Away Home

by Billy Coffey

  My lips thinned to a smile of their own accord. I whispered to her, “Don’t you go preaching to me, now.”

  “Then I’ll state it plain.” She came to me and raised my hand and laid my palm to her breast. My fingers closed around her soft flesh. My body felt made of wires. “This,” Micky said, “means very little. This means much more.”

  She took my hand away and rose up on her toes, leaning forward. Our lips met in a kiss, tender and soft, plumbing a depth inside me far down to where paltry passion cannot reach. A kiss that served not as a prelude to more but that held all the more I had ever craved, and a sureness beyond faith that ours was a bond that stretched across not days but worlds. I cannot say what part of me Michaela Dullahan’s lips touched, only that by it I knew my own ignorance. My years had been spent pining for scraps while a feast sat before me.

  Her mouth left mine. “Do you see?”

  I stumbled backward, the hilltop feeling made of water. A chuckle flew from Micky’s lips. It died in my ears as the streak of orange and red in the distance drew her attention once more.

  “I think it’s time,” she said.

  “No. I don’t know what you think is going to happen, Micky, but it isn’t. Nobody’s coming up here. I won’t hurt you. I won’t let anyone else.”

  “Nothing you can do, Owen.”

  “There is. There’s one thing.” My eyes shut. I felt my jaw tightening. “I saw something at that train. Something . . . I don’t know. I can’t explain what it was or what happened, but it was so big . . . like my head can’t even hold the memory of it, and I didn’t know what to do. How to act. What to think or feel or . . .” I looked away from the fire and back to Micky, then back to the fire. “I don’t know what it was other than a little of what you saw, like how somebody jumps into the water beside you and you catch some of the splash. I couldn’t handle it. I tried pushing it away and forgetting about it but I couldn’t, and then when you started telling everybody what you saw, I tried pushing you away but I couldn’t. Because I love you. But I couldn’t go where you went, Micky. I couldn’t accept any of it, and you know why? Because it was too great. If I believed what I saw, really believed it, then it could only mean one thing.”

  Behind me, she said, “Tell me what that one thing is, Owen.”

  “That everything I ever wanted for my life, baseball and you and all of it, wasn’t anything when set next to that. Those things were sand I’d gather up into a pile that’d one day get blown away by some gust of wind. But what I saw . . .” I shook my head. There weren’t words for what I saw. “I couldn’t, though. Couldn’t go as far as you. Because you’re right—I had more to lose. Everything I’d worked my whole life for. Dad too. Baseball fills me up. There was no room for anything else.”

  “And now?”

  I kept my eyes to the dying glow against the mountains.

  “You’re going to go away, Owen. You have to. I understand that now. Away’s where you think you’ll find everything you need, but someday you’ll come back right here and find what you know you’ve always wanted. It’ll be a strawberry moon like the one right up there now, and you’ll come here to remember and forget.”

  “I think right now all I want is to get as far away from Camden as I can.”

  “You’ll come here,” she said, “because it’s a special place. It’s the most special place there is, that’s why I don’t mind it. It’s where I always felt so good and where so many good things happened. There’s so few places in the world that give you such a feeling. They’re holy, I think. They’re like a gate that swings open and leads you on.”

  “Come away with me, Micky. Please.”

  “I will, but not like how you want. My time’s come. I done all I could.”

  The sirens had reached Shantytown. I heard them—three or four. Red lights blinked among the pine trees like mutant lightning bugs.

  “I love you, Owen Cross. I will always love you. There’s nothing more can be given me than what you have. You remember that, and don’t you blame yourself. I want you to go on for as long as you’re meant, knowing you’ll find your way even when you don’t think you will. I want you to know you’re being watched over even when you call yourself hunted. I want—”

  And that’s all. Those are the last words Michaela Dullahan ever spoke to me, a single unfinished wish I have spent all these years wanting to hear completed. Only that: I want—

  I begged her to finish. No answer came from behind me. I dug my heels into the soft ground and spun, meaning to grovel and plead as a peasant would before his queen, but what greeted me was only the wide trunk of the oak. In the place where my love once stood there lay only a fine white dress, cast off as one would a rag.

  Micky was gone.

  -9-

  Adding to Mike’s misery is Bernie Williams getting plunked by Ryan’s third pitch. Two men on, two out. I hear Country from all that way in center hollering, “One more, one more, bay-bee,” and I know if Tino Martinez somehow gets those runs in, there’s no way Mike will let me pinch hit, no way at all. But the ghosts go quiet (For now, I tell myself. Only for now, and you know that, don’t you? Deep down? Those ghosts have been waiting years for you) and Martinez sends a slow grounder to Bordick at short, which is gobbled and tossed to Hairston at second.

  The dugout erupts. Ryan has worked his way out of trouble with only two runs in. He holds the Yanks down for three more outs, the game is ours. We’ll pack up and head back to the hotel. Grab some food. Enjoy the New York City nightlife. Country will start at DH tomorrow and he’ll take a loaded Betsy to the plate beneath a strawberry moon as big as the sun, looking to inch a little closer to his four hundred dingers. And I hope he gets there.

  I do.

  Top 9

  -1-

  Country’s beside me long enough to slap his glove down and pull on his batting gloves. He eyes Betsy beside me.

  “You watch over my bat?”

  “Didn’t nothing happen to her. Did hold her a bit, though.”

  He has one glove on and is fastening the other, but now Country stops, eyeing me. “Said you held her?”

  “Couldn’t help it. Guy’s got the chance to hold one a Country Kitchen’s black Betsies, he’s gotta take it. Right?”

  “She’s lighter than she looks, ain’t she?”

  “Noticed that.”

  Country takes Betsy from beside me and hefts it with an arm that looks as big around as both of mine. Out on the field, Knight’s already halfway through his warm-ups and Segui, our leadoff, is walking toward the plate. Country walks off, says, “I’m on deck,” and turns when I call his name.

  “You take care that bat. Wouldn’t want it to splinter. You catch that ball square.”

  He winks at me. “Always do.”

  At the end of the dugout he takes the helmet Ethan hands him and then climbs the steps, pausing to say something to Mike. Country nods my way. Mike doesn’t look. Segui steps into the box as Country centers himself in the on-deck circle. He uses Betsy to loosen himself up. Eyes cast toward the pitcher on the mound. Gauging Knight’s delivery and speed, the tightness of his curve. Maybe even drawing a box around the point where the ball leaves the hand, just as my father once taught me.

  -2-

  I searched hours upon a hill that took only minutes to circle, peering into the full dark of night for a flitting shadow or a last, whispered call of my name. Scouring the slopes and the oaks for a trace of Micky beyond the clothing she left behind. Down one side and up the next, down and up again, forming a W in the tall grass. I stumbled what part I did not run. The remaining I crawled hands and knees like a beggar, tracing my hands over the uneven ground in the vain hope Micky had lost her balance fleeing and knocked her head against a stone or root. I beat upon the earth with balled fists and screamed her name toward a strawberry moon. Ripped at the grass as I would my own hair. And when I could search no more, I held Micky’s dress against my face and felt cotton like her skin, soft and born of the earth. I
breathed deep the aroma of her sweat.

  The glow from Shantytown was now a snuffed candle. Inky tendrils reached heavenward—all that was left of the barn.

  I left near to dawn. Before going I gathered a handful of dandelions and tied them in a knot at the stems. Those would be my final marker, forever unclaimed. I lit out for home after changing into the clothes I’d hidden and buried the ones caked in soot with Micky’s dress in a grave dug by my own hands. They remain on the hilltop now is my guess, though I cannot remember where.

  No one could pinpoint who called for help in battling the fire tearing through an old tumbledown barn in the heart of the Pines, though reporters from the Record exhausted every possibility. They had better luck ascertaining the call was received by a 911 screener and relayed without pause to the Camden Fire Department. Given the lateness of the hour and that the Camden FD has always been manned by a strictly volunteer force, no one was at the station. Men rose from beds and shook the sleep from their eyes, pulled on what clothes lay nearby. It took nearly forty-five minutes for the first trucks to reach the Pines. By then, the Fellowship of the Lost was naught but cinder and ash.

  None from Camden much mourned the outcome other than my mother. No blame was assigned. You couldn’t get a fire truck off that dirt road and down the path through the trees to where the barn sat. A bucket line of fire department personnel and Shanties was formed, though by then the only goal was to keep the blaze from lighting up the surrounding woods.

  Whispers grew in the weeks and months after—mostly coming out of the Pines, but in some corners of town as well—that quite a lot more could have been done really, if the fire department had reached Shantytown earlier. Those mutterings stated someone else managed to catch wind of the fire in Shantytown (Mayor Henry’s name was most mentioned, though Clancy’s was a close second) and made a quick call to the firehouse, telling the boys to take their time, it was only some Shantie barn anyway. The truth of those rumors eluded me. I wanted to believe our town leadership was made of stronger stock. But I remembered Clancy’s face as I spoke with him in his office, looking so tired and undone, like all he craved was the whole mess being over. As did I, as did my father. In the end we were each granted our wish, which is a rare thing in this world. And in the end we found our reward somehow made our lives feel less, which is a thing exceedingly common.

  The barn’s loss was relegated to an afterthought compared to the disappearances. Word spread of Earl’s running away with bags full of ill-gotten money. Tips poured in of his location, ranging from Mattingly to Kentucky and all the way to the Mississippi and beyond. Each day’s newspaper became devoted to the search, every conversation its topic. It was as if all the rage and hurt felt by so many settled upon the shoulders of a single man. I remember standing in line at the Ace a few days before leaving for college, hearing an old-timer among old-timers go on about a blight that struck every farm in town when his daddy’s daddy was a boy, and how it was somehow determined through prayer and divining the plague’s cause was an old sow named Eloise, which was then branded with the mark of the evil eye and cast off into the woods. Such backward tales told by backward people were always at the root of my desire to leave Camden. It made me feel none better to know it had happened again, only this time the sow went by the name of Earl Dullahan.

  Yet not even the furor with which Earl’s name was discussed could shine a light to the conjectures surrounding Michaela’s disappearance. Even her most fervent followers came to the belief they had run off together. Some—Louise Townsend among them, which drove Clancy to near hysterics—held to the likelihood that Micky had gone with her daddy by force. My mother held to this notion most of all. For Greta Cross, it was the only explanation for why Micky would leave all the beauty she had worked so hard and endured so much to create. No one entertained the possibility she was dead. In those early days afterward, I believe not even Clancy suspected something so macabre.

  So unnatural.

  Yet on the other side of that summer began a time of healing. Reverend Sebolt and the other preachers in town took up two Sundays’ worth of offerings to replace what money Earl had stolen. Stephanie and Jeffrey delivered the proceeds to the Pines. They went door to door together, giving what was needed.

  By the end of that summer, little of Micky’s preaching remained. Her talk of love drifted like the black smoke of her burning church, away and away. Only Todd sought something of a revival. For weeks he went all about Shantytown and Camden, telling everyone who would listen of the death that came for him on the night of the strawberry moon and the angel who saved him from it.

  The hard shell around my father never did break, though it softened some toward Mom. I still wonder if it would have, were Micky not proven in the town’s eyes the charlatan he had always suspected. Our home became solemn but peaceful, much as it always had been. I kept to myself. Washed Bubba’s cars and cashed his checks and knew not what to do with the money. No one suspected what I had done. I was always such a good boy, the ballplayer who went off to college to chase a dream he could not help but love most of all.

  I could hide my shame from Dad, from Jeffrey and Travis and Clancy, but I never could hide it from my mother. She knew in that mystical way mothers do—never anything so concrete she could come out and ask, but more impressions left in the soft parts of her heart. I could never tell her what I had done, never break her heart so. My secret became a wall she picked at until her death, chipping away layer upon layer faster than I could add to its thickness. We grew more distant in the years following than I ever imagined possible. I hated myself for it. Micky’s going padded my father’s pride and ruined my mother’s faith, and though the truth of it would have brought him low and lofted her, I confessed not a word.

  Don’t blame yourself, Micky had said. But I did. My love had saved nothing. To me the burning of that barn was what caused Micky’s disappearance, all to take what was never mine to have.

  -3-

  David Segui singles to right to start the top of the ninth. A smattering of cheers rolls down onto the field as Bob Sheppard announces the next batter (“Number twenty-three, Bobby Kitchen, number twenty-three”) and jeers as well, the jeers bringing another smile to Country’s face, him knowing they don’t boo nobodies in the Bronx. He holds Betsy close to his chest as he steps in. Digs his back foot into the faint white line marking the back of the box. Looks over his shoulder to say something to Oliver crouched behind the plate and to the umpire.

  Mike looks over to me as Country works the count 2–1. Segui leads off first. Takes an extra step. He’s ready to run. Fastball count, gotta be a strike, Knight won’t want to go three balls on Country. Not a hitter like him, past his prime but still a power threat, that bat he’s got still has life.

  Country knows it, knows this pitch is his. He cocks Betsy over his shoulder and rocks back as Knight falls into his windup, takes a small step and unleashes the bat.

  The ball takes off like a rocket, the crack deafening. Those still in their seats stand as Country tears out of the box, already watching the flight of his hit as it arcs out toward the deepest part of center field, and I can nearly hear his thoughts—Thirty-nine now, that’s all I got. But Bernie Williams is slowing his pursuit. He stops at the very end of the warning track where it abuts the center field wall and reaches up to snag Country’s hit, then fires it back to the infield, chasing Segui back to first.

  Cheers now from the stands. Country touches first and lowers his head as he veers off into foul territory, making his way to the dugout. Ten years ago, that ball would’ve been in the monuments. Now it’s only a warning track shot, even with a hollowed-out Betsy to swing.

  -4-

  It was late February, a little more than four months ago, when Mom called me in Bowie to say the doctors had found a spot on her brain. I flew down while she started chemo. It was a hard time but filled with the sweetness hard times can bring. The gulf left between us for those seven years began to shrink. I’m not sur
e how many times in those weeks Mom sat with me and cried. Probably as many times as I put my arms around her and nearly told her everything about Micky.

  Nearly.

  She asked me outright two days before I was due back in Bowie. We were in her tiny living room watching Jeopardy, me sitting in Dad’s old chair. Mom posed the question the way a contestant would who’d risked too much on a Daily Double and wasn’t sure of the answer.

  “I always thought you knew,” she said. “And I always guessed you thought the truth would hurt me too much.”

  Her eyes never left the TV.

  “You can tell me,” she said. “Doesn’t matter what it is. I need to know is all. It’s haunted me these years. I need to know if I believed true or false.”

  I told her I didn’t know, that for all I knew Michaela was down in Mexico with Earl and it didn’t matter anyway, that was so long back. Then I got a beer from the fridge. Mom watched Alex Trebek and said she preferred him with a mustache. It was the last she ever asked me about Micky.

  I stayed with her as long as I could and left only at her blessing. Spring training had already started. Skip was asking for me. Mom all but kicked me out of the apartment in an overeager way that convinced me she was afraid of my going. I hated myself for leaving and hated baseball for making me go. It was the first time I began to think hard on all the game had cost me, the much I had given it and the little it had given back.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “And even if I ain’t, don’t you fret. Truth is I miss your father. I’m tired, and I’m ready for what comes.”

  I didn’t fly to Florida but drove instead. I don’t know why I did that. Maybe it was my way of trying to extend the illusion that nothing had changed, that the world was turning on as it always had and my life was still moving in something of a straight line. Change comes hard to us all. It takes a lot of hurting before we can be anything but what we’ve always been.