Steal Away Home

by Billy Coffey

In the clubhouse afterward there are congratulations and no small measure of ribbing directed toward those who managed not to contribute to the ten runs against Mussina and the Yankee bullpen. Reporters gather in front of Johnson’s locker and inside Mike’s office. Country huddles with a dozen microphones around him and Betsy on his knee, saying he got almost all of that pitch by Knight but it don’t matter, those next forty homers are coming, you better believe it.

  No reporters work their way to the end of the clubhouse where I sit. A few players, Country and Caldwell among them, stop by to wish me the best back in Bowie. You’ll be back, they say. Always a need for a good catcher. Their tone of voice sounds the same as those who once made up the long lines of mourners waiting to greet me at Dad’s funeral and Mom’s.

  I turn my uniform in to Scooter. Rick Mills finds me to say he’s got my room at the team hotel all lined up and hands me a hundred and fifty dollars he calls meal money. I shake my head looking at it. In the Bigs you get as much to eat on in a night as my daddy did in a week of scrubbing floors at the high school.

  My flight leaves tomorrow morning. I’ll be back in Bowie in time for batting practice and the night game. Gotta hold this new kid’s hand, turn him into something the big team would like. Gotta help prop wide that door so he can walk through. That’s my life now. And it hasn’t been a bad one, in spite of it all. For seven years I have come to a ballpark and been paid to do a job I’d do for free. And really, isn’t that all I’ve ever wanted?

  Isn’t it?

  Postgame

  June 6, 2001

  My flight from LaGuardia left at 10:35 a.m.—a little more than twelve hours ago. I suppose by now they’ll be looking for me. Skip for sure and everyone in Bowie. Maybe even Country, assuming word has gotten all the way back to the guys in New York. Won’t take them long. These days about anybody can be found. It’s hard to stay hid for long.

  The truth is I couldn’t, Micky. Couldn’t go back. I’d reached my gate and had my things and was sitting in a chair reading the closed captioning of some CNN story on one of the TVs. Weather guy on there talking about the moon tonight. He called it a “harvest moon” but I whispered it another way. I left my stuff (they’re going to find my mitt at that gate, Mick, or they already have) and bought another ticket. Paid cash for it but still had to show my ID. LaGuardia to Charlotte to Charlottesville. At some point I looked out my window and believed myself passing high somewhere over Maryland. Thought maybe that was Bowie down there, my old life. And you know what? I didn’t miss any of it, not a single thing.

  Rented me a car when I landed. Stopped by Mom’s and Dad’s graves to tell them how sorry I was and all about the game last night. How it was everything I’d always thought it would be but a whole lot less and more too. I stood there and wondered if there would be enough space between them for me. But maybe that won’t matter, will it? I’m thinking it won’t. If this is all what I think it’s going to be, I just might go down as one of baseball’s greatest mysteries, right up there with whether Shoeless Joe Jackson really did help the White Sox throw the Series in ’19 and if the Babe really did call his home run shot in game three of the ’32 World Series against the Cubs. Wouldn’t it be funny if that’s how I leave my own mark in the end? Not how I played the game, but how I left it?

  From the cemetery I drove over the mountain and left the car downtown where the old Rivera’s restaurant used to be. I left a note under the windshield wiper saying who I was and to call the rental place so somebody could come get it. Maybe it’s Clancy who’ll find it. I bet he’ll understand, having spent all these years listening to his Louise go on and on about how you were a girl touched by the Lord and given secrets no human has business knowing. I walked around town most of the evening. Over to the Auto World and the IGA, the library. Spent a good bit of time walking the outfield grass at the high school. Didn’t nobody notice who I was. I guess they all have their own lives now. Everything that went on during that summer so long back is mere memory to them, faded and gone like so many things.

  When it got to evening I pointed myself westward past our old house and kept going, skirting the tall pines in the backyard and easing through the meadow on the other side and now I’m here.

  I’m right here, Micky, just like you wanted me to be. Waiting to see what happens.

  We risk nothing greater than when we love what cannot love us back. That is all I mean to say. Upon the rest I would hold my silence rather than violate a place that is as holy to me as any church. But as I wait beneath this clouded June sky in fear and wonder and hope, I know my quiet as sin. To say no more of love would be a selfish thing, and my days of miserly living are done. It is a change that has come as hard to me as the rest. It takes a lot of hurting before you can be anything but what you’ve always been.

  I can feel the memories here, all those days and evenings we spent in this place piecing together a future we had no business dreaming of. All the way from New York I knew the past would be waiting, though I hadn’t accounted for how that past has grown in my absence. My yesterdays stretch taller than this oak I sit beneath. They come not in broken and sharp-edged images but in words, hushed tones of voices not my own hidden in the folds of the breeze. They ride upon the perfume of the far woods below me toward Shantytown and the blue mountains rising beyond. They sprout like the dandelions on the slope, which have been left free to grow in the seasons since you and I wore this spot bare in our meeting.

  But I will no longer run from what once was. I cannot, nor will I allow another hour to pass holding truth as secret. Time has a way of slipping like water through your fingers the more you try to lay hold of it. Sometime last night—maybe it was when I knew I would never get a bat in the majors, maybe as you strolled through the outfield and turned to look at me before pointing to that moon—I realized there were but a few drops left in my own hand.

  It is time now, isn’t it? I’ve done all I can do. That’s why I’m here.

  The one thing I always believed I possessed was choice. Maybe that was true at one time. But now I think the last choice I ever really made was climbing up onto those tracks to save you from that train, and ever since my days have been laid out for me in advance. Or maybe they always were. Either way, the illusion that my life was my own took years to be proved false, first when a future I once believed writ in stone became an unknowable present, then when Dad passed. Then Mom. Her dying was what settled things. In all the time since that summer, I had been chasing nothing and only running away. You saw that, didn’t you? You were the one who stood where I stand now and said I would come back to our hilltop someday. You stood beneath this tree as the world crashed down upon us and said I would go off in search of all I believed I needed, only to return here to find all I ever wanted. And I stood in this very place and answered that all I needed and wanted lay as far from Camden as I could get.

  God laughs at our plans.

  Prophets do too.

  I know what I want, Micky, now and finally. I know what I love most. It isn’t a game. Isn’t you. It’s what you found and what you carried in your heart those precious last weeks of your life. It’s the gift you tried giving to everyone.

  Mom was right, the mob will always crucify Christ. We praise Him for His holiness and wisdom but cannot bow to His message. He stoops low for us, yet all we see is how the gods we fashion for ourselves stand taller. We would rather remain slaves to ourselves. That was why you were taken from us. You fled no less than Earl, though your going was an escape of a different sort. Your daddy ran not from Camden but from a damnation that will pursue him until justice is meted. Yet the same hand with which I pray Earl Dullahan will be struck down is the very one that reached down in mercy and love to snatch his daughter from a world unworthy of the woman you became.

  And though you bid me not blame myself, though your last words were of love for me, it was never enough that I go on to live what small life remained. You knew my own gods were taller than your words. You knew I was
not yet free.

  Say what you will of your going. Tell me it was the last bits of sand running from a glass turned over by the hand of grace or that it was a postponement of your end so that you might crawl back into the dark hole that is this world and tell everyone what magic lies beyond its lip. It does not dull the truth of what I did that night. I burned your church not to save you but to make you a sacrifice to the god of my own selfish needs, and your loss became my judgment.

  You told me neither of us was long for this world. I never believed you until now. We were so young, and what is life to the young but a road stretching ever on toward a moving horizon? It is the curse of life that we spend so much of it in slumber, waking to find our parents old and our dreams for nothing and all its gifts traded for what wilts and dies. What could I do then but what I did?

  But as I wait upon this hill I am left with a faith that the vision granted you saw to a far greater distance than my own, and that you knew the end of my story. I pray such, here so near the end. I pray that was how you could look upon me with love even as I burned that church.

  There are clouds here and no moon, but I’ve heard the moon is coming. I will wait for it and drink in the silence of this place and its secret beauties. This night has come to me as a gift. It makes me glad for the life I’ve lived.

  I think of Dad and whether he is looking down, if he’s still proud of his boy. I think of Mom and what she said on the second story of the Camden library the day you left. It is true that baseball was ours alone—Paul and Owen Cross, to the bitter end. Mom had no place but to sit in the stands and cheer. What I could never find the words to say to her is that she had no place in my dreams for one reason alone: I knew Momma loved me as I loved her. There was no need to work out our love. But my father was different, wasn’t he? You knew that.

  I grew up with the knowledge that the only way to secure his love was to play a game even better than he’d once played it, and claim for myself a future stolen from him. And so I played it, Micky. I made baseball my life and never turned away, not even when you bade me for the sake of my own soul, and it was only last night I finally understood why. Never before had I seen brighter lights. They shone upon me only to expose my own emptiness. I always loved baseball for my own reasons, but I played it these many years to earn a father’s love.

  That is why I hung on as long as I could, crouched behind a plate until my knees felt made of brittle bone and sandpaper. The game I loved never loved me back, and yet I loved it still for him. Sitting on that bench last night, hearing the crunch of wood against rawhide as I held Country’s bat, I knew even the having of all I ever wanted would only lead to more wanting. It came to me like the thunderstorms that used to roll through when we were kids, quick and sudden and with a noise you could feel deep in your bones. What can a man do when he comes to know all he has striven for in life is dust? What choice is left him when he realizes the race he has chosen to run has no end but keeps on and on with no finish, leaving him to die from weariness upon the very road he once believed would carry him to his dream?

  At that moment the box I’d kept inside me marked Do Not Open sprung, and from it flew every falsehood I ever told myself and every wonder I ever denied. It was never what the game felt like that made me love it, or what I had always believed it promised me. It was what baseball meant. What it pointed to. There are nights I dream of baseball. I jerk myself awake by the moving of my hips as I settle into a swing. I have loved it so, and now I know why. Is it because baseball holds a promise of eternity with no clock and no time running out, and where played to perfection a single game can stretch on to always? How the plate must be seventeen inches whether you stand in Yankee Stadium or an old field in an old town in old Virginia, and the mound must be sixty feet, six inches away and the bases ninety feet apart but other than that there are no dimensions set, not one, Micky, meaning a field can cover one end of the universe to the other?

  No, it is the impossibility of baseball I have always loved, nothing more. It is the art of hitting ninety-five-mile-an-hour gas and knowing the ball is fifteen feet before your brain can find it and another fifteen before you choose to swing, and how when the ball is upon you, your brain and eyes cannot work fast enough, so that the pitch itself turns invisible to your mind, and in that narrowest window of time, that bubble of eternity, you have seven milliseconds to meet a round ball three inches wide within one-eighth of an inch dead center on a round bat. And it all, every bit of it, happens faster than it takes the eye to blink.

  That is the game to me, why I loved it. Because to play should be impossible for mere mortals, and yet the impossible is done time and again. I played those many years for no other reason than to behold a small succession of miracles. Now I stand beneath this strawberry moon, asking for one more.

  The moon, Micky. I see the moon. God, how beautiful it looks. Just like that night. Just the very same.

  I am not afraid. Strange as it sounds, I have never felt more peace. Faith can do that to you, and love. I have come to know that these years. And I have come to know those are two words for the same thing.

  No one is free. That is what you said on this hill when I proclaimed my liberty even as chains formed about me. It was freedom you offered by way of a love none of us understood because it seemed so great and ourselves so unworthy. Now here I stand to say you’re right. Our souls are so large that not even the having of all our desires can fill them. Yet we try, oh how we try, only to find ourselves lost in all the darkness we create, our only hope to walk one another home. Is that not what you preached for a single summer in this town? And is that not why I have come back to this place you called special, where we would sit and bask in the magic of eternity? I have searched my life for all I wanted, only to come here for all I need. I love you, Michaela Dullahan. I have always loved you. There is nothing more can be given me than the greater love you said was mine for the having, and the last prayer upon my lips is for the grace of that gift offered once more. I want my journey to end with my way found. I want to know I have been watched over even as I called myself hunted. I want a love everlasting. I want—

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Ron Kitchen for his help in the crafting of this book, and for those long phone calls between Virginia and South Carolina that helped me remember what it was like to be seventeen. I played second base; he pitched. Back in 1990, Ron’s nickname was “Heat.” That was for a reason. Don’t tell him I said it, but he remains the only pitcher I was ever afraid to face.

  My thanks as well to LB Norton, and to my editor, Amanda Bostic, who wanted a baseball book. Daisy Hutton, Kristen Golden, Jodi Hughes, and Allison Carter: I’m so grateful to have gone on this journey with you.

  Claudia Cross can talk the Yankees as well as anyone, but she is an even better agent.

  And to Kathy Richards, who has suffered all these years as an Astros fan. Here’s hoping they have the pennant when you read this.

  Discussion Questions

  1.Early on, Owen tells Micky that everyone has a crutch, one thing they turn to when everything goes bad. Do you agree? What is your crutch, and how well does it serve you?

  2.What do you think really happened when Owen and Micky were nearly killed by the train?

  3.Why did Owen and Micky react to their near death in such different ways?

  4.How does the way Micky views herself before the incident at the train impact her behavior afterward?

  5.Both Owen and Micky suffer throughout the story from a lingering fear that their lives will count for nothing in the end. How common is this fear? How best is that fear diminished?

  6.Micky’s message is centered upon love, namely where our love is placed. Why is that so important, and how does where we place our love influence the quality of our lives?

  7.What change in Owen allowed him to be taken in the same way Micky was?

  8.What role, if any, does pain and sadness play in the spiritual life?

  About t
he Author

  Photograph by Joanne Coffey

  Billy Coffey’s critically acclaimed books combine rural Southern charm with a vision far beyond the ordinary. He is a regular contributor to several publications, where he writes about faith and life. Billy lives with his wife and two children in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

  www.billycoffey.com

  Facebook: billycoffeywriter

  Twitter: @billycoffey