Contents
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Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Epigraphs
Baseball Rules and Bylaws for the Aurora County All-Stars
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Extra Inning
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright © 2007 by Deborah Wiles
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
www.hmhco.com
Portions previously published as the short story “Moves the Symphony True” by Deborah Wiles, Boston Globe, 2005
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Wiles, Deborah.
The Aurora County All-Stars/Deborah Wiles.
p. cm.
Summary: For most boys in a small Mississippi town, the biggest concern one hot summer is whether their annual July 4th baseball game will be cancelled due to their county’s anniversary pageant, but after the death of the old man to whom twelve-year-old star pitcher House Jackson has been secretly reading for a year, House uncovers secrets about the man and the history of baseball in Aurora County that could fix everything.
[1. Baseball—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. Pageants—Fiction. 4. Sexism—Fiction. 5. Race relations—Fiction. 6. Mississippi—Fiction.] I. Title.
pZ7.W6474Aur 2007
[Fic]—dc22 2006102551
ISBN 978-0-15-206068-8 hardcover
ISBN 978-0-15-206626-0 paperback
Map by Finesse Schotz and House Jackson
Compass holder, Melba Jane Latham
eISBN 978-0-547-53711-5
v1.0216
For Steven Malk,
shortstop
Courtesy of the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, the Library of Congress
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul.
—Walt Whitman, from the preface
to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, 1855
People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.
—ROGERS HORNSBY,
SECOND BASEMAN, ST. LOUIS CARDINALS
Baseball Rules and Bylaws for the Aurora County All-Stars
By House Jackson, captain and pitcher, and Cleebo Wilson, catcher, and the rest of the team, signed below
We agree:
Seeing as how the nearest official Little League teams are in Rankin and Jones counties, we hereby declare ourselves our own team, the Aurora County All-Stars. Here are our rules.
NO GIRLS.
We play every day. We play in the rain. We play if it’s cold. We play if it’s hot. We play until dark or until too many kids are called home. Then we play catch.
If less than nine kids show up, we play flies and grounders. If more than nine kids show up, we make two teams.
Three strikes make an out and three outs make an inning. No exceptions.
No spitballs. Spitting is allowed. We share balls, bats, gloves, and gum (not chewed).
If a batter hits the chinaberry tree or the schoolhouse, it’s an automatic home run. No one has ever hit the chinaberry tree or the schoolhouse.
Balls hit into the cemetery stay there.
Every July 4 we play a real game with the Raleigh Redbugs. It’s our one big game of the year and we promise never to miss it.
Signed in blood (not really) by the aforementioned and also by:
Wilkie Collins, first base
Boon Tolbert, left field
Ned Tolbert, center field
Lincoln Latham, second base
Arnold Hindman, right field
Evan Evans, third base
Please do not remove this notice from the telephone pole by the backstop.
1
To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.
—WALT WHITMAN
Mr. Norwood Rhinehart Beauregard Boyd, age eighty-eight, philanthropist, philosopher, and maker of mystery, died on a June morning in Mabel, Mississippi, at home in his bed.
He died at the simmering time just before daybreak. Crickets tucked themselves under rocks for the day. Blue jays chitter-chattered in the pines. High above the tree-tops, cirrus clouds wisped across a slate blue sky.
Mr. Norwood Rhinehart Beauregard Boyd lay unbreathing on a feather mattress surrounded by a carved rosewood bed frame with a high headboard that he had bought in Madagascar on his travels many years ago, before he closed himself up in his house with his treasures.
All night long the June bugs had tap-tap-tapped against the glass panes at the open bedroom window, trying to buzz into Mr. Norwood Boyd’s room and touch the lamplight. As the light came into the day, the hard-shelled little insects fell into an opening between the glass and the screen, where they hummed together at the bottom of the window in soft confusion. Outside the window, deep in the tall weeds, a garter snake slithered in search of mice. It was June 17. A Thursday.
Mr. Norwood Boyd died a quiet death attended by sky, clouds, crickets, birds, bugs, snakes, and one human being: House Jackson.
House Jackson, age twelve, crackerjack baseball pitcher, obedient son, and keeper of his own counsel, had arrived just before the simmering time. He eased himself gingerly into a ladder-back chair next to the carved bed. He held his breath as he watched Mr. Norwood Boyd breathe and stare at the ceiling in a faraway silence. Instinctively—for it had been his habit—he reached for the book on the bedside table. Treasure Island. He opened it to the page that had been saved with a ribboned bookmark, and read out loud in a mechanical voice: Still, Silver was unconquered. I could hear his teeth rattle in his head; but he had not yet surrendered.
At that moment, Mr. Norwood Boyd surrendered. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth. A rattling sound came from his throat. The smell of Mr. Norwood’s rattled breath made House blink and sit back in his folding chair. That breath—the sound of it and the smell of it—traveled the entire room, spangling the air like a salute, as if that breath was a last farewell to the big old bed, a last farewell to the lighted lamp, a last farewell to the rose-patterned carpet, to the bureau where the clothes were kept, to the bedside table where water shimmered in the glass, and to House, who had been faithful.
When there was no
more rattle and no more breath, House did as he had been instructed to do. He called Doc MacRee’s office from the big black telephone beside Mr. Norwood Boyd’s bed. His fingers trembled as he dialed, and his voice cracked as he tried to speak.
“Mr. Norwood Boyd.” He was out of breath.
“Who is this?” asked a cranky-voiced Miss Betty Ramsey at the doctor’s answering service.
“He’s . . . dead.” House felt the truth tingle across his shoulders, up his neck, through his scalp. He reached under his baseball cap and gave his head a small scratch.
“Is this a joke?” Miss Betty did not like jokes.
“No, ma’am,” House whispered. His pale cheeks were on fire—he could practically hear his freckles sizzle.
Miss Betty’s voice was high and nasal: “Is that you, Cleebo Wilson? You scoundrel! I’m calling your mama right now—she will whip you good! This is not funny!” House couldn’t think of one useful thing to say. Miss Betty waited. “Hello?”
House put the telephone receiver back in its cradle as quietly as he could, as if he were handling a sleeping baby. Miss Betty’s voice squeaked, Who’s there? Who’s—and then it was gone.
House licked his lips and stared at Mr. Norwood Boyd. He had half a mind to touch him, but he didn’t. His mother had died at home six years ago, and he had wanted to touch her, too, but he hadn’t. He thought about that moment now, of how he had somehow known that the body lying on the bed was no longer his mother. She was no longer there. And now Mr. Norwood Boyd was no longer here.
House glanced out the window where the sun was beginning to light up the day. It would be a hot one. Soon the whole town would know about Mr. Norwood Boyd’s death. Kids would talk and the stories about Norwood Boyd would surface. The old rumors would rise and kids would have a heyday.
And there was nothing House could do about that. What could he say that would change anything? No one would believe him, anyway, and he’d never hear the end of it. It was best to keep his secret and to tell none of them.
He rubbed his open palms across his face and stood up. It had been a hard morning—an unbelievable morning. And today there would be more hard things. As soon as the sun blazed high in the morning sky he was going to have to face an enemy. A girl.
Swallow your toads early in the day, his mother used to say, and get the hardest things over with first. When he was six, his toads were easy to understand: Make your bed! Clean your room! Vegetables! As he got older, toads got harder to swallow: Apologize! Be responsible! Tell the truth! Now that he was twelve, his toads were life-sized and impossible to face, much less swallow—but he would do it.
He stared at a cobweb in the corner of the room. He had already faced death; he could face his toad this morning.
House took a last look at Mr. Norwood Boyd. He would go home now. He would take his sister, Honey, to pageant tryouts because he said he would. Then he would go to baseball practice. He would pitch like Sandy Koufax, his favorite baseball player of all time on his favorite team of all time, the long-ago Los Angeles Dodgers dream team of 1965. Koufax had pitched a perfect game in 1965, even when his arm felt like it was about to come off. House knew about pain like that.
Yes, that’s what he would do. He would face his toad and he would get his life back to normal with the baseball team, the game, the summer. And no one would know that he had sat in Mr. Norwood Boyd’s ghostly home this morning, watching a dead man decompose.
2
A man has to have goals—for a day, for a lifetime—and that was mine, to have people say, “There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.”
—TED WILLIAMS, LEFT FIELDER, BOSTON RED SOX
The sound of fat tires crunching over the pea gravel at the front gates to Mr. Norwood Boyd’s driveway shocked House out of his reverie. He almost bit his tongue as he leaped to his feet. Outside, car doors opened. Shut.
“How are we going to get in there?” Sheriff Taylor’s voice sifted through the windowpanes.
House scooted out of Norwood Boyd’s bedroom at the front of the house, sprinted down the wide hallway filled with photographs, dodged around the chairs in the dusty dining room, and jumped off the back-kitchen door stoop. He slid along the side of the house, his heart banging against his ribs. Kudzu vines slithered away from the driveway gates like snakes, as they were hacked and pulled down from the other side. Any minute now that gate would swing open. House parted the thick, leafy branches of a giant honeysuckle bush beside the front porch and crawled into what he knew was a good hiding place. It was cool and cavelike inside the honeysuckle bush. There was plenty of room. And House was not alone.
An old pug-dog with bulging eyes shivered herself sick inside the branchy cave. She stared at House with a pitiful look. “Hey, Eudora,” House whispered. “Hey, girl.” He scratched her between her ears. Eudora closed her eyes and gave a tiny sigh.
“What am I going to do with you?” said House. “I got baseball practice this afternoon.” He would pitch and his best friend, Cleebo Wilson, would catch. Together they would work on House’s fastball, now that his elbow seemed to be back in business. It had taken the better part of a year to get the elbow in good shape. The whole team was counting on that fastball to help them beat the Raleigh Redbugs in the big game on July 4. They had just over two weeks to be ready to pull off a victory.
House scratched Eudora under her collar—it made a crinkling sound. “You got something stuck in here, girl?”
The big gate in front of Mr. Norwood Boyd’s creaked open at the same time that House pulled a piece of paper from Eudora’s collar. It was rolled like a scroll, and his name was written on the outside of it—HOUSE—in an old, careful script. House stared at it. He felt the sweat stand out on his face. He had seen that handwriting before.
The gate clanged back against the iron fence and a cushion of kudzu. House shoved the note deep into his pocket and watched through the leafy branches of the honeysuckle bush, his heart pounding in his chest, as Bunch Snowberger and Sheriff Taylor entered and then left the house with Mr. Norwood Boyd between them on a stretcher, covered with a white sheet from head to toe.
“I’ll call the county and get someone to board up the place tomorrow, before the curious arrive,” said Sheriff Taylor. “Somebody’s bound to get hurt out here—this place is falling apart.”
The stretcher was swallowed up into the hearse. The double doors closed behind it like a tomb. Mr. Norwood Boyd was carried away, and House was left alone with a frightened, lonely dog and a note burning a hole in his pocket, just waiting to be read.
Cicadas called from the trees. Frogs sang from the pond in the back pasture. The sky was now a brilliant, empty, bright-morning blue.
The dog grunted. House rubbed her back and smelled her old-dog smell. “It’s over, Eudora,” he whispered.
But it was not over. It was just beginning.
Mr. Norwood Rhinehart Beauregard Boyd left behind a collection of black-and-white photographs, a library filled with musty books, and an ancient, pug-nosed, white dog named Eudora Welty. Later, when the long mystery that was Norwood Boyd unraveled and summer revealed its secrets, some folks would say it was the note that changed House’s life forever. Others would say it was the dog. But it was neither the note nor the dog.
It was the pageant.
* * *
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Morning Edition, June 17
THE AURORA COUNTY NEWS
HAPPENINGS IN HALLELUIA
By Phoebe “Scoop” Tolbert
Heart palpitations and two days at the hospital notwithstanding, here I am, a little late with the news but with a lot of catch-up!
In a landslide vote at Miss Mattie Perkins’s mercantile last week, the town council voted to give the director’s chair for the Aurora County Birthday Pageant to Miss Frances Schotz, age 14, local theater talent and former Miss Sparkle Pants of Aurora County.
Frances moved with her family to Jackson last year, where she attended the Lanyard Scho
ol for her eighth-grade year, concentrating on dance and foreign languages. She brings to the pageant director’s chair extensive theater experience at Mabel Middle School, her alma mater, where she began her career as a tomato in a production of “The Long Hot Summertime.” She is a natural choice to direct a pageant that will be performed entirely by children. She will live with her great-grandfather in Mabel this summer in order to be available to us and our pageant.
All children ages 14 and under are welcome to audition for the pageant. The most exciting news is that the pageant will be funded (indeed, was proposed) by Our County’s Own Dr. Dan Deavers of the television soap opera “Each Life Daily Turns” (which can now be viewed on a gigantic television at the Sunshine Laundry in Halleluia every weekday at noon—“Watch While You Wait!”—but this is a topic for another article). Dr. Dan will leave his longtime home in Los Angeles for an overdue vacation—he will come home to attend the pageant! He will no doubt survey our young ones with an eye toward future stardom for a few.
Mamas! Sign up your children for Hollywood!
3
I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.
—WALT WHITMAN
House and Eudora Welty came through the piney woods together. Eudora stumbled over tree roots and slipped over the pine straw that layered the woods path from Mr. Norwood Boyd’s home to House’s. It was a short trip, but Eudora, who was old and round, had to stop and rest every few minutes. “Good girl,” said House every time Eudora rose to her stubby feet again. They walked out of the woods and onto a rutted dirt lane that hugged the pines and led to the house.
The Aurora County All-Stars Page 1