The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  “Don’t ever let anyone talk you out of being what you want to be,” he told me on more than one occasion. That was about the only advice he ever gave me, for we were awkward around each other, our time together full of clumsy silences. Father was pale and thin with a fringe of blondish hair. He spent his life doing a job he hated while Mother hovered behind him, bullying and cajoling. Grandfather, who retired to California, still sent long detailed letters in his large, vertical hand, offering advice, no, giving instruction, on pricing, inventory, and promotion. But Father had the last laugh, and I will always have a soft spot in my heart for him because of it. In spite of everyone’s good intentions he managed to stay drunk on the contents of nefariously hidden bottles of vodka for over twenty years. He also flimflammed the books so my mother never suspected the insolvency of the business until the bankers arrived, padlocks in hand, to close the store. My father continued to drink; he would set off for his job as a security guard armed with a fifth of vodka and a heavy copy of Gray’s Anatomy.

  For all our bad times, we were better off than my friends. We had, if not a happy family, at least a relatively tranquil one. My mother would hiss at my father only long after I was in bed, supposedly asleep. I never heard exactly what she said, but I know my father never defended himself against whatever charges she made.

  The time she made the remark about us being white trash my mother was about as depressed as she ever got. She rallied quickly and fixed up the house. She sewed bright curtains, scrubbed every inch of the place with Lysol, planted an extravaganza of flowers in the ugly front yard: poppies, pansies, heavy-headed white mums, sweet peas, cosmos, and hollyhocks. My bedroom reminded me of a coffin; my single bed filled the room. Mother put up a shelf alongside the bed and tacked a curtain to it to separate me from the bluish mildew that covered the wall.

  She also made some quick alliances in the neighborhood: a Mrs. Piska, a Mrs. Hlushak, a Mrs. Hearne. “Misery loves company,” she loved to say. The four of them would congregate for coffee each morning at the oilcloth-covered table in one of their kitchens. Mrs. Piska was rolypoly and always wore a black babushka festooned with blood-colored roses; she rolled her own fat cigarettes and in her heavy Polish accent stated that even though she had been married for over thirty years, her husband, Bronko, did not know she smoked. Mrs. Hlushak’s only son was in jail for car theft; Mrs. Hearne, who had nine children, carried religious medals in her apron pocket and often gave the other ladies one when the coffee klatch broke up.

  We at least had running water. Kaz lived in a cluster of shacks that didn’t even have the dignity of being assigned a street address. His mother was dead; his father was a brutish drunk; he had one sister of about eleven who grew wild and untended. Kaz’s father worked from four to midnight at the Firestone Tire plant. After work he would stop at one of the all-night bars along Railroad Avenue, drink himself into a rage, fistfight with whoever was handy, and often end up sprawled on the gravel behind the hotel. On more than one occasion I slipped out of the house deep in the night after Kaz tapped on the wall behind my head (my room had no window), and the two of us took turns pulling Kaz’s metal wagon home from the hotel, his father face down, mumbling, cursing, his hands dragging on the street.

  Eddie was the third of four children. His family lived in a shack with a slanted roof, and they had to carry water from a community water spigot four blocks away. Eddie’s father, Isaac Kleinrath, claimed they were Hungarian Gypsies. Eddie said they were Jewish and called his father “The Rabbi” behind his back.

  I don’t think anyone ever realizes the best times of their lives while those times are happening. It’s just as well, for if they did, they would realize that everything else is downhill, no matter how gentle and gradual the slope, and they would stop trying, stop striving. I suppose it was sometime in my twenties when I realized that my baseball days, those three summers I spent in Northside, had so far been the best days of my life. That time when baseball was like the sun lighting my days. I was through university, working my way up the ranks in the newspaper business, ambitious, acquisitive, when the first suspicions appeared. My suspicions, shadows, gray, disturbing, like animals skulking about the edge of a camp, came in the form of disturbing thoughts about Cory, mixed with pleasant reveries about baseball. I dreamed of the long, sunny afternoons on the field where our endless game went on from the time the dew left the grass until it was too dark to see the ball. We played a game called Eleven, where if either team was ahead by eleven or more runs after even innings the game was called; we either started over or broke up and chose new sides. I can still hear Eddie’s shrill “Way to go, Flash,” as I ran in on a fly ball that was going yards over my head, or as I crashed to the ground after connecting with the ball, taking precious seconds to get to my feet, turning a double into a single.

  I loved those times, the tense, uncaring heat of August, the air thick, sweat drizzling into my eyebrows. I remember grabbing the bottom of my damp T-shirt, pulling it up and wiping my forehead, drying my eyes before heading for the plate. I remember squinting through a haze of perspiration from my spot in right field, the earth aerated by cheeky prairie dogs who peeked and chittered all the long, lazy afternoons.

  I had been in the enclosed yard behind Mazeppas’ store on more than one occasion. In that way boys have of exploring like animals, I had peeked through the caragana hedge, crossed the yard, peered through the window of the garage where Mr. Mazeppa stored a seldom used, pre-war Essex. The car was tan, all square angles, with a windshield that tilted forward. One day I helped Mr. Mazeppa, a grumpy man with a sharp tongue, unload boxes of groceries he had carried home from the wholesaler. I carried in crates of tin cans, boxes full of pungent coffee and exotic-smelling spices. The cottonwood trees were tall with broad leaves. The leaves deflected the sun even in midafternoon, so only a few white diamonds of light would dance on the spongy earth of the yard. A few bluebells grew in the mossy turf, a cool aster bloomed, its purple head bowed by the weight of its lush petals.

  One afternoon, a skyful of black clouds stampeded in from the west, bringing heavy wind and rain with them. The game broke up quickly, some players running for home, some seeking shelter nearby. Cory had been sitting on the sidelines alone, as she almost always was; we both ran across the street, dodging the penny-sized raindrops.

  “Come on in the yard,” she said. I was planning to make a run for home, but I quickly took her up on her invitation. Cory was wearing a mauve dress, a hand-me-down of some kind, that clung to her body. We stood under the leaves for a moment or two. The wind whirled through the tops of the cottonwoods. The tempo of the rain increased but the yard remained dry.

  “Do you want to see my rabbit?” Cory asked.

  The storm made the yard darker than twilight. We peered through the wire mesh but all we could see were the rabbit’s eyes, a phosphorescent amber in a far corner. I touched Cory’s hand and my heart bumped as if I’d tripped and stumbled. But I didn’t let go. The feeling I experienced was the most beautiful I’d ever known. Being an only child, I had never felt protective toward anyone. It never occurred to me that what I was feeling was sexual, though I considered kissing Cory as we walked slowly to the center of the yard and sat side by side on one of the gnarled roots of the largest cottonwood. Cory’s fingers were slim and her hand so much smaller than mine. I couldn’t speak, but I glanced at her. Her long hair was uncombed. There were water marks on her cheeks as if she might have cried earlier in the day. I let my arm circle her shoulder, my fingers barely touching the skin of her upper arm. Cory let her head lean against my shoulder. I was just about to turn to kiss her when I glanced down. Below our feet, in the bare dirt near the roots was a scuffle of twigs, feathers, and blood, where a small bird had probably fallen victim to a cat; there was a worm of entrails, an inch of pale yellow, scaly leg.

  “What is it?” whispered Cory. I tightened my grip on her shoulder so she wouldn’t look down. We were suddenly interrupted by pounding footsteps and
loud voices. By the time Kaz and Eddie pushed through the hedge into the tranquillity of the yard, shaking themselves like dogs, Cory and I were sitting a couple of feet apart.

  In the spring of my third and final year in Northside, on the opening day of the baseball season, my father died. In his typical way, not wanting to disturb anyone, he died in his sleep. Since he worked nights, it was midafternoon when my mother discovered his body. By the time I got home from school the undertaker had already removed the corpse, funeral arrangements had been made, she had called his employer to say he wouldn’t be in again, and had contacted a branch of the insurance company which insured his life. Mother was so efficient that we were hardly inconvenienced at all.

  Four months after my father’s death, my mother married a man named Nick Walczak, a fifty-two-year-old dairy farmer, and we moved to Wisconsin in time for me to start school in September. Nick was a widower with a grown family. He wore a felt hat and a shiny blue serge suit. His face was windburned and he smelled of cattle. I hated Nick, the farm, Wisconsin, and the Bible Belt high school I attended in a holier-than-thou town called St. Edward. I have to admit that Nick was a good deal more tolerant of me than I would have been of him if our roles had been reversed.

  My mother must have met Nick through the personal ads in our daily newspaper, or through a lonely-hearts club of some kind. I imagined his ad: Gent. 52, widower, farmer of some means, seeks marriage-minded woman. Box – – – .

  “You’re going to become Polish by marriage,” Kaz teased me.

  Nick claimed to be Estonian but Kaz taught me the vilest Polish curses he knew and Nick seemed to understand them. Someday I am going to write a novel about the year I spent on Nick Walczak’s farm in America’s Dairyland.

  Cory is dead and her death stays with me, a stain on the canvas of my life. When I was a kid in Iowa, in our dark and unused parlor hung a watercolor painted from a photograph, a picture of my mother’s older brother. It was a large head-and-shoulders view of what could have been either a boy or a girl: a pink-faced child with rouge cheeks and artificially blue eyes, staring sullenly from a mop of long, blond hair. Charlie had died at age seven from a bee sting to the eye. My mother, a year younger than Charlie, had been playing with him in the garden on a sunstruck afternoon when Charlie bent a tall hollyhock down to his face and the resident bee panicked and stung him on the eyelid. The poison went to his brain and he died a day later.

  My mother, in one of the rare moments when she talked about her past, said that she blamed herself for Charlie’s death, and that throughout the rest of her childhood she planned how, as soon as she was old enough, she would get pregnant and present her parents with a baby to replace Charlie. “I thought about it endlessly, but I never acted,” she said. She was in her mid-thirties when I was born, and by that time both her parents were dead.

  There is an Indian legend called “The Woman on the Rocks,” and I can’t help but recall it as I think of Cory and all the what-might-havebeens. The legend states that young warriors of pure spirit will, as they wander the forests, one day see a beautiful young woman sitting amid rocks at the top of a fearsome waterfall. The girl sees them, beckons to them seductively from behind the white spume of the falls. Each warrior who sees the young woman is immediately captivated, but each, for whatever reason, considers too long before going to her aid. Each one hesitates for a fraction of a second, taking his eyes from the beautiful face for an instant, and when he looks back the maiden on the rocks is gone, swept away to her death perhaps, or simply vanished because of the warrior’s indecision. But the warrior is left forever with a memory pure and fresh, cut into his heart—a memory of what might have been if he had been quicker to act. No warrior ever reached the woman on the rocks. Elders interpreted the phenomenon as a moral statement, a truth. Carrying the leaden ball of what-might-have-been deep within us is not a punishment but a lesson. And the ache is not always unpleasant, but often warm and nostalgic, reeking of lost innocence.

  But what of the woman on the rocks herself? What happens when she is not a spirit, a lesson, an abstraction, but real flesh and blood with a heart that breaks and a soul full of human longings?

  I have tried on several occasions to write about Cory and how she touched my life. About ten years ago I got several pages into a story called “Who Can Eat a Gingerbread Man?” which was about Cory’s last hours of life. But I was still too close to the material. I wrote a story about the Three Ks, called “Tough Guys.” It is one of my few unpublished stories. What follows is the opening page of “Who Can Eat a Gingerbread Man?”

  On a dismal afternoon in February 1967, Corrina Ann Mazeppa (her married name had been Kliciak, but she had taken back her maiden name after the divorce) bundled her three youngest children into their snowsuits, put them into a cab, gave the driver her last ten dollars and her mother’s address, telling him to be certain and send the change in with the oldest child.

  Corrina Ann Mazeppa, Cory to everyone, closed the door, shivered away the cold draft that had chilled her feet and ankles. She took a last look at the buried yard where snow sculptures like whitecaps sat stiffly in the sullen cold of midwinter. Cory made her way to the bathroom, where cheap plastic curtains covered the frosted glass of the single window. The room smelled of diapers, baby powder, and sour towels. She ran water into the scummy, avocado tub, took off her jeans and sweatshirt, slipped down into the very hot water. She picked up a safety razor, released the blade, rinsed dried soap and hairs from both edges, drew the blade harshly across the underside of her left wrist, changed hands, and cut her right wrist in the same manner. She slid deeper into the water until it touched the back of her neck. Suppressing an urge to vomit, she watched transfixed as her blood colored the water.

  I abandoned that fiction, or faction. For though we know Cory put her kids in a taxi and later cut her wrists in the bathtub, no one can ever know her thoughts in those last moments.

  I remember noticing, those first summers in Northside, how many of the boys at sixteen or seventeen suddenly began drifting away from the eternal pickup game. I couldn’t imagine it ever happening to me. But during my final summer, after my father’s death, life began interfering with baseball. I got a paper route; for six days a week, from three to six in the afternoon, I had to abandon the game. I also had to miss Friday evenings, which was collection time.

  Kaz, the first of us to turn sixteen, got his driver’s license and suddenly became obsessed with rebuilding a rusty skeleton of a one-ton truck that had languished in his father’s yard for years.

  Eddie, the most fearless and outgoing of our group, developed an interest in religion; he visited one of the two synagogues in the city to discuss his Jewishness.

  “You circumsized?” he asked me one day as we slouched along Railroad Avenue.

  “No,” I replied.

  “At the synagogue they asked me and I told them the truth. I wish I’d lied. I wonder if they really check your dong to make sure you’ve been cut?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  And of course we all discovered girls. Some of us more than others. I was one of the others. Most of the girls I knew were shrill, giggling brats. Kaz suddenly started talking about one or two of the older girls who were reputed to put out; he talked as if he was speaking from experience. Eddie emulated Kaz, though I had more doubts about his claims. “What about you?” Kaz said one evening. “You’re not cherry, are you?”

  “I know my way around,” I said defensively.

  But Eddie was the one who talked, about anybody and everybody. “Oh, God,” he’d cry as we walked away from Mazeppas’ store in the twilight. “Did you see the knockers under that sweater of Cory’s? I’d sell my right nut just to touch them. One touch and I’d die happy.” He would fumble through his jacket pockets looking for matches to light his cigarette, his eyes bleary slits behind his thick glasses.

  I was surprised one night when Kaz called Eddie on his wishful thinking. “You’re all talk, Kleinrath,
” he said. “You’re talking about Cory Mazeppa, for chrissakes. Anybody can do it with Cory.”

  Kleinrath was all ears and I, too, was silent as Kaz told us how Cory had taken him into the back seat of the square-fendered Essex. I knew Cory didn’t come to the ballfield very often anymore. I’d seen her walking with a boy named Buck Johnson; he was white trash, a pock-faced kid who worked on the killing floor of the packing plant. He had a long, equine head and a greasy pompadour. Another time I saw her duck into her yard with Nick Kliciak, a thug who lived at the Passtime Pool Hall. He was short, and, even though he was only a year or two older than us, wore a charcoal-gray suit and pink shirt with an inch-wide black tie.

  A week later, Eddie was echoing Kaz’s story word for word.

  “Come on, Kirkendahl,” he said, “get in on the act. You’ve always had a thing for Cory, haven’t you?”

  I only smiled and changed the subject.

  This is not one of those heartwarming stories of lasting friendships and lifelong loyalties. After I left Northside, we did not stay in touch. I finished high school in Wisconsin, moved to the warmth of California, and married a California girl. Now I seldom leave the state except to go on book promotion tours, which was what brought me to Illinois in the winter of 1967.

  A few years after we left Northside, after my mother had been widowed for a second time—this time being left well off financially—she did a very strange thing. She moved back to Northside. She rented a modest apartment on the edge of the old neighborhood, and took up where she had left off with her old friends. The four of them have all been widowed for years and years. Among them they have the complete oral history of Northside in their heads. My mother can recite from memory the history of all the families who populated the district when we first moved there thirty-five years ago.