The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  Now I stand ready to cut into the cornfield, to chisel away a piece of our livelihood to use as dream currency, and Annie says, “Oh, love, if it makes you happy you should do it.” I carry her words in the back of my mind, stored the way a maiden aunt might wrap a brooch, a remembrance of a long-lost love. I understand how hard that was for her to say and how it got harder as the project advanced. How she must have told her family not to ask me about the baseball field I was building, because they stared at me dumb-eyed, a row of silent, thick-set peasants with red faces. Not an imagination among them except to forecast the wrath of God that will fall on the heads of pagans such as I.

  He, of course, was Shoeless Joe Jackson.

  Joseph Jefferson (Shoeless Joe) Jackson

  Born: Brandon Mills, S.C., 16 July, 1887

  Died: Greenville, S.C., 5 December, 1951

  In April, 1945, Ty Cobb picked Shoeless Joe as the best left fielder of all time.

  He never learned to read or write. He created legends with a bat and a glove. He wrote records with base hits, his pen a bat, his book History.

  Was it really a voice I heard? Or was it perhaps something inside me making a statement that I did not hear with my ears but with my heart? Why should I want to follow this command? But as I ask, I already know the answer. I count the loves in my life: Annie, Karin, Iowa, Baseball. The great god Baseball.

  My birthstone is a diamond. When asked, I say my astrological sign is “hit and run,” which draws a lot of blank stares here in Iowa where 30,000 people go to see the University of Iowa Hawkeyes football team while 30 regulars, including me, watch the baseball team perform.

  My father, I’ve been told, talked baseball statistics to my mother’s belly while waiting for me to be born.

  My father: born, Glen Ullin, N.D., 14 April, 1896. Another diamond birthstone. Never saw a professional baseball game until 1919 when he came back from World War I where he was gassed at Passchendaele. He settled in Chicago where he inhabited a room above a bar across from Comiskey Park and quickly learned to live and die with the White Sox. Died a little when, as prohibitive favourites, they lost the 1919 World Series to Cincinnati, died a lot the next summer when eight members of the team were accused of throwing that World Series.

  Before I knew what baseball was, I knew of Connie Mack, John Mc-Graw, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, and, of course, Shoeless Joe Jackson. My father loved underdogs, cheered for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the hapless St. Louis Browns, loathed the Yankees, which I believe was an inherited trait, and insisted that Shoeless Joe was innocent, a victim of big business and crooked gamblers.

  That first night, immediately after the voice and the vision, I did nothing except sip my lemonade a little faster and rattle the ice cubes in my glass. The vision of the baseball park lingered—swimming, swaying—seeming to be made of red steam, though perhaps it was only the sunset. There was a vision within the vision: one of Shoeless Joe Jackson playing left field. Shoeless Joe Jackson who last played major league baseball in 1920 and was suspended for life, along with seven of his compatriots, by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, for his part in throwing the 1919 World Series.

  “He hit .375 against the Reds in the 1919 World Series and played errorless ball,” my father would say, scratching his head in wonder.

  Instead of nursery rhymes, I was raised on the story of the Black Sox Scandal, and instead of Tom Thumb or Rumpelstiltskin, I grew up hearing of the eight disgraced ballplayers: Weaver, Cicotte, Risberg, Felsch, Gandil, Williams, McMullin, and always, Shoeless Joe Jackson.

  “Twelve hits in an eight-game series. And they suspended him,” my father would cry, and Shoeless Joe became a symbol of the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless. The name Kenesaw Mountain Landis became synonymous with the Devil.

  It is more work than you might imagine to build a baseball field. I laid out a whole field, but it was there in spirit only. It was really only left field that concerned me. Home plate was made from pieces of cracked two-by-four imbedded in the earth. The pitcher’s mound rocked like a cradle when I stood on it. The bases were stray blocks of wood, unanchored. There was no backstop or grandstand, only one shaky bleacher beyond the left field wall. There was a left field wall, but only about 50 feet of it, 12 feet high, stained dark green and braced from the rear. And the left-field grass. My intuition told me that it was the grass that was important. It took me three seasons to hone that grass to its proper texture, to its proper colour. I made trips to Minneapolis and one or two other cities where the stadiums still have natural grass infields and outfields. I would arrive hours before a game and watch the groundskeepers groom the field like a prize animal, then stay after the game when in the cool of the night the same groundsmen appeared with hoses, hoes, rakes, and patched the grasses like medics attending wounded soldiers.

  I pretended to be building a little league ballfield and asked their secrets and sometimes was told. I took interest in their total operation; they wouldn’t understand if I told them I was building only a left field.

  Three seasons I’ve spent seeding, watering, fussing, praying, coddling that field like a sick child until it glows parrot-green, cool as mint, soft as moss, lying there like a cashmere blanket. I began watching it in the evenings, sitting on the rickety bleacher just beyond the fence. A bleacher I had constructed for an audience of one.

  My father played some baseball, Class B teams in Florida and California. I found his statistics in a dusty minor league record book. In Florida, he played for a team called the Angels and, by his records, was a better-than-average catcher. He claimed to have visited all 48 states and every major league ballpark before, at 40, he married and settled down a two-day drive from the nearest major league team. I tried to play, but ground balls bounced off my chest and fly balls dropped between my hands. I might have been a fair designated hitter, but the rule was too late in coming.

  There is the story of the urchin who, tugging at Shoeless Joe Jackson’s sleeve as he emerged from a Chicago courthouse, said, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

  Jackson’s reply reportedly was, “I’m afraid it is, kid.”

  When he comes, I won’t put him on the spot by asking. The less said the better. It is likely that he did accept some money from gamblers. But throw the Series? Never! Shoeless Joe led both teams in hitting in that 1919 Series. It was the circumstances. The circumstances. The players were paid peasant salaries while the owners became rich. The infamous Ten-Day Clause, which voided contracts, could end any player’s career without compensation, pension, or even a ticket home.

  The second spring, on a tooth-achy May evening, a covering of black clouds lumbered off westward like ghosts of buffalo and the sky became the cold colour of a silver coin. The forecast was for frost.

  The left-field grass was like green angora, soft as a baby’s cheek. In my mind I could see it dull and crisp, bleached by frost, and my chest tightened.

  Then I used a trick a groundskeeper in Minneapolis taught me, saying it was taught to him by grape farmers in California. I carried out a hose and making the spray so fine it was scarcely more than fog, I sprayed the soft, shaggy, spring grass all that chilled night. My hands ached and my own face became wet and cold, but as I watched, the spray froze on the grass, enclosing each blade in a gossamer-crystal coating of ice. A covering that served like a coat of armour to dispel the real frost that was set like a weasel upon killing in the night. I seemed to stand taller than ever before as the sun rose, turning the ice to eye-dazzling droplets, each a prism, making the field an orgy of rainbows.

  Annie and Karin were at breakfast when I came in, the bacon and coffee smells and their laughter pulling me like a magnet.

  “Did it work, love?” Annie asked, and I knew she knew by the look on my face that it did. And Karin, clapping her hands and complaining of how cold my face was when she kissed me, loved every second of it.

  “And how did he get a name like Shoeless Jo
e?” I would ask my father, knowing full well the story but wanting to hear it again. And no matter how many times I heard it, I would still picture a lithe ballplayer, his great bare feet, white as baseballs, sinking into the outfield grass as he sprinted for a line drive. Then, after the catch, his toes gripping the grass like claws, he would brace and throw to the infield.

  “It wasn’t the least bit romantic,” my dad would say. “When he was still in the minor leagues he bought a new pair of spikes and they hurt his feet; about the sixth inning he took them off and played the outfield in just his socks. The other players kidded him, called him Shoeless Joe, and the name stuck for all time.”

  It was hard for me to imagine that a sore-footed young outfielder taking off his shoes one afternoon not long after the turn of the century could generate a legend.

  I came to Iowa to study, one of the thousands of faceless students who pass through large universities, but I fell in love with Iowa. Fell in love with the land, the people, with the sky, the cornfields and Annie. Couldn’t find work in my field, took what I could get. For years, each morning I bathed and frosted my cheeks with Aqua Velva, donned a three-piece suit and snap-brim hat, and, feeling like Superman emerging from a telephone booth, set forth to save the world from a lack of life insurance. I loathed the job so much that I did it quickly, urgently, almost violently. It was Annie who got me to rent the farm. It was Annie who got me to buy it. I operate it the way a child fits together his first puzzle, awkwardly, slowly, but when a piece slips into the proper slot, with pride and relief and joy.

  I built the field and waited, and waited, and waited.

  “It will happen, honey,” Annie would say when I stood shaking my head at my folly. People look at me. I must have a nickname in town. But I could feel the magic building like a storm gathering. It felt as if small animals were scurrying through my veins. I knew it was going to happen soon.

  “There’s someone on your lawn,” Annie says to me, staring out into the orange-tinted dusk. “I can’t see him clearly, but I can tell someone is there.” She was quite right, at least about it being my lawn, although, it is not in the strictest sense of the word a lawn, it is a left field.

  I watch Annie looking out. She is soft as a butterfly, Annie is, with an evil grin and a tongue that travels at the speed of light. Her jeans are painted to her body and her pointy little nipples poke at the front of a black T-shirt with the single word RAH! emblazoned in waspish yellow capitals. Her red hair is short and curly. She has the green eyes of a cat.

  Annie understands, though it is me she understands, and not always what is happening. She attends ball games with me and squeezes my arm when there’s a hit, but her heart isn’t in it and she would just as soon be at home. She loses interest if the score isn’t close or the weather warm, or the pace fast enough. To me it is baseball and that is all that matters. It is the game that is important—the tension, the strategy, the ballet of the fielders, the angle of the bat.

  I have been more restless than usual this night. I have sensed the magic drawing closer, hovering somewhere out in the night like a zeppelin, silky and silent, floating like the moon until the time is right.

  Annie peeks through the drapes. “There is a man out there; I can see his silhouette. He’s wearing a baseball uniform, an old-fashioned one.”

  “It’s Shoeless Joe Jackson,” I say. My heart sounds like someone flicking a balloon with their index finger.

  “Oh,” she says. Annie stays very calm in emergencies. She Band-Aids bleeding fingers and toes, and patches the plumbing with gum and good wishes. Staying calm makes her able to live with me. The French have the right words for Annie—she has a good heart.

  “Is he the Jackson on TV? The one you yell, ‘Drop it, Jackson,’ at?”

  Annie’s sense of baseball history is not highly developed.

  “No, that’s Reggie. This is Shoeless Joe Jackson. He hasn’t played major league baseball since 1920.”

  “Well, aren’t you going to go out and chase him off your lawn, or something?”

  Yes. What am I going to do? I wish someone else understood. My daughter has an evil grin and bewitching eyes. She climbs into my lap and watches television baseball with me. There is a magic about her.

  “I think I’ll go upstairs and read for a while,” Annie says. “Why don’t you invite Shoeless Jack in for coffee?” I feel the greatest tenderness toward her then, something akin to the rush of love I felt the first time I held my daughter in my arms. Annie senses that magic is about to happen. She knows that she is not part of it. My impulse is to pull her to me as she walks by, the denim of her thighs making a tiny music. But I don’t. She will be waiting for me and she will twine her body about me and find my mouth with hers.

  As I step out on the verandah, I can hear the steady drone of the crowd, like bees humming on a white afternoon, and the voices of the vendors, like crows cawing.

  A little ground mist, like wisps of gauze, snakes in slow circular motions just above the grass.

  “The grass is soft as a child’s breath,” I say to the moonlight. On the porch wall I find the switch, and the single battery of floodlights I have erected behind the left-field fence sputters to life. “I’ve shaved it like a golf green, tended it like I would my own baby. It has been powdered and lotioned and loved. It is ready.”

  Moonlight butters the whole Iowa night. Clover and corn smells are thick as syrup. I experience a tingling like the tiniest of electric wires touching the back of my neck, sending warm sensations through me like the feeling of love. Then, as the lights flare, a scar against the blue-black sky, I see Shoeless Joe Jackson standing out in left field. His feet spread wide, body bent forward from the waist, hands on hips, he waits. There is the sharp crack of the bat and Shoeless Joe drifts effortlessly a few steps to his left, raises his right hand to signal for the ball, camps under it for a second or two, catches the ball, at the same time transferring it to his throwing hand, and fires it into the infield.

  I make my way to left field, walking in the darkness far outside the third-base line, behind where the third-base stands would be. I climb up on the wobbly bleacher behind the fence. I can look right down on Shoeless Joe. He fields a single on one hop and pegs the ball to third.

  “How does it play?” I holler down.

  “The ball bounces true,” he replies.

  “I know.” I am smiling with pride and my heart thumps mightily against my ribs. “I’ve hit a thousand line drives and as many grounders. It’s true as a felt-top table.”

  “It is,” says Shoeless Joe. “It is true.”

  I lean back and watch the game. From where I sit the scene is as complete as in any of the major league baseball parks I have ever attended: the two teams, the stands, the fans, the lights, the vendors, the scoreboard. The only difference is that I sit alone in the left field bleacher and the only player who seems to have substance is Shoeless Joe Jackson. When Joe’s team is at bat, the left fielder below me is transparent as if he were made of vapour. He performs mechanically, but seems not to have facial features. We do not converse.

  A great amphitheatre of grandstand looms dark against the sky, the park is surrounded by decks of floodlights making it brighter than day, the crowd buzzes, the vendors hawk their wares, and I cannot keep the promise I made myself not to ask Shoeless Joe Jackson about his suspension and what it means to him.

  While the pitcher warms up for the third inning we talk.

  “It must have been . . . It must have been like . . .” but I can’t find the words.

  “Like having a part of me amputated, slick and smooth and painless, like having an arm or a leg taken off with one swipe of a scalpel, big and blue as a sword,” and Joe looks up at me and his dark eyes seem about to burst with the pain of it. “A friend of mine used to tell about the war, how him and a buddy was running across a field when a piece of shrapnel took his friend’s head off, and how the friend ran, headless, for several strides before he fell. I’m told that old
men wake in the night and scratch itchy legs that have been dust for fifty years. That was me. Years and years later, I’d wake in the night with the smell of the ballpark in my nostrils and the cool of the grass on my feet. The thrill of the grass . . .”

  How I wish my father could be here with me. He died before we had television in our part of the country. The very next year he could have watched in grainy black and white as Don Larsen pitched a no-hitter in the World Series. He would have loved hating the Yankees as they won that game. We were always going to go to a major league baseball game, he and I. But the time was never right, the money always needed for something else. One of the last days of his life, late in the night while I sat with him because the pain wouldn’t let him sleep, the radio dragged in a staticky station broadcasting a White Sox game. We hunched over the radio and cheered them on, but they lost. Dad told the story of the Black Sox Scandal for the last time. Told of seeing two of those World Series games, told of the way Shoeless Joe Jackson hit, told the dimensions of Comiskey Park, and how during the series the mobsters in striped suits sat in the box seats with their colourful women, watching the game and perhaps making plans to go out later and kill a rival.

  “You must go,” he said. “I’ve been in all sixteen major league parks. I want you to do it too. The summers belong to somebody else now, have for a long time.” I nodded agreement.

  “Hell, you know what I mean,” he said, shaking his head.

  I did indeed.

  “I loved the game,” Shoeless Joe went on. “I’d have played for food money. I’d have played free and worked for food. It was the game, the parks, the smells, the sounds. Have you ever held a bat or a baseball to your face? The varnish, the leather. And it was the crowd, the excitement of them rising as one when the ball was hit deep. The sound was like a chorus. Then there was the chug-a-lug of the tin lizzies in the parking lots and the hotels with their brass spittoons in the lobbies and brass beds in the rooms. It makes me tingle all over like a kid on his way to his first double-header, just to talk about it.”