by Chris Lynch
I whip the ball back at him, forcing those dubious hands right back up to protect that dubious face. “Washington’s window. Get it right, tell it right. And I’m expecting you to spread my legend over there, too, wherever over there turns out to be for you.”
We are interrupted then by a piercing voice from the second-floor window.
“Over there? Over there, over where, over there?” It is like heckling from the grandstands, only much harder to ignore.
That is our little sister, Susan, and her voice has every right to be piercing. It is gonna get a whole lot worse, too, because she is ten years old and idolizes both of us and we have been doing a bad thing to her out of fear.
We have been keeping the enlistment plan from her. Theo and I both agreed that we are a lot more scared of Susan than of whatever all we are gonna run into overseas.
“Snoozie Suzie, how long you been listening to us?” Theo calls up, all play on the outside but surely all pudding on the inside.
“Too long, that’s how long. I shoulda stopped when I was about five. But since I didn’t have the sense then, why don’t I just keep listenin’ now while you tell me where the over there is that you’re takin’ that stupid George-Washington-broken-window-fat-lie story to.”
Because we are good under pressure, my brother and me, we start throwing the ball back and forth crazy fast like we are in a game of pepper or something, but neither one of us has words to give to a ten-year-old girl who certainly deserves some. Maybe because her strong and sharp words sank into a sad, cracky warble, which is definitely not our sister’s way. Maybe because we know that she knows what we are hiding, and we all know how it is gonna go from here.
“Right,” Susan says to the big, strapping ballplayers who are switching uniforms to go put the world and the war to rights. “I’m comin’ down there.”
It shames me a little bit to admit that I am truly considering running. But only a little. Susan is a fearsome force, I tell you what. But if I am gonna learn honorable behavior and facing up to fear, this is the very place to start.
Theo has his arms open wide as she comes running out of the house full throttle toward him. This is their game, and it is always fifty-fifty whether or not she is going to knock him backward, even though he does not ever purposely give in. I can feel the earth rumble beneath my feet as she thunders past me, gaining speed and heading for the inevitable.
Theo, glove on, eyes closed, is smiling and wincing both as she reaches him.
And she stops cold.
He holds his eyes shut. She reaches up and peels them open.
“You got something to tell me, Theodore?” Susan says, deep and deadly.
He closes his eyes again. She runs quickly out of humor, folds her arms, and waits.
By the time my brother gathers up the courage to open his eyes, there are tears coming from them. The two of them are weeping. All right, all right, there are three of us at it then.
Pop has always been one of the most practical men on earth. One of the things he did to make Theo and me among the best defensive infielders in the game was spend hours and hours drilling us. What he drilled us with was tennis balls. He’d line us up along the back wall of the house and from about twenty feet away he would serve us bombs like he was Don Budge or something. Where he got the balls, the racket, or the ability to serve like that was anybody’s guess since he barely recognized tennis as a sport. Except, that is, when Budge would win a major tournament someplace and Pop would remind us that Budge’s father was a Scot.
He hit those balls at us relentlessly, ’til we had welts all over our bodies — and our faces. We had to field them glovelessly, and wordlessly, until his trash barrel of balls was empty and then we had to collect them all up and feed them back to the beast so the beast could welt us some more. We had to field them and field them until we could catch every catchable ball and then until we could redefine what was catchable and catch all of the rest as well. Nobody had hands like us. Because nobody had a pop like Pop.
He is that serious and practical about most things, and that includes religion. We have always been a pious and churchgoing family. Despite that, I couldn’t tell you what exactly my father believes or doesn’t believe, because on that subject he remains as silent as snow.
Because on all matters Episcopal, there is one head of the McCallum congregation, and that is Mam.
I’m not sure myself whether I believe in God in any of the forms I have been made aware of. But I believe in my Mam, and by that same power I have no trouble thinking of myself now and forever as Episcopalian. Whatever I go on to see in this world, it’s never going to be convincing enough to get me to unsee what my mother has shown me.
“Listen hard, my boys,” Mam says as we all walk together to our last Sunday service before Theo and I ship out. “Whatever the Reverend has to say today should sustain you through your trials, on your travels, until we are all able to listen to him together once more.”
“Yes, Mam’am,” I say.
“Should we not heed what the chaplains have to say in the meantime?” Theo teases.
Pop clips him in the back of the head. Sounds just like snapping fingers. Not his, of course, since my father has never in his life used his fingers for anything as frivolous as snapping.
“Heed,” Mam says. “Do heed. Especially you, Theodore. But home, family, your church, your parish — that’s what you’re to remember deepest and hold dearest. That’s what’ll keep you. It’s what’ll keep us.”
And that is that for that. Sunday is for listening — it is one of Mam’s tried and trues. We walk in peace the rest of the way, and we sit listening hard once we get there.
Listening hard, but listening to what? Distant guns and foreign tongues. Anchors Aweigh, the Navy’s fight song, which I could swear I am hearing clearly from the academy just up the way. Annapolis is right around the corner according to the map but still too far away to be hearing a bunch of cadets singing. Yet I can hear it, clear and loud and immediate. How could anybody hear anything from the pulpit in that situation?
“… and farewell to two more of Maryland’s finest, Henry and Theodore McCallum, joining the effort to do Our Lord’s work in this terrible fight …”
That would be one way. As attention-grabbers go, I can’t think of a time when Reverend Jenkins topped this.
There is a bubbling of low murmur throughout the church, which in this place is the equivalent of a standing ovation in a baseball park. Susan, I see out of the corner of my eye, is turning every which way to make out what all the fuss is about until Mam grabs her arm and stills her. Our folks are looking down at the floor, refusing to acknowledge anything because for them that would be immodest. But I slide a glance to my right at Theo, and he slides one left at me, and we both nod, an appreciation to the congregation even if we aren’t strictly looking at any of them. They get it, though, because that is pretty well how communications get exchanged in Prince George’s County.
We certainly pay attention now, since this is the first time we have ever been the actual subject of a sermon, and the only time we are ever likely to be.
“… a dauntingly hard road ahead for our brave boys,” Reverend Jenkins intones. “Against long and frightening odds, and a lamentably sad task it will be, regardless …”
I am beginning to get really worried for us, now that the Reverend is stating our case. Fortunately, Theo is on hand for perspective.
He leans in close to my ear. “That’s nothing. Doesn’t he realize we played in the farm system of the Philadelphia A’s? Every single game is dauntingly hard for the A’s.”
“Ha!” escapes my mouth just before I manage to clap a hand over it. The entire congregation bears down on me with stares, starting with my mother, swinging around the whole church, and ending with my mother. Never mind the Pacific Theater of Operations, I might not make it out of Christ Episcopal Church in one piece.
Fortunately, just as the Reverend Jenkins giveth our problem, the R
everend taketh it away.
“Ha, indeed,” he says, gesturing with open arms toward my brother and me. “Have we ever seen such bravery?”
And this time we get applause, the real kind, and the contours of the church and the strangeness of this response make the whole thing sound like the structure is going to crumble and crash down around us.
It is a sensation I am probably going to have to get used to. And learn to disregard.
“But!” Reverend Jenkins admonishes, waving a finger at the whole population as they settle back down, then waving it specifically at the brothers McCallum. “Your bravery will get you far. But not so far that you can ever leave your humanity, and your Christianity, behind. As the Lord said in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter five, verse forty-four, I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you.”
The congregation has gone more silent now than at any time since we arrived. Quieter, I imagine, than it was before anyone arrived.
“It is what separates us from them. It is what will show our enemies the righteous way, the life, and the light, that guides us, and will someday guide them all out of their darkness. Do God’s work, men. Do the sorrowful and the necessary, but never forget your Christian selves while you do it.”
I have never heard the Reverend like this. I don’t know if he has ever sounded like this, whether maybe he sounded like this every week and I just hummed my way through it until he directed it to me specifically. But he has my attention now, my brother’s and sister’s and probably Hitler’s and Emperor Hirohito’s, too, as he winds down the service and sends us out into the wide world.
The procession out of the church is likewise nothing like I have ever experienced here before. It’s like the most solemn and peculiar wedding of all time, as Theo and I are the last to exit, with all the other families of the congregation there outside on the steps like a receiving line. All waiting to shake our hands and pat our backs and well-wish us down onto the sidewalk, across the street, and back on the road from Christ Episcopal to the old home one more time.
The quiet among the family feels different this time. We walk, as usual, in contemplative quiet. The contemplation, though, is not the usual.
Susan seems softly agitated, straining to keep to our studied, slow Sunday pace while she slaps her open palms nervously against her thighs. Mam is solemn as ever, but with a bit of something different, an almost prideful tilting back of her head. We will never know, though, never hear what she is thinking or feeling because that is just not her way.
Pop’s way, of course, is always going to be Sunday silence. No reason to expect anything different today, even as different as today is. So we aren’t looking for anything. Sure aren’t looking for this.
“Any man who loves his enemies is not functioning properly,” he says toward the ground, like he is telling it to Satan himself down there. He says it in a voice that makes Reverend Jenkins sound like a first-grade girl. “And any man at war who loves his enemies is insufficiently interested in coming home again.”
Coming home again. That is the steely and stoic man’s concern. And his message.
Now, nobody stops walking or breathing, though those are exactly the things that make the most sense at the time. We keep leaning homeward, but I surely feel the eyes of Susan and Theo on me, wondering: What on earth do we do here? Sidelong, I note the positions of both my parents, just ahead of the children per usual and per correctness. This is a declaration of war itself here, and something is almost certain to erupt as Mam turns slightly but definitely toward the side of her husband’s head. Her cheeks are rose red, her tight lips violet blue.
For his part, the old man keeps walking, head down, no more words coming from him, but an unmistakable low, low growl coming up. A growl.
Not toward Mam; never, never. But a growl all the same, a statement of seriousness I would bet he is unaware he is even making.
We wait.
We walk, and we wait.
And we walk on. Mam stops looking at him, and he stops growling. He has never once spoken up about God or the Reverend or the Church or the message before.
But we never had before what we have now.
She reaches sideways without looking at him, and takes his hand.
Another Sunday something that never happened before.
I don’t know whether I sleep at all. My waking dreams and my sleeping dreams have all joined up together into one long barrage of heavy cannon fire, fighter planes swooping overhead, machine guns, and yelling. What I do know is that my gear is packed and it is just after daybreak when I head downstairs. I carry my glove and the battered ball, the brutally scarred baseball that I would throw against the jagged stone foundation of the house on the rare occasions when my brother was not available to throw with. It was a tremendous exercise for the reflexes, in that the wall’s irregularities meant the ball never came back true. But it was a second-rate exercise, too, because with Theo the ball always came back true.
I won’t have to go through it this morning, however, because by the time I get to the wall, the kid himself, my double play partner, is already there waiting. We won’t be playing one more game of catch, though, either. His glove is on the ground and he’s not alone.
“Line up, boys,” Pop says with almost a smile on his thin lips. He’s standing by his trusty rusty barrel, a tennis ball in one hand and a racquet in the other. “Can’t be letting your skills erode just because of some war. Baseball will be waiting for you when you return.”
“Sure, Pop,” Theo says, which our father takes as some kind of starter’s gun.
And gun he does. It is almost like he’s mad at us for something, the way he booms shot after shot at us, taking no time at all between serves. He grunts like a wild boar as he throws himself into each shot, harder than the last.
And we are up to the task, let me say. Like giant spiders, like light-footed, sticky-fingered, spring-loaded alien athletes from Mars, we snag every single ball the old man launches. At my face, snagged. At Theo’s feet, snagged. Ranging far, left and right, snagged and snagged, until Pop starts breathing real heavily and we start doing the grunting for him, growling and yapping as we amaze even ourselves with what is possible.
Until, at one point I become aware of Theo’s soft hands hardening. He drops a ball. Then another. He is dropping balls, missing them entirely, having them pound off his chest, his arms. His primal grunting transforms, too, into something weaker, something wounded.
“Catch the balls, Theo,” I say calmly, as if I wasn’t saying the most obvious and unhelpful thing I could think of.
“I’m trying,” he says, almost whispery.
“Catch the balls,” I say, same as before. “Catch the balls. Catch them. Like we do. Catch them.” All the while I keep catching them. Feel like I could close my eyes and not miss a one.
But if I’d done that I would have missed Theo’s return, his bounce, his lunge, his snag. He has it again, he is right again. We are right.
Until it is done. The barrel is empty, our father wheezing, hands on his knees and a grimace of pure love and pride on his face. We stand upright, a small sea of fuzzy white balls rolling in the yard around our feet.
“It’s just about that time, Pop,” I say when he eventually straightens up.
He nods, with his hands on his hips now as they should always be. “Not before you pick up these balls. You’re not going anywhere just yet. The war can just wait another minute while you do as you’re told right here.”
“Yes, sir,” we say in unison, as we have done hundreds of thousands of times, and as we will now be saying separately, to other commands from other men, hundreds of thousands more times. We’ll never mean it as much as we do now, though.
“And make it quick, because your mother wants to line me up for a few shots when you leave. She serves harder than I do, too. Ah, but fair enough, so. I can at least absorb this for
her, eh?”
“Eh, Pop,” Theo says, stuffing balls back into the barrel.
“Eh, Pop,” I say, doing the same.
When the balls are all collected, Pop nods at the barrel, like he approves, like he needed to see the task through and now it is. I look up to see Mam at the window, washing away at some mystery dishes in her spotless pre-breakfast kitchen.
When she notices the three of us standing there like pointless oafs, she dries off her hands, then disappears from view. A couple of minutes later she reappears, coming around from the front of the house, rather than through the door right by the kitchen. Susan is with her, and each one of them is carrying one of our bags.
“Gee, rush us out, why don’tcha?” Theo says, laughing.
Mam drops the bag, walks right up to him, and slaps his face. It is not one of her meaningful slaps, but still it is an attention-getter.
“No swearing. I don’t care if you are in the Army now. You’ll leave here with the manners you were taught, and you will return with them, too.”
“Army Air Corps,” he says, grinning.
Slap.
“Yes, Mam’am.” He coughs, squashed in her spontaneous strangle-hug.
She kisses his cheek hard, turns away from him quick. It is like one fluid motion, like she is turning a double play, as she swings into me, squeezes me ’til I think my eyeballs will pop right out, and then heads wordlessly, but quietly sobbing, back to her kitchen the direct way.
Pop shakes my hand, and bites his lip. He shakes Theo’s hand, still biting. Then he heads for the kitchen door as well. Mam watches him, already back in position dishwashing. There’ll be no enamel left on anything by the time we return.
“You know that thing,” Susan says, picking up one bag and jamming it into Theo’s hand. Then she shoves him in the back, in the direction of the war.
“What thing?” I say, similarly given my marching orders.
“That thing, about loving your enemy. About never forgetting you are a Christian and never forgetting who you are. That thing.”