It was a drowsy hot June afternoon, moist and sweltering and windless. At the stone bench in the flower garden you could smell the thick spice of clove pinks; behind the sundial you could see the red heads of bee balm thrusting up toward the heat of the sun. Anna’s book—Mansfield Park this time—lay on its spine with the pages open; it seemed absurd and tiresome and petty in light of the Kansas City Athletics. I wound along the flagstones to the gazebo. From there I could see Anna kneeling at the border of our garden, dressed in her mother’s dirt-stained gardening apron and with her hair crimped into a loose bun full of black tendrils. Black sprigs of hair fell away from her ears and her neck as she worked with a weeding spade along the sliver of astilbe we had planted, tossing the uprooted weeds behind her with a minute turn of the wrist. They lay limply behind her in a long broken row at the edge of the lawn slope, each with its own root-crust of earth crumbling into the green grass and drying to a listless gray hue in the heavy swelter.
Perennials—even nursery starts—come into their own only gradually, and seldom make much of a show before their second season. Our garden was too new and tender and therefore scarcely in flower; the best we could hope for was a few forget-me-nots and, perhaps late in summer, some pink phlox and a smatter of snakeroot. The astilbe, though, had miraculously bloomed—it was the middle of June already and nearing the solstice; the days had been long and hot and at dawn all month the sudden rains had come—and now they showed their feathery spires in a halo around Anna. I went down the lawn slope and began to gather up the pulled weeds. Sliding along with one knee in the grass and a clutter of weeds dangling from one fist I told Anna about Kansas City and Chambers and the two-seventy-five a month the Athletics would pay me to play baseball. My memory of this moment is clear—my life, in retrospect, seems to have turned on it—Anna rose and dusted off her apron, smacked the dirt from her hands and reached into the pocket of her summer dress. She held the envelope out to me; I let fall the tangle of weeds in my hand and sat back on the lawn to read what it contained.
A school in Pennsylvania—Saint Alphonse College—had offered Anna a full scholarship to study literature: now I knew what all her books fed into. I read the letter twice; halfway through the third reading I knew that she would go, that when the season ended in Chambers and I came home she would be gone, that when she returned the next summer I would be pitching somewhere else again and wanted to, and that this would go on endlessly and we would see each other almost never, until at last we were entirely strangers. I didn’t know whether or not this was what I wanted, whether dread or ecstasy ought finally to be the state of things; I loved her as long as it was simple—as it was in the flower garden—but now the sticky web of the larger world was swiftly settling over us. And so I slowly forced the letter back inside its envelope and laid it on the lawn, and found I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I knew that it had never been right; she was solemn and cerebral and bound for college and I was a baseball player. Suddenly in Anna I saw the prospect of a future that might not include baseball, if I so chose; baseball, really, meant leaving her, even without the hindrances of logistics and Pennsylvania and time. What had come to pass was not a problem but a looking glass, a mirror in which the truth emerged as solid as a diamond. Love was too hard; it argued I could not be my own center alone, that there were others on the planet with me—love was impossible and too much to ask of a boy. We sat on the lawn in the white light of the sun and Anna insisted that distance was no object; I agreed with that, but already I had moved farther off than she could ever realize.
“It’ll work out,” I told her. “It won’t change anything.”
But of course she knew that I lied. It was as obvious as my shame. “I’m not going to change,” she said. The words trembled, the voice came softly. “I swear to it. I swear to it by these flowers, right now.”
She’d read too many books, but I didn’t say that. “Swearing isn’t any good,” I said. “We’ll just have to try to work it out.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about keeping the flowers going?”
“What about it? I’ll try.”
“Swear to it.”
“I can’t swear.”
“I didn’t think you could,” she revealed at last. “I kind of suspected—I felt it right here.” She placed her hand over her heart and held it there for a moment. “Right here. Right here!”
I couldn’t look at her though. “Leave me alone,” I said. “Okay?”
“Did I hear you correctly?” asked Anna.
“Don’t talk to me,” I heard myself say. “I don’t love you. It doesn’t have anything to do with your college or anything else. I just don’t love you.”
I was marveling at the blades of grass in the lawn as I spoke these words. Each molecule of each blade had taken on an unsettling, perfect clarity of being; each appeared shot through with a quiet green inner light. It seemed to me I couldn’t fix myself on anything else at that moment, nothing but the texture of the lawn seemed real, and when I brought my head up at last I realized the silence had lasted too long, that Anna was no longer beside me. Something like panic overtook me in a flood and I jumped to my feet, disoriented, crazed, with just time to see her recede toward the house, recede through the flowers and then run up the porch steps, black hair streaming toward me as she turned through the door—and then Anna completely disappeared.
Chambers turned out to be a grim and dusty town, a long, narrow street of slatternly storefronts surrounded by blocks of austere and weather-beaten homes. A kind of stasis, disquieting and ever-present, seemed to oppress the very buildings along Main Street, and nothing moved but the occasional, slow-eyed dogs who stalked their tails in the lonely shadows, stirring the dust up and eyeing everything sadly. The searing summer wind carried the aroma of sulfur from the nearby mill, and the air smelled of insecticide in the early evenings. The townspeople, like figures in a dream, moved slowly and aimlessly when they moved at all, but came to the baseball games suddenly transformed (the games were like prayer meetings or old-time revivals) and sat fanning themselves and wiping their faces on their shirtsleeves in the bleachers, yapping in ecstasy at every base hit, swooning at every home run.
Chambers played in the Northern League, a Double A circuit that took in Saradon and Vicksburg, Oxacala and Merton, Larabee and Burris and Minapee City. The team bus rambled over roads as straight as ramrods, over pavement that sweated from a distant vantage but was only full of pockmarks and holes when you passed over it to wherever you were going. We were a team, mostly, of journeymen minor leaguers, men who had played baseball everywhere and were no longer surprised when they were traded or sold—men who played baseball for a living mechanically, with only a faint trace left of the hope they had once held inside. Some of them had had their day in the majors, of which they never spoke, and had followed a downward trajectory ever since, as though it were somehow their duty to see things through to their proper, inevitable ends. We played in dust and heat, slept on buses and in sweltering hotels, endured, with a consensual stoicism, our undeniable anonymity. I won my first start on bluster and optimism, but then I lost four badly and fell out of the rotation. Chambers used me in long relief rarely; the rest of the time I chewed gum in the bullpen, watching and wondering where I’d gone wrong.
I suppose you could say that the dream fell away then; the shell broke around me and I felt no protection in the game any longer, but only the little-known reality of it. In my room over the auto parts store on the main street of Chambers I began to have nightmares, hideous dreams in which the void of my future expressed itself as a chasm, dark and impossible to avoid. From my vantage in the bullpen the actual game seemed far away and I would daydream through whole innings, sitting forward with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands, staring at the dusty ground. More and more I thought of the flower garden, wondered what bloomed there and what sort of birds had come to the feeders. By the time the seaso
n ended it seemed quite important—the possibility that our pink phlox had blossomed, that the candelabralike flowers of snakeroot had opened up, that perhaps the alyssum or Jacob’s-coat would surprise us—the image of that lost world of color and light seemed always before me now, a salve of sorts for the wound the game had turned into.
Kansas City did not renew my contract, and I came home with baseball behind me, as if seeing the world for the first time. In my hometown the hard light of summer had softened and annealed; winds slightly cooler than summer winds blew, and in the mornings the sky appeared a heavy shade of mottled gray. I wandered a lot; at Adams Field a crowd of younger boys had come to dominate the baseball diamond, and sometimes I would sit against the chain-link fence behind the elementary school, watching their games from the hilltop. More often I would ponder the lost Eden of the flower garden, and once or twice, when night came, I passed by the hedge at the Lewis home. Beyond the clasped gate there was only darkness and the shadowy flickerings of the television in the front window, where Doctor Lewis, I knew without a doubt, looked at the late news and chewed on his cigar in the easy chair. It seemed to me that all across town the streets themselves had changed; they were narrower, the quiet in them had become a sad thing—they seemed desolate, and I saw now, improbably, that there were intricate lives in every home. A job, I began to say to myself, seeing how most men came out of their houses in the morning—but I couldn’t bring myself, yet, to look for one. I spoke only when spoken to, and I am sure that people spoke of me as one who had failed at his dream. Yet everywhere I went I thought of our flower garden and not of baseball; perhaps, I said to myself, the day lilies have come out, or the evening primroses, or the clump of zinnias has bloomed. By the time September ended I had led myself to believe in the elusive perfection of that place, and stubbornly felt the urge to go there, to stand among the flowers one more time.
A night came in October when I awoke at two A.M. and knew the killing-frost had come. The sharp air of winter flooded at the window, and outside, illuminated by the glitter of the full moon, the leaves on the cottonwood in the yard had bound themselves up and dropped to the lawn. It dawned on me then that the flowers in our garden would close against winter now, and I got up and dressed quickly, shivering all up and down my neck and back and arms. I went out hurriedly into the street and ran toward Anna’s in the cold moonlight, barreling up the old broad avenues of my paper route. When I turned into Tullis I stopped and waited while the steam of my breath died down. Moonlight bronzed everything—the leaves in the rigid maples, the clean, silent porches, the frost on the lawns and the gables and trellises—and the windowpanes all up and down the street shimmered like deep pools of water. The frost had hardened to a crust that fractured readily underfoot, and the night dew, silver in color, lay in drops the size of small pearls on the blade tips. The flowers, I thought: they will have folded up already where the frost is this thick, and I noticed uneasily a disturbance in the air then, and a steady drumming in the pit of my stomach, and my spine tightened as I walked and the tips of my ears felt furious with cold. I unclasped the gate I’d unclasped hundreds of times; inside the trimmed hedge each flagstone appeared as a ragged square of impeccable light; the three-story house rose hugely against the blue-black of the night sky, luminous, familiar, melancholy and silent—an impenetrable fortress of silver-white clapboard, with long eaves glistening beneath the moon.
Perhaps, I told myself one more time, everything will be in blossom—and then I stepped carefully along the lit flagstones. I went through the bend in the garden path; I came on the stone bench; on the low knoll to my left and before me I saw the outline of the white gazebo. I wound through the paths and down the shadowed lawn slope, but the garden Anna and I had planted was only a dark mass of stems now, everything cut back to a foot in height and mulched with several inches of raked leaves from the rest of the yard.
Everything else was as it should be, as it had been, but I had no place in it anymore. I’d trespassed in order to be there at all, and suddenly I felt more alone than I ever had, more desolate, more burdened by my own soul and by who I was, however ineluctably, and it began to seem as if my presence in that place at night beneath the moon marked the last moment ever in which I could really be young. Years have passed, but still today—on buses going downtown, in restaurants booming with noise, on airplanes as they lift off, at weddings and at movies and at baseball games when those moments arrive and the field disappears and I find myself burrowing backward in time, lost in myself as the game goes on—I have felt in my heart that same widening aloneness that buried me then: the loneliness that boys feel who are forever afraid of death and of becoming men.
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The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind,
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Available at your local bookstore, or visit
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The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind Page 14