IV. The Long Slow Curve
But the trouble was far from over and that became evident in the clouds gathering all along the western horizon the next morning. Heavy purple thunderheads tumbled over the rolling hills, ominous clouds, pregnant with the smell of rain and blowing with a fierce wind, far too cold for Texas in May. I wanted desperately to stay in bed, to pull the blanket up around my shoulders and drift back into the darkness of slumber again, to hide and wait there until the sun was a bright blinding yellow and the skies were blue and clear. But it was a school day and I had an algebra test.
In some ways, baseball is a game with a lot of similarities to that thing we call ‘life’. The reverse is also true: In a lot of ways, life is a game with a lot of similarities to the obsession we call ‘baseball’. For me, it was also true to say that when one or the other wasn’t going so well, the other suffered in direct proportion. And as fate or luck or the mischievous furies would have it, the car wouldn’t start that morning. That was something that the ghosts of Mickey Mantle or Lou Gehrig couldn’t fix, and it was just the thing to lock my mood in first gear for the day.
Mom called the neighbors to see if I could get a ride to school, but after my slow start, they weren’t willing to wait around. Instead, she drove back from town in the pouring rain and picked me up in time to catch the second half of third period, a civics class that I loathed.
“Of all the days to sleep in,” mom started.
“I know, I know,” I answered. The roads were thick with mud, the ditches flowing with brown rain water.
“If it keeps on like this –“
“They’ll cancel the game tonight,” I interrupted.
It kept raining and yes, they cancelled the game. I needed to go back out there and get on the mound, to mow some guys down with my fastball and curve, but it rained and rained. And rained some more. The regional office called and re-scheduled the game for the following week, making it a back-to-back Thursday, Friday playoff. Mr. Peterson assigned me the Thursday spot and with that, the long slow game of waiting began. A week without baseball. A whole week with nothing to do but go to school and finish some chores and maybe, the occasional coaching session in the hay meadow beside the barn.
In the interim, I made a 67 on the algebra test. My overall grade was still a B, but mom wasn’t pleased. The alternator was out on the old car, and it took just over $400 to get it replaced. Worst of all, the rain kept falling, a steady flow of intermittent showers every morning fading into a dull, steady hum of rainfall most of the night each night. On the Tuesday night before the regional playoffs, I dozed in my bed, lulled to sleep by the soft rhythmic noise of the wind and the rain gently tapping the window pane. After a couple of hours, I woke to find the curtain open and a bright white moon casting its silver hue throughout the room. It had a way of washing the color out of everything, so that the pictures on the walls, the books on the shelves, the desk and all its contents seemed re-cast in black and white, like some movie from the 1950s. At the foot of the bed, I noticed the figure of my mother, sitting with her back to me, her small form also shaded in the monochromatic light blue and soft grey tones. At some point, she had wondered in to my room, to talk I guess.
“Mom?” I said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, but she stopped me with a wave of her hand. And then I realized she was crying. Maybe she was trying not to cry, but I heard her sniffle, saw her wiping her nose with a Kleenex.
“Mom, it’s okay,” I tried again, “Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay.”
“It’s not going to be okay,” she said. “It’s not.” She shook her head from side to side, emphasizing the denial. “You were supposed to go to college, meet a girl, move away from here, but now….”
I couldn’t say anything. My lips were open to speak, but the words, any word, all words froze in my throat. She knew just what I had been thinking for the last several days. She knew and she understood that I didn’t want to stop playing baseball after my junior year, stop playing so that I could help with the farm. She realized what that meant, that it would probably be an end to any chance of college for me. And though we never talked about it openly, she recognized that it also meant the end of whatever chances I had for a career in baseball.
“I know you’re good,” she continued, motioning towards my glove and jersey resting prominently in the chair across the room. “And I know you can play at a higher level. I don’t know what that means, or if it means you’ll be rich or famous one day, but I know what you have is special.”
Fool that I am, I half expected her next words to be something like they say in movies on television during those lazy Saturday afternoons in the middle of summer. I wanted her to say that ‘Whatever it takes, we’ll find a way.’ Somehow, some way. It was a cliché and a promise that she didn’t really have the ability to keep, but I needed to hear it, just the same.
Instead, she said, “This farm is all I have left of your father.”
The words sank in, their meaning moved through me like a chill, and that feeling trembled through my chest like a roll of thunder.
“It’s all that I have left,” she continued, “And I wouldn’t even begin to know how to let it go. Or what I would do after it was gone.”
“Mom, you don’t have to,” I said at last. “After the season’s over, it’s just you and me. We’ll fix everything. It will all be better then. You’ll see.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, standing up to leave, but looking back at me from the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry and I will always be sorry for this, but I can’t see any other way.”
In the morning, she offered me a cup of coffee, her way of saying that I was a man and ready to take on the world and all of its challenges. I accepted it and we both sat at the kitchen table, cradling our mugs between the palms of our individual sets of folded hands. It was a surreal scene, almost like two people pressing their fingers together in prayer. Neither one of us said a word about the night before, but silence has a way of conveying its own set of emotions. In the stillness just after dawn, I thought I understood what it must be like for her to be so connected to a place, to not know how to be in any other. The picture I imagined was frightening, like a thick stand of trees, where no light penetrates. There was darkness and a sense of loneliness in that place, and I didn’t want to banish my mother to it; so I resigned myself to the fate we had settled on in the silver moonlight. With that resolution firmly in mind, the sun broke through a spot in the clouds and a sliver of golden light spilled across the table between us, illuminating the entire kitchen with a long bright beaming shaft of daylight.
I finished my coffee, got ready and went to school; but all morning I kept thinking about my mother crying at the foot of the bed in the middle of the night. Without even trying, I could still hear her confirming my worst fears. As soon as the season was over, I became a farmer. Forever. Whatever childhood I had left would only last as long as our team’s playoff run. Said differently, when the Ramblewood Wranglers lost and were consequently eliminated from the state tournament, my baseball career ended. Likewise, with every game we won, my innocence was prolonged another two or three days, but at most, I only had the final three weeks of May, the first few days of June.
That afternoon, the day before the regional playoffs, I cut hay in the south pasture, losing myself in the grinding rumble of the old John Deere tractor. The ground was still spongy, but in Texas, the early summer sun has a way of baking the moisture out of the red clay soil.
At the end of each row, I turned the tractor and focused my mind on delivering a perfect fastball, an excellent curve. As I rode down the next line of tall grass, I concentrated on willing that imaginary ball from the mound through the strike zone and across the plate. At the edge of the pasture, I wheeled the machine around and steered it down the next row, again floating with my pretend pitch out across the field and right past the fantasy hitter’s swinging arc. In a couple of hours, I had cut all of the grass in that section and in my mind, I had pitched six innings of pretty good baseball.
During that time, I came to a couple of good sound conclusions as well. I loved baseball. It wasn’t just something I did to try and connect with my dad. It was something that I enjoyed for all of those reasons that are so often cited, but still so hard to explain: The “feel” of the scuffed ball in my hands, the smell of a worn leather glove, the crack of the bat, the sound of the crowd, the warm summer air. All of it made my mind hum with energy, filled my chest with a buzzing pride, and I needed that rush to be truly alive in this world.
The second was that I loved my family – mom, grandma, and especially the memory of my father – loved them more than baseball even, and if the farm was their home, then I loved the farm too. There was a simple, but fluid poetry involved in mowing the pasture in the amber light before sunset with the locusts whining their machine chirp just inside the tree line. I found I quite enjoyed the call of the whippoorwills and the “Bob White” quails, as they passed their nightly news through the tree tops. There was a perfect, solemn music in the lowing of cattle across the pastures, a serious and plaintive calm blowing through the hay meadow. It was a hush that stood in opposition to the chatter and noise of my favorite game, but it was a part of me as well.
When Mantle said, “You can take the kid out of the game,” Gehrig finished his sentence by saying you couldn’t “take the game out of the man.”
Suddenly I remembered that they still watched baseball, even up there in heaven. And I smiled because I realized it wasn’t over for me. They might take the kid out of the game, but the man I was becoming would always be a fan.
Standing there between the oak trees and the old barn, beside the hay meadow to the west and the haggard pecan tree at the end of the fence row, I realized I might have one game left, or I might have two or three, but I was going to play every single one of them like it was game seven of the world series.
CONTINUED...
But the trouble was far from over and that became evident in the clouds gathering all along the western horizon the next morning. Heavy purple thunderheads tumbled over the rolling hills, ominous clouds, pregnant with the smell of rain and blowing with a fierce wind, far too cold for Texas in May. I wanted desperately to stay in bed, to pull the blanket up around my shoulders and drift back into the darkness of slumber again, to hide and wait there until the sun was a bright blinding yellow and the skies were blue and clear. But it was a school day and I had an algebra test.
In some ways, baseball is a game with a lot of similarities to that thing we call ‘life’. The reverse is also true: In a lot of ways, life is a game with a lot of similarities to the obsession we call ‘baseball’. For me, it was also true to say that when one or the other wasn’t going so well, the other suffered in direct proportion. And as fate or luck or the mischievous furies would have it, the car wouldn’t start that morning. That was something that the ghosts of Mickey Mantle or Lou Gehrig couldn’t fix, and it was just the thing to lock my mood in first gear for the day.
Mom called the neighbors to see if I could get a ride to school, but after my slow start, they weren’t willing to wait around. Instead, she drove back from town in the pouring rain and picked me up in time to catch the second half of third period, a civics class that I loathed.
“Of all the days to sleep in,” mom started.
“I know, I know,” I answered. The roads were thick with mud, the ditches flowing with brown rain water.
“If it keeps on like this –“
“They’ll cancel the game tonight,” I interrupted.
It kept raining and yes, they cancelled the game. I needed to go back out there and get on the mound, to mow some guys down with my fastball and curve, but it rained and rained. And rained some more. The regional office called and re-scheduled the game for the following week, making it a back-to-back Thursday, Friday playoff. Mr. Peterson assigned me the Thursday spot and with that, the long slow game of waiting began. A week without baseball. A whole week with nothing to do but go to school and finish some chores and maybe, the occasional coaching session in the hay meadow beside the barn.
In the interim, I made a 67 on the algebra test. My overall grade was still a B, but mom wasn’t pleased. The alternator was out on the old car, and it took just over $400 to get it replaced. Worst of all, the rain kept falling, a steady flow of intermittent showers every morning fading into a dull, steady hum of rainfall most of the night each night. On the Tuesday night before the regional playoffs, I dozed in my bed, lulled to sleep by the soft rhythmic noise of the wind and the rain gently tapping the window pane. After a couple of hours, I woke to find the curtain open and a bright white moon casting its silver hue throughout the room. It had a way of washing the color out of everything, so that the pictures on the walls, the books on the shelves, the desk and all its contents seemed re-cast in black and white, like some movie from the 1950s. At the foot of the bed, I noticed the figure of my mother, sitting with her back to me, her small form also shaded in the monochromatic light blue and soft grey tones. At some point, she had wondered in to my room, to talk I guess.
“Mom?” I said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, but she stopped me with a wave of her hand. And then I realized she was crying. Maybe she was trying not to cry, but I heard her sniffle, saw her wiping her nose with a Kleenex.
“Mom, it’s okay,” I tried again, “Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay.”
“It’s not going to be okay,” she said. “It’s not.” She shook her head from side to side, emphasizing the denial. “You were supposed to go to college, meet a girl, move away from here, but now….”
I couldn’t say anything. My lips were open to speak, but the words, any word, all words froze in my throat. She knew just what I had been thinking for the last several days. She knew and she understood that I didn’t want to stop playing baseball after my junior year, stop playing so that I could help with the farm. She realized what that meant, that it would probably be an end to any chance of college for me. And though we never talked about it openly, she recognized that it also meant the end of whatever chances I had for a career in baseball.
“I know you’re good,” she continued, motioning towards my glove and jersey resting prominently in the chair across the room. “And I know you can play at a higher level. I don’t know what that means, or if it means you’ll be rich or famous one day, but I know what you have is special.”
Fool that I am, I half expected her next words to be something like they say in movies on television during those lazy Saturday afternoons in the middle of summer. I wanted her to say that ‘Whatever it takes, we’ll find a way.’ Somehow, some way. It was a cliché and a promise that she didn’t really have the ability to keep, but I needed to hear it, just the same.
Instead, she said, “This farm is all I have left of your father.”
The words sank in, their meaning moved through me like a chill, and that feeling trembled through my chest like a roll of thunder.
“It’s all that I have left,” she continued, “And I wouldn’t even begin to know how to let it go. Or what I would do after it was gone.”
“Mom, you don’t have to,” I said at last. “After the season’s over, it’s just you and me. We’ll fix everything. It will all be better then. You’ll see.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, standing up to leave, but looking back at me from the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry and I will always be sorry for this, but I can’t see any other way.”
In the morning, she offered me a cup of coffee, her way of saying that I was a man and ready to take on the world and all of its challenges. I accepted it and we both sat at the kitchen table, cradling our mugs between the palms of our individual sets of folded hands. It was a surreal scene, almost like two people pressing their fingers together in prayer. Neither one of us said a word about the night before, but silence has a way of conveying its own set of emotions. In the stillness just after dawn, I thought I understood what it must be like for her to be so connected to a place, to not know how to be in any other. The picture I imagined was frightening, like a thick stand of trees, where no light penetrates. There was darkness and a sense of loneliness in that place, and I didn’t want to banish my mother to it; so I resigned myself to the fate we had settled on in the silver moonlight. With that resolution firmly in mind, the sun broke through a spot in the clouds and a sliver of golden light spilled across the table between us, illuminating the entire kitchen with a long bright beaming shaft of daylight.
I finished my coffee, got ready and went to school; but all morning I kept thinking about my mother crying at the foot of the bed in the middle of the night. Without even trying, I could still hear her confirming my worst fears. As soon as the season was over, I became a farmer. Forever. Whatever childhood I had left would only last as long as our team’s playoff run. Said differently, when the Ramblewood Wranglers lost and were consequently eliminated from the state tournament, my baseball career ended. Likewise, with every game we won, my innocence was prolonged another two or three days, but at most, I only had the final three weeks of May, the first few days of June.
That afternoon, the day before the regional playoffs, I cut hay in the south pasture, losing myself in the grinding rumble of the old John Deere tractor. The ground was still spongy, but in Texas, the early summer sun has a way of baking the moisture out of the red clay soil.
At the end of each row, I turned the tractor and focused my mind on delivering a perfect fastball, an excellent curve. As I rode down the next line of tall grass, I concentrated on willing that imaginary ball from the mound through the strike zone and across the plate. At the edge of the pasture, I wheeled the machine around and steered it down the next row, again floating with my pretend pitch out across the field and right past the fantasy hitter’s swinging arc. In a couple of hours, I had cut all of the grass in that section and in my mind, I had pitched six innings of pretty good baseball.
During that time, I came to a couple of good sound conclusions as well. I loved baseball. It wasn’t just something I did to try and connect with my dad. It was something that I enjoyed for all of those reasons that are so often cited, but still so hard to explain: The “feel” of the scuffed ball in my hands, the smell of a worn leather glove, the crack of the bat, the sound of the crowd, the warm summer air. All of it made my mind hum with energy, filled my chest with a buzzing pride, and I needed that rush to be truly alive in this world.
The second was that I loved my family – mom, grandma, and especially the memory of my father – loved them more than baseball even, and if the farm was their home, then I loved the farm too. There was a simple, but fluid poetry involved in mowing the pasture in the amber light before sunset with the locusts whining their machine chirp just inside the tree line. I found I quite enjoyed the call of the whippoorwills and the “Bob White” quails, as they passed their nightly news through the tree tops. There was a perfect, solemn music in the lowing of cattle across the pastures, a serious and plaintive calm blowing through the hay meadow. It was a hush that stood in opposition to the chatter and noise of my favorite game, but it was a part of me as well.
When Mantle said, “You can take the kid out of the game,” Gehrig finished his sentence by saying you couldn’t “take the game out of the man.”
Suddenly I remembered that they still watched baseball, even up there in heaven. And I smiled because I realized it wasn’t over for me. They might take the kid out of the game, but the man I was becoming would always be a fan.
Standing there between the oak trees and the old barn, beside the hay meadow to the west and the haggard pecan tree at the end of the fence row, I realized I might have one game left, or I might have two or three, but I was going to play every single one of them like it was game seven of the world series.
CONTINUED...
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