Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (40 page)

Long Johnson on the mound did a slow serpentine windup. It was like a snake on a limb of a tree, uncoiling, suddenly darting at you. Instantly Johnson’s hand was in front of him, open, like black fangs, empty. And the white pill slashed across the plate with a sound like a razor.

‘Stee-rike!’

Jimmie Cosner put his bat down and stood glaring at the umpire. He said nothing for a long time. Then he spat deliberately near the catcher’s foot, took up the yellow maple bat again, and swung it so the sun glinted the rim of it in a nervous halo. He twitched and sidled it on his thinboned shoulder, and his mouth opened and shut over his long nicotined teeth.

Clap!
went the catcher’s mitt.

Cosner turned, stared.

The catcher, like a black magician, his white teeth gleaming, opened up his oily glove. There, like a white flower glowing, was the baseball.

‘Stee-rike two!’ said the umpire, far away in the heat.

Jimmie Cosner laid his bat across the plate and hunched his freckled hands on his hips. ‘You mean to tell me that was a strike?’

‘That’s what I said,’ said the umpire. ‘Pick up the bat.’

‘To hit you on the head with,’ said Cosner sharply.

‘Play ball or hit the showers!’

Jimmie Cosner worked his mouth to collect enough saliva to spit, then angrily swallowed it, swore a bitter oath instead. Reaching down, he raised the bat, poised it like a musket on his shoulder.

And here came the ball! It started out small and wound up big in front of him. Powie! An explosion off the yellow bat. The ball spiraled up and up. Jimmie lit out for first base. The ball paused, as if thinking about gravity up there in the sky. A wave came in on the shore of the lake and fell down. The crowd yelled. Jimmie ran. The ball made its decision, came down. A lithe high-yellar was under it, fumbled it. The ball spilled to the turf, was plucked up, hurled to first base.

Jimmie saw he was going to be out. So he jumped feet-first at the base.

Everyone saw his cleats go into Big Poe’s ankle. Everybody saw the red blood. Everybody heard the shout, the shriek, saw the heavy clouds of dust rising.

‘I’m safe!’ protested Jimmie two minutes later.

Big Poe sat on the ground. The entire dark team stood around him. The doctor bent down, probed Big Poe’s ankle, saying, ‘Mmmm,’ and ‘Pretty bad, Here.’ And he swabbed medicine on it and put a white bandage on it.

The umpire gave Cosner the cold-water eye. ‘Hit the showers!’

‘Like hell!’ said Cosner. And he stood on that first base, blowing his cheeks out and in, his freckled hands swaying at his side. ‘I’m safe. I’m staying right here, by God! No nigger put
me
out.’

‘No,’ said the umpire. ‘A white man did.
Me. Get!
’

‘He dropped the ball! Look up the rules! I’m safe!’

The umpire and Cosner stood glaring at each other.

Big Poe looked up from having his swollen ankle tended. His voice was thick and gentle and his eyes examined Jimmie Cosner gently.

‘Yes, he’s safe. Mr Umpire. Leave him stay. He’s safe.’

I was standing right there. I heard the whole thing. Me and some other kids had run out on the field to see. My mother kept calling me to come back to the stands.

‘Yes, he’s safe,’ said Big Poe again.

All the colored men let out a yell.

‘What’sa matter with you, black boy? You get hit in the head?’

‘You heard me,’ replied Big Poe quietly. He looked at the doctor bandaging him. ‘He’s safe. Leave him stay.’

The umpire swore.

‘Okay, okay. So he’s safe!’

The umpire stalked off, his back stiff, his neck red.

Big Poe was helped up. ‘Better not walk on that,’ cautioned the doctor.

‘I can walk,’ whispered Big Poe carefully.

‘Better not play.’

‘I can play,’ said Big Poe gently, certainly, shaking his head, wet streaks drying under his white eyes. ‘I’ll play
good
.’ He looked no place at all. ‘I’ll play plenty good.’

‘Oh,’ said the second-base colored man. It was a funny sound.

All the colored men looked at each other, at Big Poe, then at Jimmie Cosner, at the sky, at the lake, the crowd. They walked off quietly to take their places. Big Poe stood with his bad foot hardly touching the ground, balanced. The doctor argued. But Big Poe waved him away.

‘Batter up!’ cried the umpire.

We got settled in the stands again. My mother pinched my leg and asked me why I couldn’t sit still. It got warmer. Three or four more waves fell on the shore line. Behind the wire screen the ladies fanned their wet faces and the men inched their rumps forward on the wooden planks, held papers over their scowling brows to see Big Poe standing like a redwood tree out there on first base. Jimmie Cosner standing in the immense shade of that dark tree.

Young Moberg came up to bat for our side.

‘Come on. Swede, come on, Swede!’ was the cry, a lonely cry, like a dry bird, from out on the blazing green turf. It was Jimmie Cosner calling. The grandstand stared at him. The dark heads turned on their moist pivots in the outfield; the black faces came in his direction, looking him over, seeing his thin, nervously arched back. He was the center of the universe.

‘Come on, Swede! Let’s show these black boys!’ laughed Cosner.

He trailed off. There was a complete silence. Only the wind came through the high, glittering trees.

‘Come on, Swede, hang one on that old pill…’

Long Johnson, on the pitcher’s mound, cocked his head. Slowly, deliberately, he eyed Cosner. A look passed between him and Big Poe, and Jimmie Cosner saw the look and shut up and swallowed, hard.

Long Johnson took his time with his windup.

Cosner took a lead off base.

Long Johnson stopped loading his pitch.

Cosner skipped back to the bag, kissed his hand, and patted the kiss dead center on the plate. Then he looked up and smiled around.

Again the pitcher coiled up his long, hinged arm, curled loving dark fingers on the leather pellet, drew it back and—Cosner danced off first base. Cosner jumped up and down like a monkey. The pitcher did not look at him. The pitcher’s eyes watched him secretively, slyly, amusedly,
sidewise. Then, snapping his head, the pitcher scared Cosner back to the plate. Cosner stood and jeered.

The third time Long Johnson made as if to pitch, Cosner was far off the plate and running toward second.

Snap
went the pitcher’s hand.
Bom
went the ball in Big Poe’s glove at first base.

Everything was sort of frozen. Just for a second.

There was the sun in the sky, the lake and the boats on it, the grandstands, the pitcher on his mound standing with his hand out and down after tossing the ball; there was Big Poe with the ball in his mighty black hand; there was the infield staring, crouching in at the scene, and there was Jimmie Cosner running, kicking up dirt, the only moving thing in the entire summer world.

Big Poe leaned forward, sighted toward second base, drew back his mighty right hand, and hurled that white baseball straight down along the line until it reached Jimmie Cosner’s head.

Next instant, the spell was broken.

Jimmie Cosner lay flat on the burning grass. People boiled out of the grandstands. There was swearing, and women screaming, a clattering of wood as the men rushed down the wooden boards of the bleachers. The colored team ran in from the field. Jimmie Cosner lay there. Big Poe, no expression on his face, limped off the field, pushing white men away from him like clothespins when they tried stopping him. He just picked them up and threw them away.

‘Come on, Douglas!’ shrieked Mother, grabbing me. ‘Let’s get home! They might have razors! Oh!’

That night, after the near riot of the afternoon, my folks stayed home reading magazines. All the cottages around us were lighted. Everybody was home. Distantly I heard music. I slipped out the back door into the ripe summer-night darkness and ran toward the dance pavilion. All the lights were on, and music played.

But there were no white people at the tables. Nobody had come to the Jamboree.

There were only colored folks. Women in bright red and blue satin gowns and net stockings and soft gloves, with wine-plume hats, and men in glossy tuxedos. The music crashed out, up, down, and around the floor. And laughing and stepping high, flinging their polished shoes out and up in the cakewalk, were Long Johnson and Cavanaugh and Jiff Miller and Pete Brown, and—limping—Big Poe and Katherine, his girl, and all the other lawn-cutters and boatmen and janitors and chambermaids, all on the floor at one time.

It was so dark all around the pavilion; the stars shone in the black sky,
and I stood outside, my nose against the window, looking in for a long, long time, silently.

I went to bed without telling anyone what I’d seen.

I just lay in the dark smelling the ripe apples in the dimness and hearing the lake at night and listening to that distant, faint and wonderful music. Just before I slept I heard those last strains again:

‘—gonna dance out both of my shoes,
When they play those Jelly Roll Blues;
Tomorrow night at the Dark Town Strutters’ Ball!’

The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes, like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light. The three women’s mouths twitched over their work. Their bodies lay back and then imperceptibly forward, so that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured. Each woman looked to her own hands, as if quite suddenly she had found her heart beating there.

‘What time is it?’

‘Ten minutes to five.’

‘Got to get up in a minute and shell those peas for dinner.’

‘But—’ said one of them.

‘Oh yes, I forgot. How foolish of me…’ The first woman paused, put down her embroidery and needle, and looked through the open porch door, through the warm interior of the quiet house, to the silent kitchen. There upon the table, seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life, lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat, resilient jackets, waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.

‘Go hull them if it’ll make you feel good,’ said the second woman.

‘No,’ said the first. ‘I won’t. I just won’t.’

The third woman sighed. She embroidered a rose, a leaf, a daisy on a green field. The embroidery needle rose and vanished.

The second woman was working on the finest, most delicate piece of embroidery of them all, deftly poking, finding, and returning the quick needle upon innumerable journeys. Her quick black glance was on each motion. A flower, a man, a road, a sun, a house; the scene grew under her hand, a miniature beauty, perfect in every threaded detail.

‘It seems at times like this that it’s always your hands you turn to,’ she said, and the others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.

‘I believe,’ said the first lady, ‘that our souls are in our hands. For we do
everything
to the world with our hands. Sometimes I think we don’t use our hands half enough; it’s certain we don’t use our heads.’

They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing. ‘Yes,’ said the third lady, ‘when you look back on a whole lifetime, it seems you don’t remember faces so much as hands and what they did.’

They recounted to themselves the lids they had lifted, the doors they had opened and shut, the flowers they had picked, the dinners they had made, all with slow or quick fingers, as was their manner or custom. Looking back, you saw a flurry of hands, like a magician’s dream, doors popping wide, taps turned, brooms wielded, children spanked. The flutter of pink hands was the only sound; the rest was a dream without voices.

‘No supper to fix tonight or tomorrow night or the next night after that,’ said the third lady.

‘No windows to open or shut.’

‘No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.’

‘No papers to clip cooking articles out of.’

And suddenly they were crying. The tears rolled softly down their faces and fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.

‘This won’t help things,’ said the first lady at last, putting the back of her thumb to each under-eyelid. She looked at her thumb and it was wet.

‘Now look what I’ve done!’ cried the second lady, exasperated. The others stopped and peered over. The second lady held out her embroidery. There was the scene, perfect except that while the embroidered yellow sun shone down upon the embroidered green field, and the embroidered brown road curved toward an embroidered pink house, the man standing on the road had something wrong with his face.

‘I’ll just have to rip out the whole pattern, practically, to fix it right,’ said the second lady.

‘What a shame.’ They all stared intently at the beautiful scene with the flaw in it.

The second lady began to pick away at the thread with her little deft scissors flashing. The pattern came out thread by thread. She pulled and yanked, almost viciously. The man’s face was gone. She continued to seize at the threads.

‘What are you
doing
?’ asked the other woman.

They leaned and saw what she had done.

The man was gone from the road. She had taken him out entirely.

They said nothing but returned to their own tasks.

‘What time is it?’ asked someone.

‘Five minutes to five.’

‘Is it supposed to happen at five o’clock?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they’re not sure what it’ll do to anything, really, when it happens?’

‘No, not sure.’

‘Why didn’t we stop them before it got this far and this big?’

‘It’s twice as big as ever before. No, ten times, maybe a thousand.’

‘This isn’t like the first one or the dozen later ones. This is different. Nobody knows what it might do when it comes.’

They waited on the porch in the smell of roses and cut grass. ‘What time is it now?’

‘One minute to five.’

The needles flashed silver fire. They swam like a tiny school of metal fish in the darkening summer air.

Far away a mosquito sound. Then something like a tremor of drums. The three women cocked their heads, listening.

‘We won’t hear anything, will we?’

‘They say not.’

‘Perhaps we’re foolish. Perhaps we’ll go right on, after five o’clock, shelling peas, opening doors, stirring soups, washing dishes, making lunches, peeling oranges…’

‘My, how we’ll laugh to think we were frightened by an old experiment!’ They smiled a moment at each other.

‘It’s five o’clock.’

At these words, hushed, they all busied themselves. Their fingers darted. Their faces were turned down to the motions they made. They made frantic patterns. They made lilacs and grass and trees and houses and rivers in the embroidered cloth. They said nothing, but you could hear their breath in the silent porch air.

Thirty seconds passed.

The second woman sighed finally and began to relax.

‘I think I just
will
go shell those peas for supper,’ she said. ‘I—’

But she hadn’t time even to lift her head. Somewhere, at the side of her vision, she saw the world brighten and catch fire. She kept her head down, for she knew what it was. She didn’t look up, nor did the others, and in the last instant their fingers were flying; they didn’t glance about to see what was happening to the country, the town, this house, or even this porch. They were only staring down at the design in their flickering hands.

The second woman watched an embroidered flower go. She tried to embroider it back in, but it went, and then the road vanished, and the blades of grass. She watched a fire, in slow motion almost, catch upon the embroidered house and unshingle it, and pull each threaded leaf from the small green tree in the hoop, and she saw the sun itself pulled apart in the design. Then the fire caught upon the moving point of the needle while still it flashed; she watched the fire come along her fingers and arms and body, untwisting the yarn of her being so painstakingly tht she could see it in all its devilish beauty, yanking out the pattern from the material at hand. What it was doing to the other women or the furniture or the
elm tree in the yard, she never knew. For now, yes now! it was plucking at the white embroidery of her flesh, the pink thread of her cheeks, and at last it found her heart, a soft red rose sewn with fire, and it burned the fresh, embroidered petals away, one by delicate one…