Shoeless Joe (21 page)

As I open the door into the common room, I see Eddie Scissons, the oldest living Chicago Cub, sitting in a square green easy chair. His back is to me, but the mane of white hair easily identifies him.

“Kid Scissons,” I say, stepping around his chair in order to face him. I stick out my hand.

He half stands, but his creaking joints won’t let him make it all the way. “Been expecting you,” he says. “At least I think I have,” he goes on, a puzzled expression drifting across his face. “I dreamed about you last night and I said to myself, I bet Ray’s gonna come see me today.”

He settles back into the chair, but instead of looking at me he looks at the floor. “Whatever you want to say to me, get on with it,” he says to the faded carpet that was once the color of a green apple.

“It’s nothing bad,” I say. “You must be remembering your dream. I want you to come out to the farm with me. I have something to show you—something I should have shown you a long time ago.” I find myself pacing back and forth. He looks up at me, his eyes the faded blue of dried bachelor’s buttons. He stares over his hands, which are cupped over the serpent-head cane.

“Did you just come in from the farm?” he says finally.

“I’ve been away,” I reply, “for a couple of weeks. I have people I want you to meet. Have you heard of J. D. Salinger, the writer? And a baseball player—he played in the majors—no, that’s not right, quite. Anyway, I want you to meet him.”

Eddie fidgets in the chair. His head is down. He mumbles something about someone named Judy, who I assume is a supervisor at the center.

“Come on,” I insist. “You don’t have to check with anybody here, and you live alone.” I reach down and take his arm and help him to stand. We move a step or two toward the door.

“You’re not gonna hurt me, are you?” says Eddie.

“Eddie! For heaven’s sake, it’s me, Ray Kinsella. I’m taking you out to your old farm.” And I wonder how much Eddie’s mind has deteriorated since I last saw him.

Once Eddie has walked a few steps, it becomes easier for him to move, and we make it down the front steps and over to the car without incident, Eddie all the time looking around as if he expects to be attacked from ambush.

Salinger moves into the back seat beside Moonlight Graham and his dolorous duffel bag, and with much difficulty, like storing an open folding chair, we get Eddie into the passenger seat.

I burble like a meadowlark at everything I see. I am happier than I have been since I left Iowa. A quick drive through town, a stop at First National Bank to see if we are still solvent, a stop at New Pioneer Co-Op for groceries, and then we head east to the farm. I can feel Annie’s warmth pulling me, smell the sweetness of her, pure as spring rain, her tongue tart as raspberry. Annie is an Iowa girl, raised on a farm. I’ve only seen pictures of her father, a man I’m almost glad I never met. Not that we wouldn’t have liked each other, it’s just that I’m uncomfortable with most men, especially “men’s men” who know all about gears, rifles, and how to splice rope. They always make me feel like the new kid on the block, tolerated but not accepted, and they always act as though they have a common secret that I will never be party to.

A picture of Annie’s father still sits on the darkly severe mantel in my mother-in-law’s home—a freckle-faced man with home-cut hair and a sunburned neck. He stares frankly at the world, with Annie’s green eyes. When Annie was nine, he found his way into the whirling gears of a John Deere harvester.

Annie’s mother relishes telling the story of how it took the other members of the threshing crew over four hours to recover all the parts of him from the clanking machine. I think I would have liked him, and, more important, that he would have liked me. He went to church just to keep peace in the family, Annie has told me, and he chewed snuff and was known to drop in at Donnelly’s Bar in Iowa City for an occasional beer. Annie must have inherited her loving nature from him, and she says she remembers him once attending a baseball game when he was in Kansas City for a Great Plains Corn Growers convention.

The kind of people I absolutely cannot tolerate are those, like Annie’s mother, who never let you forget they are religious. It seems to me that a truly religious person would let his life be example enough, would not let his religion interfere with being a human being, and would not be so insecure as to have to fawn publicly before his gods. My mother-in-law can and does work the Lord into every conversation, whether it concerns coffee prices, Karin’s cat, or the weather. The understatement of the year would be to say we do not like each other.

When I appeared at her door to apply for the room she had advertised for rent in the
Daily Iowan
, the first question she asked me was, “Are you a Christian?” For the remainder of the interview, she was cold and distant, the sharp light from a circular tri-light glittering off the rims of her glasses. Housing was very scarce. I left my phone number, but held out little hope. But it was early October, her Christian roomer had been cut by the football team and had left for Georgia, after kicking a hole in his door and writing misspelled four-letter words on the wall with a crayon. I was living in a basement room where waterdrops the size of thumbtacks condensed on the walls, where the bedsheets were always cold and wet, and where large black waterbugs clacked across the linoleum all night every night. It turned out that she needed the money even if it came from a non-Christian wallet, and I needed a dry place to sleep.

As we drive toward the farm, I think of Annie and me walking, with our arms around each other’s waists, toward the ballfield, in the evenings when the clouds are a dozen shades of pink, rose, and chocolate, looking as though they have been stirred in a blender.

Annie is a spectator, not a fan. Like a reader who reads a whole book without caring who wrote it, she watches, enjoys, forgets, and doesn’t read the box scores and standings in the morning paper.

I have had good reason not to tell Eddie Scissons about the baseball field I’ve built. These past few green and gold summers, I have kept it a secret. We have Eddie out to the farm for dinner every couple of months, and I drop in at the Friendship Center to listen to him talk about baseball. But when he comes to the farm, I park at the side of the house, where my enterprise is not visible, and Eddie’s arthritis keeps him from exploring the farm himself. When Annie suggests that Eddie would enjoy seeing the field, I choose not to answer her.

“A guy from First National phoned me yesterday,” Eddie said to me during my last visit to the Friendship Center before I set out for New Hampshire.

“Oh,” I said.

“Says you’re spending four thousand dollars for a new mini-tractor. Wanted to know if you were keeping your mortgage payments up-to-date.”

“Oh,” I said again.

“I said you were. What bankers don’t know doesn’t hurt them. But what do you need with one of them little tractors?”

There was no way that I could explain to Eddie, at least so he would understand. I bought the new tractor, an International Cub Cadet, so I could mow the outfield grass. It was taking me a full day to mow the ballpark with my rattletrap gas mower that had to be refueled every few circuits of the field, and stalled over and over if the grass was wet or more than an inch long. But Eddie knew enough about corn farming to know that there was no reason for me to own such a machine. And the mortgage payments were indeed in arrears, and the situation would get worse before it got better. I rationalized that it was not as if Eddie needed the money, and I fidgeted and gave evasive answers until he stopped asking, but I knew he was angry with me.

We drive east toward Annie, my farm, my miracle; and I have no idea what is going to happen when we get there. I might as well be the Wizard of Oz, Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmanuel Ambrose Diggs, heading for a Kansas farm in company of a scarecrow, a tin man, and a cowardly lion, with one eye cocked lest the wicked witch come swooping by, riding a broom and clutching a screaming black cat to her bosom.

I feel just a touch of depression, as if a hand were passed in front of my eyes, as I turn the Datsun into the long driveway and, with a rumble, cross the metal cattle guard that keeps livestock from escaping to the roadway. Everything seems smaller than I remember it. The house is neither so stately as I have described it to Jerry and Moonlight, nor as grand as I remember it. A granary lists awkwardly, weathered gray as dust. The ballpark looks ragged and forlorn.

But as I ease the car to a stop, a few of Annie’s white Wyandotte hens strolling out of the way, staring at the car with bland orange eyes, Karin bolts from the back door, a blur of white blouse and pink pedal pushers. She flings herself into my arms as I step from the car, and hugs my neck in unrestrained joy, smelling sweet as red clover.

“Daddy, Daddy. It’s
really
you. I can tell,” she shouts.

An unusual greeting, it seems to me.

“I have a surprise. I have a surprise,” she shouts, kissing me madly on one cheek and then the other. She pulls back to look at me, and her eyes widen as she spots the scar at my left eyebrow, pale pink as a worm.

“It
is
really you, isn’t it?” Her green eyes are troubled.

“Of course. You’re silly.” I hug her to me, kissing her soft cheeks while she wiggles like a cat being dressed in doll’s clothes.

Salinger has squeezed out from behind the driver’s seat, walked around the car, and is slowly easing Eddie out of the passenger side, while one of Moonlight’s long, dark arms pushes on Eddie’s back.

I walk around the car, still holding Karin.

“This is Jerry Salinger,” I say. “You remember Mr. Scissons, and the fellow in the back is Archie Graham.”

Salinger makes polite noises. Karin scarcely glances at any of them.

“I have a surprise,” she says again, and wriggles from my grasp. I realize I have forgotten to bring her anything as a gift, except a jar of black olives from the Co-Op that she’ll eat later all by herself. But she hasn’t noticed.

She climbs the three faded steps to the back door, turns, and faces us from the top one, spreads her arms as if she were a ringmaster about to begin an introduction, squares her chin, and begins talking in a twangy, singsong voice quite unlike her own: “The world’s strangest babies are here. You’ve talked about them, wondered about them, now you owe it to yourself to see them. Once you’ve seen them, you’ll agree this is a show the whole family should see. Mothers bring your daughters. Fathers bring your sons.”

Annie appears behind Karin, smiling through the screen. She stares down where Karin continues her spiel, and flexes her hands in a gesture of helplessness. I want to touch Annie, but we have to wait. The others stand uncomfortably in the yard, assuming that I know what is going on. They must think I’ve forgotten to mention that Karin is an aspiring Shirely Temple, Tatum O’Neil, or whoever.

“You’ve read about them, heard about them, now come in and see them. Look at all the pictures—read all the signs, buy a ticket, and come on in. You owe it to yourself to see these strange babies. The world’s strangest babies are here. See the famous Siamese twins. The gorilla baby. The baby born to a twelve-year-old mother. Mothers bring your daughters. Fathers bring your sons. Buy a ticket and come on in.”

Karin stops and smiles, proud as a cat with a dead bird in its teeth.

I’m not certain what to do.

Jerry applauds politely, a bewildered look on his face. Eddie leans on his cane. Moonlight is extracting his duffel bag from the back of the car.

“Your brother’s here,” Annie says, bouncing down the steps. She gets to within a few feet of me, and then she sees the scar. “Richard, what are you doing—no—you’re not …”

“It’s me,” I peep. “I walked into a pillar at Fenway Park in Boston. Jerry will vouch for me.”

“Of course,” says Annie, but she still hasn’t touched me.

Richard, after all these years. He must have something to do with Karin’s recitation.

“Karin was born at two thirty-one P.M. on a Saturday afternoon,” I say rapidly. “Her second name is Irene. On our first real date, you and I went to the Iowa Theater on Dubuque Street, to see a Walt Disney movie. I spilled Coke on the floor under our seats, and our shoes stuck to the sidewalk as we walked back up Johnson Street toward your mother’s home.”

“Oh, Ray, I knew it was you,” says Annie, and she fits her mouth inside mine for a few seconds. Instead of crushing her to me as I have fantasized, I barely touch her shoulders with my fingertips, as I let the thrill of her surge through me like an electric shock.

“This is Annie,” I say. “Annie, I’d like you to meet J. D. Salinger.”

Annie steps forward, wiping away some red-pepper curls with a hand that has recently been immersed in flour. The curls retreat, leaving a white half-moon sketched on her freckled forehead. She smiles, wipes the floury hand on the thigh of her jeans, shakes hands.

“Jerry,” says Salinger. “People who know me call me Jerry.”

“Where did Richard come from? How did he find us? What’s he been doing all these years?” I ask questions, but they don’t seem to get answered.

There is much confusion as we help Eddie into the house and I introduce Moonlight Graham. They must think it strange that I haven’t seen my brother in over twenty years; that I have hardly mentioned having an identical twin; that my wife almost didn’t know me. But Salinger only grins good-naturedly, and I imagine him salting the scene away for use in a future novel.

“What about the baseball team?” Moonlight interjects during a brief lull.

“Later,” I say, and he goes back to his coffee.

Eddie sits, hands on cane, looking unhappy.

“You should have seen Karin,” says Annie, laughing brightly. “She ran right into Richard’s arms when he got out of the taxi in the yard. Then she turned her head away and said ‘You smell funny, Daddy.’ It took her a few days to get over that: Every time Richard would walk into a room, she’d start to say Daddy.”

“And you?” I ask.

“The first words he said to me were, ‘I’m not Ray. I have a scar.’ And he took off his cap so I could see it. It
was
a shock, though, I have to admit.”