The Art of Fielding: A Novel (65 page)

Often Owen dropped by as late as three or four, mug of tea in hand. Schwartz would share his recent discoveries; Owen, as he listened, would purse his lips into something like a smile. They would seal their evening by smoking a wordless joint on the front steps of Scull Hall. Tonight, though, Owen didn’t come, and Schwartz, feeling rather literary, took down Affenlight’s
Riverside Shakespeare
and settled in behind the desk to page through it. He scanned the marginalia, paused to read some familiar passages. He somehow felt deeply at home here, in Affenlight’s office, among Affenlight’s thoughts, near Affenlight’s death. Deeply at home but also tenuously so; he considered it a privilege to serve as the de facto custodian of Affenlight’s papers, and he felt a constant worry that someone closer to Affenlight, or at least better versed in American literature, would show up to kick him out. But it hadn’t happened yet, and as the summer crept by it seemed less and less likely to happen. Which saddened Schwartz, in a way: what a smart and thoughtful man Affenlight had been, and how little he’d be remembered.

The Sperm-Squeezers
was a beautiful book, the early exemplar of a critical genre; perhaps grad students would read it for another decade, and intellectual historians mention it for a decade after that. And perhaps Schwartz, as he readied all this paper for the college’s library, could pull together a second, posthumous book, a collection of essays and speeches that a university press would publish. But a Guert Affenlight wasn’t a Herman Melville; wouldn’t burst back into prominence after death and fifty years’ obscurity. His portrait would hang in the dining hall, alongside those of the other former presidents; four years from now, only the kitchen staff would recognize his face. No doubt some conference room or floor of the library would be renamed in his honor—or, Schwartz thought now, what about the baseball diamond? The current name, Westish Field, was strictly by default. Affenlight Field had a nice ring to it. Was that alliteration or assonance? The crowds there usually constituted a small group, though that might change now that they were national champs.

The office door creaked open, waking Schwartz, who’d been dozing at Affenlight’s desk. Morning light leaked through the blinds. Schwartz jumped up, not wanting to get caught by Mrs. McCallister, who preferred both him and the dog to sleep upstairs. But it was Pella, freshly showered and dressed for work. She hadn’t so much as poked her head in here all summer. “Hi,” she said, and plunked down on the love seat, and told him what she wanted to do.

Schwartz said nothing for a while; just leaned back in the president’s chair. She’s been reading too much, he thought—had drifted across that line that separated what you might find in a book from what you might do. “I think we should think about this,” he finally said.

“I’ve
been
thinking about it.”

Maybe it was the morning light, or the heat of the shower still flushing her cheeks, but she looked sharpened and repaired. “We have to,” she said. “We have to.”

“You can’t just dig up a body.”

“Why not? It’s my dad. It’s my plot. It’s my coffin.” She swept a hand over the room. “You’ve been through all this stuff. So show me where it says, ‘Put me in a box. With fake gold trim. And then stick it in the ground.’ Show me where it says
that.
”

Schwartz went to the love seat and sat down beside her. He zipped her hoodie up to her chin and gently knotted the strings. This gesture used to bug her—it bugged her right now—but at least she’d figured out what he meant by it: you are mine.

“It just makes sense,” she said. “My dad loved this lake. He spent three years on a ship. He spent half my childhood rowing on the Charles. It’s what he would have wanted.”

Schwartz, having passed the summer among all this Affenlight-annotated Melvilleania, the memoirs of whaling ships, merchant ships, naval ships, couldn’t disagree. “I understand why you want to do it this way—”

“We should have done it this way to begin with. If I’d had time to think it through, we would have. If I hadn’t been so upset.”

“I see what you’re saying. But it’s just not possible. It’s a felony, for one thing”—Schwartz was bluffing, but he figured it could easily be a felony—“and you’ve got to remember how deep that hole is. And how much that box weighs. It would take forever. One person walks by and we’re sitting in jail.”

“Fine by me.” Pella smiled, and Schwartz knew that he had lost the argument, had lost it before it began. He ran his hand over his deepening widow’s peak, scratched his softening belly. He hadn’t worked out once since May.

He half hoped that Owen would veto the scheme, but Owen just nodded and said, “Call Henry.”

80

H
enry,” Owen said warmly, wrapping his slender fingers around what remained of his roommate’s biceps. “Is that you? You’re skinnier than I am.”

Schwartz held out his fist and Henry bumped it with his own, and Pella could tell from their somber, ceremonious expressions that their feud, or whatever you’d call it, had ended. Men were such odd creatures. They didn’t duel anymore, even fistfights had come to seem barbaric, the old casual violence all channeled through institutions now, but still they loved to uphold their ancient codes. And what they loved even more was to forgive each other. Pella felt like she knew a lot about men, but she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be one of them, to be in a room of them with no woman present, to participate in their silent rites of contrition and redemption.

“Hey,” Henry said to her.

“Hey.” It seemed strange not to hug, so after a brief fit of school-dance awkwardness they finally did. He smelled ripe, like an adolescent boy not yet attuned to the fact that he needed to wear deodorant. It’s because he’s been on the bus all day, she thought, and hoped this was true—hoped he hadn’t smelled this way since June. She held on to him for an extra second, long enough to detect an undertone of sticky Greyhound pleather in the scent of his skin.

They’d arranged to meet here, at the Melville statue. The afternoon had been scorching, and the dog-day humidity had compressed itself into a drumming rain that now, just after dusk, was dwindling to an ambient mist. The lake, churned-up but calm, looked like fresh-poured cement. Already the days were shorter than they’d been in June.

Two shovels, a cooler, a picnic basket, and a giant vinyl football equipment bag leaned against the weathered brick of Scull. They shouldered the gear and set off. Henry didn’t ask where they were going or why; maybe he’d figured it out, or maybe he’d forgotten to care. It could be hard to tell with Henry, and Pella didn’t know what effect the summer had had on him. When she’d called his parents’ house in South Dakota, she’d merely said, “We want you to help us with something before Owen leaves.” And he’d merely said, “Who’s
we?
”

They crossed the Small Quad and then the Large in silence, walking four abreast. Contango sauntered along behind, eyeing the occasional darting sparrow with lazy suspicion. The grass of the practice fields had been burned khaki by the endless heat.

“Let’s stop a moment. My arms are exhausted.” Owen set down the beer-laden cooler and took from Pella the picnic basket, which he’d packed. He opened the wicker lid and took out a bottle of scotch from her dad’s collection. “You first,” he said, handing it to her. She lifted it to her lips and took a long slow glug. It burned nicely all the way to her stomach. Great minds, she thought, patting the flask in her windbreaker pocket as she handed the bottle to Owen, who drank and gave it to Mike. And then to Henry, and back to her. When the bottle was half gone, they put it in the basket and moved on.

Three rolls of sod had been laid over Affenlight’s grave, and though the grass had grown long and damp, the edges of the rolls were still visible. One of the spades had a flat, rectangular head, while the other’s was heart-shaped. Mike took the flat one and plunged it into a sod seam. The grass roots began to yield with a series of weak pops and groans as he leaned his weight on the handle. He worked his way around all three rolls. He and Henry lifted them off the grave and laid them aside.

They worked mostly in silence, Mike with the flat spade, Henry with the heart-shaped one. Owen, his reading light clipped to the brim of his cap, held the battery-powered lantern and distributed cans of High Life from the cooler. Pella sat nearby on an upright headstone, drinking scotch and stroking Contango’s fur. The recent rain had softened the topsoil, rendering it easy to dig through, but beneath that the earth was pale and rock hard, and soon their progress slowed.

Sometimes a cloudless swatch of sky would blow past the moon, and Pella could see the outline of Mike’s face in slightly sharper relief. It was strange the way he loved her: a sidelong and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention. Like their first meeting on the steps of the gym, when he’d hardly so much as glanced at her. With David and every guy before David, what passed for love had always been eye to eye, nose to nose; she felt watched, observed, like the prize inhabitant of a zoo, and she wound up pacing, preening, watching back, to fit the part. Whereas Mike was always beside her. She would stand at the kitchen window and look out at the quad, at the Melville statue and beyond that the beach and the rolling lake, and realize that Mike, for however long, had been standing beside her, staring at the same thing.

A light rain began to fall. Henry stopped digging and leaned on his shovel. The hole was shin-deep. The dog had fallen asleep. “Let me relieve you,” Owen said, but Henry waved him off. The night was close and soupy, so that the rain didn’t seem to be falling so much as oozing out of the wet air, and the sweat that trickled down Mike’s and Henry’s cheeks and noses mixed with the ooze as well. Henry looked exhausted. Owen declared that it was time for a break; they sat on headstones and ate pâté-and-Triscuit sandwiches, drank more beer. Pella passed around her scotch. After that, Henry held the lantern while Owen and Pella took turns digging beside Mike.

It wasn’t long before Schwartz’s spade banged against one of the metal runners on the casket’s lid. The unexpected contact sent a rude judder through his forearms, like fouling a fastball off the neck of the bat in cold weather. At the noise they stopped and looked at one another in the moonless dimness. Their plan wasn’t just a plan anymore. Schwartz felt more worried by the second. Not worried that they’d get caught; his worry, his fear, was more obscure. He was thinking about his mom. He looked at Pella, who nodded with fierce and possibly drunken resolve. “It’s okay,” she said.

Schwartz had planned the excavation as scrupulously as he could. First they widened and deepened the hole to free the sides of the casket; then they dug out, at the head, a space large enough for Schwartz to climb down into and stand. He knew from the funeral-home director that the oak casket weighed 240 pounds; that plus Affenlight’s weight was a lot, but he needed to hoist only one end of it. He hunkered down in his deepest catcher’s squat, grasped the single metal handle at the casket’s head with both hands, and said a little prayer that his back would hold up. He drove through his heels, yanked with his arms and shoulders, felt the pain knife down his spine. Was this the origin of the word
deadlift?
Surely not, but it was the same motion.

That first effort was needed to free the casket from the earth beneath. The second would be the tricky one; more a power clean than a deadlift. He dropped low, rocked even lower. He exploded upward, jerked his hands toward his chin. As the head of the casket moved upward, Schwartz let go, dropped his hips, maneuvered his hands and shoulder, just barely, beneath the casket’s bottom. Then it was a matter of walking it up to vertical, letting it tip over and lean, almost upright, against the far side of the hole. A little rain was falling. It wasn’t a ceremonious procedure—he could feel Affenlight’s body sliding inside the box—but at least it was getting done.

Henry and Pella and Owen grabbed hold of the casket’s handles from above. They pulled from above while he tried to push from below. He’d imagined this part would be easier, but his friends weren’t strong, and their footing on the wet grass was poor. The casket moved inch by inch, and he bore its weight from below. “On three,” he said. “Owen, count.” And as Owen counted Schwartz got down as low as possible, grunted, gave a last Olympian shove. Henry and Pella and Owen stumbled backward. The casket slid over the lip of the grave and, now upside down, settled beside the hill of dirt they’d made.

The rain had slowed again. Schwartz dug in his equipment bag for the sanitary gear he’d brought—facemasks, nose plugs, elbow-length rubber gloves. He handed a set of gear to Henry. Pella and Owen dragged Contango off to the opposite side of the cemetery. Mike could hear her laughter ring through the darkness; it sounded a bit hectic, but not worryingly so. He was glad she’d finally gotten drunk.

He reached a rubber glove into the cooler and produced two cans of beer, handed one to Henry. They drained them at a long slow gulp.