The Art of Fielding: A Novel (66 page)
“Ready?” he said, and Henry nodded.
With effort they flipped the casket over. Schwartz undid the buckles. As he raised the lid he held his breath and stood as far back as possible, head turned, letting the first wave of whatever would come out disperse itself into the humid night.
“It’s okay,” Henry said. “We can do this.”
Schwartz nodded. He wondered how Emerson had done it—whether Emerson really
had
done it, after all. It was one thing to hear President Affenlight tell the story, one thing to imagine Emerson kneeling in the dirt in his suit, tears in his beard, lifting the simple wooden lid off a simple wooden casket. Your mind stayed trained on the emotional, the intellectual, the symbolic. Emerson became a character in a play, and his act became a myth, a source of meaning. You didn’t think about what Ellen Emerson’s decaying body looked like, or how it smelled: you couldn’t think about that if you tried.
Schwartz felt himself faltering. His face was still averted, and he wanted to keep it that way.
“It’s okay,” Henry said. “It’s not so bad.”
Schwartz, both heartened and abashed by the Skrimmer’s calm, turned his head. A shock ran through him, another current of obscure fear, but the shock passed, and Henry was right that it was not so bad—or at least it wasn’t so much worse than the viewing at the funeral. Affenlight’s body had slid toward the foot of the casket and was oddly, pathetically, contorted, but the embalming seemed to have held up through the hot summer, and the body seemed still to be his own.
They lifted him by the lapels of his suit, the pockets of his pants. They lowered him into the huge vinyl bag Schwartz had pilfered from the VAC, and into which he had inserted steel bars to ensure that the body would sink. He zipped the bag shut. They pulled off their gloves and masks, tossed them into the casket, clapped it shut. Nose plugs still in, they slathered their arms in diluted bleach, hoisted the bag, and carried it down to the beach. Owen and Pella rejoined them at the water’s edge, where a long rowboat awaited them. Luckily the water was calm. They tied Contango to the little pier and rowed out into the lake, tacking this way and that because they were drunk and none of them knew how to row.
T
hey were far, far out, dangerously far if you wanted to think of it that way, and even the few lights of Westish that pricked the distance seemed on the point of vanishing. Mike, who’d been doing the heavy rowing, grimacing in pain all the while, stopped and raised his oars from the water. Henry, behind him in the bow seat, did the same. The creak of the rowlocks ceased, as did the steady slosh of the blades, and all that remained was the slap of waves at the rowboat’s hull, the black sky all around.
Pella sat in the stern, Westish at her back, the lake ahead, though most of what she could see was Mike’s sweat-drenched chest, the shrug and drop of his big shoulders as he tried to catch his breath. What a face, she thought. Let it never be bearded again.
Alone at the prow sat Owen, his back to the rest of them. He looked out at the dark water, a hand laid softly on the material of the bag in which Pella’s father lay.
They were drifting now, the rowboat’s nose tacking softly to port, to the north. It was time, and Mike was looking at her, waiting for her to say that it was time, but even though it was her dad and her idea, she realized that she was waiting for Owen. Owen would know what to do. She found a warm can of beer beneath her seat—they’d brought the beers but not the cooler—and cracked it and handed it to Mike. Mike handed that one to Henry, and she found another.
Finally Owen turned around. He was wearing his Westish cap with the harpoon-skewered
W,
and behind the weak beam that streamed from his reading light his face was wet. He smiled, looked at Pella. “Would it be all right if I said something?”
They rearranged themselves, Owen and Henry on one bench, Pella and Mike on the opposite one, her dad in between. Owen passed the bottle of scotch.
“Perhaps we should bow our heads,” Owen said. “Don’t worry. I won’t invoke any bread-based religions.”
They bowed their heads. The beam of Owen’s reading light passed over each of them, settled on the navy vinyl bag at their feet. “Guert,” he began.
“At risk of becoming sentimental, let me say that you’ve been integral to my life for a long time. I read your book when I was fourteen, and it bolstered my courage at a moment when my courage was required.
“When we met, three years ago, it was because you selected me for the Maria Westish Award—another reason I’ll always be grateful to you. Because barring that I would never have come to Westish, and I would never have met the people who are with me now. My own dear friends, as the poet said.
“But it wasn’t until a short time ago that you and I became friends. And of course I regret that our time, your time, was so short.”
Owen’s voice wavered. He closed his eyes, opened them again.
“You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul—not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those who knew you.
“Which is partly why your death is so hard for us. It’s hard to accept that a soul like yours, which took a lifetime to build, could cease to exist. It makes us angry, furious at the universe, not to have you here.
“But of course your soul does exist, Guert, because you gave of it so unstintingly. It exists in your book, and in this school, and also in each of us. For that we’ll always be grateful.” Owen looked up, lifting the beam of his reading light. It passed over each of them again. He smiled. “And we miss your corporal form, which was also nice.”
Pella was weeping like crazy, as quietly as she could. That stuff about making a soul—she wondered whether her dad had really said it, or whether Owen had derived it himself, as a sort of synthesis of what her dad believed. Either way it was remarkable, and she glimpsed for the first time how close they were, how their relationship may not have been a static, one-sided kind of smitten worship, as she’d lazily imagined it, but a real and powerful thing.
She was shivering, and Mike put his arm around her. Despite the appalling heat of the day before and the day to come, despite the heat of the scotch she’d been drinking and drinking, both from Owen’s bottle and her own flask, the four a.m. breeze that came over the water felt cutting and frigid. It was time for her to say
something,
to do right by her father somehow, but it was impossible, there was too much to say and no way to say it.
Owen reached across and handed her something. A piece of paper, folded into quarters. She unfolded it, but it was too dark to see.
“Here.” Owen took off his Harpooners cap and, as Pella leaned forward, placed it on her head. In the beam of the battery-powered light she could see what he’d handed her: a typed copy of “The Lee Shore,” the short chapter of
Moby-Dick
that was her father’s favorite piece of writing, the source of his old password, and, not incidentally, the poetic epitaph of a brave and handsome man.
She’d known it by heart since she was six, and once she’d started she didn’t need the page. When her dad recited it in lecture he did so with a stage actor’s vigor, shouting his way through the exclamation points, as if to remind the students that old books contained strong feelings. She couldn’t do that now, but in a hushed way she tried to do the passage justice. Mike squeezed her hand.
When she’d finished, Mike took a pair of scissors from his pocket and cut slits in the bag, so that it would fill with water and sink. He and Henry knelt beside the body, cradled its length with both arms, and, very slowly so as not to capsize them all, scooped Affenlight up and over the side.
T
he four of them—five, including Contango—stood on a rocky stretch of beach that had been dragged by the Parks Department earlier in the summer and still showed sweeping parallel marks, like a fresh-raked infield.
“Will you take the dog?” Pella asked Mike. “I have to get to work.”
Schwartz frowned. “You promised you’d take the day off.”
She handed him the leash, winked at Henry with a cried-out eye. “You can have an off day…”
She wrapped Owen in a long hug, they whispered to each other, and she padded off toward the dining hall, flip-flops slapping the packed sand.
The clouds were dispersing, and the sun had poked above the lake. Owen was leaving for San Jose, en route to Tokyo, in a matter of moments. Henry desperately wanted to say something fitting, to thank Owen for being such a good friend and roommate, to tell him how much he was going to miss him, but now his own eyes were full and he couldn’t even squeeze out a
Take care
or a
See ya around.
Owen gripped his shoulder consolingly. “Henry,” he said. “You are skilled. I exhort you.”
And then it was just Henry and Schwartz, standing there in their gritty T-shirts. The dirt on Schwartz’s face, and the mean-looking five a.m. shadow beneath it, reminded Henry of their first meeting back in Peoria. Schwartz’s widow’s peak had deepened since, and his shoulders and chest had thickened and settled into a kind of premature middle age. But his eyes still held that pure maple-syrup color, that light that drew people to him like moths.
“What time’s practice?” Henry asked.
“Not till seven.” Schwartz checked his watch. “If we hurry we can fill in that hole.”
They made their way to the cemetery and shoveled the dirt back into what had been Affenlight’s grave. Once the sod had been relaid, the surface looked a little uneven, as if a mild earthquake had struck, but it seemed unlikely anyone would notice or care. They shouldered their shovels and headed back to campus.
“Where’s your new place?” Henry asked.
“Grant Street. Block and a half from the old one.”
They walked in silence for a while. Though it was still quite early, Henry saw one and then another Ryder truck pass by in the distance. It was freshperson moving-in day.
“The new football players aren’t bad,” Schwartz said as they stopped in the VAC parking lot. “I might make a few of them puke today.”
During Henry’s time in the hospital in South Carolina, he’d met every day with his psychiatrist, Dr. Rachels. She’d taken a liking to him, or at least an interest in him, and had come in on the weekends to continue their sessions. Sometimes they talked for two hours or more. To Dr. Rachels, the ethically dubious things Henry had done—sleeping with Pella, quitting the team—were justifiable and even borderline heroic, because they asserted his independence from Schwartz, whom Dr. Rachels considered an oppressive, tyrannical, oedipal figure in Henry’s life, an assessment confirmed for her once and for all when Henry told the story of his and Schwartz’s first meeting in Peoria, and the name that Schwartz had called him.
“Pussy,”
Dr. Rachels said, tapping her pencil against the arm of her chair with barely restrained glee. “Before you’d even
met.
”
Whereas the thing he’d done that might sound pretty brave—putting his head in the path of a whistling fastball, for the sake of the team—could even be considered cowardly.
“What comes to mind when I say the word
sacrifice?
” Dr. Rachels asked.
“Bunting.”
“Decorative bunting?
Easter
bunting?”
“Bunting,” Henry said, holding an imaginary bat horizontally across his chest. Dr. Rachels didn’t have a couch, as he might have imagined; he sat in a stiff wooden chair. “Laying down a bunt.”
“This is a baseball term? Use it in a sentence.”
“Instead of bunting, I swung away.”
“I found it interesting,” said Dr. Rachels, “that you chose to say
Laying down a bunt
the way a person might say
Laying down my life.
You’re familiar with this passage from the Gospel of John?
Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
”