The Brothers K (6 page)

Dr. Franken filled out a bunch of papers and sent them to the mill, saying that Papa had been a victim of “malpractice” and that the damage was “irreversible,” but that by having the dead part of his thumb cut off, his big toe transplanted onto his hand, and a fake toe called a prosthylactic or some such thing sewed onto where the real toe used to be, Papa would most likely end up with a thumb that had feeling in it and could do a thing or two. So the mill sent Franken’s papers to their insurance company, who sent them on to their own doctors, who hemmed and hawed for four whole months then told the insurance company that the whole idea was expensive and risky and “completely unwarranted.” So that’s what the mill told Papa. “I guess that’s that,” he’d said, lighting up a Lucky. But Mama said, “The
hell
it is!” And she got on the horn to Dr. Franken, told him what had happened, and he had another swearing fit worse than his first, but Mama was so mad at the insurance company that even though he used words like “flaming assholes” she didn’t realize till later that he was cussing: she said she thought he was quoting the Psalms.

We couldn’t afford a lawyer, but after a long struggle Mama and Doc Franken finally talked Papa into taking his case to his union. Then Papa’s union talked to more doctors yet, and to their own lawyers, and decided to take the mill’s insurance company to court. The courts are so slow that we won’t know what’s happening till sometime this fall, but if Papa’s union’s lawyers whip the mill’s insurance company’s lawyers, then the mill, or the insurance company, or anyhow somebody besides us is going to pay Dr. Franken to build Papa a new thumb. That’s the best I can understand it, anyhow. Papa says it’s one heck of a kerfuffle. Mama says
it’s all in God’s Hands. I think that means they don’t quite understand it either.

Everett is sure that Papa will win the suit, have the surgery, and make a sensational pro baseball comeback. Peter’s not so sure. He says that Papa’s toe is going to make an awfully big, awfully weird thumb. Everett says it’s weirdness could give Papa’s pitches extra stuff, but Pete says he isn’t sure Papa wants stuff. He thinks Papa might settle for things like being able to work a pair of scissors or pliers left-handed again. Papa is completely boring on the subject. All he ever says is: “We’ll see.”

T
he Indians are up now, top of the ninth. I was having trouble concentrating, so I’m standing behind Papa’s chair, letting
his
concentration leak into mine, which is another trick Peter taught me. Peter claims that a person’s mind is much larger than their brain. He claims your mind actually hovers out around your head in a pulsing, invisible ball of varying size and color. Peter claims lots of things. He reads an awful lot.

Vic Power, the Indians’ Negro first baseman, is the hitter. It’s weird to see a big black man like Power getting called an “Indian.” Come to think of it, it’s pretty strange to see a bunch of white guys running around calling themselves “Indians” too. How are
real
Indians supposed to feel about this? I mean, what if there was a team of white guys, with an Indian first baseman, called “the Cleveland Negroes”? It’d make exactly as much sense. Better yet, what if there was a team of Negroes and Indians called “the Cleveland White Guys”? I think a lot of pale-faced folks wouldn’t be all that thrilled. That’s one big advantage the Yankees have: black, red, brown or white, they look like Yanks, and act like Yanks, and
are
Yanks. None of this cutesy Oriole or Cub or White-Indian crap for them.

But my concentration is really shot. Whitey Ford struck Power out on three straight pitches, and I didn’t even know it till I heard Dizzy saying that the way Whitey handles pressure brings to mind another fine young pitcher of his acquaintanceship, namely himself. Pee Wee didn’t laugh at this, but Papa did. Jimmy Piersall is the hitter now.

It doesn’t seem fair, though, Papa laughing. He never laughs when
we
brag. He won’t even let us brag about
him
. Everett once tried to defend some bragging he was doing about Papa by saying that the Diz once said, “It ain’t braggin’ if you done it.” Papa said, “That was Dizzy talking about Dizzy. You’re Everett talking about me.” Everett said he didn’t see the difference. Papa said, “Well, there is one.” Everett said he still didn’t see it. “If you think I’m worth bragging about,” Papa told him, “you’ll
take my word for it.” Everett said, “What is this?
Father Knows Best?”
But he hasn’t bragged about Papa since.

Mama still brags about him, though. She and Everett both know what Papa’s done as a ballplayer better than Papa himself. Everett can recite all Papa’s statistics and reel off lists of all the big league sluggers he’s fooled, but Mama watched Papa play for years when Everett was just an ignorant little blob in her lap, so she has more stories. The trouble with Mama’s stories is that after she tells a good one she’ll sometimes put on her Pious Face, sigh, and say, “Sometimes I’m afraid I know baseball better than I know my own Bible.” Last time she said it, though, Everett told her that God didn’t even
own
a Bible, so chances were He knew baseball better too. Mama looked sort of squirmy, but she laughed.

T
he person who never brags or laughs about baseball or Papa is Grandawma. I don’t know if it’s her Englishness or college or Darwin or what, but when she was living with us last year she once told Everett and me that baseball had turned Papa into a complete nobody. Of course Everett hit the ceiling. “If Papa’s a nobody,” he yelled, “who’s paying for Gomorrah’s stinking dog food?” Grandawma told him the dog’s name was Isadora. “Picky about names, huh?” Everett said. “Okay. Name me three big league ballplayers.”

Grandawma was just irritated enough to give it a try. “Babe Ruth!” she snapped. “Lou Gehrig! And, um, Oscar Unitas!”

When we burst out laughing she asked what was so damned funny. Everett told her, “You only know Ruth and Gehrig because of Irwin and Kade’s piggy banks. So how can you say what baseball has turned Papa into? You don’t know what it’s turned
anybody
into. You don’t know what baseball
is.”

Everett’s the only kid I know who refuses to back down from grownups in arguments. Most times I even think he wins, though the grownups never admit it. The trouble with Grandawma, though, is that she makes you spitting mad, so you fight her, but then her head starts to palsy so bad you feel like you’re beating up on old ladies, so you stop. Then, despite the wobble, she turns around and says something that makes you even madder. That’s exactly what she did this time. “I don’t
want
to know what baseball is,” she told Everett. “I refuse to squander mental energy pondering the technicalities of anything so patently inane.”

“A
ll
ballplayers are nobodies to you,” Everett retorted. “Even the greatest, and kindest, and most heroic. So Papa couldn’t please you to save his life. So you might as well be quiet and leave him alone.”

“A long time ago,” she said, wobbling so bad it seemed her head might roll clean off her shoulders, “your father showed signs of keen intelligence. Then he made this boy’s game his entire life. Thanks to this boy’s game he barely finished high school. Thanks to this boy’s game one small injury has ended his career. Thanks to this boy’s game he is a man with six children, no money, no employable knowledge or skills, and he stands an excellent chance of being trapped in that miserable mill for the rest of his life. So no, I
don’t
understand baseball. But I see what it’s done to my son. He’s a beautiful young man with the jaded, hopeless eyes of some pathetic old derelict. And you wonder why, when I see you and Peter hellbent on following in his footsteps, I am not enthusiastic!”

What she said about his eyes scared me. But all it did to Everett was make him madder. “Papa could make
you
sound stupid too!” he roared. “He could make
your
life sound wasted and
your
eyes sound ugly too! But he doesn’t, does he? So how come he learned better manners playing ball than you learned in college? And while we’re at it, how come
you’re
not happy? How come you like fossils and dead scientists better than living people?”

“Don’t you
dare
take that tone with me!” she cried, her voice quavering like someone dying.

“I apologize!” Everett shouted. “I apologize for loving my nobody of a father. I’ll try to learn to
despise
him, like you!”

With a quickness that stunned me she snatched Everett’s wrist and gripped it. “We’re
all
nobodies,” she said, and her calm was awful, her head nearly still. “We’re nothing, and less than nothing. You’re a
child
, Everett Chance. A callow, arrogant little mill-town child.
Oh, if you could see some of the things these old eyes have seen!”

Her dry, red-rimmed eyes turned suddenly, fixing on mine, and I looked away in terror. But there was no escaping her voice: “You know,
I
had brothers once. Three fine brothers, and a father I dearly loved. And they died, every one of them, in the Great War. I must tell you, sometime, what they thought they were fighting for. And I must tell you exactly how and why they died.”

Everett was quiet, and scared now too. She’d been part of a family as real and nearly as big as ours. They’d had everything we had, and money too. And it was gone, every bit of it. This grim, palsying old woman was all that was left.

“But enough of this,” she sniffed suddenly, her face and voice so changed, so eerily pleasant that the bitterness still scalding us seemed like something we’d dreamed. “I notice you didn’t mention Oscar Unitas.
What’s the matter, Everett? Have I shocked you by passing my little quiz?”

I thought Everett might laugh at her again, but he didn’t. He just nodded, and said quietly, “You pass, Gran. You pass.”

Given her opinion of baseball, I don’t know how this could please her. But it obviously did.

M
uch as she dislikes baseball, Grandawma likes the Bible even less. This is because her hero, Charles Darwin, discovered evolution before God even mentioned it, proved scientifically that men are just apes at heart, and got the Christians all worked up because none of this was in the Bible. That’s what Everett and Peter say anyway. Late one night when we were sitting around yapping, Peter said to Everett that if the Christians had any horse sense they’d just sit down and write themselves a new Bible, sticking some evolution in there this time. He said the biblical creation story was a dud anyhow, especially if you were a girl, since God made everything in the Universe, claimed He saw it was good, and then when the First Lady went out naked for a walk to enjoy all this so-called goodness, a completely evil Devil in snake’s clothing came down out of a tree, lied his head off to her, got her thrown out of Paradise and cursed into having it hurt like hell to have babies, and she was
still
such a nice person that she didn’t go back with a stick and kill that damned snake. Whose fault
was
all this? Peter wanted to know. Who claimed it was “good” in spite of the snake, then tried to cover Their tracks with a lot of cockamamie hoodoo about Forbidden Fruit and Trees of Knowledge and Eve’s wicked curiosity? And what harm could a little Darwinian evolution possibly do to a mess of a story like that?

But Everett told Peter it’d be a snowy day in hell before the Christians wrote themselves a new Bible. Too many bugs in the plan, he said. In the first place, who do you ask to do the writing? An Adventist? A Catholic? A Baptist? If you picked just one, he said, the others would kill you. And if you picked one of each they’d kill each other. In the second place, he said, most Christians would refuse to rewrite the Bible anyway, because they’d want God to do it for them, because most of them think it was God who sat down and wrote the one they’ve got.

“Well, wasn’t it?” Irwin butted in, looking pretty shocked.

“See what I mean?” Everett said to Peter.

“Oh that’s right!” said Irwin, smacking himself in the forehead. “It was Jesus!”

Peter and Everett looked at each other, then slowly shook their heads.

“Okay! I give!” Irwin cried, laughing like a loonbat. “Who
did?
Who
did
write the Bible?”

“King James,” said Peter.

“Oscar Unitas,” said Everett.

Irwin went loonbats again.

“Anyhow,” Everett said to Peter, “you can bet any amount, any odds, the Christians will stick with the Bible they’ve got, sure as the Chicago Cubs’ll stick with Wrigley Field—even though it’s got no lights.”

Peter nodded. “Nightfall is to the Cubs,” he said, “exactly what Charles Darwin is to the Christians.”

“Q
uit jumping around!” Papa hollers.

Oops. I guess I was sort of hanging on his chair by one leg and one arm, and maybe kicking and swinging around some. It’s Darwin’s fault, though. He’s who got me thinking about apes. When I drop to the floor I hear Pee Wee Reese start yelling and see Roger Maris running, but thanks to my dud concentration I missed the pitch that whoever it was—Jimmy Piersall, I guess—hit. Maris leaps, grabbing a drive bashed clear to the warning track. But when Papa hollers, “Great catch! Great catch!” my brain changes channels again, coughing up a picture of me in the Wind, catching fish.

Papa says we could get trout today, no trouble, but we’re not going to because we’ll be after summer steelhead, which are like trout, except huge. He caught one two weeks ago that almost broke his pole, and it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen dead, and one of the most beautiful things, period. It took all eight of us two days to eat it, and the smoke from Papa’s cigarettes and the blue-gray ballplayers on the screen are the exact same color as the steelhead’s back, and its sides were as silver as a brand-new—

“KADE!”

“Oops. Sorry, Papa.” I guess I was banging my head on the back of his chair. The thing was that if I squatted down and lined my eye up just right, I could make it look like the blue-gray batter was using Papa’s Lucky for a bat, so I was conking my head on the chair when they were supposed to swing.