The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (17 page)

“What was he talking about?” I asked his too-lovely and too-quiet daughter.

“Baseball.” Just one word. Then: “You.”

We talked for some time, with great seriousness, and about matters better left untouched by children. At last, because she’d implied for so long that the words were really necessary, I told Anna that I loved her. I said it with my head hung and my eyes averted. I remember there were icicles hanging from the eaves; it was just before Thanksgiving and the killing-frost had come and gone—she cupped my face in her hands as we sat side by side on her mother’s sofa and—with eyes that were stern, wet and scared, eyes that were serious even about themselves—Anna said she loved me too, plainly and boldly and with too much painstakingly concocted drama for me not to feel ill about everything. She waited for me to fill the empty space that followed, to ladle emotion into it—staring at me, and me sick about it, sweating. I felt her breath on my face and smelled her clean flesh and just-washed hair—something like a tremor went through me which I suppressed and concealed while I made a comic face, a parody of lovesickness, a mask as reply, an image of what I kept myself from being or becoming—she didn’t laugh and I flicked out the light behind us and kissed her with a force that I wished could obliterate the need for words but which failed to do so; I didn’t know what I felt, not really, not well enough to articulate it anyway, and within my excesses of ecstasy and dread there was only turmoil and uncertainty about Anna. I knew that, suddenly, too well.

Later, walking home in the cold through streets that were dark but for the blurred glow of streetlamps, I felt relief at having a bed of my own to return to. At home I stared hard at the ceiling of my room, knowing what I felt and knowing it was a betrayal of feelings I had felt to be true until then: I squeezed my eyes shut until a thousand helixes of light
shot forth inside them, and told myself I loved Anna a hundred times until somehow, in the silent utterance, it seemed to have become true and I could finally sleep.

A wave, though, had been set in motion. That winter I waited, mostly, for baseball season; I threw some, indoors, and I gave up my paper route to concentrate on pitching. When spring came my arm was already strong, and I had added a sweeping knuckleball to my repertoire. The ground thawed in a sudden rush of heat, the grass turned green in the field again and the team turned out in the afternoon beneath skies that were turquoise and empty of clouds. In the evenings I often showed up at the Lewises’ and met Anna in the garden—reading, as always, at the stone bench—and it was then, in April, that we began to plant a slope of the yard with a few perennial flowers of our own.

I don’t remember where the idea came from anymore, but no doubt it was Anna’s: she was obsessed with gardening, with gardens and books about people who never lived by people who were no longer living. One evening, simply, I found myself busy with a hoe and rake, rooting up strips of lawn behind the gazebo. We plowed a long crescent of soil to a depth of twelve inches, and shoveled the earth through an angled rock screen, and then we tilled in four twenty-pound bags of steer manure and raked a clean contour into the bed. I spread a thin layer of vermiculite one Saturday and we sat down at the stone bench and made out our garden plan meticulously. We sketched in, along the edge of the lawn, Jacob’s-coat, heliotrope, zinnias, astilbe, bearded iris, alyssum, baptisia, forget-me-nots and evening primroses. Behind these we added white regal lilies and pink phlox—late summer flowers—backed by a line of delicate snakeroot. Lastly, we filled in with gas plant and butterfly
weed and a few day lilies—long-suffering flowers that will bloom even where there is no nurturing and little sustenance.

The sun fell behind the house while we planned and measured, and it became too dark to see our sketch easily. I went home, but all the next week, evenings, we planted with nursery sets and fragile garden cuttings, and raked over a layer of leaf mulch, shredded, in order to keep the weeds from taking root in the dark loose soil. By the middle of April—baseball season—Anna and I had a flower garden of our own to care for, and sometimes, as I waited to throw from the home dugout at Adams Field, I would wonder suddenly when the first blooms would begin to appear, and I wanted to be there when the buds began to open in the sun below the white gazebo.

That was a surprising, golden season—my last good season, really, in baseball (there is something, though, to be said to the good for my seasons as a spectator since then, too). My arm had hardened over the winter and I’d found my throwing strength at last; I learned to concentrate on the mound, to expurgate the unnecessary clutter of the world at game time, and when I got behind on a batter or had men on base I still kept my focus on the strike zone. I’d come to insist that the enclosed world of baseball protect me altogether finally, and as love became more difficult I probed the intricacies of pitching more deeply and perhaps more desperately, too. As long as the game lasted I was safe, hidden, but when it ended—when the season ended, I feared—I would come to myself in a shudder of self-knowledge and absorb the turmoil of love once more. It was a strategy of disciplined withdrawal, yes—how many athletes are driven by the confusions of their lives to do well at
games?—but within it my numbers led the High School League: nine and one, sixty-five strikeouts, a two-point-three-one e.r.a. I pitched eight complete games—two of them three-hitters, three of them shutouts—and
The Clarion
—the newspaper I’d delivered on the east side once—wrote me up in June as a bona fide major league prospect.

Two days after graduation the Kansas City Athletics called. They wanted me in their farm system, at Chambers, upstate, for two-seventy-five a month plus per diem and bus fare and a chance to step right into the rotation or, if that didn’t work out, a guaranteed spot in the bullpen. I told them yes immediately, that I would report in three days, and then I went over to see Anna Lewis, figuring in my head as I walked the time it would take before I was pitching in the big leagues.

It was a drowsy hot June afternoon, moist and sweltering and windless. At the stone bench in the flower garden you could smell the thick spice of clove pinks; behind the sundial you could see the red heads of bee balm thrusting up toward the heat of the sun. Anna’s book—
Mansfield Park
this time—lay on its spine with the pages open; it seemed absurd and tiresome and petty in light of the Kansas City Athletics. I wound along the flagstones to the gazebo. From there I could see Anna kneeling at the border of our garden, dressed in her mother’s dirt-stained gardening apron and with her hair crimped into a loose bun full of black tendrils. Black sprigs of hair fell away from her ears and her neck as she worked with a weeding spade along the sliver of astilbe we had planted, tossing the uprooted weeds behind her with a minute turn of the wrist. They lay limply behind her in a long broken row at the edge of the lawn slope, each with its
own root-crust of earth crumbling into the green grass and drying to a listless gray hue in the heavy swelter.

Perennials—even nursery starts—come into their own only gradually, and seldom make much of a show before their second season. Our garden was too new and tender and therefore scarcely in flower; the best we could hope for was a few forget-me-nots and, perhaps late in summer, some pink phlox and a smatter of snakeroot. The astilbe, though, had miraculously bloomed—it was the middle of June already and nearing the solstice; the days had been long and hot and at dawn all month the sudden rains had come—and now they showed their feathery spires in a halo around Anna. I went down the lawn slope and began to gather up the pulled weeds. Sliding along with one knee in the grass and a clutter of weeds dangling from one fist I told Anna about Kansas City and Chambers and the two-seventy-five a month the Athletics would pay me to play baseball. My memory of this moment is clear—my life, in retrospect, seems to have turned on it—Anna rose and dusted off her apron, smacked the dirt from her hands and reached into the pocket of her summer dress. She held the envelope out to me; I let fall the tangle of weeds in my hand and sat back on the lawn to read what it contained.

A school in Pennsylvania—Saint Alphonse College—had offered Anna a full scholarship to study literature: now I knew what all her books fed into. I read the letter twice; halfway through the third reading I knew that she would go, that when the season ended in Chambers and I came home she would be gone, that when she returned the next summer I would be pitching somewhere else again and wanted to, and that this would go on endlessly and we would see
each other almost never, until at last we were entirely strangers. I didn’t know whether or not this was what I wanted, whether dread or ecstasy ought finally to be the state of things; I loved her as long as it was simple—as it was in the flower garden—but now the sticky web of the larger world was swiftly settling over us. And so I slowly forced the letter back inside its envelope and laid it on the lawn, and found I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I knew that it had never been right; she was solemn and cerebral and bound for college and I was a baseball player. Suddenly in Anna I saw the prospect of a future that might not include baseball, if I so chose; baseball, really, meant leaving her, even without the hindrances of logistics and Pennsylvania and time. What had come to pass was not a problem but a looking glass, a mirror in which the truth emerged as solid as a diamond. Love was too hard; it argued I could not be my own center alone, that there were others on the planet with me—love was impossible and too much to ask of a boy. We sat on the lawn in the white light of the sun and Anna insisted that distance was no object; I agreed with that, but already I had moved farther off than she could ever realize.

“It’ll work out,” I told her. “It won’t change anything.”

But of course she knew that I lied. It was as obvious as my shame. “I’m not going to change,” she said. The words trembled, the voice came softly. “I swear to it. I swear to it by these flowers, right now.”

She’d read too many books, but I didn’t say that. “Swearing isn’t any good,” I said. “We’ll just have to try to work it out.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about keeping the flowers going?”

“What about it? I’ll try.”

“Swear to it.”

“I can’t swear.”

“I didn’t think you could,” she revealed at last. “I kind of suspected—I felt it right here.” She placed her hand over her heart and held it there for a moment. “Right here. Right
here!”

I couldn’t look at her though. “Leave me alone,” I said. “Okay?”

“Did I hear you correctly?” asked Anna.

“Don’t talk to me,” I heard myself say. “I don’t love you. It doesn’t have anything to do with your college or anything else. I just don’t love you.”

I was marveling at the blades of grass in the lawn as I spoke these words. Each molecule of each blade had taken on an unsettling, perfect clarity of being; each appeared shot through with a quiet green inner light. It seemed to me I couldn’t fix myself on anything else at that moment, nothing but the texture of the lawn seemed real, and when I brought my head up at last I realized the silence had lasted too long, that Anna was no longer beside me. Something like panic overtook me in a flood and I jumped to my feet, disoriented, crazed, with just time to see her recede toward the house, recede through the flowers and then run up the porch steps, black hair streaming toward me as she turned through the door—and then Anna completely disappeared.

Chambers turned out to be a grim and dusty town, a long, narrow street of slatternly storefronts surrounded by blocks of austere and weather-beaten homes. A kind of stasis, disquieting
and ever-present, seemed to oppress the very buildings along Main Street, and nothing moved but the occasional, slow-eyed dogs who stalked their tails in the lonely shadows, stirring the dust up and eyeing everything sadly. The searing summer wind carried the aroma of sulfur from the nearby mill, and the air smelled of insecticide in the early evenings. The townspeople, like figures in a dream, moved slowly and aimlessly when they moved at all, but came to the baseball games suddenly transformed (the games were like prayer meetings or old-time revivals) and sat fanning themselves and wiping their faces on their shirtsleeves in the bleachers, yapping in ecstasy at every base hit, swooning at every home run.

Chambers played in the Northern League, a Double A circuit that took in Saradon and Vicksburg, Oxacala and Merton, Larabee and Burris and Minapee City. The team bus rambled over roads as straight as ramrods, over pavement that sweated from a distant vantage but was only full of pockmarks and holes when you passed over it to wherever you were going. We were a team, mostly, of journeymen minor leaguers, men who had played baseball everywhere and were no longer surprised when they were traded or sold—men who played baseball for a living mechanically, with only a faint trace left of the hope they had once held inside. Some of them had had their day in the majors, of which they never spoke, and had followed a downward trajectory ever since, as though it were somehow their duty to see things through to their proper, inevitable ends. We played in dust and heat, slept on buses and in sweltering hotels, endured, with a consensual stoicism, our undeniable anonymity. I won my first start on bluster and optimism, but then I lost four badly and fell out of the rotation. Chambers
used me in long relief rarely; the rest of the time I chewed gum in the bullpen, watching and wondering where I’d gone wrong.

I suppose you could say that the dream fell away then; the shell broke around me and I felt no protection in the game any longer, but only the little-known reality of it. In my room over the auto parts store on the main street of Chambers I began to have nightmares, hideous dreams in which the void of my future expressed itself as a chasm, dark and impossible to avoid. From my vantage in the bullpen the actual game seemed far away and I would daydream through whole innings, sitting forward with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands, staring at the dusty ground. More and more I thought of the flower garden, wondered what bloomed there and what sort of birds had come to the feeders. By the time the season ended it seemed quite important—the possibility that our pink phlox had blossomed, that the candelabralike flowers of snakeroot had opened up, that perhaps the alyssum or Jacob’s-coat would surprise us—the image of that lost world of color and light seemed always before me now, a salve of sorts for the wound the game had turned into.