Two in the Field (29 page)

“She’ll be fine,” I told him. “Without you to worry over, she can get on with her own life now.” I watched him chew on that difficult notion. “Anyway, nothing’s permanent. You can always come back.”

He shook his head sorrowfully. “All they think about in O’Neill City is stuff like plowing for buckwheat in June and rye in September,” he said. “I want more.”

“Fortunately,” I said, “your mother recognizes that.”

He looked up at me. “You’ll go back to her, won’t you?”

I assured him that I would.

“She was happy in Cincinnati when you courted her, but it hurt her awful bad when you didn’t come back. You can’t do it again, Sam.”

“I don’t intend to.” Even as I said it I felt a tiny icicle of doubt. Could I really prevent myself from being thrust back into the future?

A lark’s sweet whistle came from a clump of grasses near the dock; it was the only sound besides a murmur of breeze.

“By the way,” I said, mock accusingly, “why didn’t you tell me about going to San Francisco?”

“Ma ordered me not to.”

“Some pal you are,” I teased, mussing his hair. He squirmed away.

“After we couldn’t find you,” he said, “Ma was so busy with the Fenians that I got to stay a lot with Andy.” He picked up a small stone and with one graceful motion threw it and clipped the head from a tall thistle twenty feet away. “Andy took me to the Union Grounds and taught me ball playing. Those were my best times ever, Sam.”

And now he was trying to recapture them. Well, there were worse things. At his age I’d been consumed by sports. Why put a damper on his dreams? But Tim was deluded if he believed he was ready for pro ball. The best he could hope for would be to join a junior team in Boston, meanwhile finding a way to support himself. A tall order. But kids in these times were thrust early into the world and they had to be tough.

Wumpf!
Tim’s fist thudded into the cushion in my left hand.
Wumpf! Wumpf!
He delivered a fast one-two to my right-hand cushion.

“Good.” I backed up slowly. “Remember to breathe.”

Wumpf!
He lunged and socked a cushion.

“Stop,” I said. “Look at your feet.”

Breathing heavily, he looked and shifted into proper position.

“You’ve got to keep them under you,” I said. “Otherwise, you’re out of balance.”

“You keep telling me to breathe, Sam,” he complained, “and it messes me up.”

“Oxygen feeds your cells. You’re fighting with all your body, not just your hands.” I lowered the cushions I’d bought from a train vendor. “That’s enough for this time.”

Tim’s coordination was excellent, his reflexes extremely fast. We’d had only a few sessions but already his footwork was shaping up. If he set his mind to it, he could be a fine boxer. And Cait would kill me.

“That kid’s gonna be somebody!” a voice yelled from one of the train windows where a row of heads had watched us while the locomotive took on coal and water. Station platforms usually provided enough space for brief workouts. When we didn’t spar, we threw a baseball.

Smiling, I shouted back, “He already is somebody!”

I set aside the dog-eared copy of
The Innocents Abroad
I’d been reading aloud. It helped pass the long train hours, and Tim loved Twain’s irreverent slant on the world. “My grandpa read me almost everything he ever wrote,” I told him.

Tim looked at me oddly. “Isn’t he still writing?”

Oops. “What he’d written up to
then
, I mean.” It sounded lame even to me. “Anyway, I’m planning for you to meet him.” I’d already wired ahead to let Twain know I was bringing half of his money.

Heeding Cait’s concern about schooling, I picked up newspapers each day and we duly discussed national and international events. But both of us took more interest in news of the National Base Ball Association, where Boston had taken a comfortable lead although the powerful Athletics were still in striking distance. Seeing the names of those he knew from Cincinnati—Wright, McVey, Leonard—made Tim impatient to rejoin them, and I began to worry that his expectations were impossibly high.

Tim’s private reading taste ran to nickel novels readily available on trains. Two of them had especially unlikely titles:
Frank Reade, the Inventor, Chasing the James Boys with His Steam Team
and
The Man on the Black Horse! or The James Boys’ First Ride in Missouri
.

“Did you know that Jesse hid out in caves by the Niobrara River?” Tim asked, when he could pull himself away from the lurid text. “Everybody in O’Neill City heard about that! And how Jesse’s gang boarded the UP outside Ogallala and robbed a Wells Fargo car?”

A vision of the hazel-eyed psycho and his Bible-quoting brother came to mind. The Jameses hadn’t been famous back then, but now every armed robbery in the country was attributed to them, and writers worked overtime to dream up fanciful tales.

“When Jesse was just a boy,” Tim went on avidly, “he pinched off a fingertip cleaning his gun, and yelled at his ‘dodd-dingus pistol.’ That’s how he got nicknamed Dingus.”

“So that’s where it comes from.”

“Huh?”

I explained that my path once crossed the Jameses’, and that Frank had referred to his brother as Dingus.”

“Wow!” Tim sounded like the eight-year-old I’d known before. “You
know
the James boys!”

“I wouldn’t say that, but we rode in a compartment together. They didn’t advertise who they were, of course; I only put it together later.”

“I wish I’d been there!”

“No, you don’t.”

In Chicago I insisted that he write to Cait and tell her that he was well. I looked around to buy stationery from a train butch.

“Why not pick up a penny postcard at the next station?” Tim said. “Wouldn’t cost so much.”

“I didn’t think they’d been invented yet.”

“Sam, where you
been?”

If the trains had moved faster and we’d made our connections, we might have seen the Dark Blues play the visiting New York Mutuals on July 8. Instead, we arrived the day after to find that Twain had just returned from Lexington and Concord, where he’d attended the gala centennial of the Revolution’s outbreak and been put off by thick crowds.

“The infernal things are dotting the landscape like moldering plums,” he said sourly. “Next year in Philadelphia it’s the whole nation’s birthday party, and they’ve started on it already!”

His mood brightened at Tim’s presence, and even more when Tim asked, as I’d suggested, how
Tom Sawyer
was coming.

“Finished!” He clapped his hands and looked at me. “I took your advice and stuck to Tom’s boyhood—which cleared a whole lot of tangles out of my course. Want to hear a section?”

We adjourned to the library, where he fired up a cigar, picked up a sheaf of manuscript pages and adjusted his spectacles. “Tom
appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush,”
he read in his drawling tones.
“He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high
.…”

Leaning forward, engrossed, Tim sat on Mark Twain’s divan and listened. Light through the curtains highlighted gray streaks in Twain’s hair as his head rolled with the rhythms of the sentences. If nothing else, I’d provided the boy a memory to last his lifetime. I wished that Cait were there. And my daughters, too. Why couldn’t the few people on this planet that I loved ever be together?

In the morning Twain showed us plans for his automatic typesetter, a huge, cumbersome machine that I knew he would invest heavily in and as a result nearly ruin the family’s finances.

“This is the career for you, lad,” he told Tim. “Our factory will be set up within the year. Once the kinks are smoothed, it’ll sell faster than greased flapjacks. We’ll be on the lookout for young go-getters to pitch sales.”

“Those aren’t the pitches he has in mind,” I said. “Tim’s set on being a ballplayer.”

“Mercenaries!” Twain barked. “Not like in your day, Sam.” He ignored my warning look. “The league’s a done-up job.”

“You didn’t talk like this last time.”

“Boston’s walloped our boys four more times since then,” he said. “I’ve come to see that the sporting chance of the thing is used up. Last week they came in and cleaned us out again, 7-0.”

“Andy was here last week?” Tim said wistfully.

I explained that we were headed for Boston.

“In that case,” Twain said, “since you’re only here for the day, I’ve got a scheme for you. This afternoon’s the last chance for Professor Donaldson’s aerial show here at Barnum’s circus. I paid an emperor’s ransom to go up in his balloon, but I’ve got a deadline with Blish, my confounded publisher, and can’t get out of it. You two can go in my place.”

“Whoa, I don’t think—” I began.

“Could we?”
Tim blurted.

We’d read plenty about this Donaldson in the papers. The man was a maniac, a former trapeze performer who’d made a name by dangling in tights beneath the basket of his balloon. Later he’d tried to pilot one of the primitive gasbags clear across the Atlantic, and recently he’d settled in with Barnum for an astronomical twenty thousand dollars a year—the amount, I supposed, he figured his life was worth.

“No way,” I said flatly.

“Aw, Sam!”

“Maybe we could all just walk down to Brown’s Lot,” Twain said soothingly, “where Barnum’s is set up. You could take in today’s Hippodrome show and at least say hello to the aeronaut.”

“Please?” Tim implored.

“Okay,” I agreed. “But only for the circus show—nothing else.”