Two in the Field (4 page)

“Yes?” A woman with cocoa-colored skin smiled pleasantly. “Do you have an appointment?”

I told her that I did not, that I was looking for a death record but had no idea when it occurred. I half hoped she would tell me to go away. Instead, she said I was in luck, no researchers were using the records just now.

“You do have the
name
of the deceased?” she asked good-naturedly, and led me to a table stacked with blue and brown binders containing alphabetized lists of records beginning in 1860. With trembling fingers I opened the “N-P” binder. No Caitlin O’Neill. No Timothy O’Neill. No Caitlin Leonard in the “K-L” binder. I stood up, not sure what I felt. Probably more relief than anything else.

“Did you check the marriage entries?” the woman asked helpfully.

“I don’t want to know about that.”

“Oh?” She looked at me.

“No.” I tried to think of some way to explain, then gave it up and spoke the simple truth. “I love her.”

Long pause.

“I see.” Her tone said,
Well isn’t that interesting?
Her eyes said,
I’ve got a loony here
. “Well, if she was Catholic, you might check with the local archdiocese.” Those archives were outside the city, she explained, at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary, and contained records of all wedding and funeral masses. Not open to the public, but requests could be submitted by phone and after several weeks—

“Please,” I said, backing toward the door. “I’ve really got to leave now.”

She smiled politely. “No problem.”

Doubting myself again, I decided to make a final effort. At the Public Library, on Vine, I found a shelf of vintage city directories and opened the 1869–70 volume. There was Cait, listed as a widow, residing on the west side of Sixth Street. I ran my finger over the line of agate print and for an instant thought I experienced a hint of the milkiness. Cait
had
been here! On an impulse I checked the volume for ’71–72. No Caitlin O’Neill. Nor in the next volume. Nor any after that.

Where had she gone?

Where did that leave me?

I had no idea.

The Reds were playing at home. That evening I set out early, walking from the hotel I’d selected off Central Parkway—as close to Cait’s boardinghouse as I could get. Seeing the breast-shaped towers of Procter and Gamble looming against the sky, I couldn’t recalling the company’s old wooden soap factory down on Second and the pleasant, eye-tingling odor of lye it produced.

An hour before the game I sat behind first base staring out at artificial turf. Amplified rockabilly music battered my ears. The visiting Pirates finished warming up and were replaced by men garbed in old-time uniforms. Some of them sported dickeys of the kind I’d worn when I played with the Stockings. I stared hard at the burgundy and white of the Brooklyn Atlantics, our old rivals. In 1870 they’d ended the Stockings’ win streak.

What the hell was going on?

These individuals bore little resemblance to my erstwhile teammates. They came in all shapes and sizes, and several looked
near retirement age. Wearing no gloves, they spread out and began tossing brown leather baseballs around. The stadium announcer boomed that this would be a two-inning exhibition staged by the Ohio Vintage Base Ball Association. These “picked nines” would play according to 1860 rules.

A few muted jeers sounded as the first “striker” stepped to the plate and waved a long, skinny bat at the pitcher, only forty-five feet away, who lobbed the ball underhand. The hurler possessed none of Red Stocking ace Asa Brainard’s speed or deception. Nonetheless, the batter fouled the pitch off. The catcher, twenty feet behind the plate, took it on the bounce, and the next hitter stepped in.

“One pitch and he’s out?” said a man nearby.

“Catcher got it on the first bounce,” I explained. “It’s called the ‘foul bound’ rule.”

He gave me a long look. “It’s stupid, is what it is.”

The two-inning exhibition was laughable except for one moment: On a ground ball up the middle, the shortstop on one of the teams crossed in front of second looking for all the world like George Wright, the Stockings’ Hall of Famer. He snatched the ball barehanded and in the same motion threw a laser to the tall first baseman, who stretched and took it as stolidly as Charley Gould, the Stockings’ “human bushel basket,” whose uniform I’d borrowed for my “tryout” one fateful afternoon.

That sequence stayed in my mind during the regular contest that followed, a slugfest won by the Reds, 9-7, in which half a dozen jacked-up balls sailed over the walls for homers. The succession of relief pitchers seemed endless. I couldn’t help but remember the pro game’s beginnings here, when we’d sung corny club songs while riding to the grounds in pennant-decked carriages. The players received salaries, true, but everything hadn’t been so damned business-like.

The city was shrouded in mist when I walked out of the stadium. Lights from buildings on the Kentucky shore winked across the river. Prowling the near-deserted downtown streets, I tried to conjure gaslights hissing on the corners.

There must be a passageway
.…

I turned on to Eighth and stopped in front of Arnold’s, a restaurant advertising that it had been in business since 1861. A different name back then?
Leininger’s?
No, that had been our favorite hangout, an oyster bar on Fourth. I couldn’t come up with it, but it seemed that I’d been here with Andy Leonard, the Stockings’ left fielder, who also happened to be Cait’s little brother and my best friend.

Inside, the bar was open. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Christian Moerlein beer still existed, and ordered a bottle. We used to drink it by the foaming tub. Earlier, I’d passed the brewery’s old location on Elm, now a lamp factory. After a second bottle I went upstairs to ease my bladder.

Through a tiny window in the so-called “water closet,” I stared at the soot-blackened brick walls lining the alley. Had they been here in 1869? Maybe we’d come here after the gala banquet welcoming us home from the triumphant eastern tour. I could almost hear the brassy strains of Currie’s Zouave Band leading the Grand Reception Parade. Like conquering heroes we’d waved to the throngs from our open carriages, banners and streamers and crepe paper pouring down on us. The whole city dressed in red. A homecoming game had followed the politicians’ speeches. I’d tripled on a pitch Brainard laid in for me.

Some things you don’t forget.

I buttoned my pants. Down the alley a woman’s head emerged from one of the lighted windows. A mass of curly hair. A sliver of cheek, amber in the yellow light. I stared at her, my
heart stopping. It took all my strength to wrench the paint-sealed window open a few inches.

“Cait!”

She turned. Not Cait but a moon-faced older woman. Seeing me, she yanked down her shade.

The night held one final irony. Near my motel, a heavyset woman leaned from a narrow sidestreet and seemed to peer at me. Clara Antonia, I thought. Popping up like she had in San Francisco. I moved forward.

Nobody was there.

At that moment I decided that being in Cincinnati was too painful.

I’d had enough.

I did make one final stop. Charley Gould had been the only Cincinnati-born player on the Stockings. In 1951 the National League, recognizing him as one of baseball’s pioneer professionals, had provided a fitting headstone at Spring Grove Cemetery. With the caretaker’s help I found it. The surrounding evergreens dripped with mist. Monuments of the city’s wealthy families stood nearby; among them I recognized a few names of Stockings supporters. Lost in time, I communed with Charley about the days we’d spent together.

Late that morning I sped out of Ohio across Indiana and into Illinois, eyes locked on the blacktop as I tried to get a handle on things. Why had I been plunged back in time, if not to meet Cait? Had it amounted to nothing more than a sadistic trick designed to spoil
this
life?

My allergies to spring pollens were kicking up. That night I dosed myself with prescription medicine I’d brought along, and slept heavily in a roadside motel outside Peoria. In the morning,
realizing that I’d been blindly retracing the Stockings’ route when we’d crossed the country on the new transcontinental railroad, I left the interstate and drove more slowly on back roads. I followed signs toward Nauvoo, which according to my road atlas lay near the Mississippi River.
Nauvoo
. I liked the name. Might as well go there.

Crossing the Mississippi, I thought of Twain. My grandfather had named me for the famed humorist and read his books aloud to me. In J-school at Cal I’d done my thesis on Twain’s reporting style. I knew the contours of his life as well as those of my own. He would be blissful now, married to Olivia Langdon, the woman of his dreams.

Blissful
then
, I could hear Sjoberg correcting.

On the Iowa side I stopped in Keokuk, where a youthful Twain had spent several years in the 1850s before becoming a river pilot.

The morning was overcast and muggy, the sky swollen with rainclouds. I strolled around the “historic” riverfront, spruced up by the Lee County Historical Society. The paint seemed too bright on the High Street house Twain had purchased for his mother. A paddle wheeler built in the 1920s as part of an attempt to revive river transportation now housed a museum. I’d hoped that coming here would help me feel closer to where I wanted to go, but the distance only seemed greater.

I headed west out of Keokuk. The weather worsened to match my mood as the clouds opened and torrents of rain fell, driven almost horizontal by headwinds that rocked the car. Visibility had shrunk to mere feet, except for when lightning punctuated the gloom. Heavy-headed from the allergy medicine and lulled by the clicking wipers, I nearly nodded off several times.

It happened as I rounded a curve.

My eyes snapped wide as a massive shape loomed directly
ahead. Lightning flashed. In that instant I saw the drenched, white-faced driver who’d let his enormous tractor drift out of its lane. I yanked my wheel to the right and stomped on the accelerator. The car surged crazily ahead and somehow missed the tractor’s forward wheel. Then it shot up the embankment and went airborne. I glimpsed the milky surface of a water-filled ditch below me an instant before hitting it, my body going rigid as I braced for impact. I was slammed against the steering wheel and then thrown back again as the hood nosed skyward. The front wheels must had gotten some traction on the far bank; the car seemed to climb again for an instant before turtling backward on its roof. Upside down and rocking wildly, held in place by my seat belt, I became aware of a slooshing sound from the doors. Water was coming in.