The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
BY W. P. KINSELLA

The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Copyright © W. P. Kinsella 1986

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Portions of this novel appeared in a slightly different form in Descant, Saturday Night, New Quarterly, Arete, and Buzzard’s Luck, and in the short story collections The Thrill of the Grass (Penguin Books, 1984). Several excerpts were broadcast on CBC Radio and the MacNiel/Lehrer NewsHour.

W. P. Kinsella asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007497508

Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007591299

Version: 2014-08-07

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

I: The Warm-up

1

2

3

4

5

II: The Game

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

III: The Post-game Show

14

Also by the W.P. Kinsella

About the Publisher

I The Warm-up

Nothing bleeds quite like devotion.

—Gary Kissick

1

My name is Gideon Clarke, and, like my father before me, I have on more than one occasion been physically ejected from the corporate offices of the Chicago Cubs Baseball Club, which are located at Wrigley Field, 1060 West Addison, in Chicago.

My father’s unfortunate dealings with the Chicago Cubs began with his making polite requests for information concerning the 1908 baseball season: player records, box scores, nothing out of the ordinary. At first, the Cubs’ public relations people were most cooperative. I have their letters. However, the information they provided was not what my father wanted to hear. His letters became more pointed, critical, accusatory, downright insulting to the point of incoherence. The final letter from the Chicago Cubs Baseball Club – their stationery has a small picture of Wrigley Field at the top – is dated October 7, 1945, and states clearly: ‘We consider the matter closed and would appreciate it if you did not contact us again.’

After that letter my father began to make personal visits to the Cubs’ corporate offices.

My father’s quest began in 1943. I was born in 1945 and grew up in a home where the atmosphere was one of vague unease. I sensed my father was a troubled man. The general anxiety and discomfort that permeated the air also affected my mother and my sister, Enola Gay.

My father’s problem was this: he was in possession of information concerning the Chicago Cubs, our home town of Onamata, Iowa, and a baseball league known as the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, information that he knew to be true and accurate but that no one else in the world would acknowledge. He knew history books were untrue, that baseball records were falsified, that people of otherwise unblemished character told him bold-faced lies when he inquired about their knowledge of, and involvement with, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

As a child, though I sympathized with my father, I never fully understood the significance of his obsession. As the Indians say, one cannot walk in another man’s moccasins. I was never able to conceive what he suffered, until, upon his death, when I was sixteen, I received his legacy, which was not money, or property, or jewels (though I was not financially bereft), but what I can only liken to a brain transplant. For upon my father’s passing, I inherited not only all the information he alone had been a party to, but also his obsession to prove to the world that what he knew was right and true.

His example taught me well, for no matter how futile his efforts seemed, he would not be moved from his goals, just as I shall not be moved from mine. I will pursue the elusive dream of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy until it is admitted that the Chicago Cubs traveled to Iowa in the summer of 1908 and engaged in a baseball game against the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars.

As there are stages in grieving, in aging, in acceptance of illness, so there seem to be stages in the development of the inherited obsession of which I speak. I began my investigation by making the same polite written inquiries to the Chicago Cubs and other sources who should have known of the Confederacy, and ended with the same personal confrontations and shouted accusations, which resulted in my being firmly escorted from the Cubs’ offices.

Two years ago, I learned, by eavesdropping on a conversation in the box next to mine at Wrigley Field, that the Cubs were in the process of hiring a junior public relations person. I applied for the job; in fact, I submitted a twelve-page letter of application, outlining some of the facts I knew about the Chicago Cubs, past and present. The personnel department didn’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge my application. However, by phoning the Cubs’ offices on various pretexts, I was able to learn that the person hired was to begin work the following Wednesday. I also learned that the executives held business meetings on Monday mornings.

I showed up on Monday, dressed in a rented three-piece suit, looking as eager, expectant, thrilled, and breathless as I anticipated the new employee would feel.

‘Hi! I’m supposed to start work this morning,’ I said, smiling brightly. For the occasion I had had my hair cut and dyed a neutral brown. My hair is usually shoulder length, white as vanilla ice cream, which makes it difficult for me to appear inconspicuous. I am not an albino, for though my skin lacks pigmentation, my eyes have color: a pale, translucent blue.

My job – or, rather, the job of the new public relations person – was to write copy for the Chicago Cubs yearbook. A young woman whom I remembered having a confrontation with a few years before kept checking the dates on her calendar and staring at me, trying, I’m sure, to place me. She assigned me back issues of the yearbook to read, promising to give me more substantial employment after lunch when the public relations director returned.

As I glanced at the yearbooks, I eyed the rows of foot-locker-green filing cabinets, my mouth watering for the opportunity to leap into history. Shortly before lunch I made my way to the supply room and secreted myself behind several thousand Chicago Cubs yearbooks. I lay on the floor and covered myself with the glossy little magazines, their slick surfaces smelling like new-car interiors. I slept for a while, dreaming I was in the hold of a fishing vessel, covered with slippery tropical fish.

When the fluorescent hands on my wrist watch showed 6:00 P.M., I ventured out. The offices were deserted, silent, smelling of paper and coffee grounds.

I spent the entire night skimming through the filing cabinets, reading everything I could find concerning the years 1902–1908, which were the years the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was in existence.

It was sad to find out that, to the Cubs, baseball was not the least magical; it was strictly business. The files contained little but contracts, tax forms, medical expense forms. There were no elaborate personnel files, no newspaper clippings, no fan testimonials.

Here was the Cubs’ greatest pitcher, Mordecai Peter Centennial ‘Three Finger’ or ‘Miner’ Brown, in a manila folder labeled M. BROWN and smudged with fingerprints. Not even a first name. No mention of his 239 victories or of his induction into the Hall of Fame. No mention of his injury, the cropped finger that allowed him to put a special spin on the ball. Just a file with the barest of records.

I did find some of my own correspondence in a file labeled CRANK LETTERS, filed away alongside a letter claiming the Chicago Cubs would win the last pennant before Armageddon and another containing what purported to be conclusive evidence that Ernie Banks and Billy Williams were extraterrestrials. Seeing them side by side, I had to admit that those letters made as much sense as mine.

There were penciled notes on one of my more inflammatory letters: Dangerous? F.B.I.? Relative of E. G. Clarke? My sister, Enola Gay, is a fugitive from justice.

I emerged at 6:00 A.M., disheveled, dry-mouthed, redeyed, and without one shred of evidence that the 1908 Chicago Cubs ever visited Big Inning, Iowa, or, for that matter, that there ever was a Big Inning, Iowa.

‘It is a fact that there are cracks in time,’ my father repeated endlessly. ‘Weaknesses – fissures, if you like – in the gauzy dreamland that separates the past from the present.’ Hearing those words like a musical refrain all through my childhood, I came to believe them, or, rather, accept them; it was never a matter as simple as belief. To me they weren’t remarkable; after all, some children were taught to accept the enormities, the absurdities, the implausibilities of scripture as fact.

‘Time is out of kilter here in Johnson County; that’s my conclusion,’ my father said to me often. ‘But if something is out of kilter, there’s no reason it can’t be fixed. And when it’s fixed I’ll be proven right.’

Briefly stated, here is what my father believed: through those cracks in time, little snippets of the past, like small, historical mice, gnaw holes in the lath and plaster and wallpaper of what used to be, then scamper madly across the present, causing eyes to shift and ears to perk to their tiny footfalls. To most people they are only a gray blur and a miniature tattoo of sound quickly gone and forgotten. There are, however, some of us who see and hear more than they were ever meant to. My father was one of those, as am I.

My father, Matthew Clarke, dreamed his wife. He lay in his bedroom in the square frame house with green shutters in the Iowa town called Onamata, which, long ago, before the flood, when everything but the church was washed away in the direction of Missouri, was called Big Inning. Wide awake, eyes pressed shut, Matthew Clarke dreamed his ideal woman, conjuring her up from the scarlet blackness beneath his lids, until she rose before him like a genie, wavery, pulsating.

‘There’s always been a strangeness hovering over all this land,’ he used to tell me. ‘Even before I dreamed Maudie, before I learned of the Confederacy, I knew there were layers and layers of history on this land, like a chair with ten coats of enamel. And I sensed some of those layers were peeling off, floating in the air, waiting to be breathed in, soaked up like sunshine. I tell you, Gideon’ – and he would scratch the tip of his long, sun-bronzed nose and run a hand through his black curls, which were as unruly as twitch grass – ‘there are all kinds of mysteries dancing around us like sunbeams, just beyond our finger tips.’ When I’d look at him as if I didn’t quite believe him, he’d go on, ‘They’re there, like birds in a thicket that you can hear but can’t see.’

And I would listen to him and marvel at his energy and dedication, and I’d believe him or at least accept what he told me, but with a total lack of awe. If my father insisted that he alone was in step, the rest of the world a ragtag of shabby marchers, who was I to disagree? Nothing, including the resurrection of the dead, would have surprised me.

My first experience of the floating magic he talked of was when the hollyhocks sang to me. I suppose I was eight the first time I heard those hollyhocks, tall, sturdy flowers the color of sun-faded raspberries. They grew high and physical outside my father’s bedroom window, their stocks like broom handles, saucer-sized heads bowed silently, gathered together like a freshly scrubbed barbershop quartet. ‘Ooooooh, ooooooh, ooooooh,’ they sang at first, softly as a choir.

As I listened I knew they were performing for me alone, that if a playmate appeared he would hear nothing. I remember thinking, Why shouldn’t the hollyhocks sing? And I pictured a nebulous rock wall, desert-rust in color, cracking open like an egg, the tall flowers ducking their heads as they emerged, eerie as aliens. As I sat cross-legged on the lawn in front of them, their song grew louder, the tempo increased: ‘DA da DA da DA DA, DA da DA da da, DA da DA da da, DA da DA DA DA.’ It would be years before I discovered the source of their music.

One thing I don’t understand is that I did not tell my father of the experience. How he would have loved to have had me as an ally. In that credulous way children have of accepting what life offers them, it didn’t occur to me then how lonely my father’s quest must have been. By the time I realized, my mother had long since left us and taken my sister and my cat with her to Chicago. Father was devoting his whole life to proving the existence of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy and having precious little success.

I didn’t understand his obsession well enough to be the kind of son I should have been. Now, years after his death, after he has been dead for more years of my life than he was alive, after I have come to have an obsession of my own, I understand all too well what he went through, and I sympathize, too late though it may be.

But back to my father’s dream. I won’t tell what I know about the Iowa Baseball Confederacy just yet. It is more important to explain about my father and my mother, the woman he dreamed to life.

‘She was so real sometimes, I could smell her and taste her and do everything but touch her,’ he used to say to me. ‘When you get older you’ll understand what it was like, Gid.’ I wonder if all parents tell their children things the children don’t understand but will when they get older. I wanted to understand then.

Matthew Clarke knew he wasn’t likely to find his dream among the residents of Onamata, or even in nearby Iowa City. It was the summer of 1943, the war was raging, and Matthew Clarke was just graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in American history.

‘I had a choice to make and make quickly,’ he used to say to me. Some of my earliest memories are of hearing this story. We – when we were still a family – used to sit on the wide verandah on humid summer evenings, Mother and Father on slatted wooden chairs, hers enameled white, his vermilion, while my sister and I sat on the floor, our legs in front of us in V shapes, rolling a ball back and forth.

‘It was either the army or graduate school,’ my father would continue. ‘In fact, I had the graduate school application, all filled out, in the back pocket of my pants the night I dreamed your mother to life.’ He’d laugh a low, soft chuckle, and look across at my mother, who would be sitting forward in the white chair, dusky as an Indian, her eyes unfathomable and molasses-black.

I have often imagined Matthew Clarke as he lay on top of the old black-and-red patchwork quilt, which still graces the bed and still looks as if it might at one time have served a Gypsy as a cape, the graduate school application folded and stuffed in his rear pocket, crinkling to remind him of its presence each time he moved slightly.

‘That evening, I was just like a bear gettin’ a whiff of honey, Gideon. I stood up, my arms out in front of me like a sleepwalker, and I headed for the truck, drove off to Iowa City, went to the carnival, and the rest is history.’

That was the short version of the story. The tale became longer and longer, I think in direct proportion to the time my mother was absent from us. As the years passed, my father recalled more and more about that fateful summer night. And as I grew older he supplied more details, and told more and more about what he felt on that magical evening.

After telling the short version, my father would look over at my mother and down at us children and smile. He would wipe imaginary sweat from his high forehead, raise his hands palm up in a gesture of wonder. I would stare at my dark-haired father, at my dusky mother and sister, who would blend into the summery shadows of the porch until I sometimes wondered if they were there at all, and silently question why or how I came to have lank blond hair and eyebrows the color of corn silk.

Matthew Clarke had lived all his life near Iowa City, where sun-blond girls with browning skin and endearing overbites flocked around the campus of the University of Iowa. A few even lived in some of the two dozen houses that made up his home town of Onamata. In the summer of 1943, those sweet, sincere, interchangeable young women wore saddle shoes and pleated skirts. The skirts were made of red, yellow, or green plaid, often with a six-inch safety pin worn just above the knee to keep them modest. Many of these young women were beautiful; most were scrupulously laundered, smelling clean as fresh ironing. They were cheerful, dutiful, God-fearing, and ravenous for husbands. Matthew Clarke wanted none of them.

He knew what he wanted. He had even gone to Chicago in search of her.

‘I ever tell you about the fat woman in Chicago?’ I remember him saying to me. We were on our way to St. Louis to see a Cardinal double-header. It was a Sunday and we’d left Onamata at five A.M. to be sure to get there in time to buy good seats.

‘Fifty times,’ I was tempted to say, but didn’t. I was about fourteen and thought anyone as old as my father must be partially fossilized and fully retarded. But I was cautious. He didn’t wait for an answer from me.

‘Seemed like every street I walked on in downtown Chicago there were women every forty feet or so, posed like statues, in suggestive stances. And there were loud women in the bars I went to, women with quarrelsome voices and stringy hands. But they weren’t the kind I was lookin’ for. Stay away from those kinds of women, Gid. They’re nothin’ but trouble.’

‘Your experience with women hasn’t exactly been trouble free,’ I thought of saying, but again, didn’t.

‘Then I met this woman, Gid. And I think she was the start of this whole thing with the Confederacy.’

‘She’d slipped through one of the cracks in time,’ I said, staring out the window, resisting the temptation to say something about its being a wide crack.

‘I was just off State Street, I think. A dark street with sidewalks covered in grit and glass fragments. There were boarded-up buildings, and bars with blue neon beer bottles bleeding down their windows. She ambled out of a doorway, wide as she was tall, so ash-blond I swear she gave off light, an aura. She was as blond as you. She had bangs to the middle of her forehead. The rest of her hair was straight and chopped, as if a bowl had been set on top of her head. She might have been twenty-five or she might have been fifty. Her face was wide and mottled, her nose flat as a baby’s. She was wearing a tentlike dress that stopped above her pale knees; the dress was a swirl of color, like scarves blowing in the wind.

‘Her eyes were a pale, pale blue, and she was barefoot. She walked splay-legged right into my path, her stubby feet with their gray, sluglike toes grinding sand. She’d come out of a run-down building where dirty velvet curtains were strung across a storefront. A few stars and triangles were painted on the glass in front of the curtains. The words FORTUNE TELLING had been hand-lettered on the windowpane by an amateur.

‘That woman looked a little bit like Missy, you know, except she was a lot fatter than Missy, and she wasn’t a … a mongoloid, although before she spoke I thought she might be. As I stood staring at her, the only thing I could think of was a white Gypsy, an albino Gypsy.

‘‘‘Excuse me,” I said, and tried to step around her. But she didn’t move; in fact, she leaned into my path until I had to stop.

‘‘‘No, no,” she crooned, like she was talking to a child. And she put her pudgy hand on my arm. Her fingers were white as fresh fish, the nails chewed down to the quick.

‘‘‘I came to meet you,” she said in that same purring voice. “I could feel you getting nearer.” Her bottom lip was turned down like that of a child about to cry. Her teeth were short, crooked, and stained.

‘‘‘Go home to Iowa,” she said. “You’re not supposed to be here. Go home.” I glanced down at her huge knees; they were dimpled and scarred.

‘‘‘What are you talking about?” I said. But she was gone. I swear it, Gid. Gone, vanished. There I was, standing on that sleazy sidewalk, lookin’ like a fool, talking to a parking meter, a big, prehistoric, beast-headed thing, all pitted and ugly and metal-smelling.

‘I got out of there, let me tell you. But I never forgot that woman or her voice. And she was right. Because I no sooner got back to Onamata than I dreamed your mother. And then went out and found her.’

Ah, yes, my mother. I think it better if I tell the story of how Matthew Clarke met his wife. I was raised on that story. My father told it to me for the final time on the way to Milwaukee the day he was killed. It is the first story I remember hearing from my father, and the last.

The events that disrupted my father’s life, and in turn mine, happened in the summer of 1943. Part of the story involves my father being hit by lightning.

On that sultry Iowa evening, storm clouds swept in from the west like a fleet of tall ships. Silver zippers of lightning decorated the evening sky, and a lightning bolt struck my father as he and Maudie, the strange girl he had just met, sought shelter from the storm. He wasn’t killed; he wasn’t even injured seriously; he wasn’t fried by the heat of the bolt, disfigured, or melted down like a record left in the back window of a car. He was, however, forever changed. For as a piece of stationery is squeezed between the jaws of an official seal or as liquid metal is struck into a shiny new coin, my father’s life was altered.

As well as gifting him with a wealth of information about a baseball league known as the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, the lightning tampered with my father’s blood, rearranged his chromosomes gently as a baby’s breath turns a mobile, rattled his bone marrow, disrupted his immune system. That is how he passed the Iowa Baseball Confederacy along to me. When I was born, two years after the lightning struck him, my little flower of a brain was crammed with the same statistics, the same league standings, the same batting averages, the same information that plagued my father. Yet my knowledge was veiled, covered by one of those layers of history my father was so anxious to expound on, hidden from my view like a dove cuddled beneath a magician’s handkerchief. Eventually the Confederacy came to me full-blown, one fateful day at County Stadium in Milwaukee, the day my father died. But that comes later.

After Matthew Clarke was struck by lightning, the nut of information that was the Iowa Baseball Confederacy began to grow like a summer pumpkin. The Confederacy crowded in on his life until it became like a fat man in an elevator with two huge suitcases.

To say that my father was regarded as an eccentric in those years after he became obsessed with the Confederacy would be mild understatement. Luckily, eccentrics were tolerated, even encouraged, in small Iowa towns. ‘Like father, like son,’ the people of Onamata say about me. ‘That Gideon Clarke is a right odd fellow,’ they say, ‘but he comes by it honestly.’ I think they whisper about me more than they did about my father because I don’t work steadily, a cardinal sin in America’s industrious heartland. Thanks to my mother and sister, I have more money than I will ever need.

But to the story. As I’ve explained, my father was carrying his graduate school application in his back pocket the dreamy August evening he felt compelled to travel to Iowa City and take in the Gollmar Bros. Carnival and American Way Shows. As he approached through the parking lot he could see that the carnival was a small, sorry operation: rusty, square-fendered trucks were mired in a confusion of mud and cables. Behind the trucks was a string of blunt-nosed buses with bulging tires, some with frayed curtains at their windows. Portable generators, which powered the frail carousel and the paint-freckled Ferris wheel, roared deafeningly.

As Matthew set out for Iowa City that day he’d had the feeling that there were presences all about him, that there was hidden life in the poplar leaves that fluttered alluringly in the yard; he’d turned back toward the house once, as if beckoned by the group of slim hollyhocks that stood under the bedroom window at the side of the building. For a few seconds Matthew had thought he could hear them humming to a mysterious military music. The hollyhocks were surrounded by cosmos, themselves tall. The pale pink, wine, and mauve cosmos, peering from the frilly green lace that was their leaves, looked like delicate children appealing to a parent. Matthew stood absolutely still for several moments, staring at the tableau, waiting expectantly. There was something about the flowers; he had the feeling they wanted to speak to him.

During the drive to Iowa City, Matthew had thought he’d seen an Indian walking in the ditch, loping along with enormous strides, an Indian wearing only a breech-cloth. But as he came abreast of the spot he’d seen that it was just a trick played by the sun as it slanted through the emerald cornstalks.

Matthew slouched down the midway, his hands deep in his pockets, his dark eyes, though downcast, taking in everything. He stared and stared at the rides and the booths. He spent no money. The trampled and muddy grasses of the fairgrounds were frosted with cedar shavings, and their perfume filled the air. Matthew craned his neck, brushed stubborn curls from his forehead, stopped and scrutinized a brightly lit booth where a pyramid of milk bottles repelled puffy baseballs, until he was certain the booth held nothing of significance.

As he continued along the midway he eyed the banner advertising the obligatory girlie show, DARLIN’ MAUDIE was painted in garish red letters across a canvas banner; at each end of the banner was the same drawing of a girl with rosebud lips, sporting a 1920s hairdo. The drawing ended at the girl’s navel. She was clad in a silky red blouse, vaguely Chinese in nature. The fingers of each hand gripped the scream-red material as if she were about to tear the blouse wide open, EXOTIC! DARING! REVEALING! NAUGHTY! was printed in smaller capitals under the main headline.

Matthew noticed that the barker for the Darlin’ Maudie show was not attracting many patrons, partly because his voice could not be heard above the thundering generators, and partly because it was wartime and the sparse crowd was made up mainly of women and children. What few men were present were middle-aged or older and had women and children in tow.

After watching the barker for a moment, Matthew cut between the girlie-show tent and a barrel-like wooden structure where motorcycle daredevils rode only inches away from multiple fractures. As he rounded the corner of the tent he could hear arguing voices. He continued to the back of the tent, and there he saw Darlin’ Maudie standing at the top of some makeshift stairs, just opposite the door to a tiny, aluminum-colored trailer that appeared to be held together by rust. The first thing he noticed was her mouth. It was wide and sensuous, nothing like a rosebud. She was dressed in celery-colored satin pantaloons, the kind worn by harem girls in the movies. She had on the same blouse as the girl on the banner, only all the buttons were tightly closed, each snap surrounded by what dressmakers called a frog.

Darlin’ Maudie was pointing accusingly and cursing as if a cow had just stepped on her. The man at whom she was cursing had a red, moon-shaped face. His wiry hair was brushcut; he wore construction boots, jeans, and a soiled white T-shirt, which humped out over a sizable beer belly.

‘No matter what you say, you can’t make me do it,’ Darlin’ Maudie was shrieking. ‘You … ’ She reeled off every curse Matthew had ever heard, plus a few totally new to him.

‘If you don’t do it today, you’ll do it tomorrow,’ drawled the crew-cut. While Maudie whirred curses at his back like poisonous darts from a blowgun, the man ambled away, his boots making sucking sounds in the mud.

Darlin’ Maudie eventually turned back toward the trailer, and as she did she saw Matthew standing there wide-eyed as an orphan in front of a magician, one hand gingerly touching the rusting metal.

‘What do you want?’ she said, making her dark eyes large in an imitation of Matthew’s surprised stare as she produced a pack of cigarettes from somewhere on her body. Matthew stood rooted to the spot, gaping up at her as she lit a Philip Morris and inhaled deeply. Matthew knew he must look like a farm boy staring at his first skyscraper. But the odors that floated slowly in the sultry air had enchanted him – the tangy shavings, the burning-oil smell of the generators, Maudie’s perfume, the acrid odor of her cigarette.

‘Can I do anything to help you?’ Matthew finally stuttered. He pictured himself astride a shining steed, his lance turned orange by the setting sun.

‘What are you, a cop?’ said Darlin’ Maudie.

‘You sounded as if you were in some kind of trouble,’ said Matthew.

‘Nothin’ I can’t handle,’ she said, still eyeing him suspiciously. The sun sparked off her blue-black hair. She wore one large ringlet at the front of each ear. After a few seconds she smiled, showing small, even teeth with delicate spaces between. ‘Yeah, you can do something for me,’ she said, still smiling. ‘You can carry me someplace where I can set my feet down on solid land. I can’t get these goddamned shoes dirty.’ She pointed with her cigarette at the high-heeled red pumps, the same color as her blouse.

Matthew, his breath constricted with love, knowing the color was rising up his neck like mercury in a thermometer, stepped forward, his own shoes sinking uncomfortably deep in the mire.

‘I won’t have to carry you far,’ he said. ‘Your trailer’s parked in a low spot.’

‘We’ll see who does what,’ Maudie said defiantly as she stepped carefully down the rickety steps and deposited herself in Matthew’s arms. He carried her across the lot and fifty yards up an embankment to the edge of a cornfield.

‘Thanks,’ said Darlin’ Maudie, looking carefully at her benefactor for the first time. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Matthew.’

‘Your friends call you Matt?’

‘No. They call me Matthew.’

‘I might have figured,’ she said, making her eyes large again. Then she spotted a wide, squat tree about a hundred yards into the cornfield. ‘Let’s go in there,’ she said. ‘It looks so peaceful.’

The corn was armpit high and the field smelled fresh as dawn. Darlin’ Maudie tested the earth with one crimson shoe.

‘I told you it would be dry up here,’ Matthew said, and taking her hand he led her toward the tree.

The tree sat like a party umbrella, trunk sturdy, branches gently arching. Wild grasses grew around the base of the tree, where roots ridged above the soil like exposed veins.

They sat down on the grass, Matthew picking away twigs and pieces of fallen bark so Darlin’ Maudie wouldn’t dirty her exotic costume.

The corn swaddled the noise of the carnival. They could feel the rhythm of the generators, thumping away like distant music.

‘This is so quiet,’ Maudie said, looking tiny and frightened, a ragamuffin of a girl lifted out of her noisy and reverberating environment and deposited amid the silent corn. ‘I ain’t been anywhere quiet for months and months, since we left Florida in the spring.’

Matthew could see her shoulder blades chopping at the material of her blouse. As his gaze flashed across her black eyes, he saw that she had a beauty spot on her cheek, about an inch to the right of her mouth. He couldn’t tell if it was real or painted on, but he felt himself salivating. He was mad to caress the mysterious spot with his tongue. Maudie smiled again and he counted the spaces between her lower teeth. He held out his arms to her, tentatively, afraid she would laugh rudely or ridicule him. She moved close, there under the canopy of leaves, but with her head down so there wouldn’t be any kiss. She rested her head on his chest as he put one hand on her upper arm, which was so thin he felt as if he were holding a paper girl and not a real one.

But he could smell her. Her hair held the dusky, musky odors of soap, perfume, and smoke. If Matthew bent his neck at an odd angle he could just manage to kiss the top of her head. Her hair was a tangle of black velvet; and the sun rays, about the same height as the corn, made every tenth hair or so look as if it were on fire.

While they embraced, the sun vanished as if it had been switched off. Thunder grumbled and a sudden breeze set the leaves trembling and rustled the corn.

Maudie remained absolutely still, light as a kitten against Matthew’s chest.

‘If you’re lucky, in a lifetime you get one moment in which you’d like to live forever,’ my father said each time he recounted the story to me. ‘One moment when you’d like to be frozen in time, in a landscape, a painting, a sculpture, or a vase. That was my moment. If I had it all to do over again, Gideon, I’d do it the same way. Even if I knew then what I know now.’

Back then in the cornfield, Matthew said, ‘We’d better leave, find someplace to get out of the storm.’

‘No,’ the bird-light girl replied emphatically, pushing herself closer to him. ‘I want to stay here. I want to see what the storm is like.’

‘But your clothes … ’ said Matthew.

‘To hell with my clothes. I ain’t goin’ back. He can’t make me do it.’

To his dying day Matthew Clarke never knew what it was that Maudie didn’t want to do. It turned out that Maudie was her name. The one extravagance Gollmar Bros. Carnival and American Way Shows allowed itself each spring before the troupe hit the road was to print a new banner for the girlie show, using the name of the lead performer.

In the cornfield, the fist penny-sized raindrops plopped down.

‘We’ll have to move closer to the tree,’ Matthew said as a drop splattered on the toe of one of Maudie’s scarlet shoes. They moved closer to the trunk.

The wind gusted and the tree above them shuddered. But beneath the leaves it was eerily silent, the air heavy. Matthew thought it was strange to see the wind bending and flattening the corn just yards away, while beneath their canopy they could scarcely feel a breeze.

Lightning buzz-sawed across the sky, leaving ragged silver incisions. The rumble of thunder was followed by a bulletlike whine and a sizzling crash as lightning struck somewhere nearby. As the thunder rolled wildly, Maudie pressed against Matthew. When she turned her face up to him he saw fear in her almond-pointed eyes.

‘I didn’t know it would be like this,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not from around here.’

Matthew kissed her then, awkwardly, his lips touching her nose before covering her mouth. The rain hurtled down around them; a few drops leaked through the leaves, dripping onto the frilly grass at their feet. Maudie wrapped her arms tightly around Matthew and returned his kiss. Her tongue felt small and hot against his own.

I’m so happy I could die, Matthew thought. At that moment there was a violent, ripping, crunching sound, as if kindling was being broken right next to their ears. The tree screamed. Afterward, Maudie claimed it was her, or possibly Matthew. But Matthew knew it had been the tree, a long, shrill sound like a rabbit’s death cry.

The tree was struck behind and above them. The lightning ripped off a huge limb. Matthew found himself on the grass, staring up at a fresh white scar where the limb had been. The fallen branch lay beside him, some leaves brushing one arm.

He was nauseated; his left arm and leg felt full of pins and crawling ants. When he tried to blink he realized his left eyelid was paralyzed. In another second or so he discovered that the only part of him he could move was his right eye, and it was full of Maudie.

Darlin’ Maudie stood in the drenching rain at the edge of the corn, her arms raised above her head, her legs braced as if she were supporting a monstrous weight on her upturned hands. From where he lay, it looked to Matthew as if she held lightning in each hand, bolts the color of molten silver, crackling like cellophane, long as the sky. They stretched from her hands clear to the clouds, which were wild and black and rolling like locomotives.

Matthew felt heavy drops of rain hit his face. The drops sizzled as they splattered on his lightning-seared skin. He watched from his one good eye as Maudie’s eyes blazed in some kind of mystical triumph, her fingers dazzled with lightning.

‘I won’t!’ Matthew heard her say. ‘I won’t! I won’t!’

He never knew whether she was drawing the lightning in or warding it off.

The next thing Matthew remembered, Darlin’ Maudie was kneeling beside him on the wet grass, her cheek against his, whimpering like a puppy, alternately kissing him and imploring him to show some sign of life.

As he came around, Matthew realized he could see from both eyes, that he could blink his left eyelid. The pins were retreating from his left arm and leg, leaving an ache in his hip and knee. His fingers and toes on the left side felt like candles that had been lit and then extinguished.

‘I’m all right,’ Matthew said as Maudie planted more kisses down his cheek.

Matthew could feel her hot little breasts against his chest, burning right through her blouse and his shirt. He managed to get his right arm around her shoulders and pull her even closer to him. Her breath was warm against his cheek and holding her was like clutching an armful of flowers. The odors about her were somewhere between sweet clover and heaven. But painted on the inside of Matthew’s eyelids was the frightening image of Maudie, arms raised to the sky, joined to the lightning.

When the rain stopped, Maudie helped Matthew to his feet. He was limp as laundry and had black dots the size of floating tapioca in front of his eyes. As they moved down the rows of corn toward the carnival Matthew said, ‘I can’t carry you this time,’ and tried to muster an apologetic smile.

‘No need to,’ said Maudie.

‘But your shoes … ’

‘To hell with my shoes. I ain’t goin’ back,’ she said, looking down past her mud-splattered costume to where her shoes were all but covered in muck. ‘That is, if I can come with you?’

Matthew took her hand. ‘It’s a long, messy walk to my truck, especially if we avoid crossing the carnival grounds.’

‘I’m with you,’ said Maudie.

An hour later, wet, bedraggled, mud-scoured, Matthew Clarke and Darlin’ Maudie arrived at Matthew’s home in Onamata. As he helped Maudie out of the truck he glanced at the sky, which appeared troubled: dark fleeces of clouds glided across the night, covering and uncovering a tangerine-colored moon. Matthew tucked Maudie into the huge, black-walnut four-poster, which still dominates the downstairs bedroom, and covered her with the Gypsy quilt.

‘How do you feel?’ he kept asking.

‘It was you got struck by lightning, not me,’ Darlin’ Maudie replied.

* * *

I still live in the town of Onamata, two miles south and west of Iowa City, a hundred miles east of Des Moines. I am the only person who knows the origin of the name Onamata; yet explain as I might, no one will pay the slightest attention to me. In Place Names of Iowa, Onamata is described thus: ‘Origin unknown. Possibly a corruption of the Black Hawk Indian word for magic. Town established 1909.’

Onamata now consists of thirty houses, a general store, a café, a Conoco service station, a John Deere subagent, and the Clarke & Son Insurance Agency, of which I was until recently the proprietor. My grandfather was the original Clarke, and my father the son. Then Matthew Clarke was the father and I was the son. Now I am the Clarke and there is no son. The agency fronts on the main street of Onamata, a hundred yards from the banks of the Iowa River, where the water runs placid, the color of green quartz. The false front of the insurance agency building is painted a vibrant peach. The building once housed a bank, and before that an undertaker. Underneath the peach paint can still be seen BANK OF ONAMATA, the dark letters looking as though they want to push themselves to the surface.

Only I know that long ago Onamata was called Big Inning. That was before the flood of 1908, before the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was erased from human memory for thirty-five years. When the Confederacy did resurface, its origins, history, and secrets were known only to my father. His knowledge of the Confederacy destroyed his life, and some say my knowledge of the Confederacy is destroying mine. Personally, I feel somewhat like a prophet, and prophets are meant to be derided and maligned.

I have spent the past seventeen years of my life trying to prove the existence of my inherited obsession. Whatever was done to erase the Confederacy wasn’t enough. Bits and pieces have survived, like rumors, like buried evil unearthed and activated.

My grandparents, Justin and Flora Clarke, retired to Florida in 1942, leaving my father the insurance business and the two-story white frame house with a wrought-iron widow’s walk centered by a tall silver lightning rod. From a distance the top of the house resembles the helmet of a medieval soldier.

Grant Wood, the world-famous Iowa artist, could have known my grandparents. They could have posed for American Gothic. They were dry, meticulous people. My grandfather retired precisely on his sixty-fifth birthday, which was a Wednesday. He had been forty-one and my grandmother thirty-nine when my father was born. There had been an older child named Nancy-Rae, born to them in their late twenties, who, shortly after her fourteenth birthday, when my father was a toddler, stole off in the dark of night, walked out to the highway, where someone they knew saw her hitchhiking toward Chicago, and disappeared from the face of the earth.

‘Our greatest sadness,’ was how my grandmother described the loss of my aunt Nancy-Rae.

I saw my grandparents only once. When I was about eight my father and I drove to spring training in Florida. I saw Curt Simmons, Robin Roberts, Allie Reynolds, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Yogi Berra, and my grandparents.

They lived in a very small house on a side street in Miami. There was an orange tree in the back yard. The house and my grandparents smelled of Listerine, peppermint, and Absorbine, Jr.

They left Iowa irrevocably behind them when they retired. They never returned for a visit, never invited anyone from Onamata to visit them, including us, I suspect, although my father never said so.

What he did say, on the drive back, as if he was trying to explain something to me but was not exactly sure what, was, ‘We are haunted by our past, which clings to us like strange, mystical lint. Of the past, the mystery of family is the most beautiful, the saddest, and the most inescapable of all. Those to whom we are joined by the ethereal ties of blood are often those about whom we know the least.’ I think he was talking about much more than just my grandparents.

I listened to my father’s tales with half an ear. I knew he was obsessed with something no one else cared about. He wrote letters, articles, talked of a book, which he eventually wrote. Complained. I didn’t pay half the attention I should have. Children, thinking themselves immortal, assume everyone else is, too. He died when I was a few months short of seventeen.

The morning after being struck by lightning, Matthew Clarke woke in the cavernous double bed in the front bedroom, one of his long arms draped over the frail shoulders of Darlin’ Maudie. He stirred slightly, his finger tips touching her ribs. At his touch she moved closer to him. He had to restrain himself from counting her ribs with his fingers, one, two, three. Her body felt cool as it curved against his.

He could see her back, the skin the soft brown of tanned leather; her ear, protruding through tangles of coal-colored hair, seemed anxious to be kissed.

Matthew remembered the carnival, the rain, the lightning, the drive home with Maudie, scruffy as a drowned muskrat, at his side. He recalled adding whiskey to the coffee he made in the spacious kitchen at the rear of the house. And later, Maudie wild with passion in the big bed, her nails sharp against his shoulders, their bodies slick under the quilts as their sweat blended.

As I listened to various versions of this story, time and again, told to me as other children were regaled with fairy tales, I was always embarrassed. I realized as I grew older that it was because, as with most children, I wanted to deny my parents’ sexuality. I reluctantly have to admit that even now as I recall my father’s voice I am embarrassed. It is only when I distance the story by using my own words that I am comfortable with the telling.

There is one part of the story that wasn’t embarrassing, only puzzling. On that morning when Matthew awoke with Maudie beside him, he awoke with an awareness of something he knew was going to become the most important element in his life, more important than his business, than his home, than even the strange, fragile girl who, next to him, trembled as she dreamed.

In Matthew Clarke’s brain, which that morning felt bright as chrome, full of white light and blinding metal, the complete history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was burned in, deep as a brand, vivid, resplendent, dazzling in its every detail.

Two weeks later, on a humid August afternoon in 1943, Darlin’ Maudie and Matthew Clarke were married at the stone courthouse in Iowa City.

‘I tell you, Gid, during those two weeks there was a terrible volume of mail from Onamata to Miami. Everybody within a ten-mile radius of Onamata felt it their duty to let the old folks know what I’d done. I’d not only moved a girl into the holy confines of my father’s house, but I’d moved in what was known as a ‘carnival girl.’ A few of the more morally indignant canceled their insurance policies with my agency, but only a few.

‘After the wedding, the same straight-backed, blue-nosed women who had written scurrilous things about me to my parents came pussyfooting around the house bearing casseroles, pies, good wishes, and wedding presents.

‘After I wrote to them about the wedding, my mother added a little postscript to her next letter. “We hope you’ll be very happy,” it said. They never sent a present, never met Maudie.’

The same week he was married Matthew was accepted as a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Iowa. He was accepted reluctantly, by a vote of three to two, strictly on his undergraduate record. At his interview he was bright-eyed and only moderately coherent as he babbled about writing a thesis on some kind of baseball league that had existed near Iowa City in the early 1900s. The majority of the committee blamed his exuberance and incoherence on the fact that he was to be married in a day or two.

‘By October he’ll be back to normal and we’ll convince him to write a thesis on the Civil War,’ said E. H. Hindsmith, the man who cast the deciding vote in Matthew’s favor.

In the months that followed, Matthew Clarke continued to operate his insurance business from the dusty-windowed storefront in Onamata, not soliciting business but gently reminding local people when their fire, auto, farm, or crop insurance was up for renewal. He accepted new business when it came to him.

‘My Joseph’s gettin’ married next month,’ a sturdy farmer might say, standing awkwardly in the office, which smelled of varnish and paper and held a large, rectangular, wax-yellow desk, a wooden filing cabinet, and two severe wooden chairs. ‘He’ll be around to see you about life insurance. That is, if you’ll be in Tuesday evening.’

‘If Matthew Clarke sends you a bill, you know it’s an honest one,’ people said. They also said, ‘Matthew Clarke could have made something of his life if he wasn’t so interested in those baseball teams of his.’ They also whispered, in the gentle, misty heat of Iowa summer, ‘Matthew Clarke had a wife but couldn’t keep her.’

Matthew was hard at work on a proposal to write his thesis on the history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, though occasionally, when he tried to confirm some detail by consulting various books on baseball history and was unable to do so, he had doubts. But he quickly put them aside. He didn’t need any confirmation from outside sources. The history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was carved on stone tablets in his memory. He couldn’t know such things if they were not true.

During that time he also made Darlin’ Maudie pregnant.

Try as he might, Matthew learned little of Maudie’s past.

‘Why do you keep asking?’ was the way she would answer his questions. Or else she would say, ‘Do you love me?’

‘Of course I love you,’ Matthew would reply.

‘Then what else matters?’ And she would stare across the oversized oak table in the dining room, her chin resting in the palm of her left hand, her fingers hooked on her lower lip, a smile, full of love, gently crinkling the skin around her eyes.

It was Matthew’s nature to ask questions. He felt as if Maudie’s past was a rock that needed to be battered into gravel.

It was years later, long after Maudie was gone for the last time, that Matthew realized how lonely she must have been. He had the business, his studies, his obsession with the mysterious baseball league. But he had few friends, and much of his life was lived in solitude. Maudie maintained the old home, which still smelled of his retired parents. But she had no friends. There were simply no friends for her to have. The young people lived on the farms; the houses in Onamata were occupied mainly by retired farmers and businessmen. There were fewer than ten children in Onamata. And the mothers of those children were tight-lipped Baptists with protruding teeth and hair pulled back until their eyes bulged. The women were the same color and texture as the dusty streets of the town. Maudie walked barefoot to the general store, wearing her celery-colored pantaloons. And she smoked in public.

About the only change Maudie made to the house was to open the heavy, lined drapes with which Matthew’s mother had covered the enormous bedroom window that looked out onto a lilac-and-honeysuckle-choked yard. Maudie insisted the curtains remain open day and night. She opened the window, too. She brought a garden hose indoors and sprayed years of dust off the screens. In doing so she let the trapped odors of camphor, floor wax, and moth balls escape.

In the rich mornings they lazed in bed, the room shimmering with sunlight; they made love slowly, Matthew taking a long time to get used to the light, to the trill of birds outside the window, the flash of a cardinal across the pane, a wren or finger-sized hummingbird staring in at them over the saucerlike edge of a hollyhock.

Maudie’s skin, the color of creamed tea, both aroused and fascinated Matthew. He teased her about being Indian, remarked on her high cheekbones, her flattish nose, her sensual lips, hoping for some response that would reveal her past. In the huge bed, fragrant with their lovemaking, Matthew would lick his way slowly across her belly, thrilling to the salty sweetness of her, sure he could feel the life growing inside her, though she was barely pregnant.

‘My name is Maude Huggins Clarke. I’m nineteen, and I used to travel with a carnival. That was all you knew when you asked me to marry you; that’s all you ever need to know,’ Maudie would say in reply to whatever questions or implied question Matthew posed.

‘Hereditary diseases,’ Matthew cried one morning. ‘We have to think about the baby. Did anyone in your family suffer from hereditary diseases? Your mother? Father? Brothers? Sisters?’

‘Is clap hereditary?’ Maudie laughed.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t have any idea who my father was. I don’t think anybody has any idea who my father was.’

‘And your mother?’

‘I didn’t have a mother.’

‘Everybody has a mother.’

‘I was one of those babies janitors find wrapped in newspaper in a garbage can.’

‘In what city?’

‘Jesus, Matthew, don’t you ever quit? My father was an Indian rodeo rider, my mother was a camp follower, a rodeo whore. Oklahoma City. How’s that?’

‘Is it true?’

‘Only if you want it to be.’

Matthew would laugh, wrap his arms around her, and roll her across the big bed. He believed she told him the truth when she said she didn’t know who her father was. One crack in the rock.

My father ignored the suggestions, and later the recommendations, of his advisers at the University of Iowa History Department. He finally decided his thesis would be called A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. His advisers were at first tactful, forgiving, tolerant; later they became businesslike, orderly, methodical, and demanding of proof.

‘It is highly unlikely that we will recognize your efforts unless you can provide us with some documentation as to the existence of the so-called league about which you propose to write,’ is a sentence from one of the many letters my father exchanged with members of the History Department.

My father, at that point totally unperturbed, replied that since a number of prominent Iowans, many associated with the University of Iowa, were among the founders of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, he would have no trouble providing the required documentation. He kept every piece of correspondence connected with his project. I also have his finished thesis, his book, all 288 pages of it, from which I will quote occasionally, though sparingly. When I do quote, it is first to show the mystifying problems my father was up against, and second to demonstrate the seeming genuineness of the information my father quoted as truth.

In fact, right now I am going to transcribe a letter my father wrote and the reply he received, as well as an excerpt from A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

My father, when he woke the first morning after being struck by lightning, with Darlin’ Maudie snuggled against him, knew unquestionably that the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was founded in the early months of 1902. The idea for the league came about during a casual conversation, in a bar in Iowa City, between Clarke Fisher Ansley, one of the founders of what eventually became the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Frank Luther Mott, an eminent Iowan who was a teacher, scholar, and baseball aficionado.

My father’s history of the Confederacy is divided into three sections – Origins, Emergence, and Growth and Consolidation – with each section having many subsections and even the subsections having subsections. The Origins section takes a full seventy pages of text. Very little of it requires repeating here. I can assure you the information is accurate in every detail.

Here is my father’s letter to Mr. Mott, who in 1943 was retired but very much alive.

Dear Mr. Mott:

My name is Matthew Clarke and I am doing graduate work in American history at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. My interest is in the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, of which you were cofounder.

I will not presume to ask the many questions I wish to ask in this introductory letter. However, I would be most grateful if you would consider granting me an interview, at which time I would be pleased to learn whatever you can tell me about the formation, duration, and history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

Yours very truly,

Matthew Clarke

Mr. Mott’s reply follows.

Dear Mr. Clarke:

I have your letter before me and, I must confess, am rather mystified by it. I am totally unfamiliar with the Iowa Baseball Confederacy and certainly had nothing to do with the organization of such a league. I am, however, a baseball fan of long duration, and had any such organization existed in Iowa, I am certain I would have known about it.

I was associated with amateur and professional baseball in a number of capacities during my years in Iowa City. You must certainly have the name of the league wrong. If you could be somewhat more specific I would be happy to answer your inquiries.

Best wishes,

Frank Luther Mott

So you see the problems my father faced. He possessed a brainful of information, bright and beautiful as diamonds swaddled in midnight-blue velvet, yet it was information no one else would validate. The letters I have reproduced are merely the tip of the iceberg. There were tens, dozens, and finally hundreds of letters to anyone and everyone who might have come in contact with anyone who organized, played in, or was even a spectator at a game during the seven seasons that the Confederacy operated.

I feel as if I might have written A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy myself, for my father has catalogued in it the exact information that is burned into my brain. The only difference is that I am one generation further removed from it. The number of people who might remember the Confederacy decreases almost daily. My own task becomes more and more difficult.

I am going to reproduce another letter – the final one my father wrote to Frank Luther Mott. There was an exchange of eleven letters between them, with my father’s letters becoming more detailed, more demanding, more desperate, while Mr. Mott’s letters became shorter, more curt, and finally almost condescending.

Dear Mr. Mott:

After all our correspondence I am still unable to understand why you do not remember the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. I realize it has been a long time since 1902; perhaps if I refresh your memory. It was the evening of January 16, 1902, when you and Mr. Ansley met at Donnelly’s Bar in Iowa City.

‘Some of these young fellows who play in the Sunday Leagues are awfully good,’ you said to Mr. Ansley.

‘We should get them all together and form a semiprofessional league,’ Mr. Ansley replied.

‘I’d be willing to do some of the work if you would,’ you said.

‘It sounds like a good idea,’ said Clarke Ansley. ‘There’s that team from out around Blue Cut, call themselves the Useless Nine; they haven’t lost a game for two seasons. I was up to Chicago in September and some of those boys could play for either the Cubs or the White Sox.’

‘I know a couple of other people who would be interested,’ you said. ‘Why don’t we arrange an organizational meeting for next Wednesday?’

There you are, Mr. Mott – that was the way the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was born. Surely that must jog your memory.

Waiting anxiously to hear from you,

Yours truly,

Matthew Clarke

What follows is Mr. Mott’s final letter to my father.

Dear Mr. Clarke:

Although as you say it has been a number of years since 1902 and I have indeed spent considerably more years than you on this planet, I assure you I am not senile, demented, forgetful, or a liar. I resent the implications of your last correspondence. Once and for all, I know nothing of an organization called the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. I had nothing to do with the conception of such a league. To my knowledge, and my knowledge is considerable, such a league never existed. And on the off chance that it did exist in some remote part of the state, I certainly had nothing whatever to do with it, and neither did my friend Clarke Fisher Ansley.

I will thank you not to write to me again.

Sincerely,

Frank Luther Mott

I quote from A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy:

The Iowa Baseball Confederacy consisted of six teams, representing, with the exception of Iowa City and Big Inning, rural districts rather than actual towns, although Frank Pierce did have a post office in a farmhouse, as did Husk. Blue Cut and Shoo Fly were loose geographic areas defined by the districts from which their baseball teams drew players. Shoo Fly was in the general region now known as Lone Tree, while Blue Cut was in and around the town of Anamosa.

The league standings, as of July 4, 1908 – the time at which, for reasons as yet undetermined, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy ceased to exist forever – were as follows:

Team | Won | Lost | Pct. | G.B.
Big Inning | 32 | 16 | .667 | -
Blue Cut | 27 | 21 | .562 | 5
Shoo Fly | 26 | 22 | .541 | 6
Husk | 22 | 26 | .458 | 10
Frank Pierce | 21 | 27 | .436 | 11
Iowa City | 16 | 32 | .333 | 16

‘Something happened,’ my father would say, always making the same palms-up gesture of incomprehension. ‘Something happened on July 4, 1908, that brought history crashing down on the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Something happened that erased the league from human memory, changed the history of Iowa, of the U.S.A., maybe even the world. I’d give anything to know what it was. I don’t know if there was something in the air, or if a mysterious hand reached down out of the clouds, and patted tens of thousands of heads, wiping minds and memories until they were clear and shiny and blank as a wall newly covered in white enamel. Or maybe some phantom surgeon went into all those brains with long-handled magic scissors and snipped out all the memories of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.’

My own knowledge also ends as of July 3, 1908. The day before a scheduled game between the Chicago Cubs and the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars.

I have spent years of my life studying the Iowa City Daily Citizen and the Chicago Tribune, searching for some mention of the game or some mention that something unusual happened in the baseball world that summer. I know a great deal about the Chicago Cubs of 1908 and have written to their heirs and survivors – but I have drawn a blank.

2

My sister was born in 1944, and was, in some prophetic manner, named Enola Gay, a full year before the bomber droned over Hiroshima, its womb bursting with destruction. I was born a year after my sister and named Gideon John – Gideon, because my father, like the biblical Gideon, played the trumpet. He had a fascination for what he described as ‘soulful music.’ When he played, the instrument often seemed only a shadow of itself. The muted notes reflected his moods, burbling like water when he was happy, ticking like a clock when he felt reflective, wailing like an animal in pain when he was sad or frustrated, as he often was. Deep in the night I’d hear him in his study, or in the living room, the music soft and sad as angels. I’d shiver and cover my head with my pillow, for I’d know that his playing usually, in my early years, predicted my mother’s leaving, and later it meant his frustrations were building to unbearable proportions. On the occasions when my mother did leave us, he would climb to the second floor, pull down the old spring ladder that spent its life nestled against the hall ceiling, and climb to the widow’s walk on top of the house. There he would release all his anger and hurt and disappointment, and I would cry softly, as much for him as for myself, while he hurled the notes toward the blue-and-silver night sky.

I found out early on I had the same easy ability with the trumpet as my father. Neither of us ever took a lesson. When I was barely school age, after we had returned from a weekend of watching baseball in St. Louis, I picked up the horn and tooted ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ My version was as muted and sad as anything my father had ever played.

Instead of blood grandparents, I had John and Marylyle Baron. Only for the first five years of my life did I have a blood sister, but for all my life I’ve had Missy Baron. Missy, the eternal child. Like Raggedy Ann she has a candy heart with I LOVE YOU written on it. One of my first memories, perhaps my very first, is of Missy staring down into my crib, cooing to me in a voice of universal love. Missy, her straight red hair dangling like shoelaces across her bland, freckled face, her pudgy hands touching me as if I were made of gossamer. Missy is well over fifty now, an advanced age for one who suffers from Down’s syndrome, as it had come to be called.

The Barons, both over eighty, still live on their farm a mile out of town in the direction of the Onamata Catholic Church, which was built in anticipation of a new railroad and never relocated after the fickle iron highway chose another route.

‘We always tried to be a friend to that mama of yours,’ Mrs. Baron said to me just recently. ‘She was a strange lady, Gideon.’

In small towns, events that would be forgotten by all but intim- ate family members become community property, remain ripe for rehashing. My mother deserted us, taking my sister with her, when I was going on six.

‘Your papa was a fine man, a bright young man too, until he started carrying on about that baseball league of his. You know, Gideon, I trained as a nurse for three years, in the hospital in Iowa City, back when I was a girl. We were taught to look for symptoms, and I used to watch you with a professional eye when you were growing up, looking for signs of the same disease in you.’

She stops. She has talked herself into a corner. It is all right to mention my father’s obsession, but mine is never discussed seriously; certainly no criticism is ever offered. It is also all right to mention the strangeness of my mother, but Sunny is never mentioned, though she is my wife and, like my mother, a woman who comes and goes at will.

‘I caught the disease all at once. There were no symptoms.’

‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I always thought it was kind of like that polio that used to go around in the summers; it just snuck up and paralyzed your body. But what you got kind of affected your mind.’ She paused. ‘Well, now I have put my foot in it, haven’t I? But you really didn’t have personal knowledge of this baseball league until after your papa died?’

‘I knew only what he told me. I was just a kid, purposely uninterested in what my father was doing, kind of contemptuous, too, the way teenage boys are.’

‘And you were suddenly filled with it, just like religious fervor? But why keep at it? A smart young fellow like you should know when he’s beating a dead horse.’

‘I don’t think anyone knows when he’s beating a dead horse. But the reason I keep on trying to prove the existence of the Confederacy is that I’m right and everybody else is wrong!’ I laugh wistfully, trying to show that I do have some understanding of the futility of my quest.

‘Well, Gideon, I wish you luck. You still planning on having the town’s name changed?’

‘I don’t want to change the town name. I just want it acknow- ledged that Onamata is named for the wife of Drifting Away, the great Black Hawk warrior.’

‘I don’t suppose you have any proof that there ever was an Indian named Drifting Away?’

‘Not an iota. Except I know it’s the truth, and so did my father, and neither of us has ever been known to be a liar.’

It will take some monumental action on my part to have the Iowa Baseball Confederacy recognized and legitimized. I read of a man who climbed up a pole, vowing to sit on a platform twenty feet above the earth until the Cleveland Indians won the pennant. That was sometime in the mid-fifties. I assume he came down.

‘Well, I wish you luck, Gideon.’ And Marylyle Baron tightened up the strings of her speckled apron and hobbled up the steps of her farmhouse. I do odd jobs for the Barons. Out of love, not because I need the money. Today, I mow the big front yard; the sweetness of cut grass fills the air. I am bare to the waist and streaming sweat.

In the past year or so I have tried a new tack: I have begun to approach the subject of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy from an oblique angle. I liken it to driving a wedge in a rock.

Part of the information my father passed on to me concerned an Indian named Drifting Away, a Black Hawk warrior and chief. I know the facts I have about Drifting Away are true, but, as with the data about the Confederacy, there is not a shred of proof. But if I can get one person to acknowledge the existence of Drifting Away, if I can convince one person that the town was named for Onamata, Drifting Away’s wife, who was murdered by white settlers in the 1830s, I’ll have a real wedge in the rock.

From A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy:

Drifting Away remembers. He remembers the gentle, rolling Iowa landscape in days when buffalo still grazed idly, the only sounds the grumble of their own bones. The creak of the wheel was only a prophecy, the oxcart a vision, the crack of the whip and the crack of the rifle known only to those who made their eyes white as moonlight in order to stare down the tunnel of the future. Drifting Away remembers the haze of campfires hanging, smooth as a cloud, in the tops of dappled poplars …

Why baseball? Was it because of our obsession with the game that my father and I were gifted, if it can be called a gift, with encyclopedic knowledge of a baseball league?

I inherited my knowledge of the Confederacy and my interest in baseball, but what of my father? My grandfather never attended a baseball game in his life.

‘How did you come to love baseball?’ I asked my father repeatedly. And he told me the story of how his passion was roused by a visiting uncle, a vagabond of a man who parachuted into their lives every year or so. He would appear clutching a deck of cards and a complicated baseball game played on a board with dice and markers. He also arrived with an outfielder’s black glove and a baseball worn thin by time. He claimed the baseball was once autographed by Walter Johnson.

The uncle – I’m not clear about which side of the family he was from – first charmed my father into playing catch, then into investigating the intricacies of the board game.

‘My uncle was named James John James,’ my father reported. ‘He owned nothing but a blue serge suit, a crumpled felt hat, and the articles to do with baseball.

‘My imagination had never been exercised,’ he went on. ‘My folks weren’t that kind of people. Uncle Jim pulled my imagination out of me like a magician pulling a string of light bulbs from my mouth. We played his board game, moving little nubbins of yellow and blue around the cardboard baseball field. Strange as it seems, it was through that board game that I learned to love baseball, for my uncle could bring that small green board to life. Every roll of the dice was like a swing of the bat. My uncle arrived with a tattered copy of the St. Louis Sporting News, and as we played we invented leagues, furnishing them with teams plucked from the Sporting News standings – teams from dreamy-sounding places like Cheyenne, Quincy, Tuscaloosa, Bozeman, Burlington, York, Far Rockway. We created players, gave them names and numbers and histories. They pitched, batted, ran the bases, were benched if they didn’t hit or made too many errors, or were moved up to clean-up if they hit like crazy. We drew up a schedule, had double-headers on July Fourth and Labor Day, played out a whole season during the few weeks that my uncle visited.

‘And then he took me to a real game. We went into Iowa City and watched a commercial league in action, and it was just like I’d discovered the meaning of the universe.

‘After my uncle left I kept on exercising my imagination. If you look around on the side of the garage, Gid, you’ll see a piece of board nailed to it in the shape of a strike zone, and if it hasn’t rotted away, you’ll find a piece of plank imbedded in the earth right in front of that strike zone. Me and my friend from down the street, we made our own baseballs, according to my uncle’s recipe. We soaked Life magazines in a mixture of milk and kerosene. Uncle Jim said that combination made the balls tough but spongy. They certainly smelled bad enough. Dried them in the sun, we did. We used a little piece of one-by-two for a bat. There were no bases or running or anything like that. It was pitcher against batter. I sneaked some lime out of the garage and we made white lines down the middle of the garden, like lines on a football field. If the batter hit the ball a certain distance it was a single. A little farther, a double, then a triple, and finally over the garden fence was a home run. We spent most of the time searching for the ball in among your grandmother’s cucumbers. In the fall, when we raked up the leaves and vines from the garden, we’d find a dozen or two of our baseballs. But, oh, the imagination we had.’

I played the same game; my father taught it to me. There was nothing surreptitious about our laying white lines across the garden until it looked like a golf driving range. Eventually I found a playmate with an imagination; his name was Stan Rogalski, and though he played real baseball, too (in fact, Stan is still playing semipro ball), he and I passed hours on summer afternoons and evenings, batting and pitching, searching for the ball among the cucumbers, keeping accurate box scores for our imaginary teams. Then, after the game, we would sit in either my or Stan’s kitchen and bring all our statistics up to date.

Neither my father nor I ever played anything but sandlot baseball. I was on the Onamata High School team, but only because there were just ten boys in our high school and one of them was in a wheelchair, making his handicap only slightly worse than mine, which was lack of ability.

‘Why not baseball?’ my father would say. ‘Name me a more perfect game! Name me a game with more possibilities for magic, wizardry, voodoo, hoodoo, enchantment, obsession, possession. There’s always time for daydreaming, time to create your own illusions at the ballpark. I bet there isn’t a magician anywhere who doesn’t love baseball. Take the layout. No mere mortal could have dreamed up the dimensions of a baseball field. No man could be that perfect. Abner Doubleday, if he did indeed invent the game, must have received divine guidance.

‘And the field runs to infinity,’ he would shout, gesturing wildly. ‘You ever think of that, Gid? There’s no limit to how far a man might possibly hit a ball, and there’s no limit to how far a fleet outfielder might run to receive it. The foul lines run on forever, forever diverging. There’s no place in America that’s not part of a major-league ballfield: the meanest ghetto, the highest point of land, the Great Lakes, the Colorado River. Hell, there’s no place in the world that’s not part of a baseball field.

‘Every other sport is held in by boundaries, some of absolute set size, some not: football, hockey, tennis, basketball, golf. But there’s no limit to the size of a baseball field. What other sport can claim that? And there’s no more enigmatic game; I don’t have to tell you that. I’m glad what happened to me happened to me, Gid. I created imaginary baseball leagues when I was a kid. Now I have a real imaginary league to worry about, if there can be such a thing. But I’m glad it happened to me. I consider myself one of the chosen. I’m an evangelist in a funny sort of way. It ain’t easy, but you should be so lucky.’

I am.

A few statistics on batting from A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy:

Batting Averages
1. | Bob Grady, Husk | .368
2. | Simon Shubert, Blue Cut | .360
3. | Jack Luck, Iowa City | .358
4. | Horatio N. Scharff, Big Inning | .357
5. | Henry Pulvermacher, Shoo Fly | .351
Home Runs
1. | Ezra Dean, Blue Cut | 27 (1906)
2. | Orville Swan, Big Inning | 26 (1903)
3. | Jack Luck, Iowa City | 22 (1906)
4. | Bob Grady, Husk | 20 (1905)
5. | William Stiff, Frank Pierce | 20 (1907)

In the summer of 1907, the Detroit Tigers, who were burning up the American League, were invited to Big Inning, Iowa, to play the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars on July 4. In May, the Tigers sent a former player of theirs named Norman Elberfeld, known as the Tabasco Kid, to Big Inning to scout the IBC. The Tabasco Kid sent back a report saying that though the players were for the most part unknown, the caliber of play in the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was so high that it could prove embarrassing to a major league team experiencing an off day. The Tigers politely declined the invitation.

My father submitted his thesis, his 288-page manuscript, to the University of Iowa, Department of History, in the spring of 1946. It was about the same time that my sister, Enola Gay, poured a large tin of Golden Corn Syrup into my crib, very nearly causing my demise.

A few days later, my father was called to the office of Dr. E. H. Hindsmith, his supervisor.

‘He looked at me over the top of his bone-rimmed glasses, his eyebrows like crusted snow, his face grizzled, snuff stains in the creases at the corners of his mouth.

‘“There is no evidence to indicate that the Iowa Baseball Confederacy ever existed,” he said, coming right to the point. “In fact, Mr. Clarke, it seems that I and my colleagues have repeatedly warned you against writing on such a topic.”’

My father could reproduce the exact inflections of Hindsmith’s voice. I interviewed Hindsmith after I became obsessed with the Confederacy, and it was like speaking with an old friend. Hindsmith’s voice inflections betrayed his roots, he having been born in a place called Breastbone Hill, Kentucky, the son of a miner. My father reenacted that conversation at least once a month for all the years I knew him.

‘His eyes met mine, sending out a frank, blue stare, solid as steel rods. “This is a masterfully written thesis,” he said, pausing dramatically. He did not pronounce the r in masterfully. “We have voted five to zero to reject it completely as historical fact. However, we are much impressed with your writing ability; in fact, we took the liberty of showing a copy to Paul Engle of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Mr. Engle, also, is very enthusiastic about your writing style. He suggests that with, say, one semester of study in fiction writing, you could use the same material as a novel and probably find a publisher, at the same time earning yourself an MFA degree in English.” He kept staring at me to see how I was reacting.

‘“But it’s the truth,” I wailed. “Every word of this thesis is true. I don’t care who denies it. I don’t care how many people are in a league against me, for whatever reasons.” Oh, I made a proper fool of myself.

‘‘‘We urge you to consider our recommendation, Matthew,” Dr. Hindsmith said. ‘It is the unanimous opinion of the History Department that your field of endeavor should be fiction.”’

Drifting Away remembers, stares around at a world cut into squares. The white man’s world is full of squares. The cities are measured out in squares and rectangles – houses, factories, tables, automobiles – the white man always obsessed with bending the lines of nature, attacking the natural circles of nature, straightening the curving lines into grids, breaking circles, covering the land with prison bars.

Squares have no power, thinks Drifting Away. Power lies in the circle. Everything in nature tries to be round – the world is round, the sun, the moon, the stars; life is circular; the birds build round nests, lay circular eggs; flowers are round.

Indians knew. Tepees, round, set in circles, a nest amid many nests. Drifting Away remembers the undulating trails, smooth and easy, long as rivers, bent as snakes. At first the white man followed the Indian trails, but, always in a hurry, he could not take the time to follow nature; he had to defeat nature. The white man’s trails were straight, no matter that the going was sometimes impossible. Then came the straight iron rivers, always intersecting at right angles.

Drifting Away, in one of his lives, built a round lodge, draped it with hides, was a proud hunter, rich, provided well for his squaw and children. Owned many horses. Built that round lodge on the edge of a grove filled with every kind of bird, near the gentle Iowa River, miles from the nearest white settlement.

But the whites carved the land into squares, claimed to own it, claimed it as their own, though everyone knows you cannot sell the land upon which the people walk. The land, like the sky, is not for sale. The white men came, riding across the hills, loudly, no fear in their hearts, for their guns and engines make nature cringe. They take measure of the land, stake out the earth as if they could tie it down.

They look at Drifting Away’s lodge, make solemn faces.

‘You can no longer live here,’ they tell him.

‘The earth is for all men,’ Drifting Away replies.

‘Not for you, Indian,’ they say. ‘For you, there is a reservation. By law you have to live on your reservation.’

Drifting Away pretends not to understand, prays they will go away. They do, but leave behind a warning, like a cloud bank groaning with thunder.

‘One moon,’ they say. ‘There will be trouble if you are not gone.’

* * *

How has my father affected my life? He has been like a giant smothering me with his shadow. For every inch my memory of him recedes, his shadow grows a foot taller. His memory holds me aloft; he is a Cyclops, a colossus, angry, tossing me in the air, dangling me by one arm while I struggle, tiny as a toy.

Still, it is very hard to take someone seriously who was killed by a line drive. No matter how macabre it is, there is something humorous about being killed by a line drive. It is much the same as being fatally struck by lightning. A couple of years ago, in Iowa City, a man really was fatally struck by lightning. He was walking up the sidewalk to his fiancée’s home when, splat, he was fried like an egg on her sidewalk, cooked like a hamburger, spread out like quicksilver to shimmer in the sun. Turned out he was a churchgoer, too – a deacon or an elder or something. I’ve often wondered what a preacher could possibly say, with a straight face, about someone fatally struck by lightning. It is so biblical. So prophetic. So funny.

I am the only one who knows this: that my father committed suicide. I have never told Sunny, or the Barons, my sister, my mother, or my best friend, Stan. I’m sure, on the bright blue September afternoon at County Stadium in Milwaukee, where the air was crisp with the memory of frost and tangy with the odor of burning leaves, that my father saw the line drive coming. Bill Bruton, the Milwaukee center fielder, swung late at a Harvey Haddix fast ball and sent it screaming over the top of the visitors’ dugout, at a speed of more than a hundred miles per hour. My father was writing on his scorecard and supposedly never saw the ball, which struck him full on the left temple, bursting a blood vessel and killing him instantly. But I was there, too. He had indeed been writing on his scorecard. I still have the scorecard, the final pen line wavering downward like the graph of a failing stock. I, for some reason, while pouring the last of my popcorn from the box into my right hand, was watching my father out of the corner of my eye. He sighted the line drive – I swear I saw the ball reflected in his pupil – and instead of ducking or pulling his head back, he almost imperceptibly moved his head forward, a weary gesture of resignation, and allowed the ball to strike him, thus ending his long and unsuccessful struggle against his tormentors, those craven bureaucracies which, for whatever reasons, refused to acknowledge the existence of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

As he lay crumpled there in his shirtsleeves in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, I knew he was dead, because at the same instant I was filling up with the information he alone had been party to for so many years; it was like water transferred from one lock to another. There in County Stadium, with the smell of fresh-cut grass and frying onions in my nostrils, I was suddenly illuminated like an old Wurlitzer, garish neons bubbling. I was overflowing with knowledge, and boiling with righteous indignation because not a soul in the world cared about what I knew.

Whatever had been visited upon my father was now visited upon me. The history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was transplanted into my brain like a pacemaker installed next to a fluttering heart.

If I had to choose a way to die, I suppose I would do the same as my father. What better way to go? The lulling quality of the sun, the crack of the bat, the hum of the crowd. Surrounded by everything he cherished. I don’t begrudge him his one instant of resignation, if that’s what it was. He had been chasing the elusive Iowa Baseball Confederacy for eighteen years and for all that time it had remained just out of his reach, the uncatchable mechanical rabbit of his dreams.

On the way back to Iowa City, I drove our green Fargo pickup truck while my father’s shell rode in a satin-lined casket on a railroad baggage car at double regular fare. I made the arrangements myself. I didn’t phone anyone. Who was there to phone? I would let the Barons know after I got back to Onamata. If I had let them know sooner, they would have insisted on coming to Milwaukee. After all, I wasn’t helpless.

It never occurred to me not to pursue legitimizing the Confederacy. At least I didn’t have to worry about money. My father certainly was not wealthy, but the big old house in Onamata and the small building that housed the insurance agency were both paid for. My father had employed a charming woman, Mrs. Lever, to manage the business. She was tall, flat as an ironing board, with gray hair combed back at the sides and mother-of-pearl-rimmed glasses. She was the wife of a corn farmer who retired to the city and let his eldest take over the farm. She must have been a lot younger than she looked, or perhaps at going-on-seventeen I thought everyone looked old, for she still runs the agency.

About four years ago I said to her, ‘Give yourself a raise of a hundred dollars a month. Keep running the business as you always have. At the end of the year we’ll split the profits.’

She fussed a little but she didn’t turn me down.

The next year I gave her another raise and sixty percent of the profits. Last fall I said, ‘It’s all yours. Just promise me you won’t change the name.’

My mother had remarried and apparently settled down. At what age? On her marriage license when she married my father, she listed herself as nineteen, but did she have to show proof or did they take her word for it? If nineteen was correct, then she was about twenty-two when I was born, twenty-seven when she deserted us for the last time, thirty-four when she married a man named Beecher, who, it was rumored, had some connection with the Wrigleys and the Chicago Cubs.

I know virtually nothing about my mother that my father didn’t tell me. I remember the warmth of her, her dark, hazy eyes. It seemed to me, when I got older, that she really didn’t know how to kiss. I remember her brushing her lips across my cheeks or forehead, but brushing was what she did, not kissing. I always felt as if her and Enola Gay’s leaving might somehow have been my fault. Perhaps I was so strange a child neither of them could stand me. Perhaps she hated my blondness, my potato-white skin, my hair the color of new stationery. What if she had good reason to leave? What if my father mistreated her? He was never violent, but mistreatment can take much subtler forms. What if she couldn’t stand being ignored? What if she couldn’t tolerate my father having a mistress, one far more demanding than anyone alive and sexual and sensuous, one she couldn’t fight either physically or mentally? The IBC is like that. I know.

Mother settled down at thirty-four, to life in a Chicago mansion.

Sunny isn’t thirty-four yet. Perhaps there is hope. Perhaps Sunny will settle down with me.

To my surprise, Darlin’ Maudie and Enola Gay returned for the funeral. I had thought of notifying them but didn’t. Certainly my father’s death didn’t make the Trib. Unless, of course, it was in one of those columns of oddities in the news: RABID FAN KILLED BY BASEBALL, or FAN KILLED BY RABID BASEBALL. There were six dark-suited, nervous men from the Milwaukee organization at the funeral. The Braves were so afraid I was going to sue them for some astronomical amount and win that they paid for my father’s transportation back to Iowa City, the hearse and the undertaker, and the silver-handled oak casket – that was a small settlement in itself. There were floral tributes from the owners, manager, and players which looked as if they belonged in the winner’s circle at the Kentucky Derby.

I was sent a sack of twenty-five baseballs, each personally inscribed by a member of the team, and a lifetime pass to a box seat, which, of course, expired with the team in 1965.

My mother and sister arrived in a black limousine, driven by a large-eared youth with a white, cadaverous face partially hidden by a chauffeur’s cap. They were both dressed fashionably in black and both looked much smaller than they had been in my memory. Mother was no more than five foot one, and Enola Gay was of identical height.

In the chapel of the Beckman-Jones Funeral Home in Iowa City, there was a curtained-off area for family members, but neither Mother nor Enola Gay sat there with me. In fact, they didn’t come near me at all. It was as if they were attending the funeral of a distant acquaintance, one whose family they had never met.

The Barons drove me to the funeral home. I sat in the back seat of their comfortable old Dodge, which smelled of dust and machine oil, as Missy hummed and smiled, twisting the skirt of her dark brown dress.

‘You don’t want to be all alone in that little room, Gideon,’ Marylyle Baron said to me. ‘Come and sit out in the chapel with us.’

‘You come inside with me,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel like having everyone stare at me. I suppose there are rumors.’ I smiled weakly. ‘It’s not every day the community’s number-one baseball fanatic gets killed at a baseball game.’

‘You don’t want to hear them,’ Mrs. Baron said. ‘People have small minds and mean mouths.’

So the four of us sat on pastel chairs in the curtained-off room, separated from the chapel by a peach-colored curtain translucent enough for me to recognize many of the mourners by their silhouettes.

I peeked around the edge of the curtain once: Darlin’ Maudie and Enola Gay sat about halfway back, demure and expensively dressed. They left as the pallbearers were preparing to carry the coffin outside to the hearse for the ride to Fairfield Cemetery in Iowa City. Their leaving was a good idea. The pallbearers might have mistaken their limousine for the hearse.

It was only a year or two later that Enola Gay became one of America’s first urban guerrillas. I have to admit Enola was a pioneer; perhaps she inherited her spirit from my father. She was years ahead of the Chicago Seven, the Weather Underground, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. She has also, as urban guerrillas go, been quite successful. Her first venture was to bomb a Dow Chemical subsidiary in Chicago – $250,000 damage and no injuries. She and her cohorts left a note, signed with their real names, with a P.S. : Catch us if you can!

They have not been able to catch Enola Gay, though one of the original bombers came forward in the early seventies and spilled his guts in return for three years’ probation and a reunion with his wealthy family. He is now vice president of a bank. Another member of the group blew himself up in 1969, near an Omaha packing plant where a labor dispute was taking place. Every post office in America has posters showing Enola Gay as she looked some fifteen years ago and as they imagine she might look today. Her list of offenses takes up two sheets of Wanted paper. There is a women’s collective named for her in Iowa City, and an abortion clinic in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, bears her name. Occasionally a car full of bedraggled-looking women in sloganed T-shirts stops in front of my home and a few pale faces peer at Enola Gay’s birthplace.

After the graveside services, Marylyle Baron grabbed my arm as I tried to edge away – from the Barons, from the polite condolences of neighbors and acquaintances who, having nothing to say, tried to say it anyway. It’s too bad there are no Hallmark cards saying, ‘Sorry your loved one was killed by a foul ball.’

‘You’re coming home with us,’ Mrs. Baron said. ‘You’re not going back to that big, lonely house. In fact, I think you should come and live with us. You can finish your schooling. Only thing is, you’ll have to walk a mile instead of a block to school.’ John Baron stood behind her, nodding his big, gray-thatched head.

‘I’ll bake you cookies,’ said Missy. ‘Gideon won’t be so sad if I bake him cookies, will he?’ she said to her mother, smiling her innocence, hopping a little in her excitement.

Missy bakes wonderful gingerbread cookies; always has. Marylyle was able to teach her how to mix the ingredients, divide the dough into small balls, flatten the balls with a rolling pin, make tracks in each cookie with the tines of a fork, and place the tire-tracked cookies on a greased cookie sheet ready for the oven. I’ve watched her countless times; she sings under her breath as she performs the ritual, concentrating, brows furrowed like those of someone puzzling over a mathematical problem.

‘You always make me feel good, Missy,’ I said to her and patted her arm.

I lived with the Barons for two years, until I finished high school in Onamata. I insisted on paying my own way. It was the least I could do.

It was during that time that Marylyle Baron told me what I call the oral history of Big Inning, Iowa. From her I learned that I wasn’t quite as different as I at first thought. I shared my stories of the Confederacy with her, and though she had no memory of the events I knew as fact, she was able to add some rather astonishing folk tales to my repertoire.

Drifting Away remembers the shining desert, the Dakota Hills roiling with green and silver grasses. Drifting Away fought beside Crazy Horse, rode with him into the wilds, shared his deepest dreams, was there when Crazy Horse’s only daughter, They Are Afraid of Her, lay dying, strangling on her own phlegm, not yet five years old.

Drifting Away was there when Crazy Horse died, murdered by a soldier named Gentles, held from behind by his traitorous brother, Little Big Man. With a knife blue as moonlight Drifting Away cut out the noble heart, carried it to Crazy Horse’s elderly parents, who buried it in the clear, sweet water of Wounded Knee Creek.

3

‘I think I’ll turn in,’ I said to the Barons, early on the evening after the funeral. I was just not able to face any more conversation, no matter how loving or concerned.

But in my room, between the crisp linen sheets, I could not sleep. I got up and dressed, then tiptoed down the hall and stairs like a burglar, carrying my shoes in front of me.

The sky was clear, the stars like tinsel, the soil still warm from the sun of the afternoon. I walked down the silent midnight roads, past the small Onamata Catholic Church, its spire the middle of a trinity of shadows; evergreens on either side of the church had grown to almost equal height. Along the roads, the corn stood crisp and blond, chittering like small rodents in a whisper of a breeze.

Onamata was quiet; the streetlights hummed. Above a hedge an occasional firefly twinkled; something scuttled in an overgrown yard. I let myself into the empty house. I went to my room and retrieved my horn from where it lay encased in fuschia-colored velvet in its old black case. The moon trickled over the horn, sparking until I might have been carrying golden water in my hand. I headed for the gentle elevation on the edge of town, where the land rises steadily up from the sleepy Iowa River. The river that night was so silent it might have been painted on the landscape. I climbed the easy slope I now knew had been the Big Inning baseball grounds. I knew that something terrible, something of history-changing magnitude, had taken place there. I walked on past the furthest reaches of center field, stopping on a precipice that must, long ago, have been a buffalo jump. I stood staring out at the rolling acres of corn, the pinprick of yard lights in a farmstead or two. Behind me was the eerie glow of Onamata, like a campfire just over a ridge.

I pointed my horn toward the sky and let it cry for me, let it translate my sorrow into notes. I played such a version of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game,’ the music plaintive as a loon’s call, the melody melancholy as taps. When I finished I rested for a few seconds, then went at it again, moving the tempo up to nearly normal but still soulful. Finally, knowing my father would not want me to grieve for long, I blasted it out with a Dixieland wail, as if I were playing during the seventh-inning stretch in front of a hundred thousand frenzied fans in a pennant-deciding game.

Once in the days after I moved back into my own home, before I met Sunny, I brought Missy Baron home with me to the cool, high-ceilinged kitchen with its tall cupboards and the rectangular, flat-bottomed sink. The sink boasted high steel faucets capped with porcelain. I made soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, a bachelor’s specialty. Mainly I wanted to see if Missy would be a party to any of the unusual goings-on in my kitchen. I think, too, I simply wanted some confirmation of what I had seen, something to let me know my obsession with the Confederacy was not tampering with my sanity.

We finished our meal, Missy being elaborately careful to spoon up the last few drops of her soup and to blot up the last crumbs of her sandwich with her middle finger.

‘You do a very good job of cleaning up your plate,’ I said. Missy smiled like sunshine.

‘Can’t let good food go to waste,’ she said, and I could hear Marylyle Baron’s tones echoing in Missy’s slightly nasal sing-song.

‘No, we can’t,’ I said. Then, ‘Let’s go sit in the sun porch.’

As we stood to leave the room, the water began gushing into the sink, the dish detergent gulped out of the bottle, and a froth of suds rose to the edge of the sink. The dishes, as if carried by invisible servants, floated to the sink and immersed themselves gently like children sliding into a bubble bath.

When the washing and rinsing were done, the plates, cups, and cutlery glided off like butterflies, each to its proper place on the shelves, and the cupboard doors and cutlery drawer closed softly.

Missy stood entranced the whole time. I was vindicated. What I saw was actually happening. When our eyes met, I was smiling from ear to ear, nearly bursting with excitement. I had never shared the mystery of it before. My father was always talking of the magic in the air, but I never knew how much of it he experienced. Until now, the dishes had performed their sleight of hand only when I was alone with them.

‘They rinsed themselves only once,’ Missy said, with deadly seriousness. ‘Mama says you rinse once to get the soap off and once to kill germs.’

If the eeries in my kitchen heard, they were not about to let on, though I imagined I heard a cupboard door tugged lightly shut, from the inside.

After the funeral, Missy did bake cookies, and I helped her. Sometimes I teased her gently by taking a fork and making a cross pattern on one of the cookies, or marking one well off center. Missy would pull her lips tight in exasperation; she became the mother, I the child. ‘Oh, Gideon, that’s not the way to do it,’ she would say, scowling. Then she would deliberately take the improperly marked gingerbread back, roll the fork marks out of it, and with extreme care redo it properly.

It was a good distraction for me, taking my mind off the death of my father and the multitudinous fund of information concerning the Iowa Baseball Confederacy that whirled and flopped in my head like clothing tumbling in a dryer.

Later, from the hallway, I listened to Missy splashing her bath water, giggling like a five-year-old. ‘Gideon, come see me sail my boat,’ she called between splashes.

And then from behind the door came Marylyle’s firm voice saying, ‘You’re too grown up for Gideon to see you in the bathtub.’

But I did hear her prayers. We all did. John Baron would stand just inside the white-trimmed doorway, in the room where ballerinas forever danced on the wallpaper and where a bed with a ruffled canopy sat against a far wall. He wore bib overalls and a black-and-red checkered shirt, his white hair combed in a high pompadour, his face wide and windburned. He appeared slightly uneasy, as if he feared he might drip oil on something. Missy knelt by the bed, her nightgown a riot of black-eyed Susans, her hair still damp from her bath.

‘Now I lay me down to sleep,’ Missy said.

My tribulations. Wealth is a tribulation. I was happy enough before I had it; the insurance agency always earned enough to pay the taxes on the house and keep us in food and a new pickup truck every few years. The only thing I’ve done with my new wealth is a little advertising. You’ve probably seen the ads I’ve run in everything from the Christian Science Monitor to the National Inquirer. The small ads ask that anyone having memories or any kind of information concerning the Iowa Baseball Confederacy contact me at a P.O. box in Onamata. I receive a lot of religious tracts, offers to sell me Rhine Valley cuckoo clocks, pamphlets on numerology, brochures advertising trips to Hawaii, and instruction on how to become a Rosicrucian. I’ve also discovered that the peace movement is heavily into junk mail. So far, I’ve received polite letters from a number of baseball experts, real and imagined, who tell me the IBC never existed.

The way I became wealthy was this. My mother, Maude Huggins Clarke, married a man named Beecher, who, it turned out, was indeed related to the Wrigleys, the Chicago Cubs, and several million dollars. He died when I was nineteen and, inexplicably, left no will. My mother was about to inherit everything – he had no relatives close enough to raise legal objections – when the executors of his estate discovered that Mother had children from a previous marriage. Because of some quirk in Illinois law, Enola Gay and I became heirs to his estate – fifty percent went to Mother, twenty-five percent to each of us.

They have never been able to pay Enola Gay her share, for by the time the legal entanglements took their course, Enola Gay had embarked on her career as an urban guerrilla. I don’t know if Enola Gay is aware that I have barely touched my inheritance; I would guess she is, however. Late at night the phone will ring, and though I suspect it is Enola, I always answer just in case it is Sunny. Enola wants me to give her some of my money, or to claim her share, which I am apparently legally entitled to do, and then pass the money on to her. I am interested in doing neither. I doubt that she was very kind to my cat, Shoeless Joe, in his old age.

‘Live in fear, you bastard,’ Enola Gay said to me the last time she phoned. It must be frustrating for her to be so near that much money, to have a cause she wants to give it to, and yet not be able to get her hands on it.

‘I think the FBI has a tap on the phone,’ I said to Enola, and she hung up.

My share of the money was deposited in trust with a law firm in Iowa City. I signed a power-of-attorney form; they invest the money, pay my taxes, and keep me informed as to how wealthy I am. I can’t think of a single thing I want that all my wealth can buy me. I want:

(a) Sunny to love me enough to stay with me.

(b) To vindicate my father and myself by proving the existence of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

(c) To do something for Missy Baron.

It doesn’t surprise me that none of the items on my list requires great wealth.

The cat. I would hug him and he would hang down the front of me like a big orange bath towel. When he was hungry, he would rub around my ankles, nearly knocking me down. I think I learned some of my indifference from the cat. He demanded to be fed, or petted, let in, or let out. When he got what he wanted, he was disdain incarnate. When he didn’t, he could be as obsequious as a dog.

When he was content he would lie on his back and let me squeeze his front paws gently, feeling the moccasinlike pads, flexing his claws in and out. He was warm, and almost adoring, soft as the velvet pillows on the back of the sofa in the living room.

Enola didn’t like Joe. I have never understood why she took him with her when I was going on six years of age. If she hadn’t taken my cat, I would have claimed her money, put it in a suitcase in small bills, and left it for her in a garbage can in some suburban Chicago park on a rainy night. When I told her that, she spit curses in my ear and hung up.

The men who cleared and leveled the land to create a baseball diamond on the outskirts of Big Inning often saw, or thought they saw, flashing like a deer through the fluttering poplars beyond the outfield, the figure of a giant Indian.

He loped beyond the poplar grove, knees raised high, back bent forward as if he were performing some ritual dance or high ceremony. Sometimes, in the clean morning air, as they bent picking roots, they would hear his voice, yipping like a coyote or trilling a plaintive birdcall. Other times, they only felt his presence. Occasionally on a humid afternoon the men would stop what they were doing, notice the all-encompassing silence of the land, the trees, the nearby river. One of them would shiver, though sweat tracked in rivulets down his face and chest.

‘Someone just stepped on my grave,’ he would announce, and laugh self-consciously.

Someone else would say, ‘That damn Indian is somewhere close. I can smell his ornery hide, but I can’t see him.’

Everyone would stand still in the stifling afternoon and stare around them. Then a bird would squawk or a horsefly would bite or a frog would sing from the riverbank, and everything would be back in order just as if the moment of silence had never happened.

Drifting Away, who had been near enough to smell the white men’s sweat, near enough to reach out and touch their glistening wet backs, disappeared into the poplars, chuckling softly as a breeze.

‘Walt “No Neck” Williams, do you remember him?’ my friend Stan asks suddenly, in the way he has of jumping from subject to subject.

We are with our wives, driving back from a night game in Cedar Rapids.

‘Mm-hmm,’ I say noncommittally. ‘I know the name, but the details are fuzzy. He ended up playing in Japan, didn’t he?’

‘He played for the Sox. The White Sox. They called him No Neck because he didn’t have one.’ Stan laughs his long, stuttering laugh, sounding as if he has peanut shells lodged in his throat. There is a car following us closely and the headlights bury themselves in the rearview mirror, which then paints a moonlight-like bar across Stan’s face. As I glance across the front seat at him he looks as though he is wearing a golden mask.

‘Last summer I met No Neck Williams on the street in Chicago,’ Stan goes on. ‘I just about went crazy. “Hey, No Neck,” I called to him, and I set down my suitcases and went running after him.

‘You remember that, Gloria?’ He directs the last words at his wife, turning toward the back seat to acknowledge her, the mask of light slipping around his ear as he does.

Gloria is a big, blowzy Polish girl, cheerful and resilient. She has so far fouled off all the curves life has thrown at her, though I notice that her brows have squeezed together in a mini-scowl, as if she has been staring too long at the horizon.

‘He actually edged away from me. You remember that, Gloria? I guess you must meet a lot of nuts when you’re in the Bigs. I mean, I kept sayin’ to him, “Man, I used to watch you when you played for the Sox. You were great, man. You were great.” And I hauled out my wallet and looked for something he could sign, and I didn’t have any paper, not even a Master Charge slip or anything, so I got him to sign the back of Gloria’s picture. It’s one I’ve carried around for ten years, with Gloria in jeans and her hair up in a beehive, standing beside her old man’s ’69 Buick. No Neck looked at me like I was crazy, leaving my wife with our suitcases and chasing after him for a block like that. Don’t you remember him, Gid?’

‘I don’t get involved with modern-day players the way you do, Stan.’

My wife, Sunny, is squashed into the corner of the back seat behind me. She hasn’t said a word since we left the ballpark in Cedar Rapids. I catch a glimpse of the red glow of her cigarette. She is tiny as a child, sitting back there. I wonder how someone so small and insignificant-looking can tear me apart the way she does.

‘No Neck’s only a couple of years older than us, Gid,’ Stan says. ‘Played his last game in the Bigs in ’75. You know how that makes me feel? A guy just two years older than me, retired. And me still strugglin’ to make the Bigs?’

‘You’ll make it, Stan,’ I say automatically, just as I have been saying every year for over half my life.

Stan and Gloria have come to visit Gloria’s mother in Onamata; she’s the only family either of them has here anymore. Stan’s father is dead and his mother has gone to Florida to live with a married sister.

Since spring, Stan has been playing Triple A ball in Salt Lake City, but he sprained his right hand pretty badly a couple of weeks ago and the club put him on the disabled list and brought up a kid from a team in Burlington, Iowa, to replace him.

‘I wanted to ask No Neck how much he practiced. I bet he practiced like crazy or he never would have got to the Bigs. God, but I used to practice. Remember how I used to practice, Gideon? Gloria? Hey, Sunny, you’re bein’ awful quiet. I ever tell you how I used to practice?’

Sunny draws deeply on her cigarette but does not answer.

Stan is tall and muscular, his head square, his hair cut short, but his face is wide and innocent as a husky child’s. His eyes are pale blue and wide-set; his hair, though it’s darker now, was a lemony color when we were kids, and Stan was forever watering it, as if it were grass that would grow stronger when wet.

‘My old man never liked baseball, but I used to make him come outside and he’d stand in front of the barn, and I’d make him hit fly balls to me. I spent all my pay on baseballs – all the money I earned working for Old Piska, the cement contractor. Saturdays I used to carry a bucket of cement in each hand, from the mortar box to the sidewalk we were laying, or the garage floor. I took the money I earned and bought a box of baseballs, a whole dozen.

‘I laid them out on my bed like a bagful of white oranges, and I smelled them and touched them and handled them like a miser handling his money. Too bad I couldn’t have made real ones the way we made balls to play in your back yard, eh Gideon? God, they used to stink, but it was fun.

‘Speakin’ of stinking, the old man wasn’t a very good batter, and every once in a while he’d foul one into the goddamned pigpen. I’d have to wash the pigshit off it, and sometimes when I went into the pen, one of those big red buggers would have the ball in his teeth, and I’d have to whack his snout to make him let go, and then the ball would have tooth marks on it forever.’

Stan stops for a second or two. The highway is dark. There is an orange flash behind me as Sunny lights a new cigarette. I see that her left eye is closed, squinted up against the smoke. There is an inch-long scar, pink as a worm, on her dusky skin, running vertically from the corner of her eye onto her cheekbone. There are fine age lines spreading out from the corners of her eyes. Sunny aged a good deal the last time she was away.

‘I love the game, I’ve always loved the game, right, Gid? I used to dream about a career in baseball. It wasn’t just vague hopes like a lot of kids have. I knew what I was doing. I’ve made a living from the game for almost fifteen years. And I’m gonna make the Bigs yet, you wait and see.’

‘You’ll make it, Stan. We know that,’ I say.

‘I mean, I’ve seen guys with twice as much talent as me throw it all away. They party all night and stagger in ten minutes before a game, wearing their hangovers like badges. It’s not fair that my reflexes are one one-hundredth of a second slower than theirs. I mean, I work out three hours every afternoon. I’ve always hustled, haven’t I, Gid?’

‘You’ve always hustled,’ says Gloria from the darkness. Her voice is lifeless. She answers by rote. She, like me, has learned to agree with Stan without even listening to him.

‘And I put a washtub on its side, used it for home plate. I’d make the catch and rear back, and I got so I could hit that tub on the first or second bounce about nine times out of ten. You know what the difference is between the Bigs and the minors?’ Stan waits only one beat, not expecting a reply. ‘Consistency. The whole thing is consistency. There are players in the minors who make spectacular plays and hit the ball just as hard as in the majors, but the guys in the Bigs are more consistent. They make the plays not just nine out of ten times but ninety-nine out of a hundred.’ He pauses thoughtfully for a moment. ‘You know, I’d hit that tub nine out of ten times, but the tenth one might end up thirty feet down the line, or hit the barn door fifteen feet in the air, making a sound like a gun going off. Hey, Gideon, how about you come out and hit me some flies in the morning?’

When we got home after the game, I kissed Sunny gently and pulled her against me. Her lips were dry and she made them thin and did not return my kiss. I did everything I could think of to please her. I touched her with my finger tips, gently undressed her, massaged her, fondled her, loved her with my hands, my tongue, held back my own passion, waited for a response from her, received none.

I remember once, at a time like this, when Sunny was in one of her moods, she said something bitter, something designed to make me hate her.

‘Can’t you tell by the way I touch you that I love you?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Sunny, precipitating a long silence.

Eventually I made love with her. Her body was unpliant, mannequin-like. I wanted so desperately to rouse her, I controlled myself carefully, rocked her gently for a long time, until our bodies were slick and delicious.

‘Can’t you finish up?’ Sunny said, not even in a whisper. ‘I’m tired.’

If she had known how close I came to killing her then, it would have made her happy.

I threw myself off her without a word and lay like a rock in the darkness, my body taut, nerve ends twitching. Late in the night I heard her leave. I woke to the tinkling of hangers in our closet, knew she was packing a few blouses, a couple of pairs of jeans, in the same battered suitcase she arrived with twelve years ago. I lay, tense as piano wire, afraid to speak, afraid not to. She closed the front door quietly; I listened to her tiny footsteps descend the stairs, fade away as she moved down the sidewalk.

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