A Quality of Light (11 page)

We were tossing the ball back and forth one evening considering the possibilities when my parents suddenly appeared around the corner of the shed. In her hands my mother carried a shiny new wooden bat with a big red label. “Louisville Slugger,” it said. My dad carried a flattened glove that looked prehistoric. They were both grinning.

“How’s the inventin’ going?” my dad asked casually.

“Fine, sir,” Johnny said, eyes as glued to the bat and glove as mine.

“Well, good,” my mother said. “We thought we might be able to help.”

“That’s right. Every inventor needs assistants and we’re here to assist,” my dad said.

My mother held the bat out to Johnny. He looked at it hard and gulped. Wide-eyed, he turned and looked at me as if asking for help. I was far too surprised to even begin to know what to do or say, so I just stared right back at him. The silence between the four of us lay as flat, broad and rich as the sweep of land behind us.

“I think you might need this, John,” my mother said after a moment and smiled.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Thank you.”

My dad laughed heartily. He slipped the battered old glove on his hand and whacked it with his free hand a couple of times to loosen what was supposed to be a pocket. “Haven’t used this thing for a hundred years. I used to be pretty good. Figured maybe you could use a fielder. Whaddaya say?”

Johnny and I stared at each other again. Unable to speak, Johnny reached out and took the bat from my mother’s hands and handed her his glove.

“I used to be a pretty fair hand at pitching a few years back, you know,” she said. “Why don’t you two inventors step up to that plate and we’ll see if I can’t strike you out!”

For the rest of that evening the four of us played baseball
behind the equipment shed. My mother pitched underhand, lobbing the ball towards us as we swung. That’s it. Mostly we just swung, unable to transfer the science and the physics into contact. My dad stood patiently by the rail fence cheering us on from our outfield. “Batter batter batter batter batter!” he’d say and whack his glove with each swing and a miss. Time after time we’d take our stance — mine copied from a photo of Tony C. and Johnny’s a strange hybrid of all his heroes — wait for the pitch to sail in, swing, miss and start it all over again.

Once or twice we’d make contact and the ball would sail out over the pitcher’s mound towards the lanky form of my father, who’d run and retrieve it, bounding after it like a spring colt, heavy steel-toed work boots slamming into the ground. We hunched over the plate each time, the bat clenched in our fists, heads down, eyes straining for the first glimpse of the ball my mother released. Each time we sought the satisfaction we knew could be born from a skill acquired, mastered, controlled and celebrated. Each time we swung with resolution, grit and love. Each time we’d have to start again, tapping the wooden plate with the bat, settling into our stance and waiting.

My parents played with something close to glee. It never mattered to them that we couldn’t hit, that our skills in this area were severely limited or that we were largely silent, intent on our game. What seemed to matter was the being there, that feeling of being part and parcel of this new world that Johnny and I were entering, our friendship and the game. They loved every minute of it. By the time the sun went down and it was too dark to see the ball, we were all laughing and joking with each other. The game had swept all of us up into a collective joyful heap.

“Where’d you get that old thing, anyway?” Johnny asked my dad as we drove him home.

“The glove?”

“Yeah. It’s funny looking.”

“Well, John, strange as it may seem, I was once a young whipper-snapper, too. Long time ago, but I was just like you two.
I loved baseball. Played it all the time. That glove was a present from Joshua’s grandfather, my dad. He couldn’t understand why a farmer could want to be running off every night to play a game. But he let me do it. He let me because he loved me and he knew it made me happy. Just like you two. I always had to borrow a glove to play. We didn’t have the money for extras. But I came down to breakfast one day and there it was, sitting where my plate should be. He just sat eating his oatmeal and reading his paper like there was nothing strange going on. He was like that. Never made a fuss over anything. On the outside anyway. But I know he was churning with happiness on the inside. So I sat down, picked it up, put it on and ate my cereal through the biggest, thickest lump anyone ever had in their throat. I loved him then. Loved him as much as I ever did, maybe more.

“That night he came to see me play. Mildmay was playing Wingham and I was the left fielder. Pretty good game but not much hitting. We were up by a run going into the ninth inning. Wingham put a couple men on base with two out and their best hitter was at the plate. Everyone was tense. Mildmay has always hated to lose to Wingham. Anyway, he connected with a shot that sailed out into my field. It looked like it might go over the fence but I chased it down anyway. As I got closer and closer to the fence it seemed like the world slowed down to slow motion and all I could think about was my father and the glove I was wearing on my hand. Well, I wanted that ball more than I wanted anything in the world. I ran a step faster and then at the very last moment I leapt into the air and came down with it right at the fence! What a feeling. Everyone cheered, of course, and we won, but the best moment for me came right at the last. Everyone had been making a big fuss over me and my catch and I finally got away from them. My dad was right there, waiting. He was looking at me with a world of pride and love in his eyes and I handed him that ball. He stood there looking at it for a long time and we never said anything. We didn’t have to, I guess. He just put his hand over my shoulder and we walked to the truck and drove home. He kept that ball on his dresser right up until the
day he died. I made sure we put that old ball in the casket with him. He would have wanted to keep it.

“So that’s where I got that funny-looking thing, John, and I guess that’s why Joshua’s mother and I decided to get you guys the bat. Because if this game makes you guys happy, we want to be part of it. When you’re happy, we’re happy.”

As the highway spun away beneath us we were each lost in our thoughts. I’d never known until then that my dad and I shared any passions beyond fishing, faith and farming. Thinking of him playing the same game with the same zeal and verve as I was bringing to it was magical. We were tied together so seamlessly. That night I discovered for the first time that loving is a learning process. The geographies of our lives demand it. Just when you start to believe that you know all the territory, the sweep of a life, you’re surprised by a sudden scarp of habit, of history or belief. And that’s the magic of it all. You’re always being given someone new and the pull of it is tractive, strong and relentless. That night I knew for dead, absolute certain how much I loved my father.

Where Johnny was I don’t know. He stared straight ahead and never said a word. I can only imagine. His world was so different from mine. Ben Gebhardt lived his life like a covert operation and Johnny bore the detritus of that on his shoulders like an unkept promise — cumbersome and cool to the touch. The comparison between my father and family and his own must have seemed titanic that night, and I believe that’s what he was thinking.

My dad could have been anywhere between the back forty and Cooperstown. But we shared our silence as respectfully as friends can, and when we pulled up in front of Old Man Givens’s place and Johnny clambered from the car, I knew that any distance that may have existed between us was now shrunken, diminished and spare. He grinned, waved and walked his bike slowly to the porch, where he turned, waved and disappeared into the darkness of the house.

“My friend,” I whispered.

Every night for those last two weeks the four of us gathered behind the equipment shed for batting practice. Soon, both Johnny
and I were connecting solidly and regularly. My dad moved beyond the rail fence and stood in the alfalfa field and my mother moved back a step or two for her lobbed pitches. Johnny and I compared notes endlessly as we hit. We knew that we needed to stay motionless in the batter’s box, that any degree of motion hindered the necessary transfer of energy into our swing. We knew we had to find the optimum height for our elbows in order to snap our hands out fast. We knew our hips were essential to our swing. We knew all of it, and once again the particular magic of baseball transformed the science into joy. As our swings leveled out and we began to hit with power and precision, we cheered and my parents cheered too. We were hitters. I was a natural line-driver and Johnny was a belter, a pure and wonderful machine that could uncoil itself effortlessly and punch holes in the sky with a baseball. Time after time my dad raced backwards as Johnny’s bat arched another long flyball deep into our alfalfa field. Each time he looked at me with blue eyes blazing and I had that odd sensation again of falling through the sky.

“Just like Ted Williams,” he said. “I told you, didn’t I?”

“Yeah. You did.”

“Now I know what the answer to baseball is.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Love.”

“Love?”

“Yeah. You gotta love it,” Johnny said.

“No science?”

“No.”

“No math?”

“No.”

“You just gotta love it?”

“You just gotta love it.”

“Johnny?”

“Yeah?”

“I think you’re gettin’ it,” I said.

“Dreamer.”

“Ditz.”

T
hey sent me to camp one summer when I was eight. They were always sending me somewhere. I got dropped off more than junk mail. But that summer they actually did me a favor. I got to this camp, not knowing what to expect or even why to expect it. It had this hokey name. Camp Mi Ma Ho. Can you believe it? I’ll never forget it. It was perched on the shore of this little lake in the Muskokas and had all these cute little A-frame cabins that were supposed to look like teepees. Keeping it all in theme, you know? Anyway, they had a program that was designed to introduce us all to the ways of the Indian. Their idea of the ways of the Indian was canoeing, fire starting and storytelling around the fire. We also got our faces painted, put on dyed turkey feathers, waved small wood-and-rubber tomahawks and danced around the fire to some taped powwow music. It was all very sickening. I stuck to myself and read mostly. After a week the counselors knew that I was a hard sell and pretty much left me alone.

They had this little library in the main cabin. Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew
, Treasure Island, Peter Pan,
the usual stuff for kids. But they also had a book called
Indians.
That’s all, just
Indians.
I opened that book and I was gone.

Sometimes in life you never know that you’re searching for something until that something reaches out and grabs you. Well, I’d been needing some
thing
for as long as I could remember. My life had more holes in it than a right-wing argument. Anyway, this book was magical. Today I’d call it bullshit, but for a city kid who really needed to
be
something, it was the key to the door. There were stories in there about the Indians helping the pilgrims survive and the first Thanksgiving, about them being brave and loyal guides for the fur traders, warriors, vision seekers, hunters, fishermen, and there were pictures that showed the romance of everything. Suddenly, all I wanted to be was an Indian. A warrior. When you grow up like I did, all your dreams involve being the opposite of the way you are and the warrior thing was directly opposite from me and my life. I
devoured that book. After Camp Mi Ma Ho I knew what I wanted to be. What I
had
to be.

Once school started again I dug around the library and read everything they had on Indians. Back then no one had anything close to being relevant or true but I didn’t care. All I was after was input. Ignorance is such bliss, eh?

Soon I was walking around singing, “My paddle’s clean and bright, flashing with silver, swift as the wild goose flies, dip, dip and swing, dip, dip and swing,” reciting the ever-popular “By the Shores of Gitche Gumee” and believing that Hank Williams’s song “Kawliga” and that sappy song “Running Bear” by whoever were really paeans to the culture, for God’s sake. Paeans. Jesus. And movies? I watched every single movie on TV that had anything to do with Indians. I didn’t know whether I wanted to be an Apache, Commanche, Cherokee, Sioux or Cheyenne, but I knew I wanted to be a warrior.

Try growing up without a history. I never even knew I had a grandfather until we took over the store in Mildmay. My father, as you know, wasn’t real big on details. So sometime around eight-and-a-half I became an Indian. I never told anybody. How do you tell somebody that you’ve just become someone else? I just kept it to myself and worked at being a warrior. When I met you I couldn’t believe it. I mean, who thinks they’re going to meet a real Indian in the middle of the farm belt? When I discovered that you had no knowledge of yourself as an Indian it confused me. I knew more about who you were supposed to be than you did. Even though my information pool was shallower than Otter Creek in midsummer, I still knew more. That’s when I started to lose it — the moment I figured, at ten years old, that I knew more about being an Indian than the Indians.