Brittle Innings (17 page)

20

O
n the Monday before a trip to Opelika and LaGrange, Jumbo came upstairs to find me writing down my stats from the Eufaula series and weighing them against my teammates’. It embarrassed me for him to see me doing this—I still had a sky-high batting average and came down harder on my teammates than on myself. I couldn’t quibble with Jumbo’s stats, though. He’d played great on the road—my notebook said so.

“Daniel.”

I slammed my notebook shut on my knees.

“Some of my library books fall due this week. Go with me to return them.” Jumbo packed a laundry bag with books.

I turned an imaginary steering wheel. Would we drive? Jumbo smiled, sort of, and walked two fingers over the quilt on his mattress. Uh-uh, I thought.

“Please come. The heat here’s barbarous and the light at your cot poor.”

The heat everywhere in Highbridge was barbarous—unless you went to a refrigerated movie or the bowling alley. A walk to the library in Alligator Park would push our temperatures to sunstroke levels. On the other hand, an invite from Jumbo came round about as often as Halley’s comet.

“I’ll help you acquire a library card,” Jumbo said. “I’m on very good terms with Mrs. Hocking, the librarian.”

I agreed to go. And, yes, we walked.

In the farmer’s market, people shouted at Jumbo: “Way to gig them Mudcats, Jumbo!” and “Hit me a rainmaker gainst them lousy Gendarmes!” And so on.

An Eye-talian-looking man at a produce stall asked Jumbo to autograph one of his watermelons with a grease pencil. He took my signature on a big yellow squash, but only after Jumbo told him my batting average and sold me as a future big leaguer.

Three colored boys—one turned out to be Euclid—dogged our heels all the way to the edge of Alligator Park, where Negroes seemed to be forbidden unless they were using hedge clippers or pushing a pram with a pink-skinned kid in it.

The Alligator Park branch of the Highbridge library system was a red brick building not far from the church Mister JayMac, Miss Giselle, and a few of the Hellbenders sometimes attended. It had a pot-bellied white portico and windows separated by rose trellises or well-trimmed snowball shrubs. In Tenkiller, this branch would’ve held every book in town—maybe the whole county—with space left over for a LaSalle showroom.

Mrs. Hocking surprised me too. She didn’t have blue hair or a squint or blocky black shoes with ankle straps. She had a pretty face, a plumpish body with flying-squirrel flaps on her upper arms, and a smile that made my own mouth muscles ache. I guessed her age as fifty-plus. She greeted Jumbo like he was an electrocuted loved one brought back to life—I mean, she was overjoyed.

“It’s so good to see you, Mr. Clerval! One of the titles you asked me to put on reserve has just come in! Now I won’t have to send you a postal notice!”

Despite being on very good terms with Mrs. Hocking, Jumbo looked startled. He unpacked his books on the central desk and kept his mouth shut, a rebuke for all the fuss.

Mrs. Hocking’s young assistant hovered at the far end of the desk, eyeballing Jumbo and me the way she would’ve a pair of prison escapees.

“But you’ve only had these books out once!” Mrs. Hocking thumbed through her card bin. “You could have renewed them!”

“Yessum,” Jumbo said. “But to what end?”

“Why, to give yourself time to read them all.”

“I have read them all.”

“Oh. Then you’re a truly resourceful reader. You must have
formidable
powers of concentration.”

“Which of my reserve titles has come in?”

“Why, uh, this one, Mr. Clerval.” Mrs. Hocking picked a small book out of a nearby stacking cart. “It’s very popular just now. Mr. Salmon, its last reader, checked it out two days ago and brought it back just this morning. Perhaps you and he should meet. You have much in common, including—”

“Please, Mrs. Hocking, hold it for me here until I’ve made my other selections.”

“Of course. Pleased to. Let me know if Margaret or I can be of any further assistance.”

“My friend Daniel would like his own card.”

“All right. Does he reside in Highbridge or in Hothlepoya County?”

“Like me, he’s a Hellbender,” Jumbo said. “His stay here will certainly outlast August,”

“Then he’s
not
a resident?”

“His mailing address, like mine, is McKissic House on Angus Road. For the next two and half months.”

“Yes, but, it appears that—”

“What length of residency entitles one to a card?” Jumbo’s voice boomed through the building. Folks in the stacks looked over at us. A little boy grabbed his mother’s skirts.

“What we must do is issue a temporary card,” Mrs. Hocking said gaily. “If Margaret lists you as one local reference, Mr. Clerval, whom may we designate as the other?”

“Mr. Jordan McKissic.”

“Certainly. Very good. Here, Margaret. Help this young man fill out the application. Begin with his name and—”

“His name is Daniel Boles,” Jumbo said, already turning toward the nonfiction shelves. “B-O-L-E-S. Complete the form as far as possible without us.”

“Of course. Of course.” Mrs. Hocking waved us away. “Browse to your hearts’ content.”

In the philosophy and psychology sections, Jumbo put his hands on my shoulders and tried to whisper:

“Inside, Daniel, Mrs. Hocking feels much as her assistant Margaret does—unquiet, frightened. I realize that now. Her overfriendliness shows the truth. She hopes to hide from both me and herself the extent to which I repel her.”

Uh-uh. Jumbo needed to believe Mrs. Hocking actually did like him for himself.

“I’m correct in this,” he whispered. “From her behavior, I should have deduced her attitude before.” He let go of me to prowl the stacks, mouthing titles and authors’ names, tiptoeing around other patrons like a gigantic reshelver.

With our arms full of books, we returned to the main desk and spilled them out like hodcarriers dumping bricks. Mrs. Hocking added Jumbo’s reserve book to the pile, and I completed the card application her assistant had started.

“Isn’t that more than ten?” Mrs. Hocking stamped away.

“Eleven, with the reserve book,” Jumbo said. “But you may put that one on Daniel’s card.”

“I’m afraid we—” Mrs. Hocking started to say. “Very good,” she said instead. “Daniel may even benefit from reading it, should you finish it quickly enough to pass it on, Mr. Clerval.” She bustled and stamped. “Good day, gentlemen. Give our rivals in your baseball matches glorious what-for.”

“Thanks,” Jumbo said. “You’re more than kind.” He shoved our loot into his satchel and led me out the door.

Outside, I looked at him with real disappointment. He’d just called Mrs. Hocking “more than kind.” But if he’d sized her up correctly in the stacks, that was a lie.

“She
desires
to be a friend,” Jumbo replied to my look, “even if the natural impulse to that state eludes her. I spoke to her desire, not to the canker of her predisposition.”

That had a highfalutin ring to it, but it nailed me anyway. If Jumbo wanted to fledge Mrs. Hocking’s better angel, he rquired leave to appeal to it.

At the farmer’s market, we bought pears from a pavilion vendor and sat on the concrete platform to eat them. Stacks of produce—turnip greens, unshucked early corn, plump tomatoes in bushel baskets—more or less hid us from autograph seekers. I ate my pear first, then took my notebook from my shirt pocket and wrote out a question:

What book did you reserve?

Jumbo dug through his bag and found it. He dropped it into my lap. I wiped my sticky hands on my pants so I could handle the volume:
On Being a Real Person
by Harry Emerson Fosdick, a self-help thing by this famous New York clergyman.

“‘The central business of every human being is to be a real person,’” Jumbo said. “Mr. Fosdick’s opening sentence.”

Back then, Fosdick’s line didn’t impress me at all. All I could think of was
Fearless Fosdick
, the cartoon detective Al Capp had created in
Li’l Abner
to send up
Dick Tracy
. Fearless Fosdick strolled around with bullet-hole windows in him—they never seemed to bother him much. Anyway, I imagined this Harry Emerson Fosdick guy sitting at his typewriter with bullet holes in him, banging out
On Being a Real Person
despite looking like a wounded cartoon character himself.

I wrote
Fearless Fosdick?
on a notebook page and handed it to Jumbo, whose expression reminded me of the look you see on a baby’s face when it’s trying to load up a diaper.

“I believe this Mr. Fosdick”—he tapped the book—“is more fearless than most acknowledge. It takes . . . balls to write a treatise on achieving authentic identity.”

We set out again for McKissic House. I carried the book bag, and Jumbo walked along reading Fosdick’s best-seller. In his hands, it looked no bigger than a matchbook.

21

I
n Tenkiller, Mama’d practically had to drive a steam shovel into my bedroom in the mornings to chase me out of bed and off to school. In Highbridge, though, I loved the morning, especially the early morning. I got up before Darius prowled through calling, “Rise and shine!” I woke to some strange internal chime, and I
moved
. Maybe I just wanted to scrub my face and pull on my clothes without Jumbo’s spooky yellow eyes tracking the whole business. Maybe I just wanted to escape the killer summer heat in the brief moments before the milk wagons clattered.

Anyway, on the Tuesday morning of our road trip to Opelika, I crept downstairs and smelled bacon frying, biscuits baking, oranges set out to be halved and squoze. Kizzy’d taken over the kitchen already. With her spoons, whisks, and wood-stoked ovens, she was scraping the last fresh edge off the morning. A small price to pay—the mean-as-a-rattler heat would stick its fangs into us by ten or eleven, anyway. I sat on a stool next to Kizzy’s biscuit-making counter and claimed dibs on the first biscuit out.

“Don’t jes set, Mister Danny.” Kizzy mopped her forehead with the back of one hand. “Miss Giselle comes, you gon find yosef to work mighty quick.”

Phaugh. Kizzy liked me. Over the past weeks, we’d become good buddies. I helped her mornings, even before Darius came in from the carriage house or Miss Giselle from the bungalow. My dummyhood may’ve played a part in our friendship too. Kizzy used me as a tattletale-safe soundingboard. I didn’t echo. I absorbed.

With one flour-dusted oven mitt and a knotty black forearm, Kizzy fetched her first biscuit tray out and banged it down. “Go on. Burn yo greedy fingers gitting it.” I obeyed, right down to getting burned, but juggling that first biscuit made me happy. The sky hadn’t even begun to redden, and I had me an edible treasure.

“Eat it fast n do the jooz, or Miss Giselle’s gon have yo haid. Mine too.” Kizzy bustled in her easy way.

I broke the biscuit into crumbly halves and dawdled over it as long as I could, chewing and chewing.

“You think Miss Giselle’s a hard woman with a tart tongue. She do sometimes seem hard, but the mens in this house—even Darius, who can fill her with vinegar jes by walking by—they done become her chirren. She’s like that nussry-rhyme woman and her shoe. Don’t know what to do, cep feed em n boss em, to show how happy she is she got em.”

Happy, I thought. Miss Giselle happy? She didn’t much act it. She acted like Mister JayMac’d gone off to the employment bureau and invited a dozen hungry people to come home with him as guests.

“Got no womb chirren,” Kizzy said. “Not having none, being ever bairnless, it put her bitter. It slapt her ever-other-day mean. Under that burden, she is downright
happy
for a houseful of ballplayers.”

While Kizzy talked, I halved the oranges and ground them on the fluted glass dunce cap of the juicer.

“When Miss Giselle looks yall dagger eyes and snaps her beak like a swamp tuttle,” Kizzy said, “it aint so much yall she’s mad at. It’s things, things in genl. And it don’t hep Mister JayMac don’t brim with husbandly lovingkindness like he should. It don’t hep none he sometimes—”

The outer porch door banged, and Kizzy cut off her spiel like a butcher chopping the end off a butt roast. A good thing. Miss Giselle herself swept in, her face on, her hair just so. A looker in spite of crow’s feet, a rumpled cotton dress, her beat-up work shoes.

“Kizzy, you got any people in Detroit?”

“Mawning, ma’am,” Kizzy said. “How you feeling today?”

“You had some kin who took off north once. Where did they eventually settle, Kizzy? Detroit?”

“Chicago, ma’am. Some in Philadelphia.”

“The coloreds in Detroit have all gone crazy. Radio says it’s chaos there. A riot. Buildings and automobiles afire.”

“Mercy, but they aint any Lorrowses doing it,” Kizzy said, “less it’s a bunch I never met up with.”

“You’d think this war would be enough mayhem for anyone,” Miss Giselle said. “You wouldn’t imagine people would go out of their way to add to it with riots in their own cities. How would you feel if a policeman told you your own child was dead as a result? It must be terrible, learning a son in uniform has lost his life. How much worse to discover the bloodshed has occurred on American streets, at the hands of people with whom your child had no quarrel.”

“Folks bout everwhere prone to quarrel,” Kizzy said.

Miss Giselle cast an eye on Kizzy. “As
you
are prone to quarrel with
me
?”

“Nome. Breakfuss aint done yet.”

“Tell me why your people’ve gone crazy this way. A few days ago it was Beaumont, Texas. Now it’s Detroit. Where’ll it be tomorrow? Have yall decided to work for Hitler and the Japanese on the
inside
!”

“Ma’am, it
aint
my people,” Kizzy said. “Far’s I know, never been no insanity atall in us Lorrowses.”

Miss Giselle paced between the sink cabinets and the long center counter. “Do you like working here, Kizzy?”

“I didn’t, I’d be gone. I got me my options.”

“Have you ever heard of the Eleanor Clubs? Do you know what they are? Do you belong to one? Do you intend to join one?” Miss Giselle grabbed a halved orange and ran her tongue around its inner peel. “I won’t fire you if you do. Or taint your references. But I regard the Eleanor Clubs as a treason on a par with the chaos taking place in Detroit.”

“When I got time to blong to a club?” Kizzy said. “Full Gospel Holdiness Church bout my only one.”

“You’ve never heard of the Eleanor Clubs?”

“Eleanor?” Kizzy said. “Mrs. Roosevelt?”

“She may be the First Lady, but the rebellion she foments among poor women of color deluded into thinking they’re preyed upon by their bosses—well, that borders on apostasy.”

“Yessum,” Kizzy said.

“Do I prey upon you, Kizzy?” Miss Giselle said. “Do I exploit you any worse than the great and wonderful Mr. Jordan McKissic does Yours Truly, his wife and galley slave?”

“I don’t blong to no Eleanor Club, Miss Giselle. I don’t even like clubs. Most of em’s got dues.”

“Or committees,” Miss Giselle said. She stopped pacing. She perched herself on the stool where I’d eaten Kizzy’s first biscuit of the morning. “So Mrs. Dittrich’s girl Janet didn’t leave her at the urging of a local unit of the Eleanors?”

“Ma’am, Janet’s done gone to work fo Fomost Foge fo twelve dollahs a week. Missus Dittrich guv her three.”

“Is everything in our life money? Money or sex? What’s become of loyalty? devotion? faithfulness?
I’d
like to know.”

“Don’t know,” Kizzy said, “but peoples tell me it’s a free country and trains run both ways.”

You’d’ve thought Miss Giselle might have bristled at that—a remark so uppity—but she laughed. She got down from the stool, tied on a smudged gingham apron, and pitched in with the breakfast preparations. In the dining room, I laid the table. As I did, I could hear her and Kizzy babbling away, more like sisters than a hoity-toity employer and her downtrodden cook.

I was back in the kitchen when Darius straggled in from his apartment over the bus barn. He had an alarm clock out there, an old metal bonger that rattled him awake at six or so. But alarm clocks’d grown scarce by mid 1943, so many folks junked them during scrap drives and so few companies still made them. Which was why Darius had become a roving human alarm clock for McKissic House’s boarders.

“Rise and shine,” he mumbled, entering from the porch. “Flash them brushed-up ivories, folks.” Sleepy banter, but a kind of tucked-under grumbling too.

Miss Giselle’d treated Darius pretty well since we’d been back in Highbridge, but she turned on him now faster than a rabid birddog. “I’ll have no more of your rackety wake-ups around here,” she said. “I mean it, Darius. I’m sick of the noise and your idiot cheeriness.”

“I never meant em to be lullabyes.”

“Don’t do it anymore.”

Darius pulled in his chin. “Wake the boarders up?”

“Go shouting through the house like a fishmonger. I
hate
it. I totally
despise
it.”

“How’d you like me to git everbody up?”

“Walk up the stairs. Knock on each door. Announce in a low and civil tone that it’s nearly time to eat. Understand?”

“Yessum. Simple directions in simple English. That’ll do it fo me awmost ever time.”

“Leave those biscuits alone!” Miss Giselle snapped. “And never mind your piddlin ritual this morning. Today, Mr. Boles will do it for you.”

“He can knock, ma’am, but he cain’t talk. I’d be pleased to truck upstairs with him to hep.”

“Then you’ll be damned before you’re pleased, Darius. I want you out of this house until Kizzy calls you back to eat. For now, Mr. Boles must do the best he can with his knuckles and his youthful imagination. Out, please.”

Darius left, head up. Kizzy kept mum.

The use I put my imagination to was climbing to the third floor and waking Jumbo first. I scribbled him a note about what Miss Giselle wanted me to do, and he lumbered from room to room with me. I’d knock, and he’d say, “Breakfast. Rise and shine. Don’t compel us to come in after you.” No one stayed too long in bed after hearing him say that.

At breakfast itself, Mister JayMac put in an appearance. A show of solidarity with his players before a big road trip to Opelika and LaGrange. He didn’t sit at the head or foot of the table—Muscles and Jumbo had those spots—but squoze in between Vito Mariani and me like any other journeyman ’Bender.

Funny thing, though—Miss Giselle did him the V.I.P. honor of bringing him his own humongous platter, with three cigarlike sausages, a steaming dipper scoop of cheese grits, and a puffy cream-colored omelet, like the sort of pale-yellow cravat you’d rent from a tuxedo shop. At first I thought, Well, I guess a guy can take this I’m-just-a-regular-Joe stuff too far. Except Mister JayMac scowled when his wife put that platter down, like he figured she meant to make him look bad—uppish and scornful—with such showboaty favoritism.

“What’d you put in this highfalutin aigg?” he asked before Miss Giselle could get back to the kitchen.

“Ham, diced bell pepper, tomato, onions, a dash of tabasco sauce.” Miss Giselle cocked her head. “Why?”

“The green’s bell peppers?”

“It is. Did you think I’d chopped the bitterest dandelion stems I could find into it?”

“Nome, not really. Thing is, Darius don’t much care for bell peppers, honey.”

Miss Giselle crossed her arms. “But I made that for you, Jay.”

“Well, who ast you to? I eat what the boys eat. So take this masterpiece omelet to Darius. He can eat around the pesky peppers.”

Darius took breakfast at a junk counter on the screened-in porch—out of the kitchen, out of the dining room, out of the way. And he was out there now, finishing up.

“He won’t want it,” Miss Giselle said. “He’s already eaten enough for three normal men.”

“Take it to him anyway. Let him decide. I can’t abide special treatment.”

“Well, I won’t take it to him, Jay, for I can’t abide abuse or humiliation. And I
won’t
abide them.”

For the next few seconds, all anyone could hear was forks scraping china and Muscles glugging back his juice.

“This food can’t go to waste,” Mister JayMac finally said. “Take it to Darius.”

Miss Giselle closed her eyes, hugged herself, and swayed, like a grieving mama at a funeral. Her posture—and her sudden silence—gave everybody an even bigger discomfort than her and Mister JayMac’s arguing had. So I pushed back my chair, picked up the ritzy breakfast, and headed for the kitchen with it—my stab at doing my blessed best as a peacemaker.

Behind me, I heard Jumbo say, “I’ll walk Miss Giselle back to your house, sir.”

“You do that,” Mister JayMac said.

On the screened porch, I set Mister JayMac’s breakfast in front of Darius, who’d already eaten several biscuits and a couple of fried sunny-side-uppers. He gave me a wary sidelong look, but pulled the plate to him and dug in. Just then, Jumbo ducked into view with Miss Giselle on his arm and Miss Giselle in some sort of glassy-eyed trance.

“An apt diversion,” Jumbo told me. “You cerebrate as well off the field as on.” He helped Miss Giselle down the rickety porch steps and through the dewy victory garden to the bungalow out back. They made an odd pair, those two. Of course, Jumbo and
anybody
made a freakish twosome.

I slouched back to the dining room.