Heading Out to Wonderful (5 page)

Lying down on his quilt, he remembers it all, it enters into his body and he knows that he has become the thing he will be from now on to the end, unless something terrible, something unimaginable, happens, but believing that it will not. There is such deep silence. There is such a roar of noise inside that silence. There is just so much.

He thinks, as he does every night before he sleeps, he wonders, what is the point, what is the reason for all his wandering, for his solitude in a peopled world, if he’s not, one day, to have children, a child of his own, a son, whom he might teach and train and raise up to be a scientist, or a butcher, or a baseball star? He misses, as he does every night before he sleeps, the soft and peaceful breathing of his imagined son sleeping clean beside him.

He closes his eyes and he sees the dream that waits for him ahead, and he hears the brothers, finished with their laughing over his foolishness, realizing that they are in the act of converting a sinner into a believer, so they sing with conviction and grace and then wave him on, no more, they wave, no more, you’re on your own. That’s enough, they wave. If you don’t get it now, then we have failed and you cannot be saved.

As you roll across the trestle

Spanning Jordan’s swelling tide

You’ll behold a Union depot

Into which your train will glide

There you’ll meet the Superintendant

God the Father, God the Son

He sleeps now, cradled in peace, his right hand cupping his ear, in sleep hearing but not hearing any more the final words the old men gave to him so graciously:

With that hearty, joyous plaudit:

“Weary Pilgrim

Welcome home.”

CHAPTER FOUR

T
HE ANNUAL OYSTER
Supper at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, just outside of town on a low rise by the highway, was pretty much as good as it got. Every white person in town went, and some from as far away as Lexington. It started at three, with games and gossip until suppertime, and it went on until dark, with old Rooster Ruley playing the fiddle, and the ladies of the church cooking all day long.

The oysters came from down on the Chesapeake Bay, shipped in a few days before in big wooden barrels filled with shaved ice, and they were kept in the cool dark of the church basement, where the ladies fed them with cornmeal every day, thinking it would make them fatter, and maybe it did.

They made oyster stew, scalloped oysters with cream and butter and nutmeg—so rich it threatened to stop up every artery almost immediately—oyster fritters, and fried oysters. There was a raw oyster bar, where men shucked oysters and other men slurped them down directly out of their shells, smothered in a sauce so hot it burned your tongue.

Oysters in a land-locked valley weren’t so much a food as they were a rarity, an exotic way to while away a late summer afternoon.

There were hot biscuits with country butter, soft and rich gold in color, and corn on the cob, picked that morning, and tomatoes from the vine, and cole slaw and sweet iced tea and lemonade.

And there was ice cream, two kinds, mixed from Louisa Stephens’s grandmother’s recipe, butter pecan and peach, made with heavy farmer’s cream and sugar and barnyard eggs. It was made the night before by the teenagers of the church, cranked by hand in old wooden barrels packed with shaved ice from the ice man, and rock salt to make the cold set, the boys and girls cranking in turn until their arms hurt and then passing the job on to the next one. Then it was packed in more ice, and wrapped in muslin, and stored in the chill of the basement, and brought out, vat after vat, all day long.

There was softball in a freshly mowed field in back of the church, and the boys played all afternoon, and in the evening the men played and even some of the women, the ones who had just begun to wear pants and smoke during the war.

Even the twins came, Elinor and Ansolette Gadsden, old maids so identical that they could hardly tell themselves apart. The line that divided them as people had long since disappeared. They looked alike, of course, the creases in their sixty-year-old faces matched line for line. They also dressed alike and walked hand in hand and finished each other’s sentences.

When they were young, they were beauties, the old ones said, the people who remembered them as girls, and Elinor and Ansolette still had a certain quality about them, a refinement, that set them apart. Their people, of whom they were the last, the end of the line, because of their stubborn refusal to marry and thus be separated, had lived in the town since the town began. They were highly sought after because they were aristocrats, and because they had buckets of money, and they were the only Gadsdens left.

It was said that the reason they never married was because they used to tease the boys, changing places now and then, so that, when a hapless young man asked for Elinor’s pledge of marriage, he was met with a peal of laughter, only to find he was reaching out for Ansolette’s hand. They were both called Miss Allie, by everybody in town, and even Boaty Glass treated them with extreme respect and even affection.

The old ladies played softball. They didn’t field, they just took a turn at bat, once a year, going in turn and striking out at the soft, easy pitches the men threw to them. They swung identically at any pitch that was thrown to them, in their identical dresses, and, in six swings, their athletic endeavors were over for another year.

But that day, that day in 1948, it was Charlie Beale on the ball field who won every heart. He played tirelessly, with the boys, with the grownups, and it was a thing of beauty. He took off his white shirt, and played in his strap undershirt, so you could see the size and shape of his body, not big, but strong and slender and young, his neck and shoulders rosy from exertion. He had the power and grace of a natural athlete, and the gleam that came into his eyes whenever the ball was near him, or the bat was in his hands, was something to behold.

He could stop any ball that was hit his way, catching a ball on the first hop, jumping and swiveling in the air to rocket it to any base before the runner got there. He would dive and roll in the grass for a hard-hit grounder, and he would be up in a shot and his aim never missed its mark.

Sam Haislett was entranced. He couldn’t be coaxed or begged away from the edge of the field. He just had to watch every move.

At the plate, the bat seemed a natural extension of Charlie’s long arms. He took a stance like a pro, legs wide, angled far back from the plate, and when the ball was pitched to him, even by the fastest of the fastball pitchers, he would lean slightly back, and smack that thing into kingdom come, every time, any pitch.

Sam watched his every move, and he fell in love. His Beebo was all the baseball pictures in all the newspapers come to life. He was Jackie and Joe together. To watch him swing, or swivel and throw, his eye unnerved, his aim true, gave Sam his first sight of the power and possibilities that lay dormant in his tiny body. He had never seen anything so beautiful.

Nobody had. The edges of the diamond filled up with onlookers, and they all picked up on the nickname Sam shouted out, until every time Charlie swung the bat, every breath was caught, every voice yelled out, “BEEEEEBO!!” at the crack of the hard wood bat on the scuffed leather of the ball. They were seeing something they’d never seen before, man or woman, not in real life, and nobody there ever forgot it, and the nickname was fixed in their minds from that day on, like Babe, or Joey D.

“Must have played some ball, that boy,” said one of the men. “Maybe even pro.”

“Probably not. Maybe Triple A. But he’s played.”

When he finally came off the field, Charlie Beale’s neck and his shoulders were rosy and running with sweat, and the crowd drifted away with him, losing interest once he’d left the field. Without him, the game was over.

Somebody grabbed a towel from the trunk of a car, and he thanked her, and wiped himself down, and put his shirt back on, and every woman watched him until the last button was buttoned. The men stood around, clapping him on the back. Way to go, Beebo. Way to go. It was their way of saying Beebo was fine with them, wherever he came from, however strangely he talked, he was okay.

With the crowd drifting off, Charlie noticed Sam, and he walked him on to the field, and knelt behind him in the batter’s box, and gave the boy his first lesson in how to hold a bat, how to keep his eye fixed on the ball and never waver, and swing from the hips. Sam never again swung a bat in his life that he didn’t feel Charlie behind him, Charlie’s hands on his, Charlie’s arms leading him back and forward again and into the ball, sending it into the far reaches of the field where the eye couldn’t even follow it. For the rest of his life, every time he waited for a pitch he heard Charlie’s voice in his ear, telling him that the power came not from the arms but from the hips.

Later, cooling off, Charlie sat with Will and Alma, while Sam still hung out at the edge of the ball field, waiting for the minute Charlie might pick up the bat again, not wanting to ask but not wanting to miss it, and Alma told him everybody’s story.

“They seem like nice people,” Charlie said, looking out at all the folks, everybody in clean shirts and dresses, greeting each other as though they hadn’t seen one another for a long, long time.

“I’ll tell you a story,” Alma said. “A story my mother told me, from back in the Depression. The town drunk is sitting on the courthouse steps. A tramp walks into the town, like this, like any town, and he stops and says, ‘What kind of town is this?’ he asks, and the drunk lifts his eyebrows, looks him over, and says, ‘Oh, it’s a terrible town. It’s full of liars and cheaters and people who live for nothing but being mean.’

“And the tramp thanks him and moves on to the next town, hoping for better. A little later, another tramp stops by. ‘What kind of town is this?’ he asks. And the old drunk tells him, ‘It’s a wonderful town. The people are kind and good, and take well to strangers, and bring their children up right.’

“So the tramp decides to stay a while, and he finds a handout or two, and then he finds some work, and then some more work, and pretty soon, as times get better, he’s got a wife and a little house and some children of his own. And he, like the rest of the town, brings them up right.”

They watched the crowd for a minute, then Charlie looked at her. “Is that story about the town, or the drunk, or the tramp?”

“I think it’s about finding the thing you expect to find. What do you expect to find, Mr. Beale?”

“Are you ever going to call me Charlie?”

“Lord, Alma, the man sleeps under our roof.”

“Will, things will be this way between me and Mr. Beale. At least for a while. These are good people, Mr. Beale. I teach their children. You can tell a lot.” She turned and smiled at Charlie. “I’m just shy, Mr. Beale. Will doesn’t like it, but that’s the way I am. It’s the way you are when you don’t meet many new people.”

“However suits you, ma’am.”

She laughed, and touched his hand. “Just because I’m shy doesn’t mean I’m your mother, either. Call me Alma.”

“Seems a little unbalanced.”

“It won’t be long. One day, just by accident, I’ll call you by your name.”

“I’m patient.”

Will turned to him. “Alma’s right. Good people. Happy, by and large.”

“And we have good manners. That makes up for what happiness doesn’t provide.”

Will laughed. “Sam Mohler said to me once, when I was real young, ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think people pretty much decide early on how happy they’re going to be. And then they just go on and be it.’ Course, that was just a month before he got run over in his own front yard by Jackson Taylor’s son, who was driving drunk at the age of sixteen. Jackson Taylor sold cars. Jack Junior had borrowed one from the dealership seven minutes before he ran Sam over. It’s not all peaches and cream, whatever Alma says.” He stood up. “Speaking of which, let’s get some ice cream. Get out amongst ’em.”

The women, Charlie knew from the store. The men, Will introduced him to, and so Charlie gradually put the town together, husbands with wives with children, and they all greeted him with the same friendly distance, and nobody asked him how he had ended up working in a butcher shop in Brownsburg, Virginia.

Will got three bowls of ice cream, and joined Alma and Charlie, where they had moved to a picnic table in the shade, the ice cream already starting to melt. A long black car pulled up and parked, and Boaty Glass got out of it, and went around to the other side, and opened the door—men still did that—and then she got out, and there she was. Brand new all over again.

She was wearing a full-skirted dress, royal blue, silky, sleeveless, a cocktail party dress, not the kind of thing you’d wear to a social in the backyard of a Baptist church. She had a perfect figure, rounded, soft and fleshy for a young girl, although she seemed willowy next to her bulky husband. Her legs were long and beautiful, and her blonde hair was tied back with a ribbon in a way that reminded Charlie of someone else, some other girl, perhaps in a magazine.

She was tall, taller than her husband. If she’d been standing next to Charlie, she would have been just slightly taller than he was, especially in those shoes.