Hunting a Detroit Tiger (32 page)

B
etween games of the Labor Day doubleheader against visiting St. Louis, while the groundskeepers were applying fresh lime to the foul lines and watering down the infield dust, I was having a catch with Bobby Veach near the Tigers’ dugout.

The season had turned out to be much like that simple activity: easy, enjoyable, but to no great purpose. There was zero chance of us going to the World Series, and not much hope of climbing higher than seventh place. A calm had settled over the team. We played one game at a time, with no pressure and little strife.

I’d become more relaxed, too. No longer having to protect myself from my teammates, I directed my attention to learning from them. I studied the strategies of Ty Cobb and Donie Bush, picked up a few new tricks, and kept my batting average around .260. Most of all, I’d learned to appreciate simply being on the turf of Navin Field, in the sunshine, with my body intact and a friend or two on hand to watch me play. Karl Landfors, back from Boston, would be in the stands this day. He and Connie Siever were spending the morning at an IWW parade, but had promised to be at the park for the second game.

Even the Labor Day parade was expected to be without incident. There’d been enough of a backlash against Attorney General Mitchell Palmer that the labor crackdowns had pretty much ended.

The last two months had been eventful ones on the political front. Palmer failed in his bid to get the Democratic nomination for president. His party instead chose James Cox to face Republican Warren Harding. Harding was promising a “return to normalcy,” a notion which had strong popular appeal. He wasn’t going win me over on a slogan alone, though. I’d taken John Montgomery Ward’s advice to heart and done something to further a cause that I cared about: in July, I’d joined the National Committee on Child Labor, and wrote to both Cox and Harding asking them to support legislation to protect children from exploitation by industry. Until I got a positive response—so far, I hadn’t heard from either candidate—neither would get my vote.

Nor would they be getting Margie’s, she’d told me. And she now had the constitutional right to cast a ballot. The suffrage issue had been settled in August, when Tennessee ratified the Nineteenth Amendment.

Fresh off that victory, Connie Siever had directed her efforts toward getting Stan Zaluski elected the new head of the IWW local; she’d succeeded in that goal in less than a week.

Of all the recent changes, the one that affected me most was a personal development: Margie had moved into my apartment and it had become
our
home.

It had certainly been a turbulent year for me since I’d arrived in Detroit, but I thought I came through it pretty successfully, and was adjusting nicely to the new circumstances.

From several rows behind the dugout, I heard Margie start to chant, “Raw-lings! Raw-lings!” When Landfors’s and Connie’s voices joined in, I dropped a throw from Veach.

Well, living with Margie Turner was still going to take some getting used to. But the important thing was that I was no longer yearning for things to go back to the way they used to be. I was now looking forward to whatever was coming next.

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Copyright © 1997 by Troy Soos

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ISBN: 978-0-7582-8742-7

eISBN-13: 978-0-7582-8781-6
eISBN-10: 0-7582-8781-X
First Kensington Electronic Edition: June 2013