Prairie Hardball (4 page)

The lunch reminded me of socials in the old church basement when I was young. The Legion Hall was an unassuming building on Battleford’s main street with a hand-lettered welcome sign on an easel on the pavement outside the building. There was a coatrack inside the door, where we left our dripping umbrellas before presenting ourselves at the reception table. My mother was given a tag with her name written in elaborate calligraphy. Underneath, as an afterthought that rather spoiled the effect, the word “inductee” had been added in ballpoint pen.

The rest of us were left to fend for ourselves while one of the hostesses took my parents away to meet people. We hung around looking at strangers and caught up with each other’s lives.

My sister, Sheila, is one of those busy women. She raises the kids, keeps the ranch books, and works at the library, while still finding time to volunteer at a sheltered workshop and sing in the church choir. I, in the meantime, barely manage one job. I don’t volunteer. I don’t do good works. I don’t even go to church, and Andy’s lucky if I make dinner more than once a week, even in the off-season.

It goes without saying that I am reduced to a simmering stew of equal parts love, inadequacy, and resentment whenever I’m in her orbit. Her kids and I have a great time together, but I feel as if she thinks I set a bad example.

Her husband, Buddy, is a cattleman, happiest working with his stock or talking with his cronies. He’s a big wheel in the Saskatchewan Stockgrowers Association. He’s a small, stringy kind of guy, in contrast with my sister, who carries a few extra pounds on her hips. He’s more at home on saddle leather than on chintz, but he clearly worships Sheila and the girls, even if their feminine world is not one he understands.

The girls, Amy, who is eleven, and Claire, nine, were on their best behaviour, wearing pretty sundresses—made by Sheila, of course—and brightly coloured sandals. Although they were probably bored with all the adults in the room, most of whom would qualify for discounts at the movie house, they were silenced by the sense of occasion. They stuck to me like a pair of adoring puppies, and cast flirtatious glances at Andy, whom they thought terribly glamorous.

After a while, we headed for the food table, which was covered with a paper tablecloth that had baseball stuff printed on it, bats and balls and gloves, with serviettes and paper plates to match.

There was a choice of boring sandwiches cut on the diagonal—ham, tuna, or egg salad on white bread, brown bread, or a combination of the two. There was a coffee urn, a teapot, and a pitcher of something orange that tasted unlike any actual fruit. But the pickles were homemade, and there were tasty-looking goodies for after.

We filled our paper plates and Styrofoam cups and found a place to sit down at one of the long folding tables. Sheila took a plate of sandwiches to my parents, and came back smiling.

“She’s having the time of her life,” she said.

“That’s our Mum. Born to mingle.”

“Well, it’s good to see her in the spotlight for a change instead of just being wife-of.”

“And it’s probably good for Daddy to see how husband-of feels,” I laughed.

“He doesn’t look like he minds,” Andy said.

“Yeah, he’s plenty proud,” Sheila said.

A man on my left interrupted us, a good-looking guy probably in his early fifties. A middle-aged hunk, Doreen would have said. He was lean, with deep-set blue eyes, good cheekbones, and a sensuous mouth. His hair, grey at the temples, was dark and wavy. He looked a little dangerous, the kind of man I used to fall for, before I lost my taste for trouble.

“I couldn’t help overhearing,” he said in the flat accent of the American Mid-West. “Is your mother one of the inductees?”

“Yes, over there, in the blue-and-white stripes,” I said.

“Who did she play for?”

“The Racine Belles.”

“No kidding? My mom did, too.”

“Who’s she?”

“Virna Wilton. She was the shortstop.”

He pointed her out, a tall, elegant-looking woman in pants and a long, loose jacket. She wore sling-back sandals. Her most striking feature was her upswept salt-and-pepper hair, with one silver streak waving back off her forehead.

“For heaven’s sake,” Sheila said. “She was one of Mum’s best friends. Helen Henry. MacLaren, she was then.”

“
Wheels
MacLaren? You’re kidding!”

We introduced ourselves. He was Jack Wilton.

“You’re the second person today I’ve heard call her that,” I said. “I never even knew she had a nickname. Why did they call her Wheels? Did she steal lots of bases?”

“It was just a pun,” Jack said. “You know, Helen Wheels. Hell on wheels. They used to call her Hellion, too.”

“You know a lot about it,” Sheila said.

“I grew up with the league. Mom was in it until the end. She moved to Fort Wayne after the Belles folded, and played with the Daisies until 1954. I was nine at the time.”

“Our mother lasted five years,” Sheila said. “She quit after the 1947 season to get married.”

“A lot of women did that,” he said.

“What about your father?” Andy asked him. “Didn’t he mind his wife playing ball?”

“I didn’t have a father. I mean, obviously I did, but I never knew him. He died overseas in the war. I mainly had a lot of honorary aunts.”

“Did you travel around with the team?”

“Sometimes. Or I’d stay home with the landlady. It was a different way to grow up, but it suited us.”

“Did you get to be a bat boy?” asked my tomboy niece Claire, who is campaigning to move to Toronto to live with us and work as the Titans’ first bat girl.

“Sure. I had to earn my keep,” Jack said, giving her a killer smile.

“Well, if it was girls’ baseball, why didn’t they have bat
girls
?” Claire asked.

“Well, they did. But since I was a boy, I had to be a bat boy, didn’t I?”

“There’s no such thing as a bat girl in real baseball,” said Amy, whose ambition is to become a veterinarian. Specializing in horses, she says. “It’s a dumb idea.”

Seeing that the two were about to get into an is-not-is-too free-for-all, I suggested a dessert run. When we came back with plates full of cookies, Nanaimo bars, and date squares, Andy and Jack were talking hate mail with Sheila.

“Jack’s mother got letters, too,” Andy said.

“Why didn’t you tell us about this before?” Sheila demanded. “This is awful. We have to tell someone about this.”

“I told my mother that we should go to the police,” Jack said, “but she thinks it’s just a joke.”

“It probably is,” I said. “But we should find out if anyone else got one.”

“Let’s go ask,” Sheila said, getting up from the table. I followed her across the room to where my parents were sitting with several other players. Jack went to his mother, who was with a different group.

“I was just telling your mother about the letter I got,” Edna Summers said. “I was quite frightened.”

“Why, of course you would be,” one of the other women said, a tall woman with gold-rimmed glasses. Her name tag identified her as Willetta Heising, who had played for the Rockford Peaches.

“Did you get one, too?” I asked.

“No. The only ones I’ve heard about are the Belles.”

Jack Wilton joined us at the table.

“My mother said she had heard that Shirley Goodman, the pitcher, got a letter, too,” he said.

“I don’t think she’s here yet,” Edna said. “At least I haven’t seen her.”

“My mother spoke to her on the phone last week,” Jack said, then put out his hand. “I’m Jack Wilton, by the way.”

“Edna Summers. I was Edna Adams.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you. And you must be Helen Henry. I’ve heard a lot about you. Both from your charming daughters and my own mother.”

“Well. Nice to meet you,” my mother said, a little rudely, I thought, then turned to my father. “I think we should be getting back to the hotel, don’t you, Douglas?”

She stood up.

“Excuse me, please,” she said. “I’ll just see to the little girls.”

She was turning to walk away when the room was pierced by a loud whistle. Once he had got our attention, a jokey gentleman in a plaid shirt introduced himself as a vice-president of the Hall of Fame board and announced that the museum was open and that we were all welcome to visit.

“Do you want to go?” I asked my mother.

“Oh, you mustn’t,” Edna explained. “We Belles are all waiting until tomorrow, after the induction.”

“Once it’s official, you mean,” I said. “That makes sense. What do you want to do instead?”

“I’ll just go back to the hotel,” she said. “I think your father wants to rest his hip a bit, and we’ve got a big night ahead of us.”

“Did someone mention going to the police?” Edna asked.

“I think someone should,” I agreed and we moved towards the door.

“I’d be happy to go,” Jack said. “What about you, Andy? It might be good to have a policeman along, too.”

“That’s a good idea,” my sister said. “They’ll listen to you.”

Andy looked trapped.

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“That’s fine.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“No, I don’t want to make a big production of this. Do you have the letter with you?”

I dug it out of my bag and gave it to him.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.”

Andy took Jack with him in our purple rental car, which the nieces had by now dubbed the Grapemobile, and followed the tourist map to the Battlefords Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment across the river in North Battleford. It was an unadorned two-storey brick building a couple of blocks off the main street into town.

It was apparently a slow crime day. Inspector Walter Digby, the top cop, invited the two into his office, standard Mountie issue, including the portrait of Her Majesty gazing down upon them from the wall behind the desk.

Andy and Jack had decided on the way over that Andy would do the talking, cop to cop. He and Inspector Digby began by exploring the possibility of mutual law enforcement friends, and came up with several to break the ice. Andy had been on a forensics course ten years before with Digby’s former partner, and Digby had gone to RCMP training college in Regina with a Mountie Andy had worked with on a series of drug-related murders in overlapping jurisdictions in Ontario.

That out of the way, like a secret handshake in a fraternal order, Digby dropped his social tone and inquired about the reason for the visit. Andy told him about the letters.

“Since they were postmarked here in the Battlefords, I thought you might have some usual suspects in your files.”

“Do you have letters with you?” Digby asked.

“Just the one Mrs. Henry got yesterday,” Andy said, putting it on the desk. “She threw out the previous one, but her description is consistent with it being the same writer.”

“It looks like the one my mother got, too,” Jack said.

Digby studied the letter. He appeared to be around Andy’s age, in the mid-forties, but might as well have come from a different generation altogether. What hair he had was trimmed short and combed neatly, and he had one of those trim toothbrush moustaches that put one in mind of World War Two officers. He was in full uniform, and everything about him was tidy, from the polish on his shoes to the rigidly aligned stacks of paper on his desk. Disorder did not appear to be a permissible option in his life.

He folded the letter, picked up the phone, and punched in three numbers.

“Got a minute? In my office,” he said, then hung up.

A moment later, there was a knock on the door, immediately followed by the entrance of a compact, clean-shaven man, probably in his mid-thirties, with a dark brown buzz cut and friendly brown eyes. He was also in uniform, but without a jacket or tie. After introducing Staff Sergeant Michael Morris, Digby gave him the letter and explained the circumstances under which it arrived.

“So who got these letters?” Morris asked. “All the women?”

“Apparently not,” Andy said. “It seems to have been sent to women who played together on one particular team, the Racine Belles.”

The phone on Digby’s desk buzzed. He picked it up, listened for a moment, then punched the hold button.

“I’ll let you take it from here, Mickey,” he said, then held out his hand to each of the visitors in turn. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention.”

“That’s it?” Jack interjected. “Isn’t there something we should be doing to protect these women?”

“There will be representatives of the force in attendance this evening, both in a ceremonial and a personal capacity,” Digby said. “Including my wife and myself. The induction dinner is one of the high points of our year in the Battlefords. I’ll keep my eyes open, as will the other officers there.”

Morris led the other two to the door.

“By the way, Mickey,” Digby said, “please extend Inspector Munro every professional courtesy. He is with the Metropolitan Toronto Police Department.”

Andy couldn’t tell if he was making fun of him or not, but decided to let it pass. From his years with me, he knew that mocking big-city airs ranks right up there with hockey, CFL football, and curling as favourite provincial pastimes.

Morris seemed friendly enough, though. He took them through the story again, then led the two into another office.

“This is Sergeant Deutsch,” he said, of an altogether hipper-looking cop sitting with his cowboy boots up on his cluttered desk. He was throwing darts at a picture of the actor Paul Gross, dressed in the red serge he wears as the straight-arrow Mountie on
Due South
.

Despite his rather disreputable appearance, Deutsch turned out to be the head of the plainclothes General Investigation Section, which handled all major crimes in the area.

“Threats don’t normally fall under Donny’s jurisdiction,” Morris explained, “but he’s blessed with a mind that’s halfway between an encyclopedia and a fully loaded computer.”

He handed the letter to Deutsch, who still hadn’t taken his feet off the desk.

“What do you make of this?”

The sergeant glanced at it and shrugged.

“Typical crank,” he said. “Who got it?”

Jack explained about his mother, the Hall of Fame, and the other women who had received the same kind of thing.

“Thought you might have a possible perp in your mental files,” Morris said.

“Not offhand. You say they were sent from here?”

“Look at the postmark.”

He did.

“Could be some nutbar out at the mental hospital,” he said, handing the letter to Morris. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Den’s right,” Morris said. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, these kinds of letters are nothing to worry about. But, like the inspector said, we’ll keep our eyes open tonight. My wife and I are going, too. My uncle from Kindersley was inducted in there five years ago, and we always go to the dinner. It’s a nice event, and Dave Shury, who organizes the deal, is a popular man in town. So, if there’s any trouble at all, we’ll be on the scene.”

“So the women shouldn’t be worried, then?” Jack asked.

“I don’t think so, but you were right to let us know,” Morris said.

“Thanks for your time,” Andy said. “We can find our way out.”

“No trouble. I’ll see you tonight then.”

Going back through the central office area, Andy was struck by the laid-back atmosphere of the small-town cop-shop. There was none of the tension and energy he was used to in Toronto. It felt downright good-natured. A week here, he thought, would drive him nuts.

Outside, the rain had stopped, and the puddles were steaming in the afternoon sunshine.

“They didn’t seem too concerned,” Jack said.

“No. I didn’t think they would be.”

“We’ve done our duty, though, and it will reassure the women.”

“Duty done, it’s probably time for a beer,” Andy said.

“Lead the way. I’ve been thirsty for a Canadian brew since I got here.”