Sam's Legacy (14 page)

It was a strike, knee-high, that whistled past the batter. Bingo returned the ball to me without rising from his haunches. I threw two more strikes, to the same spot, and the batter remained, like the fans, immobile. Only their mouths moved, letting loose a cheer which echoed from the steel girders and told me that I had pleased them. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, using the back of my glove, and fired three more times, striking out the second batter, and Bingo Rouillard, loud enough for those in the dugouts and in the boxes along the first and third base lines, asked me if I would prefer to have him call in the outfield for the third batter. I smiled, wiped my fingers along my thighs to dry them, and watched the great Oscar Charleston bend over, rub some dirt into his palms, and step into the batter's box. His fame and power, however, were nothing to me, and I reared back and let fly with my fast ball and it found the hole in Bingo's glove before Oscar could move the bat from his shoulder. “You got 'em all, honey,” Little Johnny Jones called to me from third base. “Oscar's posin' for pictures there—you got 'em all, honey.” I fired again and Charleston swung, late, missing a low outside pitch. “I feel the breeze,” Jones called to the plate. “Oh I do feel the breeze.”

Bingo showed me his glove, just outside the plate, and I threw it there, hoping to have Charleston swing and miss on a bad pitch, but he left his bat on his shoulder, and I was obliged to throw again. I threw inside this time, letter-high, where Bingo showed me, and Charleston stumbled away, on his heels, but did not fall. With the count two and two, Bingo showed me the heart of the plate, knee-high, and I sent the ball there, lower than the spot I was aiming for, so that, rising somewhat past the halfway point, it cut upward and Charleston—his bat stationary on his shoulder—muttered something and walked away, knowing he was out before the umpire had told him so.

I walked from the mound, the roar of the crowd raining down on me, my own teammates running by, slapping me on the back. Johnson ambled in, the last to reach the dugout. “It's hot today,” he said. “You want to pace yourself, boy.” I sat by myself at the end of the bench, wanting my own men, I realized, to make out quickly, so that I could return to the mound. Bullet Rogan, pitching against us, accommodated me. A man of average height for an athlete—perhaps five-foot-ten—and of average build, Rogan had begun his career as a catcher for the Pullman Colts of Kansas City and had first earned fame as a pitcher during the First World War with the Negro 25th Infantry team in Honolulu. He was very fast—not as fast as I was, nor as fast as Johnson had been, but he threw what we called a heavy fast ball. Coming at you, it seemed larger than it should have been, and you strained to try to hit it solidly. In addition, unlike most fast-ball pitchers then, he had a fine curve ball. I watched him work, getting Barton to hit out in front of a curve ball, thereby tapping it to second for an easy out. He blew two high hard ones past Rose Kinnard, then caught him looking with an easy inside curve. Johnson, batting in third position, swung on the first pitch—a low fast ball—and lined it to third. Rogan had thrown only six pitches, but that was all right too. I was back on the mound that much sooner.

I forgot about Johnson, and I forgot about Rogan. I smoothed over the spot on the mound Rogan had dug out, and went to work, oblivious of the heat, the crowd, the “book” we had on each hitter. I left the spots to Bingo, who had been around for as long as Johnson had, though he himself had never been a star, merely a journeyman catcher who knew how to handle pitchers, and—his one distinction—could, until he quit (at the age of forty-seven, a year after my departure), rifle the ball to second base and catch a runner stealing without having to rise from his squat position. His right forearm seemed twice the width of my own.

Batting first in the second inning, Mule Suttles, the ABC's clean-up man, ticked a foul ball into the first base stands, but he was the only man to touch the ball. I gave him two balls before striking him out, ran the count to three and two on Anderson, who followed him and went down swinging, and then struck out Rogan, batting sixth, on three straight pitches, all low and away.

Johnson sat next to me between innings. “You want to pace yourself, boy,” he said again. “You'll melt that arm, a day like this. You want to pace yourself.” Sweat dripped down above my eyes and I tasted salt in my mouth. I looked at the field and said nothing. Jack Henry, the hot day making the light olive caste of his skin seem especially cool, sat on my other side, rubbing his hand across the D in Dodgers, thereby giving Dixon the sign to take until two strikes were against him. He nodded. “Sure,” Brick said. “You listen to old Brick, who's been around. You want to pace yourself.”

Jack Henry agreed. “It's a hot one. Rogan has his stuff, but if we make him throw a lot of balls, he might get tired seventh or eighth inning. You got to have luck against him.”

I watched Rogan. He used his fast ball sparingly, varied his speeds, wanted us to hit the ball; he tempted us by making the first and second pitches his best ones, but Jack Henry made us wait him out, and, two strikes in the hole, our second three men all had to chop at bad pitches, where they didn't like them, and we were down again in the second, one-two-three. “You'll melt that arm, fair ass, a day like this,” Johnson said as he passed me on the way to the outfield at the beginning of the third inning.

I could not reply. Instead, I threw hard. I stung Bingo's hand with my warm-up pitches and refused his advice to take it easy. There was nothing I wanted to do except to throw strikes, to make the ball move faster and faster, until it disappeared. My infielders chided the opposing team, but I no longer heard their sweet teasing words. I heard only Johnson's voice, telling me that I had brains. I mowed down the first man to face me, on three pitches. When he had swung and missed for the third time, and the ball made its way behind me, around the infield, Jack Henry, instead of tossing it to me, walked with it to the mound. I knew, from the way I felt, that my face must have been flushed. “You got to pace yourself some,” Jack said. I blinked, aware of the sound of laughter. “You gone to put us out of jobs if you keep this up.” The laughter grew and I tried to place it, to clear my head—though I did not want to; I wanted to get on with it, but Jack Henry held the ball, his glove slipped down along the underside of his left wrist so that he could rub the ball for me with both hands. He motioned behind me and I followed his glance to right field, where Johnson, lying on the grass, was feigning sleep, his cap over his face. I did not smile, for I knew, of course, that this alleged comic tribute to my strikeouts—a standard ploy of outfielders on all barnstorming teams—had its double-edge.

Bingo Rouillard joined us. “I been tryin' to get him to go slow, Jack,” he said.

“All right,” I said.

“Sure,” Jack Henry said. “You get them to hit it a few times, first or second pitch, we'll handle the rest. You got to save yourself for the late innings. A day like this, you goin' to lose seven, maybe eight pounds from sweat—even a skinny boy like you. You want to pace yourself, save some of that juice for later on.”

“All right,” I said a second time, grudgingly, knowing that they were wrong, but lacking, in the dizziness my anger induced while I was not in motion, the confidence which could have made me forswear surrender.

Bingo squatted behind the plate. “You ain't goin' to even see this one,” he told the batter, and I gave him my big motion, reared back and tried to take a little off the ball, aiming it low and outside. As soon as it was released, however, stumbling slightly to the right from the awkwardness of having pulled the string, of having arrested the fluidity of my motion, I saw my error—I saw the ball spinning lazily, high and outside, too slow, as large as a grapefruit. I saw the batter swing the instant I released the ball, anticipating my blazer—and I saw him smile—though I remember only that he did, and cannot now see that smile or remember that face—and catch his swing, hitch the bat as one never should, and then continue, whacking the ball with the meat of the bat, hitting it where it was pitched—shoulder high and on the outside corner—so that as soon as it left home plate there was no doubt but that it would land on the other side of the right field wall.

“That's all right now,” Jack Henry said to me, handling the slightly roughed ball that was to replace the first. “Ain't but one run—you pitch to 'em.”

I knew that, behind me, Johnson was smiling. I had pitched badly—taken too much off the ball, but even if I had pitched as I had wanted to, I knew, it would have been wrong. Rouillard and Barton were at the mound also, thinking they had to calm their young pitcher down, but I did not hear, or need to hear, their words of consolation and encouragement. I threw hard to the next batter—as hard as I had thrown to the men in the first two innings—and he lofted an easy fly to Kelly in left field. The man after him bunted, but I was on the ball at once as it skittered along the third base line, and I threw him out at first, with steps to spare. The inning was over, they had only one hit and one run, and yet I sensed that for me it was all over; the spell had been broken, and try as I might—throw as hard as any man had ever thrown, harder than I had thrown in innings one and two—I would never again match the perfection of those innings, I could never, I sensed, be satisfied. (“But fortune is glass,” says Publilius Syrus, “it shatters when it shines.”

There had been, I saw at once, no need to pace myself. I had more than enough energy to bear down on every pitch in every inning of every game. Why, then, had I listened?

“You took too much off that ball, boy,” Johnson said to me, between innings.

I said nothing, for to reply would have been to acknowledge the difference he had made in my life; still, I vowed that I would never again, for as long as I played, let up on a batter. I vowed that I would begin every game with the will to pitch a perfect game—no hits, no runs, no walks, no man reaching first base—though I knew that no matter how mightily I pitched thereafter, I could now, in the language of the game, be reached.

I held them hitless and scoreless through the fourth and fifth innings. In our half of the fifth, we pushed a run across: I singled to left, Jones moved me to second with a bunt, and Jack Henry, batting left-handed, poked a long single down the right field line which enabled me to score. We touched Rogan for at least one hit in each inning after the third, yet we remained unable to score against him. As the day wore on, the crowd grew quieter, and it seems to me now, as I see them again, that—after the home run against me—they lost interest, grew languid, as if they were sleeping. We sucked on oranges between innings, and our bat boy fanned me with a newspaper. I did not bother to tell him to stop. Jack Henry took Johnson out of the game in the seventh inning, the hot day being brutal to a man his age, and, though Johnson did not request his own removal, surely it was not accidental that, in their half of the eighth inning, his replacement, a young boy named Virgil Whitaker, trying for a shoestring catch of a sinking line drive, missed the ball, so that, as it rolled into the rightfield corner—a hit and not an error—the two men I had allowed on base via a walk and a Texas League single both scored. Johnson sat on the bench, his head back, a wet towel around his neck, shaking his head. He would never have tried to catch a ball like that, he told us.

In the eighth and ninth innings Rogan pitched at the same pace he had employed in the first inning, mixing his fast ball and curve ball, getting us to hit in front of the ball when he would slow down, and to chop at balls that threatened to nick the corners of the plate. I struck out their side in the top of the ninth, but after Bingo Rouillard had popped out to the second baseman to start the bottom of the ninth, even I knew that the fans were right to begin moving toward the exits. We went down without seriously threatening, and I had lost my first game, 3 to 1, giving up a total of six hits to Rogan's ten.

My brothers came to the locker room and tried to console me, pointing out that the winning runs were not, in the true sense, earned, but they saw that I was beyond consolation. Mr. Tanner shook my hand and commended me in a Latin phrase I did not understand. “Don't you worry none,” Johnson said to me, as I sat brooding in front of my locker. “It was a hot day and McGraw wasn't watching.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, without thinking.

Other players moved near. I could smell the piercing sweetness of oil of wintergreen, though it did not cut the thickness of the day's heat. “Sure,” Johnson said, and his hand was on my shoulder. My brother Tucker sat on the bench next to me, his jacket and tie still on, his derby in his lap. “But let me ask you something: how many kids you got?”

“None,” I replied, pulling my shoulder from under him. “I'm only seventeen—why should—?”

I broke off. He was laughing at me, satisfied with himself, and the other players who had gathered around laughed also, good-naturedly, I suppose, thinking Johnson was riding me properly, in the way a veteran should ride a rookie. “You mean you ain't got no children yet?” He walked away, chuckling to himself. Even now, I can hear the voice and be angered by the question he would come to take such pleasure in repeating.
You ain't got no children yet, fair assf
He had not calculated the remark that first time, since in anything other than pitching, he calculated nothing, and yet he knew he had drawn blood, and he would, with the same off-handed manner, come to ask the question of me again and again, for no seeming reason, and at no particular time. My teammates never, I think, understood how deeply his remark went, yet they laughed nonetheless, as they had the first time, whenever he used it.

I was the last player to leave the locker room, and when my brothers and I and Mr. Tanner reached the outside of the field, along the Sullivan Place side, there were no fans waiting. Three young black people—a girl and two boys—stood at the corner of Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place, however, holding placards which urged us not to play on Sunday, the Lord's Sabbath. They were all very handsome, and I must have thought that they had—with the crowd gone—been waiting especially for me. Their eyes were bright and clear and I envied them their simple faith.
And God blessed the Seventh Day and sanctified it: because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made
.