Sam's Legacy (38 page)

“I mean,” Sam said, nodding to himself, then glancing back at Tidewater, “you have all you need, right?”

“Oh yes,” Tidewater said. “As you do.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “With Ben gone, I don't even use his room, if you know what I mean.”

“Of course,” Tidewater said. “May I make you some tea? I was about to prepare some for myself.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “But I can't stay too long—I got something to do—”

Tidewater went to the high closet and took out a tin can, and some cups and saucers. Sam smiled—he'd been right—seeing the dishes and groceries in the closet. Tidewater struck a match and lit one of the burners, then put water on to boil. He sat down in a chair he pulled from under his table and faced Sam. “I'm glad you came,” he said.

‘Tm a sport,” Sam said. He glanced at Tidewater's face, to see if the man would smile. Tidewater seemed slightly puzzled. “Ben must've spent a lot of time here,” Sam offered.

Tidewater sighed. “Sometimes I wonder: did I merely use your father during our times together? I loved hearing him tell stories, jokes—” He stopped; his voice became matter-of-fact: “The sound of his voice, in this small room, was so special. You can understand that.”

“Oh sure,” Sam said. “He had some voice.” Sam felt warm. He lifted himself from the chair, sliding his right arm from his mackinaw, and stood to take it off. Tidewater took it from him and laid it across the bed. “I mean, if he wanted, he could have been a pedagogue.”

Tidewater stood at the stove, preparing the tea. “I think I understand now why he left.”

“Listen,” Sam said. “We got on okay, the last five years. We had some good times together. I don't blame the guy. I said that before—with the winters, and his age, and his brother Andy hanging on like—”

“No,” Tidewater said. “No. He was worried about you. I told you before. Now that you're here with me, I can see it: he wanted to leave you alone, so that we could, as we have, come to know one another. Don't you see that? He sensed something—he gave you up, you see, despite—”

“Come on,” Sam said. “I told you before: I look out for number one. I don't buy that stuff about everybody trying to save everybody else's ass. He did the same thing, finally, looking out for himself. He'll live ten more years, with the air they got out there.”

“You are not listening to what I say,” Tidewater said angrily. Sam sighed inside himself, and he was ready to leave. Would he tell Stella about coming down to Tidewater's apartment? Tidewater was smiling. “You're like your father in that. I'm not sure how carefully he ever listened to me—but that is no matter. Please, Sam, try to listen to the words I use. He gave you up, his only son—do you understand? He left you to me.”

“You're bats,” Sam said; then, feeling more confident than he'd imagined he would, he went on. “All that black-white white-black jazz—the way you thought about it all those years—it—” He stopped, not sure of how he had intended to complete his thought. What he wanted to say, he knew, was that Tidewater should play what was there. He should take things for what they were. But if he said that, he would not, he realized, have been able to explain exactly what he meant. “It turned you bats, that's all. I don't mean completely—but…”

“Ben,” Tidewater said, with a dreamy look on his face, “might have said that it turned me bats and balls—”

Sam groaned. “I didn't mean anything,” he said. “You can believe what you want.”

“You were his gift to me,” Tidewater said. “He said so.”

“I was on special,” Sam replied, and laughed to himself. He leaned forward, watching the man's back as he poured tea for them.

“Sugar?”

Sam nodded. “Sugar.”

“Lemon or milk?”

“Some lemon, I guess.”

Sam took the cup and saucer Tidewater offered him. He sipped his tea and remembered that his grandfather had always put strawberry jam into tea. The liquid entering Sam's chest warmed him pleasantly. The story about his grandfather quitting work one day—maybe Ben had been right about them getting on together, had the old guy lived. Sam's fingertips were cold. “I was looking at your story again—the description of your first game. Your brothers were right, if you ask me—you shouldn't have taken it so hard. From what you say, the runs weren't really earned anyway.” Sam paused, shifted his body in the chair. “That's what I think, for what it's worth. You took it too hard.”

“Yes.”

“I like the way you described things, though.” He shrugged. “That's all. I mean, Ben—he could of talked your ear off, I guess.”

Sam could see that Tidewater was pleased, and that was all right too, he figured. He'd been nuts before, letting the guy give him the creeps, when all he was, really, was a frightened old man living by himself. There were thousands of them all over the city. Sure. That was something he'd learned from cards but had forgotten to apply to his life: you should never give people any more power than they showed. Most of the time they'd be holding less than you. Things evened out, in the long run.

“But he would not have taken it as seriously as you do. Don't you understand? Bats and balls—of course. He reduced all things to jokes, in his classic Jewish manner. There was nothing—neither God nor the Holocaust—which was immune.” Tidewater's eyes found Sam's. “He knew that, like me, you did not find humor in every morsel of life. He knew that you were the one who should have possession of my story. Don't you understand?”

Sam watched the bluish streak on the man's tongue, as the tongue reached out to touch the upper lip. A man—Sam saw his grandfather's face—sits by the railroad station, weeping. Sam listened to his father's voice, acting out the parts. “My God!” the man groans. “My train is gone! What will I do? Everything is lost!” For some reason, Sam now thought that in the joke the word “everything” referred specifically to Ben's two older brothers. “When did it leave, your train?” “Only a minute or two ago,” the man replies, his body heaving, tears rolling down his cheeks into his beard. “Is that all?” says the other. “From the way you carry on one would think you'd missed it by an hour!” Sam saw Ben, walking across the green lawns of Pioneer Estates, laughing with his new neighbors, pleased to be able to entertain them, to receive their applause. “I'll tell you the truth,” Sam said, aloud. “I'm not sure I got it all. I didn't like Johnson, though, I'll tell you that. I'd cut a wide trail around a guy like him.” Sam lifted his cup and drank some more. “I would've steered clear.”

“I wondered about his nickname,” Tidewater said. “It intrigued me, and when I inquired about it as a boy, my brother Tucker told me the story.” Sam settled back. “In Johnson's first game, pitching for the Page Fence Giants against the Cleveland Elites, sometime during the last five years of the nineteenth century, he had hit a man named Dell Corrigan on the side of the head. Corrigan, the story went, had not even tried to duck, and blood had spilled from his ear, wetting the dirt in the batter's box. Corrigan's teammates had, while Corrigan still lay unconscious on the ground, started for Johnson, whereupon Johnson appeared on the mound—nobody had seen him leave it—brandishing a baseball bat in each hand, swinging them around his head and screaming that he would crack six skulls as easily as one. They believed him, and after trading angry words, order was restored, Corrigan removed, and the game continued. Corrigan lay in a coma for twelve days and when he awoke was reported to have asked: “Who hit me with that big brick?” He did not remember Johnson throwing at him, and he did not ever again play baseball or fully regain his senses.

“There were some on the Dodgers who disputed this account—they claimed that Johnson actually had the name before he ever entered baseball, for beating a man senseless with a brick during the robbery of a window-shade factory; this story lost credibility, though, when one tried to fit a jail term into what was known of Johnson's life—of a baseball career that, if his given age were true, had begun at fifteen. No matter which story was told to Johnson, however, he had the same reply: ‘That sounds good.' As for myself, I preferred to believe that the name referred to the man's torso, which—a rare thing in a pitcher—was large and square—black, but with a reddish caste to the blackness.”

Sam put his cup and saucer down on the table next to him. “I better get going,” he said.

“Yes.” Tidewater rose, put his own cup and saucer on the table, and handed Sam his coat. They stood in the middle of the room, two feet from one another, and looking into the man's face, being able to reach out and touch the pale skin, Sam thought for an instant that he was in Stella's room, about to touch her. He felt dizzy.

“You work here?” he asked. “Writing, I mean.”

“Ah,” Tidewater said, and Sam moved away from him. He remembered Flo's smile, when she had approached him upstairs. He felt tired.

“I was just curious,” Sam said.

“Your father never asked,” Tidewater said, and reached a hand toward Sam. “Come with me. I have something to show you.”

“I told you,” Sam said. “I got to get going. I got a date.”

“Of course,” Tidewater whispered. “At your age, you need somebody for that. I understand. But come with me first. I have something to show you. Come with me. It is not an accident that you asked.”

“I was just curious,” Sam said. “Maybe I was just—no offense—being polite. I mean—”

“Come with me. I promised I would show you, if you recall—the night of Ben's dinner…”

Tidewater led the way from his room back into the cellar. “But it can't take too long,” Sam said. “I told you—”

“Come with me,” Tidewater said, and Sam followed. “I will show you where I work, since you asked.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “Since I asked.”

A few minutes more, he told himself, and he'd be able to get away, out into the streets where he could breathe, even if it was cold. He followed closely behind Tidewater. The man stepped behind the oil burner and motioned to Sam to follow him. Sam was sorry he'd put his coat back on. In the dim light, he could not see Tidewater's eyes. A foot or two behind the furnace, where it would not have been wide enough for the two of them to have stood side by side, the old man was on his knees, brushing the floor with his hands. Sam blinked. He could not decide whether or not to take his coat off again. He remembered how he had felt walking through the snow to the card game Sabatini had set him up for, and he reminded himself to be careful. He heard footsteps on the floor above—Flo, he figured, moving racks of dresses.

Tidewater held an iron ring in his hand, and pulling the ring, Sam saw, lifted up a square section of the floor. “Now you will understand,” Tidewater said, “why I said what I said. Are you with me?”

“Sure,” Sam said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Come with me.” Tidewater reached toward Sam, a hand outstretched. “Don't be afraid.”

Sam stepped closer, aware suddenly that the man was already halfway into the hole, his chest only above floor level. Fear was not the right word for what he felt, he knew, and yet he did not want to go below—the thought did cross his mind that, if he did, he might never return. Still, he felt safe somehow, with the cool skin of the man's palm in his hand, with his own sweat dripping along his body, under his clothes. It was all the same to him, even this. “You got a light down there?” he asked.

“Don't be afraid. When they were changing from coal to oil—that would have been just before you and your father moved in—they discovered this door, but thought nothing of it.” He paused and Sam, as he let himself down into the hole, finding the iron rung of a ladder with the sole of his right shoe, felt somehow—the association was pleasant—the way he felt when he was in the midst of a good poker game: as if he were both there and not there, as if he were, as he descended below the cellar, watching himself do what he was doing. He smelled chalk. “You are the first to see what I have discovered.”

In the blackness, Sam could not tell how big the space around him was. He had let go of Tidewater's hand once he'd started down the ladder and he reached out now with his right hand and touched, not even a foot from the ladder, a dirt wall. He had forgotten to count the number of rungs on the ladder. He reached up, but his hand did not touch the cellar floor. There was light behind him. His foot touched ground, and he realized he had not heard Tidewater's voice or step for a second or two. He turned around, both feet on the ground, his shoulders brushing the dirt wall of the crawlspace, and saw, below him, that another door had been opened and that, in a dirt-walled chamber, perhaps six feet along each edge, the chamber sunk below the level of the earth Sam stood upon, Tidewater waited for him, his head nearly grazing a low ceiling, his hands at his sides. “I work here,” he said.

Sam ducked his head, stepped down, and entered the chamber. If he stuck his hands out, he knew, he would touch both walls at the same time. A lightbulb hung from the ceiling, the wire attached by large iron staples. In the corner, behind Tidewater, Sam saw the desk, with a typewriter on it and paper stacked neatly at the side. “How do you get air down here?” Sam asked.

Tidewater motioned behind Sam; Sam looked over his shoulder and saw, in the corner next to the door—to the right—diagonally across from the desk—that there was a round hole in the wall, next to the ceiling. “I wanted you to know,” Tidewater said. “This room has been here for over a hundred years.”

Sam nodded. He kept himself from saying anything because he did not, where he was, want to anger the man. He wondered if the room had been some kind of storage place for coal, but he didn't ask.

“I buried them there, in that corner,” Tidewater said, pointing to Sam's left.