Waiting for Teddy Williams (6 page)

E.A. went straight from counting his blessings to reciting Our Father Who Art in Heaven. He had never been exactly sure what “deliver us from evil” meant, but he assumed it had something to do with revenge. Gypsy had enjoyed revenge that morning, setting R.P. on Devil Dan and the Blade. E.A., however, still had a score to settle. He and Dan weren't even—not by a long shot. He would dump a ten-pound sack of Shurfine sugar in the gas tank of the Blade. He would set fire to Dan's machine shed with the Blade inside it. He would shoot Devil Dan with Grandpa Gleason Allen's deer rifle and hang him up by his little feet in Gran's dooryard maple like a deer.

E.A. began again. “Our Father who art in heaven . . . thy kingdom come . . .” Thy kingdom come must be Kingdom County, Our Father being somehow connected with the Colonel. E.A. no longer supposed that the Colonel actually
was
Our Father, or his father, either. But the Colonel had been as much a father to him as anyone had. The Outlaws, Earl and the boys, were more like indulgent uncles, or grown-up brothers, than fathers. Thinking about brothers sidetracked E.A. yet again, because he wished he had one, or even a sister. He seemed destined tonight not to get to the end of his prayers, so finally he just slammed through the whole shebang without thinking what any of the words meant, adding a quick P.S. wish for Gypsy to find a good man, like Randolph Scott or Jimmy Stewart in her song “A Good Man Like Randolph Scott or Jimmy Stewart Is Christly Hard to Find These Days,” and a P.P.S. for Gran to get her Series ring at last and be easier to live with, and finally for Devil Dan to fall off the Blade and get squashed under its treads like the official American League baseball.

“All in the fullness of time, boy,” the Colonel's voice said as E.A. started to drift off, feeling happy and thrice blessed and dreaming of revenge and baseball.

M
OST VISITORS
to Kingdom Common quickly realized that more ardent Red Sox fans could not be found anywhere else in New England. Three signs within the village limits proclaimed the relationship between the baseball fans of the Common and their beloved team.

Approaching the village from the south on old Route 5, you could not miss the large sign with tall black letters that said,
WELCOME TO KINGDOM COMMON, THE CAPITAL OF THE RED SOX NATION
. Strangers skeptical of this claim had only to drive another quarter of a mile to the long rectangular green at the heart of the village, with the baseball diamond laid out at its south end, and lift up their eyes not unto the steep hills surrounding the town but to the huge green bulletin board, twenty feet long by fifteen feet high, atop the bat factory, known locally as the Green Monster of Kingdom Common. During the off-season, the Green Monster announced, in white wooden letters a foot and a half high, such uplifting tidings as “236 Accident Free Days” or “Have a Safe New Year” or “Congratulations to Porter Kittredge, Proud Father of an Eleven Pound Future Power Hitter.” But from early April until however deep into the fall the Sox held on before being eliminated by bad luck or injuries or mismanagement in the front office, the giant announcement board looming over the mill was used as a scoreboard.

The Green Monster of Kingdom Common was tended by Moonface Poulin. In a box about the size of a kitchen wood-box, located behind the sign, Moonface kept his wooden letters and numbers. Nearby lay his tall, homemade, spruce-pole ladder. True, Moon's grasp of Sox data was more impressive than his spelling. He had never figured out, despite constant reminders, that Chicago was not spelled with two
g
's or that the
e
between the first and second syllables of the Oakland Athletics was superfluous. But Moon more than made up for these unorthodoxies with his unhurried, deliberate style, his quiet aplomb, and his impenetrable, stately demeanor when posting the scores. Even Gran, one morning in the summer of E.A.'s tenth year, watching Moon's expression out her kitchen window through Gypsy's rifle scope, could not discern from his features whether the Sox had won the critical rubber game in a three-game series with the Yankees the night before until the numbers went up.
NEW YORK
12
SOX
1.

Gran was so delighted by her team's humiliating defeat that she inadvertently pulled the trigger of Grandpa Gleason's rifle. The 30.06 went off inside the kitchen with a thunderous detonation, shattering the window. A hole an inch and a half in diameter instantly appeared in the middle of the letter x in
SOX
on the Green Monster. Whereupon Moonface won the everlasting admiration of the entire village by simply continuing about his business, which was to add, without missing a beat,
YANKS TAKE SOUL POSS. OF 1ST PLACE
.

Yet even in those palmy summers when the Sox were on a tear, the tidings that blazed forth from the Green Monster of Kingdom Common, however encouraging, were viewed by villagers in the context of a sobering third message, this one lettered in red on the abandoned water tank near the railroad trestle over the river just upstream from Gran's meadow. It said
BOSTON RED SOX WORLD CHAMPIONS
—1918. And no news that Moonface Poulin could ever relay to the Kingdom from the scoreboard atop the bat factory could counteract the stark truth that the Sox had not won a World Series since then.

 

“I am a vengeful fella when need be,” the Colonel was telling E.A. on the day Gran shot the Green Monster. “I'll endure so much and then no more. John Bull found that out over at Fort Ti. So did the York Staters who proposed to annex Vermont. When the time comes to act, I'll be all action. Don't you ever misdoubt it.”

“Two years have gone by,” E.A. said. “Two years have gone by since I first asked you to do something about Dan Davis. I don't recall seeing any action yet.”

Lately Dan had been threatening again to dozer down Gran's barn with his Blade. But the Colonel had not seen fit to do anything about it, and now fall was in the air once more. At the far end of the Common the Outlaws were getting ready for their last game of the season. They were playing Pond in the Sky for the league championship.

Across the street in front of the drugstore, Old Lady Benton said, “There. Do you see that, Reverend? He's talking to that statue again.”

“That's bad,” the Reverend said. “It's unnatural. Holding conversation with a graven image.”

E.A. wanted to holler across to the Reverend, was it right and natural to ask Gypsy Lee to put on a long, dark Delilah wig and nothing else but her G-string and call the Reverend her big manly Samson and chase him around her bedroom with a pair of scissors? Not that the man of the cloth had that much hair to start with.

Now Old Lady Benton was saying, “Allowed to patrol the village at all hours of the day and night. Where's his mother, I'd like to know?”

E.A. imagined that the Reverend would like to know the same thing.

“That pair over across there,” E.A. said to the Colonel, “is about as bad as Devil Dan. Maybe worse. Can't you help me with them, at least?” He looked up, past the Colonel's extended sword, broken off at the point, at the bronze face under the three-cornered hat. As usual, his old friend was gazing down the common to where the Outlaws were taking BP.

“What is it?” the statue said in that place just behind E.A.'s forehead where only E.A. could hear him. “What is it you want now?” As though he didn't want to be bothered. Or, worse yet, as though he'd already done something for E.A. and the boy was returning to the well once too often.

Though it brought him into fall view of the Reverend and Old Lady Benton, E.A. stepped directly into the statue's line of sight. “I'll tell you what I want. I want you to cause Devil Dan Davis to fall off his machine and get run over by those big treads, cleats on them the size of ax blades. And”—raising his voice and glaring across the street—“I want you to cause the Angel of Death to slay his first-born. And locusts to descend on his vineyard.”

The Colonel thought for a minute. “Why would you wish for all that misfortune to befall one man?”

“Devil Dan said Gypsy Lee was a hoor and that made our place a hoorhouse and he wouldn't have a hoorhouse next door where R.R had to look out at it every day. And that Gran's barn's going to fall over onto his property someday, and he intends to dozer it down first.”

“Does he now?” the Colonel said with more of an edge to his voice. Ethan knew the Colonel was not happy to have a direct descendant of his, even a
WYSOTT
Allen, called a hoor.

“I will reflect about all this,” the statue said.

“Why do you need to reflect? Weren't you a soldier? I want vengeance and I want it now. Before he knocks down our place. Not afterward, when it's too late.”

“I said, I will study on it. Now skedaddle on down to the ball diamond. Those Outlaws need you to shag foul balls, keep score. They shouldn't even be playing this game. They should have clinched the league ten games ago. There was no call to let the race drag on so. The rumdummies are apt to throw it all away now. Just like the Sox, losing that game to those York Staters last night. Your grandma was right to fire a ball through that tally board.”

“The state should step in and take him away,” Old Lady Benton said.

“I'll see what I can do,” the statue said to E.A. “I might send someone to help you out.”

“With Devil Dan?”

“No. Dan is a no-'count pismire. With your baseball.”

“How'll I know who he is?”

“You'll know.”

“Your only begotten son, no doubt.”

“Misbegotten is more like it. Now see here. If he shows, don't listen to him on anything but baseball. Other than baseball, he's just another loser. But on baseball, listen like your future in the game depends on it.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it does. Now scat. They'll be starting up that contest in another few minutes and I don't want to be distracted. Why I should care is more than I'll ever know.”

J
UDGE CHARLIE KINNESON
, who umpired the Outlaws' home games, was meeting with the team captains at home plate. E.A. sat on the Outlaws' bench on the third-base side of the diamond, just in front of the small wooden grandstand, copying the names of the Pond in the Sky players into the Outlaws' scorebook. The scorebook was green and flat and dog-eared and stained with beer and Coke and chewing tobacco and mustard, and it dated back one year, to when the Outlaws had lost the championship game to the team they were playing today. The players were mostly the same this year for both teams. Gypsy and Gran, who had come over to the game in Patsy, sat behind E.A. in the first row of the bleachers.

The Pond captain, who was also their pitcher, came over to the bench to get his team's scorebook, in which E.A. was now penciling the Outlaws' roster. A bespectacled beanpole, he looked like the illustration of Ichabod Crane in the matched set of Washington Irving volumes that the American literature prof from Middlebury College who summered in Lost Nation Hollow had given Gypsy for dressing up in white and reciting from Emily Dickinson's
Collected Poems
while she did a striptease.

“What's this all about?” Ichabod said. He was a substitute schoolteacher in the off-season, E.A. had heard. “Who's this kid? What's he doing with my book?”

“Scorekeeper,” Earl No Pearl said.

“He's too young to keep score.”

“Ask him a baseball question,” Gypsy called out from the bleachers.

“What?”

“Ask him any baseball question you can think of.”

E.A. saw the sneer come across Ichabod's face, saw his lip curl. “Winningest pitcher in baseball history?” Ichabod said.

“Denton True ‘Cy' Young, five hundred and eleven wins,” E.A. said, continuing to write. “Here's one for you. Pitcher who threw the first perfect game in major-league baseball?”

“What?” Ichabod said.

E.A. looked up and gave him the sneer right back. “I thought
you
were supposed to be the schoolteacher,” he said. “Cy Young again. May 5, 1904.”

Gypsy laughed. “Atta boy, E.A.”

Judge Charlie K, strapping on his umpire's chest protector, clapped his hands together twice and called out, “Let's get this show on the road, gentlemen. Play ball.”

An inning into the championship game, E.A. knew that it was going to be a pitcher's duel. Earl didn't have much to go with his fastball, but he threw so hard E.A. could hear the ball hum from where he stood behind the backstop to keep score and shag foul balls.

The beanpole substitute-schoolteacher pitcher from Pond in the Sky wasn't as fast as Earl. Nobody in the Northern Border League was. But Ichabod came from the side and was sneaky-quick and crafty, with a big, sweeping, yellowhammer curve ball that kept the Outlaw hitters off stride. Though he'd never gone to school a day in his life, E.A. disliked schoolteachers in general. During the Outlaws' games, if he wanted to see a schoolteacher all he had to do was look up at Old Lady Benton, camped out with her binoculars in her green rocker. He did not need to watch a teacher pitch.

In the bottom of the second, with no score, Porter Kittredge hit a high foul ball over the backstop. E.A. dropped the scorebook, grabbed his glove, and made a diving catch. The crowd cheered. “Ain't you a man and a half, E.A.,” Gran called out sarcastically. “Ain't you the grandstander, though.”

“Nice catch, Ethan,” Judge Charlie K said as E.A. tossed the ball back over the chicken wire. “If I'd made a few more like that one back in my playing days, the Sox might have come calling on me.”

At the end of the fifth the score was 1–1. That's when E.A. spotted him again. Though he hadn't seen the drifter for two years, he recognized him immediately. He was leaning against the last remaining elm tree on the common, twenty feet behind the backstop, under an oriole's nest. He was wearing a Red Sox cap and the same ratty suit jacket, once-white shirt, uncreased khaki pants, and battered work shoes, with a cigarette butt in the corner of his mouth and a bottle twisted up in a brown paper bag sticking out of his jacket pocket. As E.A. watched, the drifter took the bagged bottle, unscrewed the cap, drank, screwed the cap back on, and stuck the bottle back in his pocket. All without taking his eyes off the game.