Waiting for Teddy Williams (8 page)

“W
ELL
?”
ETHAN SAID
. “You see my game-winning double?”

“I scored it a single in my book,” the Colonel said. “On account of the game was over and won by the time you reached first base. Of course I saw it. I see everything that takes place on this so-called common. Including a great plenty I'd rather not witness.”

The victory procession was over. The deputy had made them stop after they'd gone three times around the green, citing a noise ordinance. But the celebration was still going strong at the hotel, where the barroom was lit up like Christmas. On Anderson Hill someone was burning leaves.

“I thought you were instructed to leave four go by,” the Colonel harangued him. “On my team, a fella that can't take instruction is going to ride the pine, by the hollering Christ child.”

“Number one, you don't have a team. Number two, you don't have to swear at me. I'm expected to watch four go by with the bat on my shoulder? Let a four-eyes substitute schoolteacher make a fool of me?”

The Colonel frowned. “I wasn't aware that the fella was a schoolmaster. That throws a different light on the situation. I never favored schoolmasters that much myself. Stuck a Canada bull thistle up through a knothole in the backhouse wall when the old dominie was inside doing his business and got myself expelled from school for good when I was your age. Before I was your age, I reckon. What are you, eight, nine?”

“I'm ten, as you very well know. Don't pretend you don't. Besides which, you've told me that Canada bull thistle story ten times. You're getting forgetful in your old age.”

“It's a good story that doesn't get into the history books. Howsomever. To get back to what's important. In baseballdom, a fella that can't take orders will never make the grade. That was more than half of your—of my own trouble. I'd been able to take orders, I'd have been president of the United States. Governor of Vermont at the very least. Now. You say you hope to go all the way to the top. Is that correct?”

“Not hope to. Intend to.”

“Fine. Then you need to be able to take orders. Otherwise, what you've got isn't baseball, it's anarchy. I was your manager, you'd ride the pine till the cows come home.”

“Well,” E.A. said, “you aren't my manager. And you aren't my father, or Our Father, either.”

“Maybe not. But for a while I and Gypsy Lee were the only friends you had and don't you forget it.”

E.A. grinned. “Everybody in the village is my friend tonight.” Then they were quiet, the Colonel standing, broken sword extended toward the ball field, E.A. sitting on the pedestal. The bonfire on Anderson Hill smelled good. E.A. noticed that the stars were out. He'd better be getting home.

“
CANDLEMAS DAY
, Candlemas Day. Half your wood and half your hay.”

It was February 2, and a gale was blowing out of Canada. As usual on Candlemas Day, Old Bill had come up to the house from his trailer to recite the ancient adage to the effect that by early February a farmer should have used up no more than half of his supply of firewood and hay, with half left to see him through the balance of the winter.

It was winter, all right. Through the blizzard, E.A. couldn't even see Fenway Park. Bill, who loved sayings of all kinds, particularly if they reassured him that his decision to do no work that day was unquestionably right, peered out the window.

“How do you like this Canadian thaw, E.A.?”

“What's a Canadian thaw, Bill?” E.A. said, feeding a couple of split floorboards from the back bedroom and a piece of a cow stanchion into Gran's Glenwood.

With considerable satisfaction, Bill said, “Two foot of snow and a hang of a blow. We won't be able to get out and do much today.” Then, “Candlemas Day, Candlemas Day. Half your wood and half your hay. What a winter!”

As far as E.A. was concerned, this winter had been like any other. Cold and long and no baseball, except throwing to his swinging tire inside the empty hayloft. He stayed busy with his homeschooling, Gran read the
Weekly World News
, Gypsy sang on weekends and put on shows at home for her regulars, Earl and Moonface and the Reverend and Sergeant Preston and a few others. The escort business always fell off in the winter. Sometimes, for fun, Gypsy and E.A. slid down the hill behind the house on flattened-out cardboard boxes.

A few days before Christmas they had taken the bucksaw up through the snowy woods to their special place to select a balsam fir for their Christmas tree. Gypsy could never find one that suited her. The balsams were all full on the side facing the clearing, sparse and ragged on the woods side. If she'd let E.A. climb up and take the top off a taller tree, the way he wanted to, they could have had their pick. But Gypsy couldn't bear the idea of topping a tree. She said that was the sort of thing Devil Dan would do, except that Dan did not believe in Christmas any more than he believed in the environment.

So as usual they'd bucked down a scraggly little fir, and as they were dragging it back toward the sugar orchard and Gypsy was composing a song called “The One-Sided Christmas Tree,” which wasn't going anyplace, she said, “Oh, Ethan. Look at this, hon.”

In the snowy meadow, on the protected east side of their sitting rock dropped by the Great Wisconsin Ice Sheet, was the perfect imprint of an owl's wings. It was probably a big white Canadian owl. The bird had dived into the snow after a mouse, most likely the night before, and the print of every wing feather stood out as if in a photographic negative. The owl's wingspan was wider than E.A.'s arms when he stretched them straight out from his shoulders. And right there was Gypsy's next great song, “The Snow Owl,” which she didn't even know she'd been looking for. She finished it two weeks later, and everybody at the hotel barroom loved it. That also happened to be her twenty-ninth birthday. For a present, E.A. had gotten her new guitar strings out of a mail-order catalog.

In January the State Environmental Board had found Devil Dan in violation of one hundred and forty-six separate regulations. But the state had no funds to take him to court. The day the indictment was handed down, during a midwinter thaw, Dan dozered five more junk cars over the bank along the river.

By the Candlemas Day blizzard, the Allens were not only out of firewood, they were close to out of food. The deer Gypsy had jacked last December was nearly gone, and they were low on maple sugar for table sweetening. Gypsy's escort service was suffering more than usual this winter; Earl was away on a haul, Moonface was in jail for three months for “tumultuous conduct,” meaning bar fighting, and she'd had to shut off a couple of the other regulars—the Reverend and the spindly little social services man from Memphremagog—because their requests were getting too outlandish. That was what a hard Vermont winter could do to people, Gypsy Lee said.

 

One sunny day in March Gypsy and E.A. took a geology field trip to their special place through hip-high snow. Bill had announced the day before that water had begun to run down the ditches. “When the spring water runs down the ditches, the sap runs up the trees,” he intoned. “Sugaring time's coming.”

The snow had melted on top of their boulder, and as E.A. and Gypsy perched on it, looking out over the Kingdom, she told him again how the ice sheet had come inching down from the north, gouging out the trenches where Lake Memphremagog and Lake Willoughby now lay, clipping off the tops of the Green and White Mountains, depositing sand and gravel on the meadow, dropping huge boulders like theirs in its retreating path. She told about the Arctic char that swam down the rivers from the north when the glacier melted and by degrees over the eons transformed into brook trout. “Our own little Galapagos,” she said. “Charles Darwin should have come to Kingdom County, Ethan. He'd have had a field day.”

E.A. wasn't sure who Charles Darwin was. Maybe a country singer, though Darwin sounded more like a country singer's first name.

“Look, hon.” Gypsy pointed at a red squirrel in the top of a sugar maple, biting off twigs and sucking on the fresh sap. “Bill's right. It's sugaring time.”

They tapped the trees the old-fashioned way, with wooden buckets and wooden spouts, no plastic pipeline running straight from tree to sugarhouse for the
WYSOTT
Allens, thank you anyway. No sugarhouse, for that matter. The Allens boiled sap on the kitchen stove. On the kitchen wall hung the new
Vermont Life
calendar depicting children coasting downhill on gleaming new sleds, ice fishermen gathered around a miniature city of colorfully painted fishing shanties, steam rising at twilight from hillside maple-sugar houses, sleigh rides and hay rides and multicolored fall hillsides.

How about a calendar showing the Allens burning their house and barn for stove wood to boil sap? E.A. wondered. Gypsy entertaining her gentlemen callers? Gran reading Nostradamus's latest prophecy in the
Weekly World News
, with an out-of-season buck hanging in the otherwise empty woodshed to get them through until May, when they could shoot woodchucks, catch trout, forage for cowslips and watercress and leeks?

Now they were burning boards from the big bays in the hayloft. “If Davis is going to dozer down our place, he better do it soon,” Gran said. “Otherwise, we'll have it all burned up.”

“T
YPICAL APRIL DAY
in the Kingdom,” Judge Charlie K remarked, looking past his portable radio on the windowsill at the monstrous snowflakes drifting down onto the village green. The radio was broadcasting an early-season Yankees-Sox game. The reception was terrible, but E.A. had been able to make out just enough of the play-by-play to know that the Sox were ahead 5–2 in the sixth.

The big courtroom, where Gypsy was being arraigned for poaching, was one of Ethan's favorite places in the village. Over the crackling broadcast, the old-fashioned propeller-blade ceiling fans made a steady, comforting hum. The courtroom was cool in summer and warm on cold days like today, the fans keeping the heated air from collecting up under the stamped-tin ceiling, the tall steam radiators clanking and hissing and grumbling. E.A. couldn't count the times he'd been here with Gypsy Lee. She was forever in court answering one minor charge or another, and for years she'd brought him along. Their court appearances had become an integral part of his homeschooling. They even had a special textbook,
How to Represent Yourself at the Bar Without Having a Fool for a Client
, which Judge Charlie K had given Gypsy a few years back. It was autographed by the author, none other than the judge himself.
How to Represent Yourself
had sold over two million copies and made Charlie rich. Now in his seventies and retired from the Vermont State Supreme Court, he presided over the local docket with a grandfatherly benignity, though he could still be tough on occasion—mainly with overreaching prosecutors and the local constabulary. Charlie made no bones about being a defendant's judge. If a good old Kingdom boy or girl was guilty, the state had better be prepared to prove it.

Ethan looked away from the snow outside the window to Exhibit One, leaning against the front panel of the judge's bench. Exhibit One was a full-size stuffed whitetail buck with a handsome set of twelve-point antlers. Its hindquarters caved in, it was propped against the bench in a semi-sitting position.

E.A. and Gypsy sat at the defense table in the front of the courtroom, to the right of the judge's bench. On the left, at the prosecution's table, sat Warden Kinneson. The warden was also sheriff's deputy, village night constable, zoning administrator, dogcatcher, truant officer, and Judge Charlie Kinneson's third cousin. Today he was wearing his green wool game warden's jacket with its official insignia, even though the courtroom was very warm. Gypsy wore her Loretta Lynn coal-miner's-daughter flour-sack dress. E.A. wore jeans, sneakers, and a Red Sox sweatshirt and cap. Judge Charlie wore a red L.L.Bean hunting shirt, neatly pressed slacks, and loafers. Warden Kinneson was bringing this case himself, as was customary with nonfelonies in Kingdom County. The court stenographer, a humorless woman named Yvette DeBainville, was poised to record the proceedings.

“Your Honor,” the warden began. “I'm going to start here by requesting that this boy at the defense table with the female defendant remove his cap in the presence of the officers of the court.”

“Leave it on,” Gypsy whispered to E.A.

“What officers of the court are you referring to, warden?” Judge Charlie K inquired.

“Why, I and you, Judge.”

“Warden,” Charlie said, “this is an alleged violation of a fish and game law, not a murder trial. Furthermore, this is a country courtroom in northern Vermont, not Saint Peter's Basilica. Finally, you are a part-time sheriff's deputy and game warden, not an officer of this or any other court. State your case so I can get back to my ball game.”

Warden Kinneson sighed. He stood up, shuffled some documents, and turned to Gypsy. “Miss Allen. Walking across the common this afternoon, I noted that the left front fender of your vehicle was dented in. Did you hit a deer?”

“You bet I did,” Gypsy said.

“When you hit that deer, Miss Allen. Did you go off the road?”

“Did I ever,” Gypsy said. “Off the road and across the meadow almost all the way to the river before I nailed that sucker.” She gestured at the twelve-pointer with the collapsed rear end.

“So you admit that in direct violation of”—the warden pulled out his book of fish and game regulations—“Statute Two-oh-one b—‘It is unlawful to take, shoot, net, snare, spear, jacklight or otherwise disturb protected species, except during the stated legal hunting season and hours, with an approved and registered weapon'—you ran down and injured this deer with your automobile.”

“I admit no such thing. I hit a stuffed deer, on my own property, that you use to decoy and entrap law-abiding citizens. I knew the deer was stuffed and I did it to teach you a lesson. How can somebody possibly injure a dead deer?”