Shoeless Joe Read online

  “I think I’ll go upstairs and read for a while,” Annie says. “Why don’t you invite Shoeless Jack in for coffee?” I feel the greatest tenderness toward her then, something akin to the rush of love I felt the first time I held my daughter in my arms. Annie senses that magic is about to happen. She knows she is not part of it. My impulse is to pull her to me as she walks by, the denim of her thighs making a tiny music. But I don’t. She will be waiting for me.

  As I step out onto the verandah, I can hear the steady drone of the crowd, like bees humming on a white afternoon, and the voices of the vendors, like crows cawing.

  A ground mist, like wisps of gauze, snakes in slow circular motions just above the grass.

  “The grass is soft as a child’s breath,” I say to the moonlight. On the porch wall I find the switch, and the single battery of floodlights I have erected behind the left-field fence sputters to life. “I’ve tended it like I would my own baby. It has been powdered and lotioned and loved. It is ready.”

  Moonlight butters the whole Iowa night. Clover and corn smells are thick as syrup. I experience a tingling like the tiniest of electric wires touching the back of my neck, sending warm sensations through me. Then, as the lights flare, a scar against the blue-black sky, I see Shoeless Joe Jackson standing out in left field. His feet spread wide, body bent forward from the waist, hands on hips, he waits. I hear the sharp crack of the bat, and Shoeless Joe drifts effortlessly a few steps to his left, raises his right hand to signal for the ball, camps under it for a second or two, catches it, at the same time transferring it to his throwing hand, and fires it to the infield.

  I make my way to left field, walking in the darkness far outside the third-base line, behind where the third-base stands would be. I climb up on the wobbly bleacher behind the fence. I can look right down on Shoeless Joe. He fields a single on one hop and pegs the ball to third.

  “How does it play?” I holler down.

  “The ball bounces true,” he replies.

  “I know.” I am smiling with pride, and my heart thumps mightily against my ribs. “I’ve hit a thousand line drives and as many grounders. It’s true as a felt-top table.”

  “It is,” says Shoeless Joe. “It is true.”

  I lean back and watch the game. From where I sit the scene is as complete as in any of the major-league baseball parks I have ever visited: the two teams, the stands, the fans, the lights, the vendors, the scoreboard. The only difference is that I sit alone in the left-field bleacher and the only player who seems to have substance is Shoeless Joe Jackson. When Joe’s team is at bat, the left fielder below me is transparent, as if he were made of vapor. He performs mechanically but seems not to have facial features. We do not converse.

  A great amphitheater of grandstand looms dark against the sky, the park is surrounded by decks of floodlights making it brighter than day, the crowd buzzes, the vendors hawk their wares, and I cannot keep the promise I made myself not to ask Shoeless Joe Jackson about his suspension and what it means to him.

  While the pitcher warms up for the third inning we talk.

  “It must have been … It must have been like …” But I can’t find the words.

  “Like having a part of me amputated, slick and smooth and painless.” Joe looks up at me and his dark eyes seem about to burst with the pain of it. “A friend of mine used to tell about the war, how him and a buddy was running across a field when a piece of shrapnel took his friend’s head off, and how the friend ran, headless, for several strides before he fell. I’m told that old men wake in the night and scratch itchy legs that have been dust for fifty years. That was me. Years and years later, I’d wake in the night with the smell of the ballpark in my nose and the cool of the grass on my feet. The thrill of the grass …”

  How I wish my father could be here with me. If he’d lasted just a few months longer, he could have watched our grainy black-and-white TV as Bill Mazeroski homered in the bottom of the ninth to beat the Yankees 10–9. We would have joined hands and danced around the kitchen like madmen. “The Yankees lose so seldom you have to celebrate every single time,” he used to say. We were always going to go to a major-league baseball game, he and I. But the time was never right, the money always needed for something else. One of the last days of his life, late in the night while I sat with him because the pain wouldn’t let him sleep, the radio picked up a static-y station broadcasting a White Sox game. We hunched over the radio and cheered them on, but they lost. Dad told the story of the Black Sox Scandal for the last time. Told of seeing two of those World Series games, told of the way Shoeless Joe Jackson hit, told the dimensions of Comiskey Park, and how, during the series, the mobsters in striped suits sat in the box seats with their colorful women, watching the game and perhaps making plans to go out later and kill a rival.

  “You must go,” Dad said. “I’ve been in all sixteen major-league parks. I want you to do it too. The summers belong to somebody else now, have for a long time.” I nodded agreement.

  “Hell, you know what I mean,” he said, shaking his head.

  I did indeed.

  “I loved the game,” Shoeless Joe went on. “I’d have played for food money. I’d have played free and worked for food. It was the game, the parks, the smells, the sounds. Have you ever held a bat or a baseball to your face? The varnish, the leather. And it was the crowd, the excitement of them rising as one when the ball was hit deep. The sound was like a chorus. Then there was the chug-a-lug of the tin lizzies in the parking lots, and the hotels with their brass spittoons in the lobbies and brass beds in the rooms. It makes me tingle all over like a kid on his way to his first double-header, just to talk about it.”

  The year after Annie and I were married, the year we first rented this farm, I dug Annie’s garden for her; dug it by hand, stepping a spade into the soft black soil, ruining my salesman’s hands. After I finished, it rained, an Iowa spring rain as soft as spray from a warm hose. The clods of earth I had dug seemed to melt until the garden leveled out, looking like a patch of black ocean. It was near noon on a gentle Sunday when I walked out to that garden. The soil was soft and my shoes disappeared as I plodded until I was near the center. There I knelt, the soil cool on my knees. I looked up at the low gray sky; the rain had stopped and the only sound was the surrounding trees dripping fragrantly. Suddenly I thrust my hands wrist-deep into the snuffy-black earth. The air was pure. All around me the clean smell of earth and water. Keeping my hands buried I stirred the earth with my fingers and knew I loved Iowa as much as a man could love a piece of earth.

  When I came back to the house Annie stopped me at the door, made me wait on the verandah and then hosed me down as if I were a door with too many handprints on it, while I tried to explain my epiphany. It is very difficult to describe an experience of religious significance while you are being sprayed with a garden hose by a laughing, loving woman.

  “What happened to the sun?” Shoeless Joe says to me, waving his hand toward the banks of floodlights that surround the park.

  “Only stadium in the big leagues that doesn’t have them is Wrigley Field,” I say. “The owners found that more people could attend night games. They even play the World Series at night now.”

  Joe purses his lips, considering.

  “It’s harder to see the ball, especially at the plate.”

  “When there are breaks, they usually go against the ballplayers, right? But I notice you’re three-for-three so far,” I add, looking down at his uniform, the only identifying marks a large S with an O in the top crook, an X in the bottom, and an American flag with forty-eight stars on his left sleeve near the elbow.

  Joe grins. “I’d play for the Devil’s own team just for the touch of a baseball. Hell, I’d play in the dark if I had to.”

  I want to ask about that day in December 1951. If he’d lived another few years things might have been different. There was a move afoot to have his record cleared, but it died with him. I wanted to ask, but my instinct told me not to. There ar
e things it is better not to know.

  It is one of those nights when the sky is close enough to touch, so close that looking up is like seeing my own eyes reflected in a rain barrel. I sit in the bleacher just outside the left-field fence. I clutch in my hand a hot dog with mustard, onions, and green relish. The voice of the crowd roars in my ears. Chords of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” float across the field. A Coke bottle is propped against my thigh, squat, greenish, the ice-cream-haired elf grinning conspiratorially from the cap.

  Below me in left field, Shoeless Joe Jackson glides over the plush velvet grass, silent as a jungle cat. He prowls and paces, crouches ready to spring as, nearly 300 feet away, the ball is pitched. At the sound of the bat he wafts in whatever direction is required, as if he were on ball bearings.

  Then the intrusive sound of a slamming screen door reaches me, and I blink and start. I recognize it as the sound of the door to my house, and, looking into the distance, I can see a shape that I know is my daughter, toddling down the back steps. Perhaps the lights or the crowd have awakened her and she has somehow eluded Annie. I judge the distance to the steps. I am just to the inside of the foul pole, which is exactly 330 feet from home plate. I tense. Karin will surely be drawn to the lights and the emerald dazzle of the infield. If she touches anything, I fear it will all disappear, perhaps forever. Then, as if she senses my discomfort, she stumbles away from the lights, walking in the ragged fringe of darkness well outside the third-base line. She trails a blanket behind her, one tiny fist rubbing a sleepy eye. She is barefoot and wears a white flannelette nightgown covered in an explosion of daisies.

  She climbs up the bleacher, alternating a knee and a foot on each step, and crawls into my lap silently, like a kitten. I hold her close and wrap the blanket around her feet. The play goes on; her innocence has not disturbed the balance. “What is it?” she says shyly, her eyes indicating she means all that she sees.

  “Just watch the left fielder,” I say. “He’ll tell you all you ever need to know about a baseball game. Watch his feet as the pitcher accepts the sign and gets ready to pitch. A good left fielder knows what pitch is coming, and he can tell from the angle of the bat where the ball is going to be hit, and, if he’s good, how hard.”

  I look down at Karin. She cocks one green eye at me, wrinkling her nose, then snuggles into my chest, the index finger of her right hand tracing tiny circles around her nose.

  The crack of the bat is sharp as the yelp of a kicked cur. Shoeless Joe whirls, takes five loping strides directly toward us, turns again, reaches up, and the ball smacks into his glove. The final batter dawdles in the on-deck circle.

  “Can I come back again?” Joe asks.

  “I built this left field for you. It’s yours anytime you want to use it. They play one hundred sixty-two games a season now.”

  “There are others,” he says. “If you were to finish the infield, why, old Chick Gandil could play first base, and we’d have the Swede at shortstop and Buck Weaver at third.” I can feel his excitement rising. “We could stick McMullin in at second, and Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams would like to pitch again. Do you think you could finish center field? It would mean a lot to Happy Felsch.”

  “Consider it done,” I say, hardly thinking of the time, the money, the backbreaking labor it would entail. “Consider it done,” I say again, then stop suddenly as an idea creeps into my brain like a runner inching off first base.

  “I know a catcher,” I say. “He never made the majors, but in his prime he was good. Really good. Played Class B ball in Florida and California …”

  “We could give him a try,” says Shoeless Joe. “You give us a place to play and we’ll look at your catcher.”

  I swear the stars have moved in close enough to eavesdrop as I sit in this single rickety bleacher that I built with my unskilled hands, looking down at Shoeless Joe Jackson. A breath of clover travels on the summer wind. Behind me, just yards away, brook water plashes softly in the darkness, a frog shrills, fireflies dazzle the night like red pepper. A petal falls.

  “God what an outfield,” he says. “What a left field.” He looks up at me and I look down at him. “This must be heaven,” he says.

  “No. It’s Iowa,” I reply automatically. But then I feel the night rubbing softly against my face like cherry blossoms; look at the sleeping girl-child in my arms, her small hand curled around one of my fingers; think of the fierce warmth of the woman waiting for me in the house; inhale the fresh-cut grass smell that seems locked in the air like permanent incense; and listen to the drone of the crowd, as below me Shoeless Joe Jackson tenses, watching the angle of the distant bat for a clue as to where the ball will be hit.

  “I think you’re right, Joe,” I say, but softly enough not to disturb his concentration.

  II

  They Tore Down

  the Polo Grounds

  in 1964

  We have been trading promises like baseball cards, Shoeless Joe and I. First I had to keep my rashly given vow to finish the baseball field. As I did, Shoeless Joe, or whoever or whatever breathed this magic down onto my Iowa farm, provided me with another live baseball player each time I finished constructing a section of the field: another of the Unlucky Eight who were banished for life from organized baseball in 1920 for supposedly betraying the game they loved.

  I completed the home-plate area first. In fact I was out there the very next morning digging and leveling, for besides being the easiest part to do, it was the most important to me. Home plate cost $14.95 at my friendly sporting-goods store in Iowa City. It surprised me that I could buy a mass-produced home plate, although I don’t know why it should have, considering that one can custom-order a baby nowadays. But somehow I had pictured myself measuring and cutting a section from a piny-smelling plank, the sawdust clinging like gold to my jeans. I installed it carefully, securely, like a grave marker, then laid out a batter’s box and baselines.

  But nothing happened.

  I continued to work on the rest of the field, but less enthusiastically. Bases cost $28.95 for a set of three, starched and glazed white as the smock of a fat baker. It was weeks before the stadium appeared again in the cornfield. Each evening I peered surreptitiously through the kitchen curtains, like a spinster keeping tab on her neighbors, waiting and hoping. All the while Annie kept reassuring me, and I would call her a Pollyanna and tell her how I hated optimists. But I find it all but impossible to be cross with Annie, and we would end up embracing at the kitchen window where I could smell the sunshine in her snow-and-lemon-drop curtains. Then Karin would drag a chair close to us, stand on it, and interrupt our love with hers, a little jealous of our attention to each other. Annie and I would stare in awe at the wonder we had created, our daughter.

  Karin is five going on sixty; the dreamer in me combined with the practicality and good humor of Annie. We would both kiss her soft cheeks and she would dissolve in laughter as my mustache tickled her.

  “Daddy, the baseball man’s outside,” Karin said to me.

  It was still daylight, the days longer now, the cornfield and baseball diamond soaked warm with summer. I stared through the curtains where Shoeless Joe softly patrolled the left field I had birthed.

  I swept Karin into my arms and we hurried to the bleacher behind the left-field fence. I studied the situation carefully but nothing appeared to have changed from the last time. Shoeless Joe was the only player with any substance.

  “What about the catcher?” I call down.

  Joe smiles. “I said we’d look at him, remember?”

  “I’ve finished home plate. What else do you need?”

  “I said we,” reminds Joe. “After the others are here, we’ll give him a tryout. He’ll have a fair chance to catch on.”

  “All the others?” I say.

  “All the others,” echoes Joe. “Get the bases down and sand and level that ground around first base. It’ll deaden the hot grounders and make them easy for old Chick to
field.”

  But I have more questions than a first grader on a field trip: “Why have you been away so long?”; “When will you come back again?”; and a dozen more, but Joe only shifts the cud of tobacco in his cheek and concentrates on the gray-uniformed batter 300 feet away.

  I did sand the first-base area, sometimes cursing as the recalcitrant wheelbarrow twisted out of my hands as if it had a life of its own, spilling its contents on the rutted path leading to the baseball field. My back ached as if someone were holding a welding torch against my spine, turning the flame on and off at will. But I sanded. And raked. I combed the ground as I would curry a horse, until there wasn’t a pebble or lump left to deflect the ball. And as I finished I ignored my throbbing back, triumphant as if I’d just hurled a shutout. I’d stand on my diamond, where just beyond the fence the summer corn listens like a field of swaying disciples, and I’d talk to the sky.

  “I’m ready whenever you are,” I say. “Chick Gandil, you’ve never played on so fine a field. I’ve beveled the ground along the baseline so that any bunt without divine guidance will roll foul. The earth around the base is aerated and soft as piecrust. Ground balls will die on the second bounce, as if they’ve been hit into an anthill. You’ll feel like you’re wearing a glove ten feet square.” I wave my arms at the perfect blue Iowa sky, and then, as I realize what I’m doing, I turn sheepishly to look at the house. Annie has been watching, and she flutters her fingers at me around the edge of the curtains.

  The process is all so slow, as dreams are slow, as dreams suspend time like a balloon hung in midair. I want it all to happen now. I want that catcher to appear. I want whatever miracle I am party to, to prosper and grow: I want the dimensions of time that have been loosened from their foundations to entwine like a basketful of bright embroidery threads. But it seems that even for dreams, I have to work and wait. It hardly seems fair.