Shoeless Joe

W. P. Kinsella

Contents

Chapter 1: Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa

Chapter 2: They Tore Down the Polo Grounds in 1964

Chapter 3: The Life and Times of Moonlight Graham

Chapter 4: The Oldest Living Chicago Cub

Chapter 5: The Rapture of J. D. Salinger

I
Shoeless Joe Jackson
Comes to Iowa

My father said he saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commercial league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name.

“He’d put on fifty pounds and the spring was gone from his step in the outfield, but he could still hit. Oh, how that man could hit. No one has ever been able to hit like Shoeless Joe.”

Three years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was a robin’s-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick, I was sitting on the verandah of my farm home in eastern Iowa when a voice very clearly said to me, “If you build it, he will come.”

The voice was that of a ballpark announcer. As he spoke, I instantly envisioned the finished product I knew I was being asked to conceive. I could see the dark, squarish speakers, like ancient sailors’ hats, attached to aluminum-painted light standards that glowed down into a baseball field, my present position being directly behind home plate.

In reality, all anyone else could see out there in front of me was a tattered lawn of mostly dandelions and quack grass that petered out at the edge of a cornfield perhaps fifty yards from the house.

Anyone else was my wife Annie, my daughter Karin, a corn-colored collie named Carmeletia Pope, and a cinnamon and white guinea pig named Junior who ate spaghetti and sang each time the fridge door opened. Karin and the dog were not quite two years old.

“If you build it, he will come,” the announcer repeated in scratchy Middle American, as if his voice had been recorded on an old 78-r.p.m. record.

A three-hour lecture or a 500-page guide book could not have given me clearer directions: Dimensions of ballparks jumped over and around me like fleas, cost figures for light standards and floodlights whirled around my head like the moths that dusted against the porch light above me.

That was all the instruction I ever received: two announcements and a vision of a baseball field. I sat on the verandah until the satiny dark was complete. A few curdly clouds striped the moon, and it became so silent I could hear my eyes blink.

Our house is one of those massive old farm homes, square as a biscuit box with a sagging verandah on three sides. The floor of the verandah slopes so that marbles, baseballs, tennis balls, and ball bearings all accumulate in a corner like a herd of cattle clustered with their backs to a storm. On the north verandah is a wooden porch swing where Annie and I sit on humid August nights, sip lemonade from teary glasses, and dream.

When I finally went to bed, and after Annie inched into my arms in that way she has, like a cat that you suddenly find sound asleep in your lap, I told her about the voice and I told her that I knew what it wanted me to do.

“Oh love,” she said, “if it makes you happy you should do it,” and she found my lips with hers. I shivered involuntarily as her tongue touched mine.

Annie: She has never once called me crazy. Just before I started the first landscape work, as I stood looking out at the lawn and the cornfield, wondering how it could look so different in daylight, considering the notion of accepting it all as a dream and abandoning it, Annie appeared at my side and her arm circled my waist. She leaned against me and looked up, cocking her head like one of the red squirrels that scamper along the power lines from the highway to the house. “Do it, love,” she said as I looked down at her, that slip of a girl with hair the color of cayenne pepper and at least a million freckles on her face and arms, that girl who lives in blue jeans and T-shirts and at twenty-four could still pass for sixteen.

I thought back to when I first knew her. I came to Iowa to study. She was the child of my landlady. I heard her one afternoon outside my window as she told her girl friends, “When I grow up I’m going to marry…” and she named me. The others were going to be nurses, teachers, pilots, or movie stars, but Annie chose me as her occupation. Eight years later we were married. I chose willingly, lovingly, to stay in Iowa. Eventually I rented this farm, then bought it, operating it one inch from bankruptcy. I don’t seem meant to farm, but I want to be close to this precious land, for Annie and me to be able to say, “This is ours.”

Now I stand ready to cut into the cornfield, to chisel away a piece of our livelihood to use as dream currency, and Annie says, “Oh, love, if it makes you happy you should do it.” I carry her words in the back of my mind, stored the way a maiden aunt might wrap a brooch, a remembrance of a long-lost love. I understand how hard that was for her to say and how it got harder as the project advanced. How she must have told her family not to ask me about the baseball field I was building, because they stared at me dumb-eyed, a row of silent, thickset peasants with red faces. Not an imagination among them except to forecast the wrath of God that will fall on the heads of pagans such as I.

“If you build it, he will come.”

He, of course, was Shoeless Joe Jackson.

In April 1945, Ty Cobb picked Shoeless Joe as the best left fielder of all time. A famous sportswriter once called Joe’s glove “the place where triples go to die.” He never learned to read or write. He created legends with a bat and a glove.

Was it really a voice I heard? Or was it perhaps something inside me making a statement that I did not hear with my ears but with my heart? Why should I want to follow this command? But as I ask, I already know the answer. I count the loves in my life: Annie, Karin, Iowa, Baseball. The great god Baseball.

My birthstone is a diamond. When asked, I say my astrological sign is hit and run, which draws a lot of blank stares here in Iowa where 50,000 people go to see the University of Iowa Hawkeyes football team while 500 regulars, including me, watch the baseball team perform.

My father, I’ve been told, talked baseball statistics to my mother’s belly while waiting for me to be born.

My father: born, Glen Ullin, North Dakota, April 14, 1896. Another diamond birthstone. Never saw a professional baseball game until 1919 when he came back from World War I where he had been gassed at Passchendaele. He settled in Chicago, inhabited a room above a bar across from Comiskey Park, and quickly learned to live and die with the White Sox. Died a little when, as prohibitive favorites, they lost the 1919 World Series to Cincinnati, died a lot the next summer when eight members of the team were accused of throwing that World Series.

Before I knew what baseball was, I knew of Connie Mack, John McGraw, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, and, of course, Shoeless Joe Jackson. My father loved underdogs, cheered for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the hapless St. Louis Browns, loathed the Yankees—an inherited trait, I believe—and insisted that Shoeless Joe was innocent, a victim of big business and crooked gamblers.

That first night, immediately after the voice and the vision, I did nothing except sip my lemonade a little faster and rattle the ice cubes in my glass. The vision of the baseball park lingered—swimming, swaying, seeming to be made of red steam, though perhaps it was only the sunset. And there was a vision within the vision: one of Shoeless Joe Jackson playing left field. Shoeless Joe Jackson who last played major league baseball in 1920 and was suspended for life, along with seven of his compatriots, by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, for his part in throwing the 1919 World Series.

Instead of nursery rhymes, I was raised on the story of the Black Sox Scandal, and instead of Tom Thumb or Rumpelstiltskin, I grew up hearing of the eight disgraced ballplayers: Weaver, Cicotte, Risberg, Felsch, Gandil, Williams, McMullin, and, always, Shoeless Joe Jackson.

“He hit .375 against the Reds in the 1919 World Series and played errorless ball,” my father would say, scratching his head in wonder. “Twelve hits in an eight-game series. And they suspended him,” Father would cry. Shoeless Joe became a symbol of the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless. The name Kenesaw Mountain Landis became synonymous with the Devil.

Building a baseball field is more work than you might imagine. I laid out a whole field, but it was there in spirit only. It was really only left field that concerned me. Home plate was made from pieces of cracked two-by-four embedded in the earth. The pitcher’s rubber rocked like a cradle when I stood on it. The bases were stray blocks of wood, unanchored. There was no backstop or grandstand, only one shaky bleacher beyond the left-field wall. There was a left-field wall, but only about fifty feet of it, twelve feet high, stained dark green and braced from the rear. And the left-field grass. My intuition told me that it was the grass that was important. It took me three seasons to hone that grass to its proper texture, to its proper color. I made trips to Minneapolis and one or two other cities where the stadiums still have natural-grass infields and outfields. I would arrive hours before a game and watch the groundskeepers groom the field like a prize animal, then stay after the game when in the cool of the night the same groundsmen appeared with hoses, hoes, and rakes, and patched the grasses like medics attending to wounded soldiers.

I pretended to be building a Little League ballfield and asked their secrets and sometimes was told. I took interest in the total operation; they wouldn’t understand if I told them I was building only a left field.

Three seasons I’ve spent seeding, watering, fussing, praying, coddling that field like a sick child. Now it glows parrot-green, cool as mint, soft as moss, lying there like a cashmere blanket. I’ve begun watching it in the evenings, sitting on the rickety bleacher just beyond the fence. A bleacher I constructed for an audience of one.

My father played some baseball, Class B teams in Florida and California. I found his statistics in a dusty minor-league record book. In Florida he played for a team called the Angels and, according to his records, was a better-than-average catcher. He claimed to have visited all forty-eight states and every major-league ballpark before, at forty, he married and settled down in Montana, a two-day drive from the nearest major-league team. I tried to play, but ground balls bounced off my chest and fly balls dropped between my hands. I might have been a fair designated hitter, but the rule was too late in coming.

There is the story of the urchin who, tugging at Shoeless Joe Jackson’s sleeve as he emerged from a Chicago courthouse, said, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

Jackson’s reply reportedly was, “I’m afraid it is, kid.”

When he comes, I won’t put him on the spot by asking. The less said the better. It is likely that he did accept money from gamblers. But throw the Series? Never! Shoeless Joe Jackson led both teams in hitting in that 1919 Series. It was the circumstances. The circumstances. The players were paid peasant salaries while the owners became rich. The infamous Ten Day Clause, which voided contracts, could end any player’s career without compensation, pension, or even a ticket home.

The second spring, on a toothachy May evening, a covering of black clouds lumbered off westward like ghosts of buffalo, and the sky became the cold color of a silver coin. The forecast was for frost.

The left-field grass was like green angora, soft as a baby’s cheek. In my mind I could see it dull and crisp, bleached by frost, and my chest tightened.

But I used a trick a groundskeeper in Minneapolis had taught me, saying he learned it from grape farmers in California. I carried out a hose, and, making the spray so fine it was scarcely more than fog, I sprayed the soft, shaggy spring grass all that chilled night. My hands ached and my face became wet and cold, but, as I watched, the spray froze on the grass, enclosing each blade in a gossamer-crystal coating of ice. A covering that served like a coat of armor to dispel the real frost that was set like a weasel upon killing in the night. I seemed to stand taller than ever before as the sun rose, turning the ice to eye-dazzling droplets, each a prism, making the field an orgy of rainbows.

Annie and Karin were at breakfast when I came in, the bacon and coffee smells and their laughter pulling me like a magnet.

“Did it work, love?” Annie asked, and I knew she knew by the look on my face that it had. And Karin, clapping her hands and complaining of how cold my face was when she kissed me, loved every second of it.

“And how did he get a name like Shoeless Joe?” I would ask my father, knowing the story full well but wanting to hear it again. And no matter how many times I heard it, I would still picture a lithe ballplayer, his great bare feet white as baseballs sinking into the outfield grass as he sprinted for a line drive. Then, after the catch, his toes gripping the grass like claws, he would brace and throw to the infield.

“It wasn’t the least bit romantic,” my dad would say. “When he was still in the minor leagues he bought a new pair of spikes and they hurt his feet. About the sixth inning he took them off and played the outfield in just his socks. The other players kidded him, called him Shoeless Joe, and the name stuck for all time.”

It was hard for me to imagine that a sore-footed young outfielder taking off his shoes one afternoon not long after the turn of the century could generate a legend.

I came to Iowa to study, one of the thousands of faceless students who pass through large universities, but I fell in love with the state. Fell in love with the land, the people, the sky, the cornfields, and Annie. Couldn’t find work in my field, took what I could get. For years, I bathed each morning, frosted my cheeks with Aqua Velva, donned a three-piece suit and snap-brim hat, and, feeling like Superman emerging from a telephone booth, set forth to save the world from a lack of life insurance. I loathed the job so much that I did it quickly, urgently, almost violently. It was Annie who got me to rent the farm. It was Annie who got me to buy it. I operate it the way a child fits together his first puzzle—awkwardly, slowly, but, when a piece slips into the proper slot, with pride and relief and joy.

I built the field and waited, and waited, and waited.

“It will happen, honey,” Annie would say when I stood shaking my head at my folly. People looked at me. I must have had a nickname in town. But I could feel the magic building like a gathering storm. It felt as if small animals were scurrying through my veins. I knew it was going to happen soon.

One night I watch Annie looking out the window. She is soft as a butterfly, Annie is, with an evil grin and a tongue that travels at the speed of light. Her jeans are painted to her body, and her pointy little nipples poke at the front of a black T-shirt that has the single word RAH! emblazoned in waspish yellow capitals. Her red hair is short and curly. She has the green eyes of a cat.

Annie understands, though it is me she understands and not always what is happening. She attends ballgames with me and squeezes my arm when there’s a hit, but her heart isn’t in it and she would just as soon be at home. She loses interest if the score isn’t close, or the weather’s not warm, or the pace isn’t fast enough. To me it is baseball, and that is all that matters. It is the game that’s important—the tension, the strategy, the ballet of the fielders, the angle of the bat.

“There’s someone on your lawn,” Annie says to me, staring out into the orange-tinted dusk. “I can’t see him clearly, but I can tell someone is there.” She was quite right, at least about it being my lawn, although it is not in the strictest sense of the word a lawn; it is a left field.

I have been more restless than usual this night. I have sensed the magic drawing closer, hovering somewhere out in the night like a zeppelin, silky and silent, floating like the moon until the time is right.

Annie peeks through the drapes. “There is a man out there; I can see his silhouette. He’s wearing a baseball uniform, an old-fashioned one.”

“It’s Shoeless Joe Jackson,” I say. My heart sounds like someone flicking a balloon with his index finger.

“Oh,” she says. Annie stays very calm in emergencies. She Band-Aids bleeding fingers and toes, and patches the plumbing with gum and good wishes. Staying calm makes her able to live with me. The French have the right words for Annie—she has a good heart.

“Is he the Jackson on TV? The one you yell ‘Drop it, Jackson’ at?”

Annie’s sense of baseball history is not highly developed.

“No, that’s Reggie. This is Shoeless Joe Jackson. He hasn’t played major-league baseball since 1920.”

“Well, Ray, aren’t you going to go out and chase him off your lawn, or something?”

Yes. What am I going to do? I wish someone else understood. Perhaps my daughter will. She has an evil grin and bewitching eyes and loves to climb into my lap and watch television baseball with me. There is a magic about her.

“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 are 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.

***

It was a Sunday afternoon the next time my wonderful mirage appeared. Annie’s relatives were visiting. Her mother, face pink as wild roses, dentures a perfect white, silver-rimmed glasses flashing glints of disapproval at everything in sight, sat ramrod straight in an antique rocking chair. When there were lulls in the conversation she read her Bible, sneering a little in her perfection.

Annie’s brother and his wife were also present. Mark is a professor at the University of Iowa in nearby Iowa City. His area of expertise is the corn weevil. He and a business partner own apartment blocks and several thousand acres of farmland. He has designs on my farm. He also has brothers named Matthew, Luke, and John.

“Daddy, the baseball game is on,” says Karin as she runs breathless into the living room.

“Now?” I say.

Karin smiles broadly, reaching her arms out to be picked up. She scissors her legs around me at belt level and, hugging my neck, whispers into my ear.

“Hot dogs.”

“Excuse us for a few minutes,” I say and head for the kitchen and out to the verandah. My relatives assume that we are going to watch television. They know that I am a baseball freak and despair that I have corrupted their daughter and am in the process of converting their granddaughter. They wish I had a more serious vice: that I would perhaps drink excessively and abuse Annie, or be arrested for some unspeakable act. They never mention my eccentricities to me, but they think I am crazy, and take turns pulling Annie aside and offering her all sorts of incentives to leave me. They all hope Mark will be successful in buying the farm. Then I will be forced to go back to selling life insurance, and perhaps Annie will come to her senses and leave me. When she does, they will all be waiting with a gaggle of Christian suitors ready to court her and bring her back into the fold, poor lamb.

My heart jumps as we hurry toward our bleacher in left field, for as we skirt the shadows on the third-base side I see Chick Candil stomping around first base, like a bull pawing the ground. His intense face with its hollow cheeks and bullet eyes glares in at a batter, daring him to hit the ball past him.

“You see,” Joe hollers up as Karin and I take our seats, “the others are waiting…”

“I’ll have the infield ready in a month,” I promise, my back twitching in anticipatory pain, “except you’ll all have to be careful of the infield grass for a while, keep your spikes off it except to make a play. The outfield will take a little longer.”

“Happy Felsch can wait a little longer,” says Joe. “One thing we got is plenty of time.”

He is able to wait. They are able to wait. It sounds as though I am conjugating a Latin verb in some obscure case. I can’t wait. My blood blazes around my circulatory system like Cale Yarborough on an asphalt straight-away.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” my own mother would say if she knew of my plight, which she doesn’t. She lives with her sister, my maiden aunt, in a high-rise in Great Falls, Montana, with a cat and a Bible. She occasionally watches a World Series game on TV, often forgetting which team she is cheering for, unless the Yankees are involved. Even though my father has been gone for over twenty years, she recalls how he loathed them, and as she sips her tea says things like “Oh, you Yankees, I hope you break a leg,” and then looks to me for approval.

Reluctantly I continue to wait, and as I finish each area of the field a new player springs to life. The cornstalks are now toast brown in the orangeade sunshine of October; the ballpark smells of burning leaves and frost. The ever-listening corn rustles like crumpling paper in the Indian-summer breeze.

***

They’ve all come now—Chick Gandil and Shoeless Joe Jackson; the pitchers, Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams; the rest of the infield: Fred McMullin the utility player at second, Swede Risberg at shortstop, Buck Weaver at third. Happy Felsch stalks center field. Only the right fielder and the catcher are ghost-gray in the afternoon sun.

The magic grows and grows. As I walk with Karin and Annie toward the bleacher, the crowd hums lazily and the chatter of the infielders swoops across my baseball park like gull calls.

I keep asking about the catcher.

“Be patient,” Shoeless Joe says.

“Keep your shirt on,” Chick Gandil advises, “we’ve kept our promises so far, haven’t we?”

And I have to admit they have.

My catcher will come too, someday—I’m sure of it.

I’ve taken to keeping stats on the games. After each one I sit at the kitchen table late into the night translating my inky scorecard into batting and fielding averages, roaming through the pages of the Baseball Encyclopedia. I write wild and sometimes incoherent letters to the White Sox Baseball Club and to the historian at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, asking for stats on the 1921 and 1922 seasons. But when the results come back nothing quite fits. The whole situation is mysterious and ethereal, reminding me of animals in a thicket that you can’t quite be sure you’ve seen. The averages for opposing teams are subtly different from existing records, a few points lower or higher, an error or two more or less. It is as if in another, fairer climate the Black Sox Scandal never happened, and the Unlucky Eight play on, several of them earning baseball immortality. I stare in awe at the acres of figures in front of me; to translate this situation to reality would be like trying to stuff a cloud in a suitcase.

In the meantime, Karin and I are out every time there’s a game, munching hot dogs, sharing Cokes, cheering Shoeless Joe and the phantom White Sox. I’m teaching her the finer points of the game and she is learning fast. At the last game, in the late innings, as a desperate situation developed in the field, Karin lay cuddled in my lap, apparently sleeping. Suddenly she sat up and said, “Daddy, why wasn’t the hit-and-run on?” And she was right, it should have been. I was astounded.

Even Annie is excited about the game now. She is more comfortable here in our ballpark than she is in the big-city ones. If she’s bored or too hot or too cold she can go back to the house. But as the summer has turned to fall and we have been gifted more and more often with this kaleidoscope of wonder, Annie has stayed longer and longer; occasionally she even leans toward the dark green fence to question or converse with Shoeless Joe.

This afternoon I kiss Karin’s nose, which is covered in freckles the color of toasted coconut. “You have the most beautiful nose in the world,” I tell her. She giggles.

“Kiss my beautiful nose,” says Annie, leaning toward me. “Who do you think she got her freckles from?”

And I do kiss her nose and hold her close to me; her breath is scented faintly with orange drink, her hair is warm against my cheek and smells of sunshine.

And it was at about this time that the ballpark announcer spoke another brief parable for my ears alone. I stiffened and strained toward the sound like a hunting dog. Annie rattled her bag of peanuts, and I reached down automatically to stifle the small noise.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“You didn’t hear?” I replied.

“Hear what?” said Annie.

I looked at Karin. She nibbled her hot dog, squinting her eyes slightly against the bright sun. She was daydreaming, humming to herself, tapping one sneaker-clad foot to some imaginary music.

“I just heard something,” I said.

“Oh Lord,” said Annie. “You’re not going to build a football field or a racetrack?”

“No, I’m not,” I say.

But it was two weeks before I was able to tell her what I was going to do. Two weeks of pacing the house, prowling the ballpark like a caged beast, sniffing the air, crunching leaves beneath my feet, the specter of winter hovering like a pale-winged bird. I knew that the season was over, that promises remained unkept.