Читать книгу Always October - C. E. Edmonson - Страница 5

I’ve been thinking on this, trying to understand why people remember some things as if they were happening right this minute, while so much else is lost in the haze of a long life.

I have an impression of me and my sister Annie and how we got along. That’s only natural, as Annie was often charged with my care and we spent a lot of time together. I can still conjure up a few images of Annie skipping rope with her girlfriends, of a fight she had with Roger Olson, who tugged at her braids, of Annie hunched over her dinner with Momma urging her to sit up straight. But these are like faded snapshots. My recollection of the Beckmeyers working their scythes is as vivid as daylight. I don’t know why, and I’d rather not know. I’d rather move on to the next incident, which just might qualify as one of my happiest moment in those early years, the good years.

As a young boy, I was crazy for baseball. Back then, it wasn’t like today. Nowadays people are so concerned with their e-mail and their text messages and whatnot. Well, I think the first thing you need to do is put all that technology stuff out of your head. And I’m not just talkin’ about the Internet and cell phones that can do more tricks than Lassie. Forget television, forget even radio. The farms in Bear County didn’t have electricity back then. Electrification would come later, during the New Deal, when President Franklin Roosevelt wired the backcountry. We did have electricity in town, and my father owned a radio that got stations from as far away as Minneapolis.

Still, and I can’t make this point hard enough, our entertainment—our whole lives, in fact—was local. Take the Thorsen sisters, Marianne and Theda, who played fiddle and guitar, and Alex Bonde, who played the piano. They weren’t great musicians by any means, but they didn’t know it. Nor did the folks who listened when they played at barn dances and weddings and on the Fourth of July. These events were as plain as could be. They didn’t take place in fancy nightclubs or catering halls, and the folks attending didn’t wear tuxedos. The outdoors was good enough when the weather was decent. And barns? Even cleared of animals and swept clean they were about as far from elegant as can be imagined.

Nobody cared. We were moved when the Thorsen sisters played, moved to dance the night away as if we were listening to a fine orchestra in New York City or Chicago.

* * *

Bear County is a neat, little rectangle with only a little piece cut away in the southeastern corner. It’s divided into twenty-eight townships, from Troy in the southwest to Hope in the northeast. The townships are all the same size, roughly six by five miles, and they’re all cut square at the corners so they lay against each other like bricks in a wall. Practical is what you might call the arrangement.

We had to be practical in Bear County. In fact, it was forced on us. See, not only were we divided by townships, with every township having its own musicians and athletic teams, we were also divided by country and religion. Germans, Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, and a few Yankee families lived in Bear County when I was a boy. Germans were the most numerous, but even they were divided into Catholics and Protestants. Back in 1917, the last good year, most people still spoke their home language to their countrymen, even though they’d been living in the United States of America for generations. And they attended churches where the pastors spoke the languages they wanted to hear. English was a second language they learned in school.

The point is we thought locally as a matter of instinct. And baseball was no exception to the rule. Every town had its own team, and the teams played each other whenever the farmers could spare their sons. Plus there was a county team of all-star players that played teams from other counties.

In Louristan, the games took place on Saturday afternoon at the school baseball field. The players wore patched uniforms—when they had uniforms to wear—and the bean ball was part of every pitcher’s arsenal. Spats were common among the spectators gathered at the edge of the playing field, as well as between the players. And heroes? We had plenty. In our hearts we knew Louristan’s best pitcher, Ernie Sullivan, couldn’t hold a candle to Hippo Vaughn, the Chicago Cubs’ best pitcher. So what? We cheered for our team so hard they might have thought they were playing in the World Series.

I can’t say I was ever that much of a baseball player, but I surely loved the game. I’d put on a raggedy glove inherited from my dad and swung a bat whenever I had the chance, usually hitting nothin’ but air. As I said, town kids weren’t overly burdened with chores like farm kids, so I had plenty of chances. We played in a lot behind the feed store because the ball field at school was reserved for the big kids. Our pitcher’s mound was a line in the dirt and we marked the bases with feed sacks. There were no foul lines, so we fought all the time about fair and foul balls.

And we never had enough players to make two full teams, either, so you could only hit to left field, which made it hard on left-handed batters. True, some of the older boys occasionally knocked the cover off the ball. But that’s only because the cover was halfway off before the game started.

* * *

It was late in spring—Momma’s tomatoes were past flowering—when Dad made one of his dinner announcements. Usually these announcements had to do with some aspect of our behavior he found wanting. Eggs, for example, left uncollected, or the pea patch choked with weeds. Fidgeting in church was a big problem, too. As families in Bear County went, the Taylors weren’t exactly the most religious, though we attended church on Sundays along with almost every other sober resident. Going to church was respectful; a failure to sit still when Reverend Masterson launched into one of his rambling, fire-and-brimstone sermons was disrespectful. Case closed.

But Dad’s announcement on that night had nothing to do with our failings for once. I remember him looking from Annie to me, then at Momma, whose grin matched his exactly.

“We’re going to Chicago, Illinois,” he said.

Ever the skeptic, Annie asked, “Who is going to Chicago, Illinois?”

“All of us, young lady. We’re going to spend two days in Chicago. I’m going to attend a farm convention on the first day while you and your momma and your dear brother see the sights. On the second day, you and your momma are going to go shopping while I take Lucas to watch the Chicago Cubs play the St. Louis Cardinals.”

“When?” I could barely breathe.

“Ten days from today.” He paused, his timing perfect, before delivering the punch line. “And if you’d like Lucas, Eddie Enstrom can come with us.”

* * *

You talk about time slowing down? Every one of those ten days was an eternity. I wasn’t quite young enough to ask what day it was, but the question repeated itself with every beat of my heart. Mine and Eddie’s, too. See, Eddie Enstrom was my best friend, a farm boy, though still too young to be weighed down with many chores. Besides, spring planting time had come and gone, and haying season wouldn’t begin until July. We were in a kind of slack season given to repairs on the barns and the fences and farm machinery.

Not that me and Eddie turned our attention to the why of it. No, what we did, every chance we had, was play baseball. Eddie was bigger than me, a freckle-faced kid with a shock of straw-colored hair that stood straight up in the front. He was stronger, too, but I was faster. In those days, even Major League baseballs were much softer than they are now, and they didn’t get thrown out after every other pitch. It was almost impossible to hit them very far. I remember that much later on, I looked up the statistics for the 1917 team. The Cub’s slugger, Larry Doyle, hit six home runs, while the whole team only hit seventeen.

Bottom line, me and Eddie were about equal as seven-year-old country baseball players, and we tried to play on the same team when sides were chosen.

We were definitely on the same team the day we walked to the train station to begin our adventure.