Читать книгу The Iowa Baseball Confederacy - W. Kinsella P. - Страница 6

My name is Gideon Clarke, and, like my father before me, I have on more than one occasion been physically ejected from the corporate offices of the Chicago Cubs Baseball Club, which are located at Wrigley Field, 1060 West Addison, in Chicago.

My father’s unfortunate dealings with the Chicago Cubs began with his making polite requests for information concerning the 1908 baseball season: player records, box scores, nothing out of the ordinary. At first, the Cubs’ public relations people were most cooperative. I have their letters. However, the information they provided was not what my father wanted to hear. His letters became more pointed, critical, accusatory, downright insulting to the point of incoherence. The final letter from the Chicago Cubs Baseball Club – their stationery has a small picture of Wrigley Field at the top – is dated October 7, 1945, and states clearly: ‘We consider the matter closed and would appreciate it if you did not contact us again.’

After that letter my father began to make personal visits to the Cubs’ corporate offices.

My father’s quest began in 1943. I was born in 1945 and grew up in a home where the atmosphere was one of vague unease. I sensed my father was a troubled man. The general anxiety and discomfort that permeated the air also affected my mother and my sister, Enola Gay.

My father’s problem was this: he was in possession of information concerning the Chicago Cubs, our home town of Onamata, Iowa, and a baseball league known as the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, information that he knew to be true and accurate but that no one else in the world would acknowledge. He knew history books were untrue, that baseball records were falsified, that people of otherwise unblemished character told him bold-faced lies when he inquired about their knowledge of, and involvement with, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

As a child, though I sympathized with my father, I never fully understood the significance of his obsession. As the Indians say, one cannot walk in another man’s moccasins. I was never able to conceive what he suffered, until, upon his death, when I was sixteen, I received his legacy, which was not money, or property, or jewels (though I was not financially bereft), but what I can only liken to a brain transplant. For upon my father’s passing, I inherited not only all the information he alone had been a party to, but also his obsession to prove to the world that what he knew was right and true.

His example taught me well, for no matter how futile his efforts seemed, he would not be moved from his goals, just as I shall not be moved from mine. I will pursue the elusive dream of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy until it is admitted that the Chicago Cubs traveled to Iowa in the summer of 1908 and engaged in a baseball game against the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars.

As there are stages in grieving, in aging, in acceptance of illness, so there seem to be stages in the development of the inherited obsession of which I speak. I began my investigation by making the same polite written inquiries to the Chicago Cubs and other sources who should have known of the Confederacy, and ended with the same personal confrontations and shouted accusations, which resulted in my being firmly escorted from the Cubs’ offices.

Two years ago, I learned, by eavesdropping on a conversation in the box next to mine at Wrigley Field, that the Cubs were in the process of hiring a junior public relations person. I applied for the job; in fact, I submitted a twelve-page letter of application, outlining some of the facts I knew about the Chicago Cubs, past and present. The personnel department didn’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge my application. However, by phoning the Cubs’ offices on various pretexts, I was able to learn that the person hired was to begin work the following Wednesday. I also learned that the executives held business meetings on Monday mornings.

I showed up on Monday, dressed in a rented three-piece suit, looking as eager, expectant, thrilled, and breathless as I anticipated the new employee would feel.

‘Hi! I’m supposed to start work this morning,’ I said, smiling brightly. For the occasion I had had my hair cut and dyed a neutral brown. My hair is usually shoulder length, white as vanilla ice cream, which makes it difficult for me to appear inconspicuous. I am not an albino, for though my skin lacks pigmentation, my eyes have color: a pale, translucent blue.

My job – or, rather, the job of the new public relations person – was to write copy for the Chicago Cubs yearbook. A young woman whom I remembered having a confrontation with a few years before kept checking the dates on her calendar and staring at me, trying, I’m sure, to place me. She assigned me back issues of the yearbook to read, promising to give me more substantial employment after lunch when the public relations director returned.

As I glanced at the yearbooks, I eyed the rows of foot-locker-green filing cabinets, my mouth watering for the opportunity to leap into history. Shortly before lunch I made my way to the supply room and secreted myself behind several thousand Chicago Cubs yearbooks. I lay on the floor and covered myself with the glossy little magazines, their slick surfaces smelling like new-car interiors. I slept for a while, dreaming I was in the hold of a fishing vessel, covered with slippery tropical fish.

When the fluorescent hands on my wrist watch showed 6:00 P.M., I ventured out. The offices were deserted, silent, smelling of paper and coffee grounds.

I spent the entire night skimming through the filing cabinets, reading everything I could find concerning the years 1902–1908, which were the years the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was in existence.

It was sad to find out that, to the Cubs, baseball was not the least magical; it was strictly business. The files contained little but contracts, tax forms, medical expense forms. There were no elaborate personnel files, no newspaper clippings, no fan testimonials.

Here was the Cubs’ greatest pitcher, Mordecai Peter Centennial ‘Three Finger’ or ‘Miner’ Brown, in a manila folder labeled M. BROWN and smudged with fingerprints. Not even a first name. No mention of his 239 victories or of his induction into the Hall of Fame. No mention of his injury, the cropped finger that allowed him to put a special spin on the ball. Just a file with the barest of records.

I did find some of my own correspondence in a file labeled CRANK LETTERS, filed away alongside a letter claiming the Chicago Cubs would win the last pennant before Armageddon and another containing what purported to be conclusive evidence that Ernie Banks and Billy Williams were extraterrestrials. Seeing them side by side, I had to admit that those letters made as much sense as mine.

There were penciled notes on one of my more inflammatory letters: Dangerous? F.B.I.? Relative of E. G. Clarke? My sister, Enola Gay, is a fugitive from justice.

I emerged at 6:00 A.M., disheveled, dry-mouthed, redeyed, and without one shred of evidence that the 1908 Chicago Cubs ever visited Big Inning, Iowa, or, for that matter, that there ever was a Big Inning, Iowa.

‘It is a fact that there are cracks in time,’ my father repeated endlessly. ‘Weaknesses – fissures, if you like – in the gauzy dreamland that separates the past from the present.’ Hearing those words like a musical refrain all through my childhood, I came to believe them, or, rather, accept them; it was never a matter as simple as belief. To me they weren’t remarkable; after all, some children were taught to accept the enormities, the absurdities, the implausibilities of scripture as fact.

‘Time is out of kilter here in Johnson County; that’s my conclusion,’ my father said to me often. ‘But if something is out of kilter, there’s no reason it can’t be fixed. And when it’s fixed I’ll be proven right.’

Briefly stated, here is what my father believed: through those cracks in time, little snippets of the past, like small, historical mice, gnaw holes in the lath and plaster and wallpaper of what used to be, then scamper madly across the present, causing eyes to shift and ears to perk to their tiny footfalls. To most people they are only a gray blur and a miniature tattoo of sound quickly gone and forgotten. There are, however, some of us who see and hear more than they were ever meant to. My father was one of those, as am I.

My father, Matthew Clarke, dreamed his wife. He lay in his bedroom in the square frame house with green shutters in the Iowa town called Onamata, which, long ago, before the flood, when everything but the church was washed away in the direction of Missouri, was called Big Inning. Wide awake, eyes pressed shut, Matthew Clarke dreamed his ideal woman, conjuring her up from the scarlet blackness beneath his lids, until she rose before him like a genie, wavery, pulsating.

‘There’s always been a strangeness hovering over all this land,’ he used to tell me. ‘Even before I dreamed Maudie, before I learned of the Confederacy, I knew there were layers and layers of history on this land, like a chair with ten coats of enamel. And I sensed some of those layers were peeling off, floating in the air, waiting to be breathed in, soaked up like sunshine. I tell you, Gideon’ – and he would scratch the tip of his long, sun-bronzed nose and run a hand through his black curls, which were as unruly as twitch grass – ‘there are all kinds of mysteries dancing around us like sunbeams, just beyond our finger tips.’ When I’d look at him as if I didn’t quite believe him, he’d go on, ‘They’re there, like birds in a thicket that you can hear but can’t see.’

And I would listen to him and marvel at his energy and dedication, and I’d believe him or at least accept what he told me, but with a total lack of awe. If my father insisted that he alone was in step, the rest of the world a ragtag of shabby marchers, who was I to disagree? Nothing, including the resurrection of the dead, would have surprised me.

My first experience of the floating magic he talked of was when the hollyhocks sang to me. I suppose I was eight the first time I heard those hollyhocks, tall, sturdy flowers the color of sun-faded raspberries. They grew high and physical outside my father’s bedroom window, their stocks like broom handles, saucer-sized heads bowed silently, gathered together like a freshly scrubbed barbershop quartet. ‘Ooooooh, ooooooh, ooooooh,’ they sang at first, softly as a choir.

As I listened I knew they were performing for me alone, that if a playmate appeared he would hear nothing. I remember thinking, Why shouldn’t the hollyhocks sing? And I pictured a nebulous rock wall, desert-rust in color, cracking open like an egg, the tall flowers ducking their heads as they emerged, eerie as aliens. As I sat cross-legged on the lawn in front of them, their song grew louder, the tempo increased: ‘DA da DA da DA DA, DA da DA da da, DA da DA da da, DA da DA DA DA.’ It would be years before I discovered the source of their music.

One thing I don’t understand is that I did not tell my father of the experience. How he would have loved to have had me as an ally. In that credulous way children have of accepting what life offers them, it didn’t occur to me then how lonely my father’s quest must have been. By the time I realized, my mother had long since left us and taken my sister and my cat with her to Chicago. Father was devoting his whole life to proving the existence of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy and having precious little success.

I didn’t understand his obsession well enough to be the kind of son I should have been. Now, years after his death, after he has been dead for more years of my life than he was alive, after I have come to have an obsession of my own, I understand all too well what he went through, and I sympathize, too late though it may be.

But back to my father’s dream. I won’t tell what I know about the Iowa Baseball Confederacy just yet. It is more important to explain about my father and my mother, the woman he dreamed to life.

‘She was so real sometimes, I could smell her and taste her and do everything but touch her,’ he used to say to me. ‘When you get older you’ll understand what it was like, Gid.’ I wonder if all parents tell their children things the children don’t understand but will when they get older. I wanted to understand then.

Matthew Clarke knew he wasn’t likely to find his dream among the residents of Onamata, or even in nearby Iowa City. It was the summer of 1943, the war was raging, and Matthew Clarke was just graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in American history.

‘I had a choice to make and make quickly,’ he used to say to me. Some of my earliest memories are of hearing this story. We – when we were still a family – used to sit on the wide verandah on humid summer evenings, Mother and Father on slatted wooden chairs, hers enameled white, his vermilion, while my sister and I sat on the floor, our legs in front of us in V shapes, rolling a ball back and forth.

‘It was either the army or graduate school,’ my father would continue. ‘In fact, I had the graduate school application, all filled out, in the back pocket of my pants the night I dreamed your mother to life.’ He’d laugh a low, soft chuckle, and look across at my mother, who would be sitting forward in the white chair, dusky as an Indian, her eyes unfathomable and molasses-black.

I have often imagined Matthew Clarke as he lay on top of the old black-and-red patchwork quilt, which still graces the bed and still looks as if it might at one time have served a Gypsy as a cape, the graduate school application folded and stuffed in his rear pocket, crinkling to remind him of its presence each time he moved slightly.

‘That evening, I was just like a bear gettin’ a whiff of honey, Gideon. I stood up, my arms out in front of me like a sleepwalker, and I headed for the truck, drove off to Iowa City, went to the carnival, and the rest is history.’

That was the short version of the story. The tale became longer and longer, I think in direct proportion to the time my mother was absent from us. As the years passed, my father recalled more and more about that fateful summer night. And as I grew older he supplied more details, and told more and more about what he felt on that magical evening.

After telling the short version, my father would look over at my mother and down at us children and smile. He would wipe imaginary sweat from his high forehead, raise his hands palm up in a gesture of wonder. I would stare at my dark-haired father, at my dusky mother and sister, who would blend into the summery shadows of the porch until I sometimes wondered if they were there at all, and silently question why or how I came to have lank blond hair and eyebrows the color of corn silk.

Matthew Clarke had lived all his life near Iowa City, where sun-blond girls with browning skin and endearing overbites flocked around the campus of the University of Iowa. A few even lived in some of the two dozen houses that made up his home town of Onamata. In the summer of 1943, those sweet, sincere, interchangeable young women wore saddle shoes and pleated skirts. The skirts were made of red, yellow, or green plaid, often with a six-inch safety pin worn just above the knee to keep them modest. Many of these young women were beautiful; most were scrupulously laundered, smelling clean as fresh ironing. They were cheerful, dutiful, God-fearing, and ravenous for husbands. Matthew Clarke wanted none of them.

He knew what he wanted. He had even gone to Chicago in search of her.

‘I ever tell you about the fat woman in Chicago?’ I remember him saying to me. We were on our way to St. Louis to see a Cardinal double-header. It was a Sunday and we’d left Onamata at five A.M. to be sure to get there in time to buy good seats.

‘Fifty times,’ I was tempted to say, but didn’t. I was about fourteen and thought anyone as old as my father must be partially fossilized and fully retarded. But I was cautious. He didn’t wait for an answer from me.

‘Seemed like every street I walked on in downtown Chicago there were women every forty feet or so, posed like statues, in suggestive stances. And there were loud women in the bars I went to, women with quarrelsome voices and stringy hands. But they weren’t the kind I was lookin’ for. Stay away from those kinds of women, Gid. They’re nothin’ but trouble.’

‘Your experience with women hasn’t exactly been trouble free,’ I thought of saying, but again, didn’t.

‘Then I met this woman, Gid. And I think she was the start of this whole thing with the Confederacy.’

‘She’d slipped through one of the cracks in time,’ I said, staring out the window, resisting the temptation to say something about its being a wide crack.

‘I was just off State Street, I think. A dark street with sidewalks covered in grit and glass fragments. There were boarded-up buildings, and bars with blue neon beer bottles bleeding down their windows. She ambled out of a doorway, wide as she was tall, so ash-blond I swear she gave off light, an aura. She was as blond as you. She had bangs to the middle of her forehead. The rest of her hair was straight and chopped, as if a bowl had been set on top of her head. She might have been twenty-five or she might have been fifty. Her face was wide and mottled, her nose flat as a baby’s. She was wearing a tentlike dress that stopped above her pale knees; the dress was a swirl of color, like scarves blowing in the wind.

‘Her eyes were a pale, pale blue, and she was barefoot. She walked splay-legged right into my path, her stubby feet with their gray, sluglike toes grinding sand. She’d come out of a run-down building where dirty velvet curtains were strung across a storefront. A few stars and triangles were painted on the glass in front of the curtains. The words FORTUNE TELLING had been hand-lettered on the windowpane by an amateur.

‘That woman looked a little bit like Missy, you know, except she was a lot fatter than Missy, and she wasn’t a … a mongoloid, although before she spoke I thought she might be. As I stood staring at her, the only thing I could think of was a white Gypsy, an albino Gypsy.

‘‘‘Excuse me,” I said, and tried to step around her. But she didn’t move; in fact, she leaned into my path until I had to stop.

‘‘‘No, no,” she crooned, like she was talking to a child. And she put her pudgy hand on my arm. Her fingers were white as fresh fish, the nails chewed down to the quick.

‘‘‘I came to meet you,” she said in that same purring voice. “I could feel you getting nearer.” Her bottom lip was turned down like that of a child about to cry. Her teeth were short, crooked, and stained.

‘‘‘Go home to Iowa,” she said. “You’re not supposed to be here. Go home.” I glanced down at her huge knees; they were dimpled and scarred.

‘‘‘What are you talking about?” I said. But she was gone. I swear it, Gid. Gone, vanished. There I was, standing on that sleazy sidewalk, lookin’ like a fool, talking to a parking meter, a big, prehistoric, beast-headed thing, all pitted and ugly and metal-smelling.

‘I got out of there, let me tell you. But I never forgot that woman or her voice. And she was right. Because I no sooner got back to Onamata than I dreamed your mother. And then went out and found her.’

Ah, yes, my mother. I think it better if I tell the story of how Matthew Clarke met his wife. I was raised on that story. My father told it to me for the final time on the way to Milwaukee the day he was killed. It is the first story I remember hearing from my father, and the last.

The events that disrupted my father’s life, and in turn mine, happened in the summer of 1943. Part of the story involves my father being hit by lightning.

On that sultry Iowa evening, storm clouds swept in from the west like a fleet of tall ships. Silver zippers of lightning decorated the evening sky, and a lightning bolt struck my father as he and Maudie, the strange girl he had just met, sought shelter from the storm. He wasn’t killed; he wasn’t even injured seriously; he wasn’t fried by the heat of the bolt, disfigured, or melted down like a record left in the back window of a car. He was, however, forever changed. For as a piece of stationery is squeezed between the jaws of an official seal or as liquid metal is struck into a shiny new coin, my father’s life was altered.

As well as gifting him with a wealth of information about a baseball league known as the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, the lightning tampered with my father’s blood, rearranged his chromosomes gently as a baby’s breath turns a mobile, rattled his bone marrow, disrupted his immune system. That is how he passed the Iowa Baseball Confederacy along to me. When I was born, two years after the lightning struck him, my little flower of a brain was crammed with the same statistics, the same league standings, the same batting averages, the same information that plagued my father. Yet my knowledge was veiled, covered by one of those layers of history my father was so anxious to expound on, hidden from my view like a dove cuddled beneath a magician’s handkerchief. Eventually the Confederacy came to me full-blown, one fateful day at County Stadium in Milwaukee, the day my father died. But that comes later.

After Matthew Clarke was struck by lightning, the nut of information that was the Iowa Baseball Confederacy began to grow like a summer pumpkin. The Confederacy crowded in on his life until it became like a fat man in an elevator with two huge suitcases.

To say that my father was regarded as an eccentric in those years after he became obsessed with the Confederacy would be mild understatement. Luckily, eccentrics were tolerated, even encouraged, in small Iowa towns. ‘Like father, like son,’ the people of Onamata say about me. ‘That Gideon Clarke is a right odd fellow,’ they say, ‘but he comes by it honestly.’ I think they whisper about me more than they did about my father because I don’t work steadily, a cardinal sin in America’s industrious heartland. Thanks to my mother and sister, I have more money than I will ever need.

But to the story. As I’ve explained, my father was carrying his graduate school application in his back pocket the dreamy August evening he felt compelled to travel to Iowa City and take in the Gollmar Bros. Carnival and American Way Shows. As he approached through the parking lot he could see that the carnival was a small, sorry operation: rusty, square-fendered trucks were mired in a confusion of mud and cables. Behind the trucks was a string of blunt-nosed buses with bulging tires, some with frayed curtains at their windows. Portable generators, which powered the frail carousel and the paint-freckled Ferris wheel, roared deafeningly.

As Matthew set out for Iowa City that day he’d had the feeling that there were presences all about him, that there was hidden life in the poplar leaves that fluttered alluringly in the yard; he’d turned back toward the house once, as if beckoned by the group of slim hollyhocks that stood under the bedroom window at the side of the building. For a few seconds Matthew had thought he could hear them humming to a mysterious military music. The hollyhocks were surrounded by cosmos, themselves tall. The pale pink, wine, and mauve cosmos, peering from the frilly green lace that was their leaves, looked like delicate children appealing to a parent. Matthew stood absolutely still for several moments, staring at the tableau, waiting expectantly. There was something about the flowers; he had the feeling they wanted to speak to him.

During the drive to Iowa City, Matthew had thought he’d seen an Indian walking in the ditch, loping along with enormous strides, an Indian wearing only a breech-cloth. But as he came abreast of the spot he’d seen that it was just a trick played by the sun as it slanted through the emerald cornstalks.

Matthew slouched down the midway, his hands deep in his pockets, his dark eyes, though downcast, taking in everything. He stared and stared at the rides and the booths. He spent no money. The trampled and muddy grasses of the fairgrounds were frosted with cedar shavings, and their perfume filled the air. Matthew craned his neck, brushed stubborn curls from his forehead, stopped and scrutinized a brightly lit booth where a pyramid of milk bottles repelled puffy baseballs, until he was certain the booth held nothing of significance.

As he continued along the midway he eyed the banner advertising the obligatory girlie show, DARLIN’ MAUDIE was painted in garish red letters across a canvas banner; at each end of the banner was the same drawing of a girl with rosebud lips, sporting a 1920s hairdo. The drawing ended at the girl’s navel. She was clad in a silky red blouse, vaguely Chinese in nature. The fingers of each hand gripped the scream-red material as if she were about to tear the blouse wide open, EXOTIC! DARING! REVEALING! NAUGHTY! was printed in smaller capitals under the main headline.

Matthew noticed that the barker for the Darlin’ Maudie show was not attracting many patrons, partly because his voice could not be heard above the thundering generators, and partly because it was wartime and the sparse crowd was made up mainly of women and children. What few men were present were middle-aged or older and had women and children in tow.

After watching the barker for a moment, Matthew cut between the girlie-show tent and a barrel-like wooden structure where motorcycle daredevils rode only inches away from multiple fractures. As he rounded the corner of the tent he could hear arguing voices. He continued to the back of the tent, and there he saw Darlin’ Maudie standing at the top of some makeshift stairs, just opposite the door to a tiny, aluminum-colored trailer that appeared to be held together by rust. The first thing he noticed was her mouth. It was wide and sensuous, nothing like a rosebud. She was dressed in celery-colored satin pantaloons, the kind worn by harem girls in the movies. She had on the same blouse as the girl on the banner, only all the buttons were tightly closed, each snap surrounded by what dressmakers called a frog.

Darlin’ Maudie was pointing accusingly and cursing as if a cow had just stepped on her. The man at whom she was cursing had a red, moon-shaped face. His wiry hair was brushcut; he wore construction boots, jeans, and a soiled white T-shirt, which humped out over a sizable beer belly.

‘No matter what you say, you can’t make me do it,’ Darlin’ Maudie was shrieking. ‘You … ’ She reeled off every curse Matthew had ever heard, plus a few totally new to him.

‘If you don’t do it today, you’ll do it tomorrow,’ drawled the crew-cut. While Maudie whirred curses at his back like poisonous darts from a blowgun, the man ambled away, his boots making sucking sounds in the mud.

Darlin’ Maudie eventually turned back toward the trailer, and as she did she saw Matthew standing there wide-eyed as an orphan in front of a magician, one hand gingerly touching the rusting metal.

‘What do you want?’ she said, making her dark eyes large in an imitation of Matthew’s surprised stare as she produced a pack of cigarettes from somewhere on her body. Matthew stood rooted to the spot, gaping up at her as she lit a Philip Morris and inhaled deeply. Matthew knew he must look like a farm boy staring at his first skyscraper. But the odors that floated slowly in the sultry air had enchanted him – the tangy shavings, the burning-oil smell of the generators, Maudie’s perfume, the acrid odor of her cigarette.

‘Can I do anything to help you?’ Matthew finally stuttered. He pictured himself astride a shining steed, his lance turned orange by the setting sun.

‘What are you, a cop?’ said Darlin’ Maudie.

‘You sounded as if you were in some kind of trouble,’ said Matthew.

‘Nothin’ I can’t handle,’ she said, still eyeing him suspiciously. The sun sparked off her blue-black hair. She wore one large ringlet at the front of each ear. After a few seconds she smiled, showing small, even teeth with delicate spaces between. ‘Yeah, you can do something for me,’ she said, still smiling. ‘You can carry me someplace where I can set my feet down on solid land. I can’t get these goddamned shoes dirty.’ She pointed with her cigarette at the high-heeled red pumps, the same color as her blouse.

Matthew, his breath constricted with love, knowing the color was rising up his neck like mercury in a thermometer, stepped forward, his own shoes sinking uncomfortably deep in the mire.

‘I won’t have to carry you far,’ he said. ‘Your trailer’s parked in a low spot.’

‘We’ll see who does what,’ Maudie said defiantly as she stepped carefully down the rickety steps and deposited herself in Matthew’s arms. He carried her across the lot and fifty yards up an embankment to the edge of a cornfield.

‘Thanks,’ said Darlin’ Maudie, looking carefully at her benefactor for the first time. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Matthew.’

‘Your friends call you Matt?’

‘No. They call me Matthew.’

‘I might have figured,’ she said, making her eyes large again. Then she spotted a wide, squat tree about a hundred yards into the cornfield. ‘Let’s go in there,’ she said. ‘It looks so peaceful.’

The corn was armpit high and the field smelled fresh as dawn. Darlin’ Maudie tested the earth with one crimson shoe.

‘I told you it would be dry up here,’ Matthew said, and taking her hand he led her toward the tree.

The tree sat like a party umbrella, trunk sturdy, branches gently arching. Wild grasses grew around the base of the tree, where roots ridged above the soil like exposed veins.

They sat down on the grass, Matthew picking away twigs and pieces of fallen bark so Darlin’ Maudie wouldn’t dirty her exotic costume.

The corn swaddled the noise of the carnival. They could feel the rhythm of the generators, thumping away like distant music.

‘This is so quiet,’ Maudie said, looking tiny and frightened, a ragamuffin of a girl lifted out of her noisy and reverberating environment and deposited amid the silent corn. ‘I ain’t been anywhere quiet for months and months, since we left Florida in the spring.’

Matthew could see her shoulder blades chopping at the material of her blouse. As his gaze flashed across her black eyes, he saw that she had a beauty spot on her cheek, about an inch to the right of her mouth. He couldn’t tell if it was real or painted on, but he felt himself salivating. He was mad to caress the mysterious spot with his tongue. Maudie smiled again and he counted the spaces between her lower teeth. He held out his arms to her, tentatively, afraid she would laugh rudely or ridicule him. She moved close, there under the canopy of leaves, but with her head down so there wouldn’t be any kiss. She rested her head on his chest as he put one hand on her upper arm, which was so thin he felt as if he were holding a paper girl and not a real one.

But he could smell her. Her hair held the dusky, musky odors of soap, perfume, and smoke. If Matthew bent his neck at an odd angle he could just manage to kiss the top of her head. Her hair was a tangle of black velvet; and the sun rays, about the same height as the corn, made every tenth hair or so look as if it were on fire.

While they embraced, the sun vanished as if it had been switched off. Thunder grumbled and a sudden breeze set the leaves trembling and rustled the corn.

Maudie remained absolutely still, light as a kitten against Matthew’s chest.

‘If you’re lucky, in a lifetime you get one moment in which you’d like to live forever,’ my father said each time he recounted the story to me. ‘One moment when you’d like to be frozen in time, in a landscape, a painting, a sculpture, or a vase. That was my moment. If I had it all to do over again, Gideon, I’d do it the same way. Even if I knew then what I know now.’

Back then in the cornfield, Matthew said, ‘We’d better leave, find someplace to get out of the storm.’

‘No,’ the bird-light girl replied emphatically, pushing herself closer to him. ‘I want to stay here. I want to see what the storm is like.’

‘But your clothes … ’ said Matthew.

‘To hell with my clothes. I ain’t goin’ back. He can’t make me do it.’

To his dying day Matthew Clarke never knew what it was that Maudie didn’t want to do. It turned out that Maudie was her name. The one extravagance Gollmar Bros. Carnival and American Way Shows allowed itself each spring before the troupe hit the road was to print a new banner for the girlie show, using the name of the lead performer.

In the cornfield, the fist penny-sized raindrops plopped down.

‘We’ll have to move closer to the tree,’ Matthew said as a drop splattered on the toe of one of Maudie’s scarlet shoes. They moved closer to the trunk.

The wind gusted and the tree above them shuddered. But beneath the leaves it was eerily silent, the air heavy. Matthew thought it was strange to see the wind bending and flattening the corn just yards away, while beneath their canopy they could scarcely feel a breeze.

Lightning buzz-sawed across the sky, leaving ragged silver incisions. The rumble of thunder was followed by a bulletlike whine and a sizzling crash as lightning struck somewhere nearby. As the thunder rolled wildly, Maudie pressed against Matthew. When she turned her face up to him he saw fear in her almond-pointed eyes.

‘I didn’t know it would be like this,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not from around here.’

Matthew kissed her then, awkwardly, his lips touching her nose before covering her mouth. The rain hurtled down around them; a few drops leaked through the leaves, dripping onto the frilly grass at their feet. Maudie wrapped her arms tightly around Matthew and returned his kiss. Her tongue felt small and hot against his own.

I’m so happy I could die, Matthew thought. At that moment there was a violent, ripping, crunching sound, as if kindling was being broken right next to their ears. The tree screamed. Afterward, Maudie claimed it was her, or possibly Matthew. But Matthew knew it had been the tree, a long, shrill sound like a rabbit’s death cry.

The tree was struck behind and above them. The lightning ripped off a huge limb. Matthew found himself on the grass, staring up at a fresh white scar where the limb had been. The fallen branch lay beside him, some leaves brushing one arm.

He was nauseated; his left arm and leg felt full of pins and crawling ants. When he tried to blink he realized his left eyelid was paralyzed. In another second or so he discovered that the only part of him he could move was his right eye, and it was full of Maudie.

Darlin’ Maudie stood in the drenching rain at the edge of the corn, her arms raised above her head, her legs braced as if she were supporting a monstrous weight on her upturned hands. From where he lay, it looked to Matthew as if she held lightning in each hand, bolts the color of molten silver, crackling like cellophane, long as the sky. They stretched from her hands clear to the clouds, which were wild and black and rolling like locomotives.

Matthew felt heavy drops of rain hit his face. The drops sizzled as they splattered on his lightning-seared skin. He watched from his one good eye as Maudie’s eyes blazed in some kind of mystical triumph, her fingers dazzled with lightning.

‘I won’t!’ Matthew heard her say. ‘I won’t! I won’t!’

He never knew whether she was drawing the lightning in or warding it off.

The next thing Matthew remembered, Darlin’ Maudie was kneeling beside him on the wet grass, her cheek against his, whimpering like a puppy, alternately kissing him and imploring him to show some sign of life.

As he came around, Matthew realized he could see from both eyes, that he could blink his left eyelid. The pins were retreating from his left arm and leg, leaving an ache in his hip and knee. His fingers and toes on the left side felt like candles that had been lit and then extinguished.

‘I’m all right,’ Matthew said as Maudie planted more kisses down his cheek.

Matthew could feel her hot little breasts against his chest, burning right through her blouse and his shirt. He managed to get his right arm around her shoulders and pull her even closer to him. Her breath was warm against his cheek and holding her was like clutching an armful of flowers. The odors about her were somewhere between sweet clover and heaven. But painted on the inside of Matthew’s eyelids was the frightening image of Maudie, arms raised to the sky, joined to the lightning.

When the rain stopped, Maudie helped Matthew to his feet. He was limp as laundry and had black dots the size of floating tapioca in front of his eyes. As they moved down the rows of corn toward the carnival Matthew said, ‘I can’t carry you this time,’ and tried to muster an apologetic smile.

‘No need to,’ said Maudie.

‘But your shoes … ’

‘To hell with my shoes. I ain’t goin’ back,’ she said, looking down past her mud-splattered costume to where her shoes were all but covered in muck. ‘That is, if I can come with you?’

Matthew took her hand. ‘It’s a long, messy walk to my truck, especially if we avoid crossing the carnival grounds.’

‘I’m with you,’ said Maudie.

An hour later, wet, bedraggled, mud-scoured, Matthew Clarke and Darlin’ Maudie arrived at Matthew’s home in Onamata. As he helped Maudie out of the truck he glanced at the sky, which appeared troubled: dark fleeces of clouds glided across the night, covering and uncovering a tangerine-colored moon. Matthew tucked Maudie into the huge, black-walnut four-poster, which still dominates the downstairs bedroom, and covered her with the Gypsy quilt.

‘How do you feel?’ he kept asking.

‘It was you got struck by lightning, not me,’ Darlin’ Maudie replied.

* * *

I still live in the town of Onamata, two miles south and west of Iowa City, a hundred miles east of Des Moines. I am the only person who knows the origin of the name Onamata; yet explain as I might, no one will pay the slightest attention to me. In Place Names of Iowa, Onamata is described thus: ‘Origin unknown. Possibly a corruption of the Black Hawk Indian word for magic. Town established 1909.’

Onamata now consists of thirty houses, a general store, a café, a Conoco service station, a John Deere subagent, and the Clarke & Son Insurance Agency, of which I was until recently the proprietor. My grandfather was the original Clarke, and my father the son. Then Matthew Clarke was the father and I was the son. Now I am the Clarke and there is no son. The agency fronts on the main street of Onamata, a hundred yards from the banks of the Iowa River, where the water runs placid, the color of green quartz. The false front of the insurance agency building is painted a vibrant peach. The building once housed a bank, and before that an undertaker. Underneath the peach paint can still be seen BANK OF ONAMATA, the dark letters looking as though they want to push themselves to the surface.

Only I know that long ago Onamata was called Big Inning. That was before the flood of 1908, before the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was erased from human memory for thirty-five years. When the Confederacy did resurface, its origins, history, and secrets were known only to my father. His knowledge of the Confederacy destroyed his life, and some say my knowledge of the Confederacy is destroying mine. Personally, I feel somewhat like a prophet, and prophets are meant to be derided and maligned.

I have spent the past seventeen years of my life trying to prove the existence of my inherited obsession. Whatever was done to erase the Confederacy wasn’t enough. Bits and pieces have survived, like rumors, like buried evil unearthed and activated.

My grandparents, Justin and Flora Clarke, retired to Florida in 1942, leaving my father the insurance business and the two-story white frame house with a wrought-iron widow’s walk centered by a tall silver lightning rod. From a distance the top of the house resembles the helmet of a medieval soldier.

Grant Wood, the world-famous Iowa artist, could have known my grandparents. They could have posed for American Gothic. They were dry, meticulous people. My grandfather retired precisely on his sixty-fifth birthday, which was a Wednesday. He had been forty-one and my grandmother thirty-nine when my father was born. There had been an older child named Nancy-Rae, born to them in their late twenties, who, shortly after her fourteenth birthday, when my father was a toddler, stole off in the dark of night, walked out to the highway, where someone they knew saw her hitchhiking toward Chicago, and disappeared from the face of the earth.

‘Our greatest sadness,’ was how my grandmother described the loss of my aunt Nancy-Rae.

I saw my grandparents only once. When I was about eight my father and I drove to spring training in Florida. I saw Curt Simmons, Robin Roberts, Allie Reynolds, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Yogi Berra, and my grandparents.

They lived in a very small house on a side street in Miami. There was an orange tree in the back yard. The house and my grandparents smelled of Listerine, peppermint, and Absorbine, Jr.

They left Iowa irrevocably behind them when they retired. They never returned for a visit, never invited anyone from Onamata to visit them, including us, I suspect, although my father never said so.

What he did say, on the drive back, as if he was trying to explain something to me but was not exactly sure what, was, ‘We are haunted by our past, which clings to us like strange, mystical lint. Of the past, the mystery of family is the most beautiful, the saddest, and the most inescapable of all. Those to whom we are joined by the ethereal ties of blood are often those about whom we know the least.’ I think he was talking about much more than just my grandparents.

I listened to my father’s tales with half an ear. I knew he was obsessed with something no one else cared about. He wrote letters, articles, talked of a book, which he eventually wrote. Complained. I didn’t pay half the attention I should have. Children, thinking themselves immortal, assume everyone else is, too. He died when I was a few months short of seventeen.

The morning after being struck by lightning, Matthew Clarke woke in the cavernous double bed in the front bedroom, one of his long arms draped over the frail shoulders of Darlin’ Maudie. He stirred slightly, his finger tips touching her ribs. At his touch she moved closer to him. He had to restrain himself from counting her ribs with his fingers, one, two, three. Her body felt cool as it curved against his.

He could see her back, the skin the soft brown of tanned leather; her ear, protruding through tangles of coal-colored hair, seemed anxious to be kissed.

Matthew remembered the carnival, the rain, the lightning, the drive home with Maudie, scruffy as a drowned muskrat, at his side. He recalled adding whiskey to the coffee he made in the spacious kitchen at the rear of the house. And later, Maudie wild with passion in the big bed, her nails sharp against his shoulders, their bodies slick under the quilts as their sweat blended.

As I listened to various versions of this story, time and again, told to me as other children were regaled with fairy tales, I was always embarrassed. I realized as I grew older that it was because, as with most children, I wanted to deny my parents’ sexuality. I reluctantly have to admit that even now as I recall my father’s voice I am embarrassed. It is only when I distance the story by using my own words that I am comfortable with the telling.

There is one part of the story that wasn’t embarrassing, only puzzling. On that morning when Matthew awoke with Maudie beside him, he awoke with an awareness of something he knew was going to become the most important element in his life, more important than his business, than his home, than even the strange, fragile girl who, next to him, trembled as she dreamed.

In Matthew Clarke’s brain, which that morning felt bright as chrome, full of white light and blinding metal, the complete history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was burned in, deep as a brand, vivid, resplendent, dazzling in its every detail.

Two weeks later, on a humid August afternoon in 1943, Darlin’ Maudie and Matthew Clarke were married at the stone courthouse in Iowa City.

‘I tell you, Gid, during those two weeks there was a terrible volume of mail from Onamata to Miami. Everybody within a ten-mile radius of Onamata felt it their duty to let the old folks know what I’d done. I’d not only moved a girl into the holy confines of my father’s house, but I’d moved in what was known as a ‘carnival girl.’ A few of the more morally indignant canceled their insurance policies with my agency, but only a few.

‘After the wedding, the same straight-backed, blue-nosed women who had written scurrilous things about me to my parents came pussyfooting around the house bearing casseroles, pies, good wishes, and wedding presents.

‘After I wrote to them about the wedding, my mother added a little postscript to her next letter. “We hope you’ll be very happy,” it said. They never sent a present, never met Maudie.’

The same week he was married Matthew was accepted as a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Iowa. He was accepted reluctantly, by a vote of three to two, strictly on his undergraduate record. At his interview he was bright-eyed and only moderately coherent as he babbled about writing a thesis on some kind of baseball league that had existed near Iowa City in the early 1900s. The majority of the committee blamed his exuberance and incoherence on the fact that he was to be married in a day or two.

‘By October he’ll be back to normal and we’ll convince him to write a thesis on the Civil War,’ said E. H. Hindsmith, the man who cast the deciding vote in Matthew’s favor.

In the months that followed, Matthew Clarke continued to operate his insurance business from the dusty-windowed storefront in Onamata, not soliciting business but gently reminding local people when their fire, auto, farm, or crop insurance was up for renewal. He accepted new business when it came to him.

‘My Joseph’s gettin’ married next month,’ a sturdy farmer might say, standing awkwardly in the office, which smelled of varnish and paper and held a large, rectangular, wax-yellow desk, a wooden filing cabinet, and two severe wooden chairs. ‘He’ll be around to see you about life insurance. That is, if you’ll be in Tuesday evening.’

‘If Matthew Clarke sends you a bill, you know it’s an honest one,’ people said. They also said, ‘Matthew Clarke could have made something of his life if he wasn’t so interested in those baseball teams of his.’ They also whispered, in the gentle, misty heat of Iowa summer, ‘Matthew Clarke had a wife but couldn’t keep her.’

Matthew was hard at work on a proposal to write his thesis on the history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, though occasionally, when he tried to confirm some detail by consulting various books on baseball history and was unable to do so, he had doubts. But he quickly put them aside. He didn’t need any confirmation from outside sources. The history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was carved on stone tablets in his memory. He couldn’t know such things if they were not true.

During that time he also made Darlin’ Maudie pregnant.

Try as he might, Matthew learned little of Maudie’s past.

‘Why do you keep asking?’ was the way she would answer his questions. Or else she would say, ‘Do you love me?’

‘Of course I love you,’ Matthew would reply.

‘Then what else matters?’ And she would stare across the oversized oak table in the dining room, her chin resting in the palm of her left hand, her fingers hooked on her lower lip, a smile, full of love, gently crinkling the skin around her eyes.

It was Matthew’s nature to ask questions. He felt as if Maudie’s past was a rock that needed to be battered into gravel.

It was years later, long after Maudie was gone for the last time, that Matthew realized how lonely she must have been. He had the business, his studies, his obsession with the mysterious baseball league. But he had few friends, and much of his life was lived in solitude. Maudie maintained the old home, which still smelled of his retired parents. But she had no friends. There were simply no friends for her to have. The young people lived on the farms; the houses in Onamata were occupied mainly by retired farmers and businessmen. There were fewer than ten children in Onamata. And the mothers of those children were tight-lipped Baptists with protruding teeth and hair pulled back until their eyes bulged. The women were the same color and texture as the dusty streets of the town. Maudie walked barefoot to the general store, wearing her celery-colored pantaloons. And she smoked in public.

About the only change Maudie made to the house was to open the heavy, lined drapes with which Matthew’s mother had covered the enormous bedroom window that looked out onto a lilac-and-honeysuckle-choked yard. Maudie insisted the curtains remain open day and night. She opened the window, too. She brought a garden hose indoors and sprayed years of dust off the screens. In doing so she let the trapped odors of camphor, floor wax, and moth balls escape.

In the rich mornings they lazed in bed, the room shimmering with sunlight; they made love slowly, Matthew taking a long time to get used to the light, to the trill of birds outside the window, the flash of a cardinal across the pane, a wren or finger-sized hummingbird staring in at them over the saucerlike edge of a hollyhock.

Maudie’s skin, the color of creamed tea, both aroused and fascinated Matthew. He teased her about being Indian, remarked on her high cheekbones, her flattish nose, her sensual lips, hoping for some response that would reveal her past. In the huge bed, fragrant with their lovemaking, Matthew would lick his way slowly across her belly, thrilling to the salty sweetness of her, sure he could feel the life growing inside her, though she was barely pregnant.

‘My name is Maude Huggins Clarke. I’m nineteen, and I used to travel with a carnival. That was all you knew when you asked me to marry you; that’s all you ever need to know,’ Maudie would say in reply to whatever questions or implied question Matthew posed.

‘Hereditary diseases,’ Matthew cried one morning. ‘We have to think about the baby. Did anyone in your family suffer from hereditary diseases? Your mother? Father? Brothers? Sisters?’

‘Is clap hereditary?’ Maudie laughed.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t have any idea who my father was. I don’t think anybody has any idea who my father was.’

‘And your mother?’

‘I didn’t have a mother.’

‘Everybody has a mother.’

‘I was one of those babies janitors find wrapped in newspaper in a garbage can.’

‘In what city?’

‘Jesus, Matthew, don’t you ever quit? My father was an Indian rodeo rider, my mother was a camp follower, a rodeo whore. Oklahoma City. How’s that?’

‘Is it true?’

‘Only if you want it to be.’

Matthew would laugh, wrap his arms around her, and roll her across the big bed. He believed she told him the truth when she said she didn’t know who her father was. One crack in the rock.

My father ignored the suggestions, and later the recommendations, of his advisers at the University of Iowa History Department. He finally decided his thesis would be called A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. His advisers were at first tactful, forgiving, tolerant; later they became businesslike, orderly, methodical, and demanding of proof.

‘It is highly unlikely that we will recognize your efforts unless you can provide us with some documentation as to the existence of the so-called league about which you propose to write,’ is a sentence from one of the many letters my father exchanged with members of the History Department.

My father, at that point totally unperturbed, replied that since a number of prominent Iowans, many associated with the University of Iowa, were among the founders of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, he would have no trouble providing the required documentation. He kept every piece of correspondence connected with his project. I also have his finished thesis, his book, all 288 pages of it, from which I will quote occasionally, though sparingly. When I do quote, it is first to show the mystifying problems my father was up against, and second to demonstrate the seeming genuineness of the information my father quoted as truth.

In fact, right now I am going to transcribe a letter my father wrote and the reply he received, as well as an excerpt from A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

My father, when he woke the first morning after being struck by lightning, with Darlin’ Maudie snuggled against him, knew unquestionably that the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was founded in the early months of 1902. The idea for the league came about during a casual conversation, in a bar in Iowa City, between Clarke Fisher Ansley, one of the founders of what eventually became the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Frank Luther Mott, an eminent Iowan who was a teacher, scholar, and baseball aficionado.

My father’s history of the Confederacy is divided into three sections – Origins, Emergence, and Growth and Consolidation – with each section having many subsections and even the subsections having subsections. The Origins section takes a full seventy pages of text. Very little of it requires repeating here. I can assure you the information is accurate in every detail.

Here is my father’s letter to Mr. Mott, who in 1943 was retired but very much alive.

Dear Mr. Mott:

My name is Matthew Clarke and I am doing graduate work in American history at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. My interest is in the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, of which you were cofounder.

I will not presume to ask the many questions I wish to ask in this introductory letter. However, I would be most grateful if you would consider granting me an interview, at which time I would be pleased to learn whatever you can tell me about the formation, duration, and history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

Yours very truly,

Matthew Clarke

Mr. Mott’s reply follows.

Dear Mr. Clarke:

I have your letter before me and, I must confess, am rather mystified by it. I am totally unfamiliar with the Iowa Baseball Confederacy and certainly had nothing to do with the organization of such a league. I am, however, a baseball fan of long duration, and had any such organization existed in Iowa, I am certain I would have known about it.

I was associated with amateur and professional baseball in a number of capacities during my years in Iowa City. You must certainly have the name of the league wrong. If you could be somewhat more specific I would be happy to answer your inquiries.

Best wishes,

Frank Luther Mott

So you see the problems my father faced. He possessed a brainful of information, bright and beautiful as diamonds swaddled in midnight-blue velvet, yet it was information no one else would validate. The letters I have reproduced are merely the tip of the iceberg. There were tens, dozens, and finally hundreds of letters to anyone and everyone who might have come in contact with anyone who organized, played in, or was even a spectator at a game during the seven seasons that the Confederacy operated.

I feel as if I might have written A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy myself, for my father has catalogued in it the exact information that is burned into my brain. The only difference is that I am one generation further removed from it. The number of people who might remember the Confederacy decreases almost daily. My own task becomes more and more difficult.

I am going to reproduce another letter – the final one my father wrote to Frank Luther Mott. There was an exchange of eleven letters between them, with my father’s letters becoming more detailed, more demanding, more desperate, while Mr. Mott’s letters became shorter, more curt, and finally almost condescending.

Dear Mr. Mott:

After all our correspondence I am still unable to understand why you do not remember the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. I realize it has been a long time since 1902; perhaps if I refresh your memory. It was the evening of January 16, 1902, when you and Mr. Ansley met at Donnelly’s Bar in Iowa City.

‘Some of these young fellows who play in the Sunday Leagues are awfully good,’ you said to Mr. Ansley.

‘We should get them all together and form a semiprofessional league,’ Mr. Ansley replied.

‘I’d be willing to do some of the work if you would,’ you said.

‘It sounds like a good idea,’ said Clarke Ansley. ‘There’s that team from out around Blue Cut, call themselves the Useless Nine; they haven’t lost a game for two seasons. I was up to Chicago in September and some of those boys could play for either the Cubs or the White Sox.’

‘I know a couple of other people who would be interested,’ you said. ‘Why don’t we arrange an organizational meeting for next Wednesday?’

There you are, Mr. Mott – that was the way the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was born. Surely that must jog your memory.

Waiting anxiously to hear from you,

Yours truly,

Matthew Clarke

What follows is Mr. Mott’s final letter to my father.

Dear Mr. Clarke:

Although as you say it has been a number of years since 1902 and I have indeed spent considerably more years than you on this planet, I assure you I am not senile, demented, forgetful, or a liar. I resent the implications of your last correspondence. Once and for all, I know nothing of an organization called the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. I had nothing to do with the conception of such a league. To my knowledge, and my knowledge is considerable, such a league never existed. And on the off chance that it did exist in some remote part of the state, I certainly had nothing whatever to do with it, and neither did my friend Clarke Fisher Ansley.

I will thank you not to write to me again.

Sincerely,

Frank Luther Mott

I quote from A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy:

The Iowa Baseball Confederacy consisted of six teams, representing, with the exception of Iowa City and Big Inning, rural districts rather than actual towns, although Frank Pierce did have a post office in a farmhouse, as did Husk. Blue Cut and Shoo Fly were loose geographic areas defined by the districts from which their baseball teams drew players. Shoo Fly was in the general region now known as Lone Tree, while Blue Cut was in and around the town of Anamosa.

The league standings, as of July 4, 1908 – the time at which, for reasons as yet undetermined, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy ceased to exist forever – were as follows:

Team	Won	Lost	Pct.	G.B.
Big Inning	32	16	.667	-
Blue Cut	27	21	.562	5
Shoo Fly	26	22	.541	6
Husk	22	26	.458	10
Frank Pierce	21	27	.436	11
Iowa City	16	32	.333	16

‘Something happened,’ my father would say, always making the same palms-up gesture of incomprehension. ‘Something happened on July 4, 1908, that brought history crashing down on the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Something happened that erased the league from human memory, changed the history of Iowa, of the U.S.A., maybe even the world. I’d give anything to know what it was. I don’t know if there was something in the air, or if a mysterious hand reached down out of the clouds, and patted tens of thousands of heads, wiping minds and memories until they were clear and shiny and blank as a wall newly covered in white enamel. Or maybe some phantom surgeon went into all those brains with long-handled magic scissors and snipped out all the memories of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.’

My own knowledge also ends as of July 3, 1908. The day before a scheduled game between the Chicago Cubs and the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars.

I have spent years of my life studying the Iowa City Daily Citizen and the Chicago Tribune, searching for some mention of the game or some mention that something unusual happened in the baseball world that summer. I know a great deal about the Chicago Cubs of 1908 and have written to their heirs and survivors – but I have drawn a blank.