Blacklick one, Stump Creek one, top of the second. Hating himself, Henry took his place on the mound, threw a few warmup pitches, and looked around. There was nobody in right field. Leroy, as expected, had disappeared. Thank God, he thought. He signaled little Paul to take Leroy’s place, and faced the batter. The batter was Mike Gresak, not Panatelli; Kovalchick had wisely juggled his batting order. Henry pitched carefully, following Will’s instructions, and got Mike to hit an easy grounder to second. But Clarence Adams bobbled the ball and Mike was safe at first.
The heavy-set, always dangerous Dominic Del Poggio now waited at the plate, batting left, ready for the pitch. Will, keeping one eye on Gresak far off first base, called for an outside pitch. Henry threw it, Gresak ran for second, Will caught the pitch and threw accurately to Chuck, covering the base, for what should have been an easy out. But Clarence, thinking the throw was meant for him, made a frantic leap for the ball and got run over by the base-runner, piling them both in the mud. A discussion followed.
Joe Glemp, peering sternly at his own nose, declared the runner safe on grounds of interference; furthermore, he penalized the home team by awarding Mike Gresak free passage to third base. The decision led to more discussion, prolonged and hectic. But the umpire stood his ground, would not be swayed by reason, common sense, the rule book, or threats of physical violence.
And Dominic still waited at the plate. He hit a high looping fly to right field which Paul Lightcap almost caught. Mike scored. Dominic loped into second, smiling, and Charlie Kromko came to bat. Bearing down, Henry fooled the batter with a curveball that failed to break, with a fastball which Kromko mistook for a change of pace, and with his soaring blooper that the batter interpreted as a wild pitch. At the last moment, cursing, Charlie stepped forward, took a swing at it, and fell on his face. Dominic stole third as Sonny Adams sat down laughing.
Concentrating on his work, Henry threw two strikes past Jerk-Off Panatelli, low and inside, then jammed him with the inside curveball—it broke a little this time—which Panatelli swung at and hit with the handle of his bat, an easy roller straight toward Red Ginter at first base. Red waited for it, one foot on the bag, but the runner got there before the ball. Dominic scored.
The ninth batter in the lineup, Willie Hritsyk, hit a soft fly ball to Elman Fetterman in left field. Elman almost caught it. Two more runs scored. The stricken cow lurched to its feet and staggered off toward deep center field.
Henry confronted the laughing Tony Kovalchick and the meat of the Blacklick batting order. Following Will’s strategic directions, pitching the corners, wasting a few, changing the pace, he struck out Tony, then Carci, and almost struck out Stanley Watta. Not quite. Watta smashed the intended third strike over second base and deep into center, where the ball splashed down in a cowpie as Junior Fetterman hurled himself at it. Paul Lightcap, backing up Junior, relayed the smeared ball to Elman to Clarence to Sonny: each player dropped it. Grinning grimly, sprinting all the way, Watta scored an inside-the-park home run. Jock Spivak, unable to control his laughing, struck out on three consecutive blooper balls.
The home team came to bat, bottom of the second, and the game, like the cow, lurched and staggered into the lengthening shadows of the afternoon. But Stump Creek was not outclassed. The Blacklick fielding proved as inept as Stump Creek’s; Chuck Tait and Will Lightcap and even Henry managed to single, double, or triple each time they came to bat, for Kovalchick’s pitching was steady and predictable: nothing but fastballs down the middle or else so high and outside that even Glemp the umpire, listening intently and obeying some primordial instinct toward objectivity, judged them balls not strikes.
The Adams boys, batting cross-handed and thus in danger of breaking their wrists, as everyone warned, succeeded in connecting with a pitch now and then, while Chuck and Will and Henry ran wild on the basepaths, detouring the mudholes, sliding greasily into second, into third, across home. In the third inning Junior Fetterman hit a double with the bases loaded; in the fourth inning Elman Fetterman, shutting his eyes and swinging for distance, popped a Texas Leaguer over the amazed shortstop Stan Watta’s head. By the end of the fifth inning every player on the Stump Creek team had got on base at least once. Even Paul, the baby.
Every one, that is, but Red Ginter. Red struck out five times, watching the pitches with lacklustre eyes, never lifting the bat from his shoulder after his initial efforts at the plate in the first inning. Each Kovalchick pitch came whistling down the middle of the strike zone, fat and smug as a melon, and Red let them all go by, unwanted, untouched, unsmitten.
At the end of the fifth inning the score stood fourteen to twelve, Blacklick leading. The sun hovered close to the roof of Prothrow’s barn, up on the green and pleasant hill to the west. Henry and Tony agreed to end the game after seven innings.
Clouds were gathering again, and the rainbirds sang.
The sixth inning was a high-scoring shambles. Each team batted around the order, scoring on fumbled grounders, wild throws, dropped fly balls, triples and doubles by Stan Watta, Jock Spivak, Mike Gresak, Tony Kovalchick, Chuck Tait, Will Lightcap, and Henry. As he stood on second wiping his brow with the felt of his cap, Henry thought for a moment he saw Wilma smiling at him. But he couldn’t be certain, she sat so far away in the encroaching twilight, among a cluster of other girls, all of them smiling, laughing, most of the time. Laughing at me? he wondered—the pride in his two-base hit sank before the pain in his lonely heart.
Red Ginter struck out again, unmoving and unmoved as a great but lifeless snag of a tree.
Blacklick scored five runs in the top of the seventh, taking advantage of fly balls to the Fetterman brothers, bouncing grounders to the Adams brothers, a throw to first a little wide that Red would not condescend to reach for, and an intentional walk to Dominic Del Poggio, who replayed Jock Spivak’s feat by stepping across the plate to hit the pitch-out over first and off Paul Lightcap’s feeble glove in right field.
Nobody hit a genuine, bona fide, legitimate home run. The pasture fence, after all, was four hundred feet away at the nearest point. Beyond the fence lay the stagnant waters of Stump Creek. Beyond the creek stood a row of white oak trees—six of them—and beyond the trees was the cow-grazed, half-trampled, half-standing fodder of Prothrow’s main cornfield.
Out of chaos, if too late, came a semblance of order. Henry and Will, aided by the general weariness of the batters, struck out the lower, weaker end of the Blacklick batting order one, two, three. After six and a half innings the score, agreed upon after much debate, seemed to be Blacklick twenty-one, Stump Creek sixteen.
In the gathering darkness and deepening gloom, with faint hearts, the home team came to bat for its last time. But Chuck Tait, leading off, intense and eager, hit the lead pitch inside first and down the foul line for a triple. His fourth hit of the game. Will doubled again, scoring Chuck, and Henry singled, scoring Will. Henry took second then third on wild throws by Panatelli in left and Carci at second. Blacklick twenty-one, Stump Creek eighteen, man on third and nobody out. Sonny Adams, learning to wait out the pitches from the tiring Kovalchick, walked. Clarence popped to second. One out. Junior Fetterman popped to the pitcher, Henry still holding third. Two outs and Elman Fetterman, Stump Creek’s smallest, weakest hitter, stood at the plate. But Elman tried, he went down swinging, and the catcher—the massive, impassive, nerveless Dominic—somehow let the third strike get past him. He groped for the ball as all Stump Creek hollered at Elman:
“Run, Elman, run!”
Elman ran. Dominic found the ball, hurled it toward first, and hit Elman on the rump, propelling the boy face down into first base. Henry raced home, Sonny took second, and Elman stood up on first smiling happily with his second big hit of the day. Two men on base, two outs, and the score twenty-one to nineteen.
Top of the order, Red Ginter. Henry had to call him in from far left field, where he’d been hunting for Leroy. Red slouched toward the plate, holding his private bat by its rough-cut, heavy end
, and took his stance. Feet spraddled far apart, like a plowman about to lift his plow around the end of a furrow, Red stared blankly at Kovalchick and waited for the first pitch, that inevitable but slowing fastball down the middle. Chewing his chaw, he stood there deep in the box, a glandular monster looming in the twilight, huge, terrific, terrifying, and impotent.
Will rose from his crouched position beyond third, where he was coaching the runners, and stared at the pitcher. Henry, watching from near first base, saw Tony Kovalchick touch the silver medal at his neck—St. Anthony—make the sign of the cross, and begin once more his fatigued but still fantastic windup. Red stopped chewing.
Kovalchick wound and then elaborately unwound, about to release the pitch—
“Mackerel snapper!” shouted Will, loud and clear.
—released the pitch, his body suddenly off balance, and threw wild into the dirt halfway between the pitcher’s block and home plate. The ball dribbled crookedly toward the batter in little rabbity bounces.
“Ball one!” yelped the umpire, as Red stepped forward this time, not back, and swung boldly downward, like Sam Snead with a driving iron, and caught the ball with his slashing club as the ball made its last pathetic hop toward home plate. There was a flurry of dirt in the air, as if Red had dug too deep and missed, but all present heard the sharp crack! of hickory meeting hardball with magnum impact, a certain special unmistakable sound that every ballplayer and every fan recognizes instantly, as if engraved on memory and soul among those clouds of glory on the other side of birth, beyond the womb, before conception, in the source of all-being when God Himself was only a gleam in a witch-doctor’s eye.
The sound of the long ball.
All faces turned toward the sky, toward the far-flung splendor of an Appalachian sunset, and saw Red’s departing pellet of thread, cork, rubber, and frazzled leather rise like a star into the last high beams of the sun, saw it ascending high, higher, and still higher over Jock Spivak’s despairing arms in the deepest part of center field, above the fence, over the creek and past the oak trees beyond the creek, where it sank again through twilight and disappeared (for two weeks) into the tangled jungle of Gil Prothrow’s cornfield.
Sonny Adams, followed by Elman Fetterman, came trotting across home plate, dancing in delight. Blacklick twenty-one, Stump Creek twenty, Stump Creek twenty-one. The home team swarmed with joy around the runners.
Ah, but where exactly was the winning run? Where was Red? Red was nowhere. Red was everywhere. Red stood in front of home plate, leaning on his bat, watching his first hit of the game vanish into immortality somewhere southwest of Stump Creek. “Run?” he said. “What the hell you mean, run? Hit’s a godamn home run, hain’t it? What the hell I gotta run round them goldamn bases fer?” He spat a fat filthy gob of juice into the trenched soil at his feet. “Only little kids run round the bases fer nothin.”
They yelled at him, pleaded, reasoned. He would not budge. Finally, when the screaming and hollering and debate became too loud he shouldered his bat in disgust and strode away down the red-dog road, headed for home. Ginter’s home, that is.
Blacklick claimed a tie, twenty-one—twenty-one. Stump Creek claimed a de facto victory, twenty-two to twenty-one. The discussion raged for weeks and never was settled to the satisfaction of anybody, except maybe Red Ginter. And Leroy, who didn’t care one way or the other. Old man Prothrow found Leroy that night bedded down in a stall on cowshit and straw, along with two heifers, when he checked his cow barn before turning in.
“No team spirit,” Chuck Tait complained. “I don’t think I’ll play with you guys anymore. You hillbillys just don’t have the right team spirit.” Chuck was a town boy; he lived in the heart of Stump Creek, in a good solid brick house with plumbing and electricity. His father was village postmaster. Chuck joined the Army Air Force in 1943, learned to fly a Mustang P-51, and would return from the Pacific Theater later with captain’s bars on his shoulders and a chest covered with ribbons. He started an insurance business and soon afterward evaporated, forever, into the state legislature.
Red Ginter joined the infantry, where he is now a master sergeant for life. Leroy joined the Salvation Army and became a major-general.
And Henry? Henry Lightcap fell in love. He fell in love that year with Wilma, with Betsy, with Elaine, and with eleven other girls. He knew his cause was hopeless but he tried. It was not Wilma or Betsy or Elaine or the others, however, but Mary, Tony Kovalchick’s little sister, who provided the needed succor. One rainy night in May, in the back seat of Will’s 1937 Hudson Terra-plane, Mary Kovalchick showed Henry Lightcap a thing or two. Henry joined Mary. For a number of times. He never again went back, after that, to throwing tennis balls at barn doors or baseballs at Roman Catholics.
Will Lightcap, he stayed with the farm.
So it was, and so it all really happened down there in Shawnee County, in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, about five thousand years ago.
FROM
Beyond the Wall:
Essays from the
Outside
(1984)
Down to the Sea of Cortez
From the terrace of my old stone house in the Santa Catalina foothills, we’ve been circling outward, farther and farther from the crowded haunts of Americans, into the wilderness. Each expedition took us a little greater distance from the cities and from what Thomas Wolfe called “the manswarm.” Now we come to where the desert meets the Sea of Cortez. This is the wildest, least developed part of Mexico, and therefore the best. I invited my friend and neighbor Richard Felger to join me for a trip down there.
He is a botanist who has specialized in the ethnobotany—people and plants—of northwestern Sonora. We made our preparations and one January day got off to an early start at the crack of noon—early for us, anyhow—and headed south for the border. Avoiding the slow-moving entry at the city of Nogales, we took a little-traveled dirt road farther to the west and entered Mexico by way of the village of Sasabe, barely detectable on the maps, which is one of the nicer things about it.
ALTO, says the road sign by the Mexican border station. We halted, entered the station, obtained our tourist cards and tipped the inspector the customary dollar’s worth of pesos. Leaving, I savored those smells characteristic of Mexico—refried beans, burning lard, mesquite and ironwood smoke, stale beer, manure, hot sheet iron, old adobe baking under the heat of the desert sun. It seemed good to be back.
We drove south by southwest over a rough, rocky, winding dirt road, past mile after mile of burnt adobe brickworks (apparently the chief local industry, after cattle raising), and then into the open desert. Buzzards circled overhead—there always seem to be more buzzards in the sky on the Mexican side of the border. Why? Because both life and death are more abundant down in Mexico. It’s the kind of country buzzards love. A candid country, harsh and bare, which is no doubt why it strikes us overcivilized Americans as crude, vulgar and dangerous.
Scrub cattle ranging through the bush galloped off like gnus and wildebeests at our approach. I never saw such weird, scrawny, pied, mottled, humped, long-horned and camel-necked brutes trying to pass as domestic livestock. Most looked like a genetic hash of Hereford, Charolais, Brahman, Angus, moose, ibex, tapir and nightmare. Weaned on cactus, snakeweed and thistle, they showed the gleam of the sun through the translucent barrel of their rib cages. But they could run, they were alive—not only alive but vigorous. I was tempted to think, watching their angular hind ends jouncing away through the dust, that the meat on those critters, if you could find any, might just taste better than the aerated, water-injected, hormone-inflated beef we Americans get from today’s semiautomated feedlots in the States.
For most of the afternoon we rambled toward the setting sun through the rolling desert of mesquite, creosote, paloverde and cactus. The saguaros were sparse and stunted looking; even the prickly pear and cholla do not seem to do well down here. But the mesquite thrives, growing in dwarf forests over what used to be grassy savanna a
ccording to ecohistorians (overgrazing—the old story). Every now and then we’d descend into a wash or arroyo where the vegetation was denser and more varied. Here Felger would stop to beat through the brush, searching for various shrubs and annuals. Some people collect stamps or beer bottles or wagon wheels; professional botanists collect weeds, press them between wooden plates, and store them away in museum files never to be seen by light of day again.
In the evening we paused for an hour to cook our supper on a heap of incandescent ironwood coals. Coyotes wailed the sun down; heavy-footed cattle stumbled through the chaparral; somebody turned on a few stars. We were down in the Mexican desert and pretty pleased with ourselves; it seemed like a retreat through time—of about fifty years. The night was long and chilly. We were glad to be heading south when the blue dawn arrived.
Into the backlands, the back of beyond, the original and primitive Mexico. For the next three days we would see few human beings and not a motor vehicle of any kind, nor a gas station, nor a telephone pole. The inevitable vultures soaring overhead reminded us, though, that somewhere in this brushy wilderness was life, sentient creation, living meat. Hard to see, of course, during the day, for most desert animals keep themselves concealed in the bush or in burrows under the surface of the ground. But you could see their tracks: birds, lizards, rodents, now and then a coyote, here and there the handlike footprints of raccoon, the long claws of badger, the prints of ring-tailed cat, the heart-shaped hoof marks of deer and javelina, the rounded pads of bobcat, the long narrow tracks of the coatimundi, or chulu, as the Mexicans call it.