Taking Lottie Home

  “Maybe,” Ben said.

  Lottie leaned against the headrest of the seat and closed her eyes. Ben wondered if she was thinking of her father, or her sister. Or if in the clouds of memory she was listening again to the close-whispered promises of Norman Porterfield. Promises of seeing places she had never seen, places too grand to imagine. Norman Porterfield was a salesman, with a salesman’s quick step and a salesman’s catchy song, and he had a salesman’s way of building castles out of air. And Ben believed that Lottie wanted to live in castles, even those made of air.

  The train roared across a trestle bridging a river, and the echo from the river flew up like a scream.

  IT WAS AFTER one when the train pulled to a stop in Jericho. Ben slipped quietly from his seat and looked at the sleeping Norman Porterfield and Lottie Barton, her head nestled against his chest. He wondered if she would leave Norman in Knoxville and if, someday, she would reappear at her parents’ home and sit with her sister to watch the river.

  He took his suitcase and moved down the aisle. Foster Lanier was sprawled across two seats, his head tilted awkwardly in his drunk-sleep. Ben paused and looked at Foster with pity. Foster was a sick, broken man. He had been a god and now he was a mortal with a mortal’s deathmask clouding his face. Ben turned and hurried down the quiet aisle. He stepped from the train. A conductor asked, “This your get-off place?” Ben replied, “Yes sir. This is home.” And the conductor said, “Wish I was getting home.”

  Ben walked away hurriedly, holding his suitcase tight in his hand. In ten minutes, he was at his home. He tried the door, but it was locked. He rapped lightly on the door. Inside, he heard the bark of his dog, Paws, and a moment later he saw light streaming out of the cracks of the doorjamb and he heard his father’s voice: “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me,” Ben answered.

  His father opened the door and stood looking curiously at Ben.

  “Hello, Father,” Ben said.

  “Why, son, what’re you doing here?” his father asked.

  “I come home. I quit the game,” Ben said.

  Elton Phelps stepped forward and embraced his son clumsily. He said, “Well, I’m glad you did. Come on. Go see your mother. She’s been worried about you.”

  THE VISIT WITH his parents was short. Ben explained that he had decided to give up baseball and return to take the job that Arthur Ledford had offered. “I talked it over with the manager,” Ben lied, “and he said he thought I could make it, but if I wanted to take a good job, he understood it. So, I just got on the train tonight, before Milo or some of the others could change my mind.”

  “How’s Milo doing?” asked his father.

  “Doing good,” Ben answered. “He’ll make it all the way. Milo’s the best they’ve got in that league. I heard the manager tell somebody that Milo might make it all the way up to Boston in a year or so.”

  “Well, I’m glad for him,” Ben’s father said. “Maybe that’s what he ought to do, but I’m glad you’re home. This is where you belong, Ben.”

  When Ben left his parents, he went into his room and unpacked his suitcase. He then took the steps leading to the attic and went into the room that had been his private world, the repository of his grandest moments since childhood. He sat in a chair and looked around the attic at the artifacts of years of play—skates and kites and wood guns and wood swords—and he could hear Milo Wade laughing. Milo belonged to the attic, also. He wondered if Milo had lain awake in the room they had shared in Augusta, thinking about him. And he wondered if someone else—Nat Skinner, perhaps—would move into the room with Milo. He looked at the baseball glove he held and the splendor of the catch in Augusta flashed into his vision and the voices filled the attic:

  “Ben, you got it! You got it!”

  He took the glove and placed it in a trunk his mother had given him for his fifteenth birthday, one with a lock. Then he left the room and closed the door. He would never again touch the glove.

  THREE

  FEW PEOPLE SPOKE to Ben about his experience in Augusta. He had been away three weeks, and three weeks was not enough time to consider as leaving and returning. He had been away and now he was home and he was working for Arthur Ledford in the job that George Hill had had before deciding to attend the University of Georgia to study chemistry. If anyone had left Jericho, it was George Hill.

  Only Coleman Maxey seemed interested in Ben’s short career in professional baseball.

  Coleman operated a shoe repair shop and was the catcher for the Jericho Generals baseball team. He was a squat, crude man with a fondness for humor that hinted of unhealthy sex and, occasionally, he would binge-drink, two faults that were patiently tolerated by the citizens of Jericho because Coleman could take a pair of walked-down shoes and make them look new, and he could hit a baseball lopsided. Such a man was valuable, even if his manners lacked sophistication.

  One week after Ben’s return from Augusta—and on the third day of his employment at Ledford’s Dry Goods—Coleman stopped him on his way to lunch at Brady’s Cafe.

  “I heard you was back,” Coleman said. “What happened down there?”

  “Just decided to give it up,” Ben answered quietly. “I had the job with Mr. Ledford waiting, and I thought I’d better take it before he gave it to somebody else.” And then he repeated something his mother had suggested: “Good jobs don’t grow on trees.”

  “You got that,” Coleman said. “What about Milo?”

  “Milo?” Ben said. “You don’t have to worry about him. He’s the best player on the team. There was talk about him making it to Boston or one of the other big teams in a couple of years.”

  Coleman wagged his head in amazement. “That right? He’s good, all right, but I never thought he was any better than you, except maybe in hitting, and he’s a born natural at that. But you’re not far behind. Guess that’s why I was surprised when I heard you’d come home.”

  Ben shrugged uncomfortably and looked away. He thought of Arnold Toeman and the silence of his teammates when they learned he had been cut from the team. “I thought about staying around awhile,” he said. “Some of the other players talked to me about it, but I had the job waiting.”

  “Like you said, Ben, good jobs don’t grow on trees.”

  “I learned a lot, though,” Ben said. “It’s a different game in the professional leagues.”

  “Well, you got a place on our team,” Coleman told him. “I guess you know that. We playing the Anderson team on Saturday.”

  For a moment, Ben did not speak. He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, tugged at the bow tie around his neck. Then: “I’d like to, Coleman, but I guess I’m through with playing ball.”

  “Why?” Coleman asked incredulously.

  “I got the job now, and Mr. Ledford stays open late every Saturday. I can’t go asking for time off, just getting started like I am.”

  “Well, damn,” Coleman mumbled.

  BEN’S EXCUSE TO Coleman Maxey was only partly true. When he spoke to Ben of duties for the clerk’s job, Arthur Ledford had suggested that most of the better citizens of Jericho believed professional baseball was a sport for hardened men with habits of coarse language and drinking and dark living.

  “In time, I think you’ll know you made the right decision,” Arthur had gently lectured. “Copy after your father, and you’ll be a man people look up to. Your father was good at baseball, too, when he was a young man. In fact, your father was one of the best athletes we ever had around here. Nobody was as fast. But he quit all of that when he took a job and a family.”

  “Yes sir,” Ben had replied.

  “I know you and Milo have been dreaming of playing baseball for a long time,” Arthur had continued. “And that’s fine. A person needs a good dream. I used to dream about sailing on the ocean, and that was before I ever saw it. I still think about it, but I’ve never been out of sight of land. It’s all right to dream. You just can’t let it get the best of you.”

  No one in Jericho
disliked Arthur Ledford. He was thought of as a kindly man who deserved every good word said about him, a diligent, almost obsessed worker, and a crusader for progress. He was driven, people believed, by an ambition to live up to the expectations of his late father, Alexander Ledford, who had established Ledford’s Dry Goods and had been counted as one of the ten most influential citizens of Caulder County in the nineteenth century—a questionable selection to many who had known him personally. Alexander Ledford had been a severe, unforgiving man who wielded the power of his presence like a weapon. Arthur was the opposite. Remembered by his contemporaries as a shy, gentle child who occasionally stuttered, he had become forceful enough to assume his father’s business only by patience and determination.

  “You’re a good person, Ben,” Arthur had added. “From the best family I know. They’re proud of you.”

  “Yes sir,” Ben had said earnestly.

  STILL, BEN COULD not desert the sport he loved so intensely. He could not play, but he could watch and dream the dream of his childhood.

  In late afternoons, after work at Ledford’s Dry Goods, Ben would go to the park where the baseball team practiced and played, and he would sit under the gray shade of a sycamore tree far away in the outfield and watch as the team paraded before him in the exuberance of the game. He was eighteen years old. Except for Spencer Franklin and Wade Pilgrim and Charles Hill, the men he watched playing his game were all older—some in their thirties—and Ben knew that none of them had his skills. None were as fast or had made a catch such as the catch he had made in Augusta. None knew the secrets of the game he had learned in three weeks from Arnold Toeman. The Jericho Generals were a team of men crudely playing a game of grace, and Ben yearned to be among them, to shout at their blundering, to show them the game as it could—as it should—be played.

  Each day Ben went to the park and watched and each day he found himself wandering nearer the field and nearer the players. He did not want to be so near them, but their presence was powerful, luring him with their teasing chants and with their oaths. It was a song of romance and Ben was in love.

  “Damn, Ben,” Coleman Maxey said one day. “If you not gone play, at least come on down here and give us some of them tips you learned down there in Augusta.”

  It was a joke, but Ben thought Coleman was serious.

  “Well, maybe a couple of things,” Ben said cautiously.

  Coleman winked at Bill Simpson, who played first base. “Anything you got,” he said to Ben in a grave voice.

  “Yeah,” Bill Simpson said. He coughed to cover a laugh.

  And Ben went among the players, talking to them, eagerly sketching in the red clay of the field the plays he had learned in Augusta, glaring at their failures with condemnation.

  To the men of the team, Ben’s presence was grand amusement. They mocked him and he did not know it was mockery. He was eighteen. A boy. The men of the team listened with controlled delight to Ben’s instruction and then performed stupidly and then laughed secretly as Ben demonstrated again and again the art of bunting, of double-play pivots, of base-stealing. The players did not want Ben’s advice. They wanted his jester exhibitions.

  “Goda’mighty, Ben,” Coleman would say, feigning frustration. “Damned if I know why we can’t do nothing right. Looks so easy, way you do it.”

  “That’s all right,” Ben would reply. “It just takes work. Takes doing it over and over. That’s the secret. Do it over and over.”

  “I guess you right,” Coleman would concede, clucking his tongue behind a buried smile.

  Ben’s tragedy was classic, and it was universal: he believed he was unique among them.

  He was eighteen. A boy.

  He did not know the men of the team were making him their mascot fool.

  Each week, he wrote a letter to Milo Wade in Augusta, describing what he was doing and how the men of the team were amazed.

  Ben ended each letter in the same manner: Stick to it, Milo. Don’t come back home unless you have to.

  He signed each letter: Your friend, Ben Phelps.

  IN LATE AUGUST, the fifth month of his return to Jericho, Christine Wade invited Ben to supper. Ben accepted reluctantly. He knew he would have to talk of Milo, and he knew Martin Wade would question him carefully. He had never been comfortable around Milo’s father. There was an aura about Martin Wade, a quiet, serious superiority. He had worked at the bank founded by his late father following the Civil War, earning respect as a man of integrity, dignity, and fairness. He was also the most handsome man Ben had ever seen, and that handsomeness had caused the citizens of Jericho to jest among themselves that too many good qualities had been wasted on one man.

  The men of Jericho also said that Martin Wade had met his match in Christine Cox Wade. She was feisty, the men contended in their gossip, saying the word crudely, with an emphasis that implied more than the word merited.

  Milo was the only child of Martin and Christine Wade. From his birth, Milo’s father had believed his son to be gifted. His son had promise, he privately asserted to friends. His son was bright and inquisitive. His son had the eyes and hands—the eyes and hands mattered—of someone who would accomplish great things. Hands meant for a musician, perhaps. The eyes of a statesman able to see visions of change and progress. No question about it, Martin Wade had pronounced: the mark of greatness was on his son. He had the eyes and hands for it, and the spirit. “All of them from his mother,” he confessed. “He’s got her in his blood, all right. But there’s more. I don’t know what, but I can sense it in him.”

  In the presence of Martin Wade, Ben had always felt that he was inferior, a tolerated outsider, though there had never been anything specific to justify his suspicions. Milo’s father had always been kind to him, had always included him in special moments to celebrate Milo’s special achievements, and when Ben had succeeded in the small school competitions of childhood, he had always been generous in his praise. Still, Martin Wade awed Ben, as he awed everyone.

  The supper was as Ben expected—a strained formality, a stagy rite of passage. Christine Wade fluttered with the serving of the food, her gay, bright voice urging Ben to overeat, reminding Ben of simple episodes of the childhood he had shared with Milo. Martin Wade listened politely, his eyes avoiding Ben. He was, Ben thought, unusually subdued.

  When the supper was over, Ben and Martin Wade retired to the living room in the ritual of men. It was a ritual Ben had never experienced as a guest, and he felt uneasy. He sat erect, in his best imitation of a man’s posture, and waited for Martin Wade to speak.

  Martin Wade packed a pipe and lit it. The odor of the burning tobacco was sweet.

  “Ben,” Martin Wade said at last, “Mrs. Wade and I invited you to supper to share something with you, something only two or three people in town know about at this time.”

  “Yes sir,” Ben said.

  “I have been given an opportunity to assume the presidency of a bank in Athens,” Martin Wade replied calmly. “Mrs. Wade and I have decided to divest ourselves of the interests we have in Jericho and move.”

  “To Athens?” Ben said.

  Martin Wade bobbed his head and drew from his pipe. “We wanted you to know because you’ve been very much like a son to us all these years.”

  Ben was startled. “When?”

  “Within the next month,” Martin Wade told him.

  Ben slumped in his chair. He said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Of course, we’ve had grave reservations about leaving Jericho,” Martin Wade said. “We were both born here, and this is where we raised our son, but we also realize what we’ve been offered is the kind of challenge we both enjoy. Sadly, it means leaving our home.”

  “It’s not too far away,” Ben suggested.

  Martin Wade sucked on his pipe. “No, it’s not. Mrs. Wade keeps reminding me of that. I expect we’ll make frequent trips back.”

  “Does Milo know about it?” asked Ben.

  “He does,” Martin Wade answ
ered. “I’m not sure how he feels about it. His letter to us simply said he wished us good fortune. But I also have some news about Milo that we haven’t shared with anyone, because we wanted to share it with you first.”

  “Sir?”

  “We received a cable yesterday that he’s been sold to the Boston Pilgrims, and he’ll be reporting to them in a few days.”

  “The Pilgrims,” Ben said in a stunned voice. “I—I knew he was doing good.”

  “Apparently, they’ve had some injuries on the team and they wanted a young man who wouldn’t cost too much as a beginner,” Martin Wade replied. “Good business, I suppose, and I’m proud of him, although I must confess I’d like to see him get over this obsession for baseball and come home. I only hope he’s not too young for the experience in Boston.”

  Ben forced himself to sit forward in his chair. “No sir,” he enthused. “There was talk about it before I left Augusta. Lots of people thought Milo was the best player on any team in the league, and they were right. He’ll be playing right off, you wait and see.”

  Martin Wade smiled.

  “You think he’ll stop off on his way to Boston?” Ben asked eagerly.

  “I’m not sure,” Martin Wade answered. “Maybe. I’m not sure when he’s leaving Augusta. Not for a few days, as I understand it. If he decides to stop here on his way, we’ll let you know.”

  “Yes sir. I’d like that. I’d like to see him,” Ben said.

  Martin Wade dipped his head in a nod. His gray eyes were focused on the window. A pause billowed in the room.

  “Yes sir,” Ben said after a moment. “I’d sure like to see him.”

  Martin Wade’s eyes blinked. He turned his face to Ben. “I understand you’ve quit playing the game.”

  “Uh—yes sir. Since I took the job with Mr. Ledford. Not enough time to do the job and play.”

  “But you go watch the games? And the practices?”

  “Uh—sometimes. Yes sir.”

  “Ben, you need to be careful about that.”