Taking Lottie Home

  To the boys, Milo Wade was a god, someone who had left their town and made it to Boston to play with the big leaguers in less than a year. They played on the same playing fields that Milo Wade had played on, their feet touching the same earth that Milo Wade’s feet had touched. Yet Milo Wade was not among them; Ben Phelps was. Some of them had even watched Ben against the giant—David against Goliath—and among the eager boys who surrounded Ben on the street, they were counted as the privileged.

  Over time, with season following season, Ben became so accustomed to the retelling of the story there were moments when even he believed in the legacy of splendor that Foster Lanier had created for him.

  Foster had given him a gift.

  No, two gifts.

  He could not forget Lottie Barton.

  Each spring he thought of Lottie and the train ride from Augusta.

  And he thought of Lottie and the amber-lighted tent.

  Sometimes the memory of Lottie was heavy with guilt and shame, and sometimes it was distant, as though faded under the sun of many years, and he thought of her tenderly. Occasionally, without prompting by memory, he dreamed of her in the tent, dreamed of her earth scent and the amber light bathing her amber body, or he dreamed of her sitting on the porch of her home in Augusta, with her sister in a nearby chair, numbly gazing at the Savannah River. And in the dream of the river, her prettiness had faded and a sadness rested permanently in her face.

  And Foster. He thought often of Foster. Once, in his unexpected dream of Lottie, he saw Foster with her, sitting in her sister’s chair.

  He wondered if Foster had killed the one-armed giant named Baby Cotwell before leaving Jericho.

  SECRETLY, IF UNEASILY, Ben welcomed the annual story about the one-armed giant. It was the only break in what he thought of as the monotony of his life.

  Yet the monotony was deliberate.

  It was not easy for Ben to harbor a lie. His parents had taught him that a person too full of himself would surely make a slip and the lie would bring him down like one of those graven-image idols God was always smashing to bits in the Old Testament.

  Ben did not want to shatter like a hollow-clay doll. His life was as carefully walked as a soldier on parade. Day after day, the same.

  And it was all right, Ben believed. It was not a bad life. He was not isolated. People seemed to like him. If life did not change for him, he would not regret being who he was.

  From 1904 until July 7, 1910, only three things intruded memorably on the monotony of his life.

  On August 17, 1907, his father died of a sudden, violent heart seizure, a seizure so unexpected that he and his mother remained dazed over it, as though it might have been a dream that both had had, simultaneously. His father had been a strong, robust, happy man, a man whose smile was so permanently fixed on his face he smiled even in sleep.

  In 1908, a reporter from the Atlanta Constitution named Ollie Miles arrived in Jericho to do a story on Milo Wade. Cliff Allen, the high school principal, directed the reporter to Ledford’s Dry Goods, telling him, “Go talk to Ben Phelps. He knows more about Milo Wade than anybody alive, and that includes the Boston Red Sox.” The interview had left Ben trembling with excitement and with a restlessness that tormented his dreams for weeks. Ben clipped the story and placed it in a scrapbook that he kept on Milo. Occasionally he read it, and the dreams would return. The man he had described for Ollie Miles was not simply Milo Wade, but the man that he, Ben Phelps, yearned to be.

  In 1909, two days before Christmas, in the storeroom of Ledford’s Dry Goods, Sally Ledford, sixteen years old, confessed to Ben that she loved him. Her words—whispered, trembling—left Ben weak and terrified and speechless. During the five years of his employment at Ledford’s, he had barely noticed her darting-around presence. She was merely the daughter of his employer, a child growing into womanhood, promising beauty.

  “I don’t want to scare you off, Ben,” Sally said bravely. “I just want you to know how I feel, how I’ve been feeling since I was thirteen, I guess.”

  Because he was standing near a doorway with mistletoe tacked to the top of the doorjamb, Sally tried to kiss him. Ben turned his face against her breath—warm, peppermint-scented—and her kiss was on the corner of his mouth.

  “Are you afraid of me or my daddy?” Sally asked.

  “Both,” Ben answered honestly.

  “I’ll leave you alone, if that’s what you want,” Sally said softly.

  “I—I got to think about it,” Ben told her.

  On Christmas Eve, he accompanied Sally to the Methodist church after giving his mother a stammering excuse about Sally tormenting him over the merits of the Methodist choir. “I told her I’d go hear them if she’d just quit trying to make them out to be better than the Presbyterians,” Ben told his mother. “I promised I’d walk her over to the service,” he added in a failed attempt at being nonchalant.

  Everyone gathered at the Jericho Methodist church to celebrate the birth of Christ—including the entire nativity ensemble of Joseph, Mary, the doll Jesus, three Wise Men, and several shepherds—paused in stunned silence when Ben followed Sally down the aisle to sit in the pew beside her mother and father. Sally would later say to Ben, “It was like they were watching the Christmas star. I’ve never felt anything that special.”

  To Ben, it was like being before a firing squad.

  At first, it was that way.

  In February of 1910, again in the storeroom of Ledford’s Dry Goods, he impulsively kissed Sally.

  The Christmas star exploded inside him, and the plodding, dull routine of his life became a blur of day speeding into day, the time that he wanted to be with Sally colliding with the time that he was with her. His mind hummed with thoughts of her, and also with thoughts of Arthur Ledford watching them. He was not sure how Arthur Ledford viewed the blatant affection his only child had for him. It would not be wise to toy with such affections, not under the constant gaze of a father who was also his employer.

  At night, in his room, Ben wrote poems to Sally, sketched her likeness on paper, gazed out the window of his room to find the north star. The north star, Sally had proclaimed, was the star of her destiny. “As long as you can see it, you can see me,” she had cooed to Ben late one afternoon. “Just look, Ben. Just look.” And it was so. He could see her in the north star. The star had her brightness. He could breathe deeply, could feel the star’s heat, the roiling firestorm of its light, warming his chest, and the gladness of it filled him.

  And, at last, he could no longer keep secret what everyone knew, but had stayed quiet about.

  “What would you think of Sally Ledford as a daughter-in-law?” he asked his mother two days after Sally’s seventeenth birthday in June.

  His mother smiled radiantly. “Nothing would make me happier,” she said.

  “I like to see you happy,” Ben told his mother. “But it’s nothing definite. I just wanted to know what you thought about it. Don’t go talking about it.”

  “Not until you tell me I can,” his mother promised.

  At the Fourth of July celebration in Jericho, an evening of barbecue and drumbeat music and fireworks and field games, Sally said to Ben in a purring, dreamy voice, “I want it to be always like this.”

  “Don’t know why it won’t be,” Ben said confidently.

  A skyrocket exploded over the fairground.

  “I don’t want it to be like that,” Sally said.

  “It won’t,” Ben replied.

  He did not know about the letter that had already been posted in Beimer, Kentucky.

  ON THURSDAY, JULY 7, 1910, almost six years after the Marvels of the Earth Exhibition had boarded train cars for another city, Ben opened a letter addressed to:

  BEN PHELPS

  BASEBALL PLAYER

  JERICHO, GEORGIA

  The letter was from Lottie:

  Dear Ben Phelps

  Foster said for me to write you. Make it to Ben Phelps baseball player Foster said. Maybe you ne
ver got the story but me and Foster was married. Five years ago I guess it was. We had us a little boy. Hes three years. We named him Ben. Its what Foster wanted and I liked it. Foster said for me to write to you and say we live in Kentucky now. Its a place called Beimer. Hes sick and he wants me to tell you to come up to see him. Hes got something to say to you and he wants to say it when hes looking at you. I know its a long way off from where you live but I sure hope you can come. Foster says you are the only person he wants to see. Its a pretty place where we live. It gets cold in the wintertime but I dont much mind. I hope you can come up soon.

  Your friend

  Lottie Lanier

  The letter deeply affected Ben. There was sadness in the news of Foster Lanier’s illness—still young, in his thirties—and there was fondness in the memory of Lottie.

  Ben had never told anyone about Lottie. He could have bragged suggestively of the night with her, as other men bragged of their nights with easy women, but he did not. He did not think of Lottie as an easy woman, but as a girl going home. It did not matter to Ben how many men Lottie had taken in a dimly lighted tent. She was a gentle person, a good person.

  And maybe that was why Foster had married her, Ben thought. Foster must have had great needs. It must have been hard for Foster Lanier, the great baseball player, a man recognized by strangers on trains, to follow the carnival as a one-legged freak. Maybe Lottie had believed him when he told her he loved her, and maybe she had made him happy. Maybe she had taken Foster into the tent one night, in some small town, and Foster had realized that Lottie was all he needed, or wanted. Maybe it had happened that way, in a fingersnap, like a religious healing. And maybe the son—Ben, the son—had helped Foster forget his bitterness.

  Other than Sally, or his mother, Lottie was probably the best woman he would ever know, Ben thought. Foster was lucky. Foster had Lottie.

  Ben read the letter again and a dark loneliness settled over him.

  THAT NIGHT, IN a small office he had fashioned for himself in the storeroom of Ledford’s Dry Goods, Ben sat at a rolltop desk and wrote a letter to Lottie. He was sorry about Foster’s illness, he wrote. Foster had been good to him, a special friend. Foster had helped him get over the hurt of not playing baseball. And he was glad about Foster and Lottie being married and having a baby, and it was a good feeling to have that baby named Ben, in his honor.

  Yes, he wrote, he would make arrangements as soon as possible for a trip to Kentucky to see Foster, as Foster wished. It would require a few days of planning, but he would do it.

  Most likely a week or two, he suggested.

  As soon as possible.

  In fact, he added, perhaps he would make the trip to Kentucky a part of an excursion he had been planning for many years, a visit to Boston, where he would see his boyhood friend Milo Wade play baseball for the Boston Red Sox. It would be a roundabout trip, but he did not mind.

  Foster would remember Milo Wade, Ben wrote.

  Things were going well for him, Ben included in the letter. A new granite quarry had been opened between Jericho and Athens and a lot of people—many of them Italian—had moved to the area to work the granite from the earth. His job was probably the best in Jericho, he suggested, and the way it looked, he would be running the store one day. And there was a girl he was seeing. Her name was Sally Ledford, the daughter of his employer. She was seven years younger than he, but very nice, the kind of girl that both Lottie and Foster would like. Might even be a wedding in the future. Near future.

  Thank you for writing me about Foster. He’s a great man.

  BEN WALKED HOME in the hot summer evening, the odor of cut grass heavy in the watery glue of the humidity. He thought of his suggestion to Lottie that he would visit Milo Wade in Boston. It was an old boast, one freely offered to men who stopped in Ledford’s Dry Goods, or took lunch at Brady’s Cafe, or played baseball on the town team. Though Milo had never returned to Jericho after his parents’ move to Athens, Ben had been faithful to the train-station promise he had made in Augusta and again in Jericho: he had followed Milo’s career with a devotion that was maniacal. Each week during the baseball seasons, Ben monitored reports of the Boston Red Sox, carefully averaging Milo’s at bats and hits in leather-bound record books. It was a solemn ritual exercised each Sunday afternoon in the privacy of the storeroom in Ledford’s Dry Goods. Closed on Sundays, Ledford’s was quiet, empty, the perfect place for ritual.

  Each month, he wrote Milo a letter noting his tabulations—his tabulations, not the lies of sportswriters and faceless official score-keepers.

  Once, he had received a brief letter of appreciation from the business office of the Red Sox, and he treasured the letter. Milo had instructed them to write, he believed. Milo had not forgotten when they played baseball together in Jericho and in Augusta.

  “One of these days, I’m going to Boston to see him,” Ben said to the men who prodded him with questions about Milo.

  “When, Ben?” the men asked.

  “Someday, when I can work it out, I’m going,” was Ben’s answer.

  Each year, Ben spoke of someday, and each year he took the excuse of pressing business, too little time. He had not seen Milo Wade in six years, had not heard from him. He knew only facts—that Milo had married a woman named Mary Bishop, that he played baseball with passion that was vicious and dangerous but brilliant, that he lived in Boston in the off-season, and that he rarely returned to the South until the spring training season.

  Other than the facts, there were the rumors. Milo Wade, the writers of sports stories contended, was a madman, despised by his teammates and by opponents. He tried to hurt anyone who challenged him, fought with spectators, bullied game officials. And there were people in Jericho who believed the stories and made shaking-head opinions that had Milo betraying his refined Southern heritage and becoming a ruffian in Boston.

  “He must of changed,” they said gravely.

  “Don’t care if he never comes back here, if he’s turned out that way,” they said.

  “He may know how to play ball, but he’s not much of a man, the way he seems to be acting,” they said.

  “Hard not to be ashamed of him, if he’s doing what they writing about,” they said. “And him having such good folks.”

  Ben heard the comments and argued about them. “You can’t believe all of that. Most of it reads like it was made up, if you ask me.”

  The people smiled patiently, knowing of Ben’s boyhood with Milo. “Maybe you’re right, Ben,” they said.

  To Ben, Milo was a player who gave and took in wars with men who were mercenaries, whose hire was for a season of victories and defeats, tallied and divided like pirate loot. Those who were the mightiest earned advertisements of their deeds in colorful stories written by imaginative men fond of hyperbole. The mightiest were giants, larger than life. Powerful. Indestructible.

  Milo Wade was one of the mightiest.

  And there was something else for Ben. Milo Wade was the magnification of what he might have become—should have become. In Augusta, the difference had been an inch or less—the space of a swinging bat missing a thrown baseball. Ben had been faster than Milo, faster than any of them. He had listened eagerly, learned quickly. He had tried. God in heaven, he had tried. He had been liked by his teammates. Yet he had failed. An inch of space. A half-inch. A quarter-inch. He had failed by such fractions of space, it seemed impossible to believe.

  AT HOME, AFTER he had put away the letter he had written to Lottie, Ben ate his supper in a troubled mood that his mother had learned to tolerate with patience. She asked him, after a long silence, “Are you all right, Ben?”

  “Just tired,” Ben told her. “I had some things to take care of at the store.”

  “That why you’re late?”

  “I had some business correspondence to catch up on,” Ben said.

  His mother studied him closely. She knew he was not telling the truth, but she knew also that the lie was not dangerous. “How’s Sally?”
she asked.

  “All right,” Ben said. “I didn’t see her today. Her mother’s been sick again.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” his mother said. “But I’m glad she’s got Sally to help out. She’s such a fine young lady.”

  Ben did not reply.

  “Of course, when she’s married, she won’t be around so much.”

  “Mama, she’s just seventeen, and barely that,” Ben said.

  “I was married at seventeen,” his mother replied.

  “Well, she’s not,” Ben said. He paused over his food, thought of Sally, and a smile that he tried to hide warmed his face. “Not yet,” he added.

  His mother pried gently. “You sure nothing happened? You look like you’re upset.”

  “Nothing, Mama.”

  “Well, tomorrow’ll be better,” his mother said enthusiastically. “Always think that tomorrow’ll be better, Ben.”

  “Maybe it will, Mama. Maybe it will.”

  EIGHT

  FOR FIVE DAYS, Ben said nothing of the trip he would take.

  He knew he would not go to Boston.

  Boston would be his deception.

  He would tell his mother and Arthur Ledford and Sally that he was going to Boston, because he could not tell them about Foster, about Lottie and the baby named Ben. They would not understand. They would lecture him sternly about the foolishness of such a trip, so far away to the backwoods of Kentucky, to see people they did not know and could only imagine as being low-class.

  Even the lie about going to Boston would cause argument, Ben realized. Yet it was an argument he believed he could win. Milo Wade was in Boston, and Milo Wade was a part of his life. Everyone understood that. Everyone.

  Each night, after work, he sat at his desk in his storeroom office and reread the letter from Lottie, and he studied train schedules and maps. On the maps, Ben had circled major train stops—Athens, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Nashville. From Nashville, he would go into Kentucky, toward Bowling Green. He would depart the train at Beimer, only a few miles across the Tennessee border, and there he would find someone to direct him to the place where Foster lived.