Twelfth Angel

  I flipped it back to him and said, “That thing should be in a baseball museum. It was probably used by Joe DiMaggio when he was a boy.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Tim replied, a smile briefly flickering across his small face.

  I leaned down toward him and extended my hand. He took it, and I pulled him to his feet, saying, “Don’t you think it’s about time you headed home?”

  “I guess.…” He sighed.

  I pointed to his old glove. “And I believe that’s your problem—that glove. It’s tough to do any job well without good tools.”

  The little boy stroked the top of the glove softly. He was obviously too embarrassed to tell me what I suspected, that his single-parent mother couldn’t afford to buy him a new glove. I tugged at the visor of his new blue team baseball cap with the gold letter A and said, “Timothy, there’s an almost brand-new Darryl Strawberry glove at home in a closet. It belonged … to … to … my little boy … but he didn’t get many chances to use it. It’s just hanging there now. I’ll bring it for you on Thursday.”

  He stared up at me intensely. “Your little boy is dead, isn’t he?”

  “Yes … yes, he’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I just nodded. “Now, maybe you had better come a little early on Thursday so that we can play catch for a while and start getting that glove broken in, okay?”

  He nodded. “Thank you. I will. I’m sorry I lost the game. I hope the kids don’t hate me too much. I feel awful, but I’ll try harder, I promise.”

  “You’ll never give up, will you?”

  He shook his head and grinned. “Never!”

  “Very good. Now, let’s get home before it’s dark. Do you have a light on that bike of yours?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay, see you Thursday, early.”

  “Good night, Mr. Harding.”

  Just as I was opening the door to my car, Timothy pulled alongside on his bike, the tiny headlight mounted on his handlebars shining brightly in my direction. “Mr. Harding, can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course. Shoot.”

  “How did you know that you would still find me here at the park?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to the little guy, but finally I replied, “I don’t know, Timothy. I think maybe my dad told me you’d be here.”

  “Oh.”

  The bicycle turned, and its light beam began moving slowly out of the parking lot. Before it was out of sight, I heard a small voice shouting, “See you Thursday, Mr. Harding!”

  X

  Wednesday seemed to last for a week. After breakfast I tried all the time-passers I had been using lately. I jogged for perhaps an hour, worked on my pitching wedge in the backyard until I had hit at least two hundred golf balls back and forth, and tried reading, but my mind just kept wandering. I was constantly hearing voices in the other rooms. Sally? Rick? I even turned on the television set, late in the afternoon, but ten minutes with Oprah and then Phil had me diving for the “off” button. I didn’t need any more pain.

  I went to bed early, soon after the sun had set, and of course awoke before dawn on Thursday. With my eyes still closed and my head buried in my pillow, I reached across to touch Sally as I had done for so many years. Not feeling her soft body, I moved my hand gently and slowly across the width of the smooth, cool pillow before I sat upright in bed and pounded my forehead with the palm of my hand. What are you doing, dummy? Sally isn’t lying next to you. Sally is dead. Dead. And so is your baby. So is Rick. Dead. Gone! Never to return!

  I finally rose and showered. Didn’t feel much like shaving, but then I remembered our game that evening. Couldn’t let the parents of our Angels think their kids were being guided by a sloppy bum.

  After an omelet, orange juice and coffee, I went into the studio, sat at my desk and stared at the page in our Little League scorebook that Bill had used to record our first game. We had only made three hits off Gerston, singles by Zullo and Nurnberg and a double by Murphy, so there didn’t seem to be much I could do to improve the batting order based on game performance. Everyone had fielded amazingly well, except for Timothy’s costly error, considering it was our first game. Unless Bill West had any suggestions otherwise, we would go with the same lineup and batting order this evening against the Cubs, except that Paul Taylor would pitch, Justin would move to third base and Todd would play first.

  I closed the scorebook, again thinking about that terrible moment in bed when I had tried to touch my lady and there was no one to touch. I tugged at the bottom desk drawer, and it slid open easily. The ugly revolver was still resting on the glossy yellow cover of a NYNEX phone book that contained the listings for Concord residents and several neighboring towns including Boland. I reached inside the drawer but immediately withdrew my hand before making contact with the dark-blue metal.

  “Good morning, Mr. Harding.”

  I nudged the drawer closed with my right shin, acting like any kid who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Some cookie jar!

  “Rose. Good morning. I didn’t hear you come in, and I guess I forgot it was your day to clean.”

  The old gal’s smile immediately faded. “Is this a bad day, sir? I can come back some other time.”

  “No, no. Today is fine. It’s just me. Too much on my mind, I guess.”

  Rose Kelley gripped the handle of our vacuum cleaner with both hands and tilted her head sympathetically. “I’m sorry. Is there anything special I can do for you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Mr. Harding, I hope you won’t mind. I went to Maplewood Cemetery yesterday morning and said a few prayers at the grave, for Sally and Rick. It is a lovely spot on that small rise near the stone wall. Have you selected a gravestone for them as yet?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Do you go there often, to be near them?”

  I stared down at my hands.

  “Mr. Harding …?”

  I shook my head again. “I haven’t been there since the funeral, Rose. I’ve driven to the cemetery many times, but I’ve never parked the car and walked along that little path to their graves. I can’t … I just can’t bring myself to get close enough … to look down at the grass … and …”

  “Mr. Harding, please forgive me, for I am just an ignorant old cleaning woman, but you must go to the grave. You must. Not for them. For you! I remember my mother, God rest her soul, telling me an old Irish tale that she said had been passed on to her by her grandmother in County Galway. It seems that a young woman in a small village on the coast lost her only son in a fall from a cliff, and in the months that followed his burial she lived a life filled only with constant tears, anguish, heartbreak and mourning. When her dead son’s next birthday arrived, she resolved to spend the entire day at his grave, and on the way to the cemetery she stopped to buy some flowers from an old man in the village square. After paying for her cemetery posies she started to leave, but paused to watch the old flower merchant who was carefully picking all the dried leaves and stems from the lower portion of a potted plant that seemed to have no life. ‘Why are you wasting your time on that dead thing?’ she asked and he replied, ‘It is not dead. Oh, some of its leaves have finished with their lives, but see, up here, there is still some green showing in the stalk. I expect that with care and love this plant will live and produce flowers for many more years. Young lady,’ he said, ‘there are many people like plants. They suffer what is a terrible loss—perhaps a child or a wife or husband—and they allow what has happened to turn them into a shriveled stalk, empty of hope and life. On the other hand, there are many, don’t you know, who will suffer the dried-up parts to just drop off and then they go right on living and breathing and singing and smiling as they keep producing lovely flowers, year after year, just as long as God can use them.’ ”

  “Mr. Harding,” Rose continued, sounding more and more like a stern first-grade teacher as she lifted the vacuum cleaner off the rug. “We already have more than enough plant
s that have perished, back there in the woods. I don’t want to see you shrivel up in sadness until you become one of them.”

  Some time in the afternoon I remembered that I had promised to bring Rick’s almost-new baseball glove to Timothy. I went into my son’s room, walked directly to the closet without looking left or right and pushed open the sliding doors. The glove was resting on a shelf I had built low enough so that Rick could store some of his more prized possessions at a level he could reach instead of stashing everything under his bed and dresser. Beneath the glove were boxes of Chinese checkers, dominoes, Trivial Pursuit Jr. Edition and Lego. Alongside were brightly colored Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe action figures mingling with missile launchers, helicopters and Pizza Throwers, all surrounding a towering brown cylinder filled with Tinkertoy parts. Then there were the three cardboard shoe boxes filled with baseball cards. I lifted one off the shelf and held it lovingly in my hand. How many hours had Rick sat at our kitchen table, carefully transferring cards from one indexed box to another as he continued to invest most of his allowance in his collection? I reached in and randomly pulled out a card: “NOLAN RYAN, Texas Rangers.” One of Rick’s favorite players. Mine too.

  Timothy was waiting for me, pacing back and forth in the parking lot, when I arrived at exactly three-thirty as promised. He came racing over to my car, and as I stepped out, I flipped him the glove.

  “Oh … wow … this is cool!” he exclaimed as he slid his tiny left hand into the leather finger slots. Then he pounded his clenched right fist, again and again, into the darker oiled palm of the glove as he flexed the heavy leather webbing that was between thumb and forefinger.

  “Want to give it a tryout?” I asked.

  “Okay!”

  Bill West had all the team supplies and equipment in his car, but I had remembered to bring a baseball and my old glove. The two of us played catch in right field until the other players started to arrive. As Timothy and I strolled back in toward the infield, I asked him, “Does it feel comfortable on your hand?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s a very good glove, Mr. Harding. Thank you. Thank you. I’ll do better now, you wait.”

  “Day by day …, Timothy?”

  He grinned and nodded enthusiastically.

  After a scoreless first inning our guys jumped on three Cub pitchers for eleven runs, and when I sent in my three substitutes in the fourth inning, the score was already 15 to 1, so I let Chris and Dick and Timothy play the rest of the game without putting the regulars back in for the sixth inning. Final score was an embarrassing 19 to 2, and although we did get fifteen hits, the Cubs helped our cause by committing seven errors. I apologized to their manager, after the game, but Walt Hutchinson was a good sport about it all and said that the way his guys played, they deserved to get clobbered. We had two batting stars. Todd hit two home runs and a double, and Paul Taylor, besides pitching a four-hit game, striking out eight and walking only two, hit a home run and three singles. Timothy came to the plate twice during those final three innings. He struck out both times. No tears, no tantrums, no self-pity, no temperament. Instead by game’s end the gutsy kid was hoarse from cheering for his teammates, and apparently they had all forgiven him for his error costing them the first game. “Day by day, in every way, we’re getting better and better!” and “Never—never—never—never—never—never give up!” were chanted so frequently and loudly by our team, at Timothy’s urging, that the spectators immediately behind our dugout picked up on it, and soon the entire grandstand crowd on our half of the field was repeating those valiant words, over and over, “Never give up!”

  On Tuesday evening of the following week our opponents were the Pirates, managed by grandfather Tony Piso, who was also the town of Boland’s treasurer. The Pirates had won their first two games, including a 9-to-8 slugfest against Sid Marx’s Yankees, who had clipped us in the first game. We knew this was going to be a tough one, and it was. We won, 2 to 0! Todd Stevenson allowed just one hit, a scratch single between short and third, and Tank Kimball singled to deep center in the fourth inning, driving in both Zullo and Nurnberg, who had walked and been advanced to second and third by a fine Paul Taylor bunt. We totaled only five hits, all singles. Timothy did finally make contact with two pitched balls, both of which he fouled over the backstop behind home plate before striking out, but he cleanly fielded a Pirate single, which had gone between first and second, and tossed it to second in time to prevent the runner from advancing. Day by day …

  After the game I spent at least an hour shaking hands and talking to our kids’ parents. What a great thrill to finally be accepted, but even more important than their kind words was hearing the unsolicited words of praise they were repeating that had come from the mouths of their youngsters about Mr. Harding and Mr. West.

  On the following evening, Wednesday, we played Sid Marx and his Yankees for the second time. Our boys were out for revenge, and they got it. With Paul Taylor pitching another fine game, we won, 6 to 4, and this time our hitting star was Bob Murphy, who had a perfect night with two singles and a double. Two of our subs managed to get their first hits of the season. Chris Lang hit a short pop fly to right that dropped in for a single, and Dick Andros hit a hard line drive shot to left-center that went for two bases. It was a close and exciting game. Some of the parents afterward said that the difference between winning and losing had been our little cheerleader, who never stopped urging his buddies on. Timothy, now the only player on our team without at least one hit, went down swinging, once again, in his only time at bat, but he hung in there on every pitch and never gave up on himself. As Timothy was running out to his right-field position for the fifth inning, patting his teammates on the back, Bill nodded in his direction and said, “John, that kid’s heart must be so big, I’ll never understand how the Lord got it inside such a tiny body.”

  Two weeks of the six-week season were now on the books, and to our great joy and surprise the Angels were leading the league with a 3 and 1 record while the Yankees and Pirates were close behind, at 2 and 2 for each of them. We still had four weeks and eight games to play. Anything could happen.

  After that second Yankee game Sid Marx, their manager, and I had a rather long and friendly chat as we leaned against the wire backstop behind home plate. I liked Sid. We covered every possible subject, from the huge growth of the Little League program to how the kids of today compare with those of twenty and thirty years ago in ability and attitude. Sid finally said, “John, it’s getting late, and I had better get rolling before Susie starts worrying about me. It was a good game, but we’ll get you next time, I promise.”

  Driving home, I had passed through the old covered bridge and just turned right on Main Street when I saw the little guy, despite near darkness. He was moving along at a steady pace, but he stopped suddenly when I pulled my car close to the narrow grass edging that separated the sidewalk from the street. I leaned over and pushed open the car door on the passenger’s side.

  “Timothy, you’re walking home from our game?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why? Where’s your bike?”

  “The chain broke this morning. My mother took everything to the bike shop in Concord on her way to work today.”

  “Hop in and I’ll take you home.”

  “I don’t mind walking. And I don’t want to bother you. I’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”

  I tried to replace the warmth in my voice with some authority. “Hop in!”

  As soon as he was in the car and the door was closed, I said, “Now, show me the way.” Following Timothy’s instructions, we continued along Main Street through the center of town, turned right on Jefferson Avenue and after about two miles of bumpy asphalt we swung left on Route 67. We continued for about another two miles before I finally turned to Timothy and asked, “Did you walk all this distance to the ballpark today?”

  Head bowed and clutching his new glove to his chest, he looked up at me through those long brown lashes and nodded, hesitatingly, as if he had bee
n caught in some crime.

  “Good Lord, how long did it take you to go from your house to the field?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “I don’t know. I left the house around two o’clock, right after I made a peanut butter sandwich for my lunch. My mom had to go to work early today.”

  Suddenly he sat upright and pointed. “See that mailbox, Mr. Harding? It’s ours. Turn right, just after we pass it, on the dirt road. Our house is only a little ways in the woods there.”

  I did as I was told, driving along slowly and carefully on the narrow, rutted lane for perhaps a hundred yards before the beams of my headlights reflected off the front of a shabby wooden structure that looked like a storage area for wood or farm equipment. Many of the unpainted clapboards along the front of the shack were missing or cracked, and there was a large area, near one corner, where someone had nailed a large and unpainted square piece of plywood. A light shone from the uncurtained window to the left of the doorway, while more plywood was nailed across the window frame to the right. Off to the side, parked under several pine trees, was a rusting blue Renault sedan.

  “That’s my mom’s car,” Timothy explained. “She says it runs a lot better than it looks … and it does.”

  An uncovered, fly-specked light bulb shone above the front door, which opened slowly as a woman stepped out onto the landing, raising both her hands to cover her eyes. I immediately turned off my headlights. “That’s my mom,” Tim announced as we were both getting out of the car. I followed him to the steps, which were only cinder blocks piled loosely atop one another.

  She was standing nervously and uncertainly just outside the door, grasping the doorknob with one hand and her apron with the other. “Good evening, Mrs. Noble. I’m Timothy’s Little League manager, John Harding. Saw him walking home tonight, so I thought I’d give him a lift.”

  Her voice sounded both youthful and weary, which was probably a good description of her appearance as well. “That is so nice of you, Mr. Harding. Won’t you please come in?”