A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (24 page)

Oh god, the cheer. The cheer went up my spine like a chiropractor. There was joy in Ohio and it went out in waves around the world. I wrote that too. Not joy at the out; joy at order restored. It was the greatest noise I’ve ever heard. I hope Billy recognized the sound.

Because what happened next, as the Cleveland Indians ran off the field like kids, and Ketchum’s mouth dropped open like the old man he would become in two minutes, surprised everyone, even me.

When the Pirates took the field (and they ran out joyfully too—it was baseball again), there was something wrong. The Pirates pitcher threw his eight warm-up pitches and one of the Cleveland players stepped into the box. That is when the Irishman umping first came skittering onto the field wheeling his arms, stopping play before it had begun, and seventy-four thousand people looked over to where I’d been staring for five minutes: first base. There was no one at first base. Sunny Billy Day had not taken the field.

I wish to this day I’d been closer to the field because I would have hopped the rail and run through the dugout to the clubhouse and found what the batboy said he found: Billy’s uniform hung in his locker, still swinging on the hanger. I asked him later if he got a glimpse of a woman in a yellow dress, but he couldn’t recall.

AND NOW
, this spring, I’m out again. I’d almost forgotten during my long season in the stands how much fun it was to play baseball. I still have a little trouble at the plate and I ride my heartbeat like a cowboy on a bad bull, but I want to play, and if I remember that and hum to myself a little while I’m in the box, it helps. The new manager is a good guy and if I can keep above .200, he’ll start me.

Oh, the Indians won the series, but it went six games and wasn’t as one-sided as you might think after such an event. Ketchum stayed in the dugout the whole time, under heavy sedation, though I never mentioned that in my stories. And I never mentioned the postcards I got later from the far island of Pago Pago. I still get them. Some-times I’ll carry one in my pocket when I go to the plate. It’s a blue-and-green place mainly, and looks like a great place for a lucky guy and a woman who looks good in summer clothing.

Sunny Billy Day was a guy with a gift. You could see it a mile away. Things came his way. Me, I’m going to have to make my own breaks, but, hey, it’s spring again and it feels like life is opening up. I’m a lot less nervous at the plate these days, and I have learned to type.

THE TABLECLOTH OF TURIN

A man, anywhere from forty to sixty, comes onto the stage. He wears glasses, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, wool slacks, and shined black shoes. Under his arm he carries a folded tablecloth. It is very large. He is also carrying a folding desk lamp, a pointer, and a packet of other small gear. The man, Leonard Christofferson, pins the tablecloth to the backdrop, sets up the desk lamp to illuminate the tablecloth, lifts the pointer, and steps toward the audience.

T
HIS IS
the seventy-first public appearance of the famed Tablecloth of Turin. My name is Leonard Christofferson, and the tablecloth and I have been traveling for almost three months now. I am an insurance investigator by trade from Ann Arbor, Michigan, but I’ve pretty much let that all go. After all, it is my tablecloth, and it is my wish to share it and show it to as many folks as I can.

In the last three months, I’ve met with a lot of skepticism about the authenticity of the cloth, but most people—when they hear the story and see the evidence—come to know as well as I do that this is the tablecloth of the Last Supper, the very cloth depicted in so many famous paintings, including Leonardo da Vinci’s, the very tablecloth over which Christ broke that bread and poured that wine.

I want to say right here: as an insurance investigator, I had many years experience with and exposure to frauds, some of them silly, some of them so well constructed as to seem genuine. We had homicides made to look like drunk driving and a bad curve; we had grand larcenies perpetrated by nephews, nieces, wives, and sons, all in cahoots with the “victim”; we had an insured Learjet go down to the bottom of Lake Michigan which upon salvage turned out to be a junked boxcar, the jet having been sold in Mexico. In my experience as a detective, I learned slowly over the years to trust nothing, nobody. It’s a terrible profession, picking through death cars and the ashes of every dry cleaner’s that burns up. The owner stands there hating you and you don’t trust him, a guy you never met before in your life. The twelve years I worked for Specific Claims in Ann Arbor were hard years on me, and they destroyed my faith in the human race.

And when I went to Italy with the Art Guild and I found, well, I was offered, this piece of white cloth, I saw my chance to turn my life around. I do not now speak nor have I ever spoken Italian, but I could see from the ardor in the man’s eyes that he too had recovered his faith and he wanted me to take care of this sacred emblem in a way that he, working in his brother’s restaurant, could never do. I paid him, left the Art Guild Renaissance trip early, flew back to Ann Arbor, and quit my job, and I have been sharing my good fortune ever since.

Enough about me. Let me show you my tablecloth.

As you can see, it’s a large one: six foot five by twenty-three feet. We have had it all chemically analyzed and I want to share our findings with you tonight. The cloth itself is one piece, constructed of rough linen, approximately fourteen threads per inch, woven on a hand loom. X-rays have revealed thirteen place settings, most of them three-piece settings of an iron clay material, which means there were over forty dishes on the table and possibly fifty, depending on how many carafes of wine were out.

This is where Christ sat. We know this not only from historical and artistic record, but also from the fact that this one space, this seat of honor, is unmarked. Under the spectrometer all the other places have revealed breadcrumbs, spilled wine, palm prints (the oil of the human hand), in one place elbow prints (someone, possibly James the Lesser, had his sleeves rolled up), but Christ’s place is clean. He not only was a careful eater, he probably didn’t have that much to eat, knowing what he knew.

Examination has also revealed some shocking new evidence:
the apostles didn’t all sit on one side of the table.
Three of the places, including the place where Judas Iscariot sat, were opposite Jesus. So: sorry, Leonardo, thanks for giving us all their faces, but the truth has three backs to the camera. We suspect that Judas sat opposite Jesus for the reasons that science has supplied. In fact, science, the ultimate detective, has unraveled the whole story of the Last Supper from this humble tablecloth.

Listen:
it was a nervous dinner.
We know this from the number of wineglass rings in the cloth itself. The men were picking up their glasses and setting them down more frequently than simply for drinking. They were playing with their glasses as if they were chess pieces.

These people would have been nervous for a number of reasons. None of the thirteen men in that room (with the possible exception of Jesus, who somehow knew the host) had ever eaten there before. Imagine it, you go to a new city, find a man carrying a pitcher of water down the street as Jesus had instructed you, and
ask him to have you
to Passover Dinner. It’s an upstairs room with a limited view. Your host, whoever he is, doesn’t eat with you. It is a strange setup. So, you’re nervous. You sit there. You’d tap your glass too, maybe as many as seventy times, like Andrew, who sat here, did.

Then during dinner, your leader starts in on some topics which any one of us might think inappropriate for the supper table. Instead of the usual reaffirming and pleasant messages, the conversation is full of hostile assertions, statements of doom and gloom. Jesus says, “Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.” Try that at home sometime, see if somebody doesn’t spill the wine. Which, our spectrometer shows, every one of the twelve disciples did, the largest spill being here, where Judas sat. In addition, traces of breadcrumbs were found here, as we found everywhere, but these were partially decomposed via the starch-splitting enzymes found in human saliva, so we know almost certainly that Mr. Iscariot, almost two thousand years before the Heimlich Maneuver, choked on his bread when Jesus said that. We don’t know who patted him on the back.

There is another large spill here (thirty-six square centimeters), and we theorize that Peter was still sitting when Jesus told him he would deny Jesus thrice before dawn. From the shape of the spill, something like a banana, it seems that Peter stood to protest, and dragged his glass with him.

Other evidence in this sacred cloth suggests that besides bread and wine, the attendees at the Last Supper enjoyed a light salad with rich vinegar and some kind of noodle dish. There was no fish. The wine was a seasoned, full-bodied red wine, which our analysis has revealed to be a California wine. This last bit of evidence has given the skeptics great joy, but I’ve got news for you. That it is a California wine does not mean that this is not the Tablecloth of Turin; it simply means that civilization in California is older than some people now think.

When I look at this magnificent cloth and see its amazing tale of love and faith and betrayal written for all to see in wine, bread, and prints of human hands, I’m suddenly made glad again that I went to Turin last fall with the Art Guild, that I met Antony Cuppolini in his brother’s restaurant, and that for some strange reason known only to God, Antony made me caretaker of this, the beautiful Tablecloth of Turin.

A KIND OF FLYING

B
Y OUR
wedding day, Brady had heard the word
luck
two hundred times. Everybody had advice, especially her sister Linda, who claimed to be “wise to me.” Linda had wisdom. She was two years older and had wisely married a serviceman, Butch Kistleburg, whose status as a GI in the army guaranteed them a life of travel and adventure. They were going to see the world. If Brady married me, Linda told everybody, she would see nothing but the inside of my carpet store.

Linda didn’t like my plans for the ceremony. She thought that letting my best man, Bobby Thorson, sing “El Paso” was a diabolical mistake.
“
‘El Paso,
’
” she said. “Why would you sing that at a wedding in Stevens Point, Wisconsin?” I told her: because I liked the song, I’m a sucker for a story, and because it was a love song, and because there
wasn’t
a song called “Stevens Point.”

“Well,” she said that day so long ago, “that is no way to wedded bliss.”

I wasn’t used to thinking of things in terms of bliss, and I had no response for her. I had been thinking of the great phrase from the song that goes “ . . . maybe tomorrow a bullet may find me . . .” and I was once again recommitted to the musical part of the program.

What raised
all
the stakes was what Brady did with the cake. She was a photographer even then and had had a show that spring in the Stevens Point Art Barn, a hilarious series of eye-tricks that everyone thought were double exposures: toy soldiers patrolling bathroom sinks and cowboys in refrigerators. Her family was pleased by what they saw as a useful hobby, but the exhibition of photographs had generally confused them.

When Brady picked up the wedding cake the morning we were wed, it stunned her, just the size of it made her grab her camera. She and Linda had taken Clover Lane, by the Gee place, and Brady pictured it all: the cake in the foreground and the church in the background, side by side.

When Brady pulled over near the cottonwoods a quarter mile from the church, Linda was not amused. She stayed in the car. Brady set the wedding cake in the middle of the road, backed up forty feet, lay down on the hardtop there, and in the rangefinder she saw the image she wanted: the bride and the groom on top of the three-tiered cake looking like they were about to step over onto the roof of the First Congregational Church. We still have the photograph. And when you see it, you always hear the next part of the story.

Linda screamed. Brady, her eye to the viewfinder, thought a truck was coming, that she was a second away from being run over on her wedding day. But it wasn’t a truck. Linda had screamed at two birds. Two crows, who had been browsing the fenceline, wheeled down and fell upon the cake, amazed to find the sweetest thing in the history of Clover Lane, and before Brady could run forward and prevent it, she saw the groom plucked from his footing, ankle deep in frosting, and rise—in the beak of the shiny black bird—up into the June-blue sky.

“Man oh man oh man,” Linda said that day to Brady. “That is a bad deal. That,” she said, squinting at the two crows, who were drifting across Old Man Gee’s alfalfa, one of them with the groom in his beak, “is a definite message.” Then Linda, who had no surplus affection for me, went on to say several other things which Brady has been good enough, all these years, to keep to herself.

When Bobby Thorson and I reached the church, Linda came out as we were unloading his guitar and said smugly, “Glen, we’re missing the groom.”

Someone called the bakery, but it was too late for a replacement, almost one o’clock. I dug through Brady’s car and found some of her guys: an Indian from Fort Apache with his hatchet raised in a nonmatrimonial gesture; the Mummy, a translucent yellow; a kneeling green soldier, his eye to his rifle; and a little blue frogman with movable arms and legs. I was getting married in fifteen minutes.

The ceremony was rich. Linda read some Emily Dickinson; my brother read some Robert Service; and then Bobby Thorson sang “El Paso,” a song about the intensities of love and a song which seemed to bewilder much of the congregation.

When Brady came up the aisle on her father’s arm, she looked like an angel, her face blanched by seriousness and—I found out later—fear of evil omens. At the altar she whispered to me, “Do you believe in symbols?” Thinking she was referring to the rings, I said, “Of course, more than ever!” Her face nearly broke. I can still see her mouth quiver.

Linda didn’t let up. During the reception when we were cutting the cake, Brady lifted the frogman from the top and Linda grabbed her hand: “Don’t you ever lick frosting from any man’s feet.”

I wanted to say, “They’re flippers, Linda,” but I held my tongue.

THAT WAS
twenty years ago this week. So much has happened. I’ve spent a thousand hours on my knees carpeting the rooms and halls and stairways of Stevens Point. Brady and I now have three boys who are good boys, but who—I expect—will not go into the carpet business. Brady has worked hard at her art. She is finished with her new book,
Obelisks,
which took her around the world twice photographing monuments. She’s a wry woman with a sense of humor as long as a country road. Though she’s done the traveling and I’ve stayed at home, whenever she sees any bird winging away, she says to me:
There you go.

And she may be kind of right with that one. There have been times when I’ve ached to drop it all and fly away with Brady. I’ve cursed the sound of airplanes overhead and then when she comes home with her camera case and dirty laundry, I’ve flown to her—and she to me. You find out day after day in a good life that your family is the journey.

And now Linda’s oldest, Trina, is getting married. We’re having a big family party here in Stevens Point. Butch and Linda have all come north for a couple of weeks. Butch has done well; he’s a lieutenant colonel. He’s stationed at Fort Bliss and they all seem to like El Paso.

Trina came into the store yesterday pretending to look at carpet. People find out you’re married for twenty years, they ask advice. What would I know? I’m just her uncle and I’ve done what I could. For years I laid carpet so my wife could be a photographer, and now she’ll be a photographer so I can retire and coach baseball. Life lies before us like some new thing.

It’s quiet in the store today. I can count sparrows on the wire across the road. My advice! She smiled yesterday when I told her. Just get married. Have a friend sing your favorite song at the wedding. Marriage, she said, what is it? Well, I said, it’s not life on a cake. It’s a bird taking your head in his beak and you walk the sky. It’s marriage. Sometimes it pinches like a bird’s mouth, but it’s definitely flying, it’s definitely a kind of flying.