A Quality of Light (10 page)

Science and math were being replaced by something far grander in scope and magnitude. Each time we arrived behind that equipment shed became like an arrival at a shrine. Our feet hit the soil of that playing area and it was like stepping into our true selves. Together. Baseball became the root of our friendship and it manifested itself in the grunts and groans, sweat and smiles of the challenge of playing a simple game at a high level. Each level of technique and experiment brought us closer. Every element of grace our ten-year-old bodies were able to bring to our play transferred itself by osmosis to the fiber of our friendship.

Finally, unable to keep her knowledge of the secret any longer, my mother said one night as we prepared to dash from the table, “Okay. Just what is it you two have been up to all this time? What are you doing out there?”

And I will never forget the words Johnny used.

“We’re inventing baseball.”

I
lived in a family whose lives flowed forward like the supple line of hills beyond our farm. There were no distances to be traveled, no geographies charted or destinations planned beyond the faith that we would all gather together in a common place when the
journey of living was over. Kane family tradition, steeped in a rich Protestant farmer history, meant only that compliance to the will of God, obedience to His commandments and working demonstrations of those precepts in our daily lives were all the plan and plotting that were needed. “Becoming” was a process dictated only by the anonymous hand of loving kindness that connected everything.

There were no arguments and there was no control other than the nurturing guidance my parents provided me. I was encouraged to look in books besides the Bible for the ways of the world beyond the borders of our small farm, and the only silly question that existed for me then was the one that went away unasked.

My parents knew the ways of that outside world and unlike more fundamentalist believers, encouraged me to encounter it, experience and learn from it. They were there like sentinels, watching over me, providing me with answers as they were needed and sheltering me only with the knowledge that my home and my God were my safety, my refuge and my source of strength. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be there. Stepping into my life each morning of my childhood was like stepping into an old and favorite pair of slippers, finding them loose and comfortable. Slipping out of that life each evening was like the dimming of a lamp, gradual and easy with no sudden rise of shadow.

“Josh?”

Yeah?”

“Do you think I could come and stay with you guys?” “Stay with us?”

“Yeah. Not always. Just sometimes.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Just sometimes.”

“I guess. I’ll ask, okay?”

“Hey, thanks, Josh.”

I was the only one surprised by Johnny’s question. My parents reacted almost as though they’d been expecting it. My dad lay down his fork slowly and deliberately and my mother straightened slowly in her chair like they always did when there was a decision
to be made about the farm or money. I looked at them and waited. My dad rested his forearms on the table and looked at me with an expression that was as close to sadness as I could remember seeing on his face. My mother sighed softly and cradled her hands in her lap.

“We can’t do that, son. I’m sorry,” he said.

“We’d like to, Joshua. We’d really like to. We love John and we want to help him … But we can’t. Not right now,” my mother said.

“He doesn’t want help,” I said. “He just wants to stay with us sometimes.”

“In his own way, son, Johnny’s asking us to help him,” my father said.

“Help him with what?”

“With his life, son,” my mother said and reached over to pat my hand. “Johnny’s not having a very happy life at home.”

“How come?”

“Well, do you remember when we drove him home the first time? The way his dad was?” my father asked.

“You said he was drunk.”

“That’s right. Do you remember what I told you about people who drink too much?”

“Yeah. You said sometimes they don’t care what they say, how they say it or who they say it to.”

He smiled. “That’s right, son. Well, Ben Gebhardt doesn’t care a lot of the time. It’s not so bad a thing to drink in your home, that’s a person’s choice. But Ben drinks everywhere.”

“Everywhere?”

“Yes. Even at the store. People have been talking about how he smells like liquor most of the time and how forgetful he is about things.”

“Gordon Shaus needed a big crescent wrench to adjust the auger in his granary,” my mother explained. “He told Mr. Gebhardt what he needed and why and told him it was important that he have it quickly. Mr. Gebhardt said he’d order it and never did. He forgot.”

My dad said, “I drove into town one day for wood screws. Ben was dropping them all over the floor trying to get them out of the tray because his hands were shaking so much. He needed a drink, son.”

“When someone drinks all the time they get so that they need it all the time,” my mother said. “Their body needs it. When their body doesn’t get it, or get enough, they start to shake. They get sick.”

“Mr. Gebhardt’s sick?”

“Yes, Joshua,” my mother said softly.

“Should he go to the hospital?”

“Well, maybe, son.” My father looked at me affectionately. “But Ben’s sick in a different way.” He looked at my mother.

“Remember King David?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Remember how in one of the Psalms David cries out to the Lord?”

“Yeah. His heart is heavy, you said. Mr. Gebhardt’s heart is heavy?”

“Yes. He’s sad inside. That’s why he drinks,” she explained.

“But what made him sad inside?”

“No one knows that but Mr. Gebhardt himself,” my mother said.

“Can’t we help him?”

“Son, the only way we can help Ben and his family is to stay out of things right now,” my dad said. “That’s why we can’t help John by letting him stay with us. Even sometimes. See, Ben’s got to get to the point where he can’t stand himself drinking. Until he does that, nothing anyone else can do will help him.”

“And letting Johnny stay with us wouldn’t be helping him?”

“That’s right,” my mother said. “But for now we can be John’s friends and support him and show him our love. But we can’t interfere with family business, even though we’d like to. But Mr. Gebhardt can’t recover if we step in and interfere.”

“What’s recover?”

She smiled. “It’s what everyone who gets a heavy heart needs to do. You know when our calves are born and they slide out of their mother’s belly all covered in wet, gooey slime?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, when we’re born we’re covered in that too. Every baby is. It’s what God sends babies into the world with to protect them before their mothers can take over. But we’re covered in other things too.”

“Like what?”

“Well, when God gives us life He brings us out into the world covered in His love. And His love is made up of things like kindness, gentleness, honesty, forgiveness, humility and respect, loyalty and love itself. We’re all born covered in those things, right, Ezra?”

“Yes, Mother. That’s how we’re born, son. All of us. But then, Joshua, we start to move around in our lives and sometimes, well, life is hard. Sometimes it’s so hard that those things we’re born with get rubbed off. That protective coating gets removed somehow and we get heavy-hearted. Some people don’t know how to deal with their heavy hearts and they drink. When they do the alcohol removes the last part of that covering. It gets washed off.”

“But God never forgets us. Even if we forget Him,” my mother explained. “He knows how much we need that covering to protect us and He allows us to hurt. When we hurt enough and we turn to Him for help, He allows us to begin to
re
-cover ourselves in His love, with all of those things we come covered in. But we have to
want
to. No one can make us and no one can tell us. We have to want it.”

“So sometimes God lets us get sick?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“And then He lets us make ourselves better? To recover ourselves?”

“With His help, yes.”

“Right in our home.”

“Right in our home,” she echoed.

“I like that. God’s kind of like Doc Niedermayer.”

“How’s that, son?” my dad asked.

“Well … He’s still willing to make house calls.”

They laughed.

B
aseball had become more than a game and more than a trial, because we had come to love it. It had become a part of who we were, part of our smell, our laughter, how we looked at things, the way we felt when we held it, and something that always made us bigger somehow. Inventing baseball, he had said. I guess all of us invent the things we love. Losing ourselves so completely in the nuance and gesture of things and people that it’s like they never existed before — like
we
never existed before. Almost as if they had slid from the ether whole and complete. Like they entered the world and walked straight towards us, embraced us, enfolded us, gave us breath. That’s what invention is, I guess — the discovery at the end that it’s ourselves we’ve created. Love too. We become more through love and invention. Johnny and I invented baseball behind the equipment shed and we grew to love it just as we grew to love each other. Every running catch, every pin-point throw, every scooped grounder became another entrance we made together. Each day we saw and felt and experienced the game more and more, and along the way we saw and felt and experienced each other more, too.

“Josh?”

“Yeah?”

“You ever wanna be someone else?”

“Someone else?”

“Yeah. Like you feel like your skin’s too tight or something and you just wanna walk around in someone else’s for a while?”

“No. Why? You?” I asked.

“Yeah. Most of the time,” he said quietly.

“Why?”

“I dunno. My dad, I guess. He makes me wanna be
anyone
else.”

“Because he drinks?”

“Yeah. Because of that. Other stuff too, though.”

“What other stuff?” I probed gently.

“Like his arms.”

“His arms?”

“Yeah. I don’t know how they feel. Only his hands. I only know how his hands feel.”

“How’s that?”

“Tough. Tough and cold and hard. And … empty.”

“Sorry.”

“Me too. Josh?”

“Yeah?”

“How does it feel to be held?”

“Well, it feels kinda warm and safe and good.”

“I believe that.”

“Johnny?”

“Yeah?”

“You think maybe the difference between a good hitter and a poor one’s how much they been held?”

“Yeah. The good one’s haven’t been. So they’re pissed off enough to hit with power!”

W
ith two weeks to go before the tournament, Johnny and I could throw from the outfield and hit each other’s strike zone. We were good. Together we’d traveled the distance between ineptness and proficiency. Now we could charge a rolling grounder, scoop it and throw in one easy sweeping motion. Casually, almost, we’d throw up a gloved hand to snare the ball. We began to play with the nonchalant confidence that marks the beginning of second nature. But there was more. Despite all the hours of pantomime in front of my mirror, we still hadn’t actually hit a ball. We knew the science of it all. We understood the singular physics that surrounds the process of hitting a baseball, but we hadn’t actually
done
it. Neither of us could figure out how we were going to get our hands on a bat, and Johnny had even gone to the trouble of cutting a
broom handle to a thirty-two-inch length so we could practice with that. It snapped after three whacks.