Crow Fair (6 page)

By late afternoon, Owen’s parents were usually having their first cocktails. His mother gave hers some thought, looking upon it as a special treat, while his father served himself “a stiff one” in a more matter-of-fact way, his every movement expressing a conviction that he had a right to this stuff, no matter how disagreeable or lugubrious or romantic it might soon make him. He made a special point of not asking permission as he poured, with a workmanlike concentration on not spilling a drop. Owen’s mother held her drink between the tips of her fingers; his father held his in his fist. Owen could see solemnity descend on his father’s brow with the first sip, while his mother often looked apprehensive about the possible hysteria to come. Owen remembered a Saturday night when his father had air-paddled backward, collapsing into the kitchen trash can and terrifying the family boxer, Gertrude. Gertrude had bitten Owen’s father the first time she saw him drunk and now viewed him with a detachment that was similar to Owen’s.

In any event, the cocktails were Owen’s cue to head for the baseball diamond that the three Kershaw boys and their father had built in the pasture across from their house, with the help of any neighborhood kids who’d wanted to pitch in—clearing
brush, laying out the baselines and boundaries, forming the pitcher’s mound, or driving in the posts for the backstop. Doug, the eldest Kershaw boy, was already an accomplished player, with a Marty Marion infielder’s mitt and a pair of cleats. Terry, the middle son, was focused on developing his paper route and would likely be a millionaire by thirty. Ben, the youngest and sweetest, was disabled and mentally handicapped, but he loved baseball above all things; he had a statistician’s capacity for memorizing numbers and had learned to field a ball with one crippled hand and to make a respectable throw with the other. To Owen, Ben’s attributes were nothing remarkable: he had his challenges; Ben had others.

It was rare to have full teams, and occasional lone outfielders started at center field and prepared to run. Eventually, Ben was moved off first base and into the outfield. With his short arms, he couldn’t keep his foot on the bag and reach far enough for bad throws. Double plays came along only about three times a summer, and no one wanted to put them at risk. So long as Ben could identify with a renowned player who had played his position—in this case, Hoot Evers—he was happy to occupy it, and physically he did better with flies than with grounders.

Owen was happy with his George Kell spot at third base, and he didn’t intend to relinquish it. He was a poor hitter—he was trying to graduate from choking the bat, though he was still not strong enough to hold it at the grip—but his ability to cover stinging grounders close to the foul line was considered compensation for his small production at the plate. He had learned to commit late to the ball’s trajectory—grounders often changed angles, thanks to the field’s irregularities—and he went fairly early when they chose up sides. Chuck Wood went late,
despite being the most muscular boy there, as he always swung for the fence in wan hope of a home run and was widely considered a showboater. Ben was a polished bunter and could run like the wind, assuring his team of at least one man on base. He was picked early, sometimes first, but never got to be captain, because in the hand-over-hand-on-the-bat ritual for choosing sides, his hand wouldn’t fit anywhere below the label. In the beginning, Mrs. Kershaw had stuck around to make sure that he was treated fairly, announcing, “If Ben doesn’t play, nobody plays.” But now he belonged, and she restricted her supervision to meeting him as he got off the school bus and casting an authoritarian glance through the other passengers’ windows.

After a game, the equipment was stored on the back porch of the Kershaw house, where Terry ran his newspaper operation and often recruited the players to help him fold for the evening delivery. The Kershaws’ small black schipperke dog, Smudge, watched from a corner. Doug put a few drops of neat’s-foot oil in the pocket of his mitt, folded a ball into it, and placed it on the broad shelf that held shin guards, a catcher’s mask, and a cracked Hillerich & Bradsby thirty-four-inch bat that Mr. Kershaw thought could be glued. It had been a mistake to go from oak to maple, he said. Eventually, Mrs. Kershaw would appear, mopping her hands on her apron before making an announcement: “Kershaw dinner. All other players begone.” Owen and the other boys would rush out, with ceremonial doorway collisions, looking up at the sky through the trees: still light enough to play.

Owen would walk home, reflecting on the game, his hits, if he’d had any, his errors and fielding accomplishments. His parents dined late and by candlelight, in an atmosphere that was disquieting to Owen and at odds with thoughts about baseball.
He eventually gave up on family dinners altogether and fed himself on cold cereal. Sometimes he arrived home in time for an argument, his father booming over his mother’s more penetrating vehemence. There were times when his parents seemed to be entertaining themselves this way, and times when they seemed to draw blood. Owen would flip his glove onto the hall bench and slip upstairs to his room and his growing collection of hubcaps. He’d still never been caught. He had once been on probation with the Kershaws, though: Doug, hiding in the bushes with a flashlight, had caught him soaping their windows on Halloween, but winter had absolved him, and by baseball season he was back in their good graces. He still didn’t know why he had done it. The Kershaws’ was the only house he’d pranked, and it was the home of people he cherished. He’d wanted contact with them, but it had come out wrong.

Owen sat with Ben on the school bus every morning. Half asleep, his lunch box on his lap, he listened to Ben ramble on in his disjointed way about the baseball standings, his mouth falling open between assertions—“If Jerry Priddy didn’t hold the bat so high, he could hit the ball farther”—and his crooked arms mimicking the moves he described: George Kell’s signature scoop at third or Phil Rizzuto’s stretch to loosen his sleeve after throwing someone out. Only Ben, whose bed was like a pass between two mountains of
Baseball Digest
back issues, would have remembered that Priddy had torn up Rizzuto’s fan letters. Yet in almost every other way, he was slow and easily influenced by anyone who took the trouble: Mike Terrell lost a year of Kershaw baseball for sending Ben on a snipe hunt.

The MacIlhatten twins, Janet and Janice, sat at the back of the bus, two horsey, scheming freshmen who dressed alike, enjoyed pretending to be each other, and amused themselves by playing tricks on Ben, hiding his hat or talking him out of the Mars bar in his lunch box. They laughed at his blank stare or repeated everything he said until he sat silent in defeat. Idle malice was their game, and, because they were superior students, they got little resistance from adults. Not entirely pretty themselves, they were brutal to Patty Seitz and Sandy Collins, two unattractive girls unlucky enough to ride the same bus, who quietly absorbed the twins’ commentary on their skin, their hair, their Mary Jane shoes, and their Mickey Mouse lunch boxes. Only Stanley Ayotte, who was often suspended, except during football season, when he was a star, stood up to the twins, and to their intervening mother, actually calling them bitches. They flirted with Stanley anyway, though he ignored it.

Owen felt the twins’ contemplation of his friendship with Ben: they were watching. At school, they disappeared down the corridor and forgot about him, but on the bus at the end of the day they resumed their focus. His rapt absorption in Ben’s recitation of baseball statistics seemed to annoy them, but, because they understood nothing about the subject, he had been safe so far.

The school knew about Ben’s love of sports. His schoolwork was managed with compassion, but water boy for the football team was the best the teachers could come up with on the field. Still, it was a job he loved, running out in front of the crowded bleachers with a tray of water-filled paper cups.

Church. Owen hated church and fidgeted his way from beginning to end. Or maybe not all of it, not the part where he stared at some girl like Cathy Hansen, the plumber’s beautiful daughter. The moment when Cathy turned from the Communion rail, her hands clasped in front of her face in spiritual rapture, took Owen to a dazed and elevated place. He wondered how such a girl could stand to listen to a priest drone on about how to get to heaven. Cathy must have registered his attention. After Mass, she sometimes tried to exchange a pleasantry, but Owen could only impersonate disdain from his reddening face, his agony noticed with amusement by his mother, when she wasn’t gazing down the sidewalk in search of a good spot for a cigarette. After contemplating the suffering of Christ, she needed a bit of relief. Owen’s father had slipped an Ellery Queen novel into the covers of a daily missal; he kept his eye on the page, presenting a picture of piety. He saw his presence at the weekly service as an expression of his solidarity with the community, sitting, standing, or kneeling following cues provided by the parishioners around him.

The slow drive home after church was a trial for Owen, who could picture the game already under way on the Kershaws’ diamond. Slow because they had to creep past the Ingrams’ driveway. Old Bradley Ingram had married the much-younger Julie, who claimed to have been a Radio City dancer but was suspected of having been a stripper at the downtown Gaiety Burlesque House. Now they were separated. Bradley had moved into the Sheraton, and Julie was still in their home, receiving, it was said, all-night visitors. Julie did not mingle locally, and so no information could be gotten from her. The best Owen’s parents
could do was check out her driveway on the way home from church.

His father stopped the car so that they could peer between the now-unkempt box hedges. His mother said, “It’s a Buick Roadmaster.”

“I can’t see the plates. I don’t have my glasses.”

“They’re Monroe.”

“That tells us nothing.”

“Really?” His mother blew smoke at the ceiling of their Studebaker. “Last week it was a Cadillac.”

“She’s coming down in the world.”

“Not by much,” his mother said, and they drove on.

Owen was required to stay at the table for Sunday lunch, which went on until the middle of the afternoon. Usually, he missed the game.

In the hardwood forest, a shallow swamp immersed the trunks and roots of the trees near the lake. Owen and Ben hunted turtles among the waterweeds and pale aquatic flowers. The turtles sunned themselves on low branches hanging over the water, in shafts of light spotted with dancing dragonflies. Ever alert, the creatures tumbled into the swamp at the first sound, as though wiped from the branches by an unseen hand. The wild surroundings made Ben exuberant. He bent saplings to watch them recoil or shinnied up trees, and he returned home carrying things that interested him—strands of waterweed, bleached muskrat skulls, or the jack-in-the-pulpits he brought to his mother to fend off her irritation at having to wash another load of muddy clothes. Once, Owen caught two of the less-vigilant turtles, the size of
fifty-cent pieces, with poignant little feet constantly trying to get somewhere that only they knew. Owen loved their tiny perfection, the flexible undersides of their shells, the ridges down their topside that he could detect with his thumbnail. Their necks were striped yellow, and they stretched them upward in their striving. Owen made a false bottom for his lunch box with ventilation holes so that he could always have them with him, despite the rule against taking pets to school or on the school bus. He fed them flies from a bottle cap. Only Ben knew where they were.

One afternoon, Owen came back from the swamp to find the flashing beacon of the town’s fire truck illuminating the faces of curious neighbors outside his house. He ran up the short length of his driveway in time to see his mother addressing a small crowd as she stood beside two firemen in obsolete leather helmets with brass eagles fixed to their fronts. She looked slightly disheveled in a housedress and golf-club windbreaker, and she spoke in the lofty voice she used when she had been drinking, the one meant to fend off all questions: “Let he who has never had a kitchen grease fire cast the first stone!” She laughed. “Blame the television. Watching
The Guiding Light
. Mea culpa. A soufflé.” Owen felt the complete bafflement of the neighborhood as he listened. Then her tone flattened. “Look, the fire’s gone. Good night, one and all.”

Owen’s father’s car nosed up to the group. His father jumped out, tie loosened, radiating authority. He pushed straight through to the firefighters without glancing at his wife. “Handled?” The shorter of the two nodded quickly. His father spoke to the neighbors: “Looks like not much. I’ll get the details, I’m sure.” Most had wandered off toward their own homes by then, the
Kershaws among the last to go. Owen’s father turned to his wife, who was staring listlessly at the ground, placed his broad hand on the small of her back, and moved her through the front door, which he closed behind him, leaving Owen alone in the yard.

When Owen went in, his parents were sitting at opposite sides of the kitchen table, the
Free Press
spread out in front of them. The brown plastic Philco murmured a Van Patrick interview with Birdie Tebbetts: it was the seventh-inning stretch in the Indians game. Owen’s father motioned to him to have a seat, which he did while trying to get the drift of the interview. His mother didn’t look up, except to access the flip lid on her silver ashtray. She held a Parliament between her thumb and middle finger, delicately tapping the ash free with her forefinger. His father flicked the ash from his Old Gold with his thumbnail at the butt of the cigarette and made no particular effort to see that it landed in the heavy glass ashtray by his wrist. Commenting on what he had just read, his father said, “Let’s blow ’em up before they blow us up!”