Love is a Wounded Soldier (2 page)

“I guess you’re gonna have to make me stop.
Pussy.” He grinned.

I struck. My fist hit him straight in the
mouth and glanced off, the knuckle on my small finger briefly catching the
corner of his lip before powering down the left side of his face to his ear.
After that, I don’t remember the sequence. I just remember hitting, again and
again and again, and not getting hit back. I remember rage and insanity and
feeling no mercy.

When I finally brought him to his knees, I
just stood for a moment, unsure of what to do. I turned, wanting to run, but I
forced myself not to. I was the victor. I didn’t have to run. Though I was no
longer fearful, part of me just wanted to get as far away from the scene as
quickly as I could.

So I walked, leisurely, until I turned the
corner. And then I ran. I ran until my lungs screamed for oxygen and pain
stabbed my side. I ran off the road and through the hills I knew as well as my
own bedroom. I ran to my spring.

I’m sure someone else knew about my spring,
but I never saw anyone else there, unless you count deer or gobblers. My spring
was a place of retreat, a sanctuary. Somewhere I could relax, read and dream
when I needed to escape the often grim reality that my life was. Today, my
spring would once again serve its cathartic purpose.

Panting like a dog, I sat down on a piece
of limestone that jutted out over the pool and let my dusty, brown bare feet
dangle in the clear, cool water. The water gurgled gently out of a crack in the
rock before flowing down like a pint-sized waterfall into a placid, glassy
pool.

As my breaths became less ragged, I looked
down at my hands. The backs of them were smeared with dried blood. I made fists
and watched cracks appear in the smears on the skin of my knuckles, making them
look scaly. They throbbed a little, especially my right hand. I leaned forward,
scooped up a handful of water, and gently rubbed my hands together. As the
stains of blood softened and sloughed off, I could see the skin on my fingers
had red patches and some light blue bruises. The knuckle on the middle finger
of my right hand had a three-cornered tear about the size of a black-eyed pea
where it had caught onto Roy’s tooth. I carefully tugged away at the little
white flap of dead skin. It was reluctant to part with the hand it’d sworn to
protect, so I decided to let it release when it was ready. I patted my hands
mostly dry on my pants, clasped them in my lap, and turned them this way and
that, looking at them as if I’d never seen hands before. That was the first
time they’d ever really hurt someone. For a moment, I viewed them with awe, as
instruments of devastation, invincible weapons. I flexed my fingers and
imagined how mighty, how terrifying they must have looked in the heat of
battle. I traced my fingers along the lines and calluses, and thought how
strong and hard they looked. Maybe even strong enough to fight Moses.

~~~

Some kids have a pa. Some have a daddy. I
had Moses.

I don’t ever remember calling my father
anything but Moses. That’s what everyone called him, and he didn’t want to be
called anything else by anyone, not even his son. I was 10 years old before I
found a birth certificate for a Samuel Delaney Mattox in a box in the attic and
finally figured out that Samuel was his birth name.

Moses was a lion of a man, with wild eyes
that would have been a pleasant shade of blue had they not been perpetually
bloodshot and yellowed. His hair was dirty blond and his shaggy mane tumbled
down on all sides of his head, in his eyes, down the back of his neck, mingling
with the similarly-colored sideburns that tangled the sides of his face. The
top of his lip grew a broad mustache that almost concealed his mouth when he
wasn’t talking. The rest of his cheeks and jaw always seemed to have about a
week’s beard growth on them, rarely more or less.

I didn’t see that much of him growing up,
yet it still seemed I saw him too much. Moses was a drunk and a brawler. He
would spend a few days on the farm, working with a little encouragement from a
brown bottle. Then, after two days, or three, or four, if he was strong, he’d
just drop what he was doing and be gone.

One time when I was nine, I found our plow horses,
Shiver and Shake, calmly grazing unsupervised in a meadow about a quarter mile
from our yard, still hooked to the plow that had caught up on a stump. That
might have alarmed most children, but not me. That’s what happened when the
intermittent swigs from Moses’ bottle could no longer fend off his mind’s
craving to be bathed in alcohol. He would leave. Sometimes two days, or three,
or four, if he was weak.

There were times when I was younger, when
he was almost sober, that I’d see a ray of humanness in him. A faint warmth,
like light timidly shining through a clouded bulb. There were brief times I
reached toward that light, moments I thought Moses might be changing,
salvageable, lovable. But I learned soon enough not to invite disappointment by
anticipating the change that would never come: the day Moses would become Pa.
Nonetheless, I yearned for his affirmation, alternately wanting him close, and
then never wanting to see him again, until the latter feeling completely
usurped the former, and I was filled with a glowing rage that smoldered, just
waiting for a breath of an excuse to burst into a fiery fury.

~~~

There’s a day when I was 12 that
particularly stands out in my mind. The occasion was the Tobacco Road Baptist
Church annual picnic. That picnic was one of the two or three highlights of my
year, and as always, I was looking forward to the three-legged races, foot races,
relay races, horseshoes—heck, there would be more things to do than time to do
them in.

And the potluck tables would groan with a
superfluity of salads, baked beans, pig’s knuckles, great dripping slabs of
watermelon, and pies almost erupting with sweet fruit.

But as much as I anticipated the activities
and food, it was all overshadowed by one thing: baseball. That year was what I considered
to be my “breakout year.” It was the year I really learned to love playing
baseball, mostly due to the fact that my gawky limbs were learning to take
orders. Our school was too small for a team, and there was no such thing as
organized ball in our little town, so I had to be content with playing during
recess and after school with whomever we could scrape up. I played baseball
whenever I got a chance.

The picnic was on a Saturday. Moses was
about as sober as I’d ever seen him, and for reasons none of us will probably
ever know, he had decided to come with us to the picnic. Ma was happy, because
he hadn’t darkened the church door since they got married, and I think she
hoped maybe a little mingling with church folk might help turn him around.

So Ma and I climbed into our black 1917
Ford Model T, Moses cranked her to life, and we rattled our way toward Coon
Hollow, several miles down the valley. I held my worn, hand-me-down glove on my
hand and ground my fist into the faded, supple palm, imagining myself scooping
up an ankle-high line drive before flopping down on my belly in dramatic
fashion. I hoped Moses would be watching the baseball. Never was I more excited
about playing a baseball game. Moses had never seen me play, and I was
determined to put on a show.

By the time we arrived at the picnic
grounds, I'd made the difficult decision to abstain from participating in the
other games in order to save my strength for baseball, and when it came time to
dig into the mouth-watering mounds of food, I ate like a bird—partly because I
didn’t want to feel too sluggish, but mostly because I was just too nervous to
eat.

“Let’s play ball!” Deacon Wilke bellowed
through a bullhorn.

My heart bounced off my Adam’s apple and I
felt the sweat bead on my forehead. I tried to walk nonchalantly over to where
Ma and Mrs. Herman Schnell sat on an old red and white checkered picnic blanket
under the shade of a gnarly oak tree, discussing cream prices, dress patterns,
and other things of concern to women. Moses was not one to socialize, so he sat
on the other end, plucking blades of grass absentmindedly, staring distantly at
a legion of ants racing back and forth with bits of food.

I picked up my mitt from under the tree
where I’d left it and put it on slowly.

“I guess I’ll be going to play ball,” I
said to no one in particular, hoping Moses would come over to watch. He didn’t
move. I started to walk slowly past him.

“You coming to play baseball?” I asked,
trying to sound offhand, like it really didn’t matter to me if he came or not.
He took his eyes off the ant he was worrying with a blade of grass.

“I reckon I might come watch.”

Immediately, I wasn’t sure whether I felt
glad or just more anxious. Part of me was elated he was coming to watch, but
the other part felt pressure, not from him, but from myself.

He got up slowly and we walked to the
diamond. He settled down on the grass to the right of home plate, and I lined
up for picking teams. Captains were chosen, and Big Joe Daniels picked me
fourth, which I was somewhat self-satisfied with, since there were a lot of
bigger, older boys and men there. I glanced over to see if Moses had taken
note. I don’t know if I was expecting him to have a look of awe and wonder on
his face at seeing his son picked so early in the draft, but if he was bursting
with pride, he sure did hide it well.

The game commenced, and I was reasonably
happy with my performance. I was playing cautiously, defensively, wanting to be
a hero, but more concerned with avoiding looking like a fool. I would be content
with convincing Moses that I was a solid ball player, though I really wanted to
prove I was a superstar.

One inning trailed another, and the score
see-sawed back and forth. For me the score wasn’t so important as personally
doing well. I singled, doubled, and flied out. I caught a fly in left field
that was two strides away from being a spectacular catch. But until the top of
the eighth, I really hadn’t shown the prowess I’d been hoping to show. I knew
it might be my last at bat.

There was one batter out with two runners
on the corners as I approached the plate, looking askance to see if Moses was
still watching the game. He was. On most days I would have been assessing the
crowd to see if Sally Anderson was spectating. She didn’t even cross my mind. I
decided it was time to take a risk. Time to attempt a big hit.

I clutched the worn hickory bat in sweaty
palms as I approached the batter’s box and wiped my hands on the sides of my
overalls. Pulling my ball cap low, I settled into the batter’s box, scraping
the two shallow dirt troughs on the left side of the plate with my feet, like a
hog making things ready to settle down. I slowly brought the bat horizontally
over the plate, indicating the strike zone, and settled back, twitching it back
and forth in what I hoped to be a strong, catlike motion.

The sun wasn’t high, but it was intense, so
in spite of my cap, I squinted toward the pitcher’s mound as though keeping the
shards of sunlight from penetrating my eyes. Billy Thompson stood on the mound,
looking so tall it seemed he’d obscure the sun if I stood any closer. He’d
played semi-pro in Illinois as a young man, and when he’d throw a pitch, you’d
swear he could make the seams smoke. The year before he’d pitched to me like I
was a kid, and he’d been a little soft on me at the start of the game, but by
now, he was coming at me with all he had. He spat on the ground and put his
glove up near his face, so I could just see his eyes. My body started and
jerked, imperceptibly to the eye, but I could feel it, as if my over-stimulated
brain was sending minute, premature impulses to my muscles.

Billy reared back slowly, lifted his leg in
a high kick, and drove it forward as his hand whipped over his shoulder. The
ball snaked toward me. It seemed to dart away just after I decided to swing. I
swung, trying to put every ounce of my strength and weight into it. I missed
completely.

“Strike one!” “Honest Amos” McCall umpired
from behind the plate.

I moved away from the plate and tried to
settle myself down. I told myself I just needed to relax and be patient. My
heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my neck.

Moving back to the plate, I was still
unable to loosen up much. Another slow motion windup, snap of the forearm, and
the ball hurtled toward me again, looking like a carbon copy of the first
pitch. I let it go.

“Ball one!”

After another failed attempt to relieve
myself of anxiety and tension, I was back at the plate, throttling the bat so
vigorously it wouldn’t surprise me if my fingerprints are still on that bat.

The giant on the mound gathered himself up
and uncoiled like a spring as he fired his third salvo toward me. It looked
pretty good, and I took a half swing before deciding it looked a little low, so
I held off. There was a brief silence. I held my breath, waiting for the call.

“Ball two, two and one,” Honest Amos made
the call.

I let a long breath funnel through pursed
lips and rolled my shoulders back. I had to get a hit. A big hit. I didn’t want
to walk.

Settling back into the batter’s box, I
suddenly felt strong, confident. I was focused, and the bat in my hand felt
like an extension of me, another appendage. I no longer used it as a tool. I
was the bat.