The House of Daniel (50 page)

Kesselring? I don't think I ever knew his family name. He was always just Big Stu to me, and to everybody else. I read the last sentence about five times. Either it meant they were crazy or it meant somebody with all kinds of clout didn't want any questions asked. I couldn't be sure, not from halfway across the country, but I knew which way I'd bet.

“You all right, Snake? Is it bad news?” Eddie asked.

“Nooo,” I said slowly. And it wasn't, even if it made me feel funny. I went on, “Just a line from somebody in my home town who figured out how to get hold of me. News from back there startled me a bit.”

He knew I wasn't telling everything there was to tell. Eddie was no dope. But he was a gent. He didn't push me about it. Neither did anyone else.

*   *   *

Mich heard about Big Stu from me, and then not long afterwards from her brother. She wasn't sorry to find out she didn't have to worry about him any more. Well, neither was I. I did kinda wonder, though. Did Charlie Carstairs have enough clout to arrange something like what happened to him? I never said anything about that to her. If she wondered, too, she never said anything to me, either—or, as far as I know, to Charlie. That was bound to be just as well.

As things worked out, I quit playing for the House of Daniel about ten days before the bus headed off to Arizona or Nevada or wherever it was going next. By then, Harv had found a guy he could put in the outfield without wanting to slit his wrists, so he didn't grouse. I left early because J. N. Hill, who owned the feed and pet store, knew a fella who had a building-supply business and was looking for a man with a strong back to give him a hand.

I went down to talk to the fella. His place was on Redondo, a couple of miles south of Todd Park. It was at the edge of a slough. Big white egrets and even bigger herons stood in the muddy water amongst the reeds, waiting for a fish to swim by.

Ken Howard—that was the fella's name—took one look at me and said, “You'll lose the whiskers, right?”

“Huh?” I rubbed my chin. I was so used to them, half the time I forgot I had 'em. “Oh, sure. Whatever you want. I grew 'em for the baseball team.”

“That's fine. But you'll be working for me from now on.” He was a great big, burly man, but he looked sharp, too. “Here. I'll take you around, show you what you'll be doing.”

Most of it was getting bricks and sacks of cement and lumber and the like into a truck, driving 'em where they needed to go, and taking 'em out again. I'd have a forklift to help at his end, but only a wheelbarrow at the other. It was a lot harder than playing center for the House of Daniel. It paid worse, too. But I'd be in town with Mich, and I'd have Saturdays and Sundays off, or time and a half if I had to go in on Saturday.

I took the job. If that wasn't love, I don't know what would be.

First thing I bought was a pair of sturdy leather gloves. Ken Howard didn't bother with 'em. He had calluses so thick, he could stub out a cigarette in the palm of his hand and not hurt himself a bit. I needed a good feel, though, if I was gonna keep playing ball.

I rented a room, too, a bigger one than Mich's. After we got married a couple of months later, she moved in with me. When we weren't too tired on account of we were both working our tails off, we were very happy together. We were still happy even when we were too tired to do anything about it, only in a different way.

And I got back to playing ball again. A company not far from where I roomed turned out what they called drizzle boots. Yeah, they were just what you'd think: rubber overshoes to keep your feet dry when it rained. They sold 'em all over the country, not just in Los Angeles, or they wouldn't have stayed in business long.

They had a team, called, naturally, the Gardena Galoshes. When I wanted to join, they asked me where I'd played before. I told 'em about the Enid Eagles, and I could see that didn't mean much one way or the other. Then I said, “And the House of Daniel.” As soon as they decided they believed me, they wanted me, all right.

They weren't
much
of a team. Even next to the Eagles, they seemed pretty sorry. I hit second for them. With just a tad more power, I could've hit third … and I've already told you, any team where I hit third wouldn't be much. But you know what? I didn't care. Just getting out there was fun, and we picked up a few extra bucks.

And pretty soon, I was driving a forklift at the drizzle-boots factory, and doing the other odds jobs around there that needed doing. They paid me better than Ken Howard did. The work wasn't as wearing, either. I'm not knocking Ken. He gave me a job when I needed one bad, and he didn't have me do anything he wasn't doing himself. But he was six inches taller than I was, and outweighed me by seventy-five pounds. It came easier to him.

We needed the money that came with the new job. Pretty soon, Mich found herself in a family way. That kept her from working for a good while, and we started renting a house instead of a room. I would've liked to buy, not rent, but you do what you can, not what you'd like to.

If Sarah Jane Spivey wasn't the cutest baby ever born, I have no idea who could've been. Maybe her ma. But having a baby complicates your life all kinds of ways. Some you can see ahead of time. Some are surprises. You worry about the future even if you'd never thought past day after tomorrow, for instance. You get more frazzled than you ever had before, too. So does your wife.

We're still going. Dunno how Mich does it. Me, I try to take it the same way I took playing for the House of Daniel. You can have yourself a good game, or you can have a lousy one. Either way, though, you can't let it get to you too much. Because you always have to remember: there's another game tomorrow, and one more the day after that. So you go on. And we're going on. Another baby due in a few months. Maybe this one'll be a boy.

 

Author's Note

The House of Daniel
never would have happened if Peter Beagle and I hadn't talked baseball through dinner at a Korean barbecue place in Los Angeles. Peter is the same kind of obsessive fan I am. His memory goes back even further than mine does, and we both know a lot about things neither one of us can remember. The conversation got me thinking, and this book sprang from those thoughts. Peter isn't to blame for any infelicities and mistakes here. They're all mine.

Obviously,
The House of Daniel
isn't set in our world. We have no zombies, vampires, werewolves, elementals, and the like. The guy juggling oranges in Denver springs from my wife's evil imagination, not mine. And nothing I say about the fictional House of Daniel and its beliefs should be taken as reflecting on the real House of David and its … although the real House of David did sponsor a real semipro team of long-haired, bearded baseball players.

By the same token, my fictional 1934
Denver Post
Tournament is not set up the same way as the real 1934
Denver Post
Tournament. Not all my participants are the same or modeled after the same real teams. The House of David did win the real tournament, with Satchel Paige and Grover Cleveland Alexander on their pitching staff. They did beat the Negro League Kansas City Monarchs for the title. So far as I know, there were no zombie riots in the real Denver.

Up into the early 1950s, semipro baseball was a huge part of the sport. It never quite disappeared altogether, but television killed its importance in the larger scheme of things. Most towns of any size at all in the 1930s would have a semipro team; most medium-sized cities would have semipro leagues. They were talent sources and sometimes farm teams for the minors and the majors. A lot of minor leagues were fly-by-night operations, and the Depression hit them hard, as it hit the whole country hard. Where what they called organized baseball failed, less organized and less expensive clubs carried on.

Most of this is forgotten now. Hardly anyone who played then or who watched those games is left alive. Statistics and records were kept erratically or not kept at all. Even when they were kept, many of them are lost now or buried in microfilm of small-town papers. Some do still survive, though. I've mined what I could for team names and park names and dimensions. Baseball is the game for historians. If you dig, you can often find things. And I'll say what shouldn't need saying: for anyone writing about the United States in the second quarter of the twentieth century, WPA Guides are absolutely indispensable.

But
The House of Daniel
is fiction. I am allowed to make things up, and I have. Do your own digging before you trust anything I say in here about some vanished team or ballpark. I will tell you straight off the bat that Todd Field in Gardena is entirely fictitious, and I've scrambled the streets and how they run. That's the town I grew up in, and I take a native's privilege in goofing with it. I sure wish that ballpark had been there, though!

Two names in
The House of Daniel
are real, because I couldn't make up any so perfect. Sad Slim Smith really did manage the Bohemian Brewers in Spokane in the mid-1930s. And Cliff Ditto did manage in Walla Walla … but in the 1970s. I hope his shade won't mind my moving him in time.

 

TOR BOOKS BY
HARRY TURTLEDOVE

Between the Rivers

Conan of Venarium

The Two Georges
(by Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove)

Household Gods
(by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove)

The First Heroes
(edited by Harry Turtledove and Noreen Doyle)

DARKNESS

Into the Darkness

Darkness Descending

Through the Darkness

Rulers of the Darkness

Jaws of Darkness

Out of the Darkness

CROSSTIME TRAFFIC

Gunpowder Empire

Curious Notions

In High Places

The Disunited States of America

The Gladiator

The Valley-Westside War

WRITING AS H. N. TURTELTAUB

Justinian

Over the Wine-Dark Sea

The Gryphon's Skull

The Sacred Land

Owls to Athens

 

About the Author

Harry Turtledove
lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the novelist Laura Frankos. He is a winner of science fiction's Hugo Award and of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History fiction. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

 

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