“Eleanor
We deplore.
Hey, huddy, what’s it to yah?
“We regret
Eliot,
Their sorry naval joon-yah!
“Let’s debar
FDR!
Make flea-bit Fala Pooh-Bah!”
Taking the whistles and applause, Sloan and his Disgusting Associates bowed to this side and that. (Fala was Roosevelt ’s Scotty dog and traveling buddy, a regular Fido Firstus.) Henry and I stamped and clapped along with the others. The colonel sank into his seat like a punctured bounce-back toy, rigidly facing front.
Mister JayMac shook his head and shooed us off the bus. “Beat it, yall! Quicklime!”
We filed down the aisle stamping our feet. As we jostled along, every player but me chanted “Shout, ‘Glory Hallelujah!’ ” or “Make flea-bit Fala Pooh-Bah!”
Mariani pitched the first game, and I started at short. Pregame ceremonies included a War Bonds spiel by a wounded vet, Mister JayMac’s welcome, and the colored accordionist Graham Jackson playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a black choir, dressed in phony plantation garb, sang the lyrics.
The President and his party hadn’t arrived yet; and few folks in the stands understood we expected such a distinguished visitor and sports fan, one of the men who’d kept pro baseball from shutting down for the war. Still, Mister JayMac refused to delay the doubleheader’s start.
Bottom of the first, I poked one down the right-field line with my new Red Stix bat. It felt good, that double, almost like it wiped from my past everything that’d happened on Friday night: my gin binge, the trip to The Wing & Thigh, my no-show at Phoebe’s house, and Henry’s cavalry-to-the-rescue routine. Charlie Snow drove me home with a single up the middle. In our first at bat, in fact, we sent another six men to the plate and scored two more runs.
Between innings, I heard sirens screaming just outside the stadium. They came closer and closer, eking up higher in pitch and volume until yard dogs began to howl and many people in the stands covered their ears.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Frye announced over the PA system, “it’s the one hundred and sixty-seventh anniversary of this great nation, but the first time ever that the President of the United States has attended a baseball game in Highbridge or any other CVL city. All rise!” As if FDR was a judge and McKissic Field a courtroom.
I’d already made my way to my shortstop position. When our old military-band recording of the national anthem began to play, I didn’t have to rise. The fans, though, buckled upward en masse, craning their necks trying to catch sight of the most famous man-forget John D. Rockefeller or Clark Gable-in the whole United States. The sirens outside the stadium stopped about the time the anthem’s rockets began to glare red and its bombs to burst in air.
Then, because the President hadn’t made his entrance by song’s end, Frye played it again. And a third time, with folks forgetting proper hand-over-heart protocol, before a guard of uniformed Marines and helmeted soldiers marched in over the brand-new ramp system. Behind them, some wheelchair outriders in suits appeared at the top of a plywood slope. They ushered in the waving President, a man until then bashful of exposing himself in such an “unmanly” state. On that Fourth, though, he rode, head high, to the caged box seat behind our dugout. Once the military guard’d peeled off, in fact, I could see the Prez as well as, or better than, anybody else in the park.
I couldn’t believe it. Me, a kid from nowhere, standing maybe fifty yards from the only three-term chief executive in the history of our land. My nape hairs did the Wave decades before that cheer even got invented.
Know what kept rippling through my gray matter, though? He didn’t see my first hit. What if I don’t get another?
Except for the smudges under his eyes and the dents in his cheeks, Mr Roosevelt looked spiffy, a lot like Francis X. Bushman or some other silent-screen actor. Cool white linen suit, dapper straw snapbrim, fluffy polka-dot bow tie.
Someone’d rigged a microphone at chest height-for a fella in a wheelchair, that is-and the President’s primary pusher-a Secret Service agent?-slipped him up to it. Ball-players and fans alike’d started cheering. The cheering swelled until it swamped the “home of the brave” finale of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Prez met the hullabaloo with head nods, his arms in the air like those of some raptured Holy Roller, his smile as wide as Tennessee.
The President’s “private” box filled up: military guards and Secret Service men, a bigwig or two from FDR’s staff, and, to my hefty surprise, Colonel and Mrs Elshtain, Miss Giselle, and LaRaina and Phoebe Pharram. In his shirt sleeves, Mister JayMac himself climbed up on our dugout’s tarpapered roof and walked over to the Chief to shake his hand and welcome him to Highbridge.
Amid this tumult, Colonel Elshtain stood in the box rocking up and back on his toes and smirking like a Siamese with a goldfish tail showing between its lips. No wonder “The Battle Hymn of the Repugnant” hadn’t amused him.
The cheering didn’t die. Coloreds and whites alike cheered FDR, the coloreds from the bleachers seats or in their spots as groundskeepers, custodians, and snack vendors. A few people-mostly women-cried. The war’d turned FDR into a god for many folks, even conservative whites. The blacks liked him because his missus spoke out for fairness and entertained Negro leaders in the White House.
The President quieted us with some calm-down hand gestures and an attempt to use the mike: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you please…” That wide chin-up smile again. “By gosh, this is a splendid reception, and I’m delighted to be here. Indeed, my apologies for interrupting your game, coming in like the Caliph of Baghdad. Goodness knows, today we celebrate American independence, not the bondage of our national pastime to my holiday travel schedule.”
He talked on like that for a minute and then gave up the mike to Mister JayMac, who summoned Graham Jackson and the plantation singers-favorites of FDR’s from his stays at Cason Callaway’s Blue Springs -back to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” again. That made five times we’d heard it in forty minutes, but our fans shouted “Play ball!” afterwards as loudly as they had every other time.
Mr Roosevelt bumped up to the mike again: “Later today, ask your neighbors if they heard about the accident here at McKissic Field. When they say, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t,’ tell em, ‘An Opelika player leaned on his bat so long waiting for the game to resume that termites ate the handle out and he fell and broke his back.’ ” The President threw back his head and guffawed, then leaned again into the mike: “I love it! Don’t you just love it!” They surely did. We all did. Even the Orphans broke up, slapping one another on the back and catcalling Max Delaney, the hitter in the on-deck circle.
“If Delaney had an ounce of sense, he’d fall down and grab his back,” Curriden told me. “But the palooka aint got roach shit for brains.”