Given that the CVL season had only half the number of games played by the majors, Henry had a better home-run percentage than Ruth’d had in his top three seasons with the Yankees. In the bigs, with the same homer percentage he’d had in Highbridge, Henry would’ve hit eighty-two! Even Lanett’s fans cheered when the third of his blasts sailed over the right-field wall into an egret-lined branch of the Chattahoochee.
In the same series, I did okay myself-seven hits in eight at bats. Every time Henry walloped a fence-clearer, I trotted home ahead of him. In fact, all of us feasted on Linenmaker pitching, and when we left on Saturday morning for Opelika, we rolled out with a certain greedy regret. Our second victory in Lanett, coupled with a rare Gendarme loss to the Boll Weevils, had lifted us into another first-place tie.
Lou Ed Dew, manager of the Orphans, had his team loaded for Hellbender. They’d dropped six games back and could finish in a tie for first only if they won all six of their remaining games while we and the Gendarmes booted ours. In other words, the Orphans had no chance-we concluded our season with three home games against LaGrange. Either the Hellbenders or the Gendarmes would win the pennant. The Orphans still had a shot at second, though, and a chance to scuttle our dreams before we returned home. Lou Ed Dew meant to scuttle em.
That weekend series-a doubleheader on Saturday and a singleton on Sunday afternoon-turned prickly as soon as the Orphans’ ace, Smiley Clough, took the mound. He threw high and tight at least once a batsman, a whistling low-bridger loosed with an oops-I-didn’t-mean-to-do-that smirk. You didn’t know whether to go after Clough with your bat or to sympathize with his control problems. Time we realized he needed his skull cracked and his smirk rubbed south, Clough had a deuce-to-zip lead and a breaking ball Nutter swore took its unhittable kink from a smear of KY jelly. Whatever, Clough went the full nine innings and shut us out.
The second game of the twin bill didn’t go much better. Dew had scared up a gangleshanks kid from the Florida pan-handle to pitch for him, a kid named Marion Root. Root threw a sidearm speedball that shrunk a fraction of an inch for every foot it covered to the plate. By the time it reached us, it looked like a petrified hummingbird’s egg.
ROOT FOR ROOT said a banner in the outfield. Orphan fans did, and he carried a two-hitter into the ninth.
Luckily, so’d our own sodbuster ace, Fadeaway Ankers, and in our last bat before extra innings, Henry polewhacked a Root hummingbird egg all the way to Sea Island, scoring himself and Worthy Bebout, who’d taken a sidearm fastball in the ribs swinging for the bleachers. We held on in the bottom half of the inning for a two-to-goose-egg win. The split kept us in a tie for first with LaGrange.
That night Henry told me Marion Root’d go up to the bigs. Not only that, Henry said, but Root would make a reputation for himself the equal of Bob Feller’s or Johnny Vander Meer’s. Not long after he’d pitched against us, though, Root reported for induction into the Army and spent the next seventeen weeks at the Infantry Replacement Center at Camp Wheeler near Augusta. He died the next winter at Anzio with the U.S. 45th Division, two weeks after going overseas.
Sunday’s game against Opelika deserves no commemoration. We lost it. The score was sixteen to three, and none of our runs was earned. No excuses-the Orphans wrapped, waxed, and shellacked us.
One truly screwy thing did happen in the bottom of the eighth. On an easy liner to center, Bebout cried, “Woodrow! Woodrow, you take it!” and dropped to his knees. The ball carried over Bebout’s head, allowing two runners to score and the hitter to reach third as Skinny hurried to chase it down.
“What the hell was that?” Curriden yelled at Bebout.
“He missed it!” Bebout shouted. “My sorry brother flat-out missed it!”
Amazingly, the Gendarmes lost to the Eufaula Mudcats in the Prefecture. The entire season, then, boiled down to our final three games against them at McKissic Field.
54
Almost every day the Herald featured the Hellbenders in the right-hand column on its sports page. Once they ran a photo of me-my bleached-out face and chest above the inky smudge of my knickerbockers-under the headline “Tenkiller Speedster Hopes to Help / Our Hellbenders Lug the Bunting.”
A husky spinster lady who used the byline O. A. Drummond had written the piece, with more appeal to front-office press releases than to interviews or personal reporting. You often saw Miz Drummond at the stadium, dressed, even in the dog-days humidity and glare, like a fox-hunting freak: knee-high boots, tweed skirt, puff-sleeved blouse, snap-brim tweed hat. She never visited the clubhouse-the Hellbenders would’ve hooted her out in a skink’s eyeblink-but always sat at a typewriter in the press box, three chairs from Milt Frye.
Anyway, I’d sent a copy of Miz Drummond’s story to Mama and folded another copy into my wallet as a pick-me-up after a poor performance. Not long after getting my vocal cords back, I’d gone to Double Dunnagin with my ratty clipping and showed it to him.
“Whattuz l-l-lug the b-b-bunting m-mean?”
“To win the pennant, kid.”
“So why d-didn’t sh-she say s-s-so?”
“Cause she’s a writer and lug the bunting’s more poetic You oughta be asking Sloan.”
By the end of August, though, we’d put ourselves in a place to lug the bunting, for real, and Miz Drummond’s daily squib for the Herald was plugging the final LaGrange series like the next Joe Louis bout-twice on the front page, next to wire reports about U. S. naval operations around New Guinea and the Solomons. Highbridge had pennant fever. If FDR wanted the CVL and Mister JayMac’s club to boost the morale of our locals, well, we were doing a bang-up job. Even a runt like Trapdoor Evans-speaking talentwise-couldn’t walk through the farmer’s market without drawing autograph hounds.
Henry didn’t borrow Mister JayMac’s Caddy on any of our off days leading up to Friday’s game. Far as I could tell, he didn’t once rendezvous in the victory garden or in Darius’s old room with Miss Giselle. He slept in his own bed, getting six or seven hours of shuteye a night. He read two very brainy books Anatole Maguin’s The Pariah and Victor-René Durastante’s Self-Evolution and Self-Extinguishment. (I jotted the titles down in my notebook.) He’d focus on two pages at once, close his eyes like a camera shutter, and then page forward again-a method I hadn’t seen him use before, like maybe he wanted to speed up his reading to beat the end of the season.
“Those any g-good?” I asked him about his books.
“Provocative. I wish I had them in the original French, but Mrs Hocking could get them only in these somewhat clumsy translations.” He finished the shorter book-the Maguin-in an hour, but spent most of one afternoon on the Durastante.
What Henry did Thursday and Friday, I don’t know. I took Phoebe to a matinee at the Exotic on Thursday (Above Suspicion with Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray) and spent my entire Friday-until going to the ballpark-clerking with her at Hitch & Shirleen’s.
We didn’t moon over each other, or try to smooch, or even spend much time holding hands. We just hung around and talked, or hung around and didn’t talk, and that horrible morning in her house over to Cotton Creek fell further into our pasts, like it’d happened in ’38 to somebody else. When Phoebe had to wait on a customer or ring up a sale, I sat on a stool behind the counter and struggled to read The Pariah.
“That any good, Ichabod?”
“I d-dunno. Not much happens. This Frenchie in Senegal lives for a year in the basement of a government b-b-building, and nobody knows he’s there. Or’d c-care if they did.”