“You’ve lost a button,” he said. “Give me your shirt.”
I undid the buttons I had, gave him my shirt, and sat down on my cot. Jumbo took a needle, thread, and a carved ivory button box from one of his shelves and sewed on the new button in five minutes. You’d’ve thought his sausage-size fingers would’ve made the task hard for him, but he did it like a pro, quick and neat.
“Here,” he said, holding up the shirt. It danced like a flag in the breeze from his fan, dropped like a windsock on a calm morning, then danced again. Fetching my shirt, I noticed the grooves, calluses, dents, and scars in the ends of Jumbo’s fingers. The skin looked dead at the tips, white or yellowish, with whorls of brown or feverish pink on their inner pads. The clay-and-persimmon smell came off him in ripples. Near to, his eyes were like peeled orange slices with the membranes still on. It was my lost friend Kenny Ward all over again.
On the floor by Jumbo’s headboard sat a cardboard box full of old-but not too dirty-baseballs. Most used balls in those days ended up in the servicemen’s Baseball Equipment Fund so the men at military posts here and overseas could play ball for training purposes or to relax. Even I knew that. The Baseball Equipment Fund was a big patriotic deal. So this box of balls struck me as suspiciously like hoarding. What did Jumbo plan to do with them? The team had all the baseballs it needed, and none of this battered bunch looked fit to plump out a scarecrow with, much less to toss or fungo around.
Jumbo reached down and grabbed a ball. He inserted his fingernails into its split seam and peeled its more or less glossy cover off. He dropped its balata core back into the box and spread the leather cover open on his knee. He rubbed the cover with his thumb, as if to work out its only visible stain and make it spotless again, then flip-flopped the spread cover and rubbed its other side.
“They lived once,” he said. “Think of it-these skins, once the hides of tall and powerful animals.” He stopped rubbing and laid the split jacket on top of the other baseballs in the box, the way you or I would return a silver dollar to a display of rare coins.
That chilled me. I slipped my shirt on.
Jumbo said, “May I call you Daniel rather than Mr Boles?”
I hesitated a second before nodding.
“Then you may call me-you may think of me-as Henry. Two men lodging together in such intimacy shouldn’t have to stand on oppressive formalities.”
I figured just the opposite, but what could I do? Jumbo had some age on me and deserved a little respect. He stuck out his hand to seal our bargain. I took it with as much zeal as I’d grab a hot wire.
“Daniel, know me from henceforth as Henry.” His hand felt cold and dry, spongy and hard-like sliding your palm into the grip of a solid-rubber statue.
Henry didn’t strike me as a suitable name for a power-hitting ballplayer. Hank did, like in Hank Greenberg, but Jumbo hadn’t asked me to call him Hank.
“A moment yet. I have a small present for you, Daniel.” From under his pillow, he took two notebooks and a handful of pencils snugged together with a rubber band. One notebook you could’ve used in school, a fat thing the size of a Leo Tolstoy novel. The other, a little bigger than a deck of cards, you could carry around in a pocket. One of the pencils, already sharpened, had a pocket clip on it. Jumbo dumped this caboodle into my hands.
“Should you wish to converse with me,” he said, “simply write in the smaller notebook, tear out that page, and hand it over. I will respond as its substance dictates.”
I hammocked Jumbo’s gifts in my shirt tail and duck-walked to my cot, where I spilled them all out.
“The larger notebook you may use as a journal,” Jumbo said, “chronicling your exploits throughout the remainder of the season.”
Hey, I’d graduated. Why would I want to scribble rehashes of ballgames in a notebook? It was the thought that counted, I guessed, but I’d’ve been happier with a candy bar or a risque pulp magazine. In the next moment, though, I started thinking I might enjoy keeping a record of my days in Highbridge. I didn’t plan to live in Georgia, after all, and one day I might like having a memory token of my minor league career here.
Jumbo, however spooky his looks or weird-sounding his talk, had begun to treat me like a roomy, not just a pestiferous kid Mister JayMac’d dumped on him. Probably, my play at McKissic Field had turned him around. What did that say for his scale of values? If I’d played lousy, would he’ve gone on treating me like a cockroach? But, hundreds of miles from Tenkiller, I appreciated his turnaround, whatever’d caused it.
I fell asleep in my clothes, with my notebooks and pencils nearby and Jumbo reading Wendell L. Willkie’s One World.
When I woke up, darkness everywhere.
Jumbo had pulled his woven-grass mat into place between us. I could smell it. I could also smell the gritty perfume of the hydrangeas in their bronze vase. I undressed and lay down again. Jumbo’s snores wheezed above the whirr of the fan, and our grass divider swayed.
15
Mister JayMac called our first Friday home game against Lanett Scrap Metal Collection Drive Night. Every kid under eighteen who brought a pound of scrap metal-a shovel blade, a bag of spent cartridges, a hoard of old soup cans-got in free. Ushers collected the scrap, and businessmen-volunteers turned it over to the War Production Board.
Anyway, the stands rocked, a lot of the crowd teenagers or soldiers from Camp Penticuff. It being wartime, GIs got in for half price, paying fifty cents for baseline seats and watching the skirts closer than they did the game. Milt Frye, the PA announcer, told us attendance stood at over three thousand, a better than decent turnout even if beaucoups of our admissions had “paid” for their seats with scrap metal.
CVL teams staged most games on weekends. Sometimes you’d have a series start on Thursday or Wednesday evening, but you could always count on open Mondays and Tuesdays, as travel days or as make-up days for rainouts.
In the clubhouse, Mister JayMac announced his starting lineup. Not a rookie in it. Junior, Skinny, and I would ride the bench until somebody got hurt or one of us was needed for strategic reasons. Fadeaway wouldn’t play at all-Mister JayMac planned to start him on Sunday.
“That’s just two days’ rest,” Fadeaway said.
Everybody gaped like he’d just decided not to join the bucket brigade at an orphanage fire.
“Way I figure it, it’s three,” Mister JayMac said. “Hell, son, you’re fifteen, aren’t you?”
“Yessir.”
“Then your recovery time for both pitching and screwing’s bout as fast as it’ll ever be, and I didn’t recruit you to screw. You gonna pitch when I ask you to or jes when you feel like it?”
“When you ast me to.”
“Good,” Mister JayMac said. “Stop pouting.”
Twilight crept over the field. The electric pole lights came on, bright as day. That summer, no one worried about a Nazi U-boat swimming up the Chattahoochee to knock out a riverside shipyard or a lone supply barge. Under the lights, McKissic Field looked like a wonderland: green grass, shiny signs, the gauzy ghosts of cigar and cigarette smoke curling everywhere. Even the tiresome smell of burnt peanuts couldn’t douse my wonder. When Mrs Harry Atwill, the organist, played “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” I got shivers. It seemed the sky would split open, like a milkweed pod, and an air force of seraphim drift down to mingle with the crowd like Mardi Gras partiers.
Creighton Nutter pitched that night, and if he hadn’t had his stuff, Highbridge would’ve lost. Our regulars played like cripples. They missed signs, booted grounders, misplayed easy flies, overthrew cutoff men, and so on. In the fourth inning, our fans began to catcall us. They singled out Trapdoor Evans for abuse after he turned a basket catch into a thump to the groin that left him writhing on the grass. Charlie Snow dashed over from center to pick up the ball and throw it in.