And Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their “Amens” and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but he knew if he ever showed up on their steps, starving or injured, the only response he’d get to a plea for human kindness would be the amen of a shotgun pointed in his face.
So Luther’s arrangement with the Lord had long stood along the lines of You go Your way and I’ll go mine. But in the boxcar, something took hold of him, a need to make sense of his own life, to give it a meaning lest he pass from the face of the earth having left behind no heavier footprint than that of a dung beetle.
He rode the rails across the Midwest and back through Ohio and then on into the Northeast. Although the companions he met in the boxcars weren’t as hostile or dangerous as he’d often heard and the railway bulls never rousted or hassled them, he couldn’t help but be reminded of the train ride he’d taken to Tulsa with Lila and he grew sad to the point where he felt swollen with it, as if there were no space for anything else in his body. He kept to himself in the corners of the boxcars, and he rarely trusted himself to speak unless one of the other men fairly demanded it of him.
He wasn’t the only man on the train running from something. They ran from court dates and policemen and debts and wives. Some ran toward the same things. Some just needed a change. They all needed a job. But the papers, of late, had been promising a new recession. The boom times, they said, were over. War industries were shutting down and seven million men were about to hit the streets. Four million more were returning from overseas. Eleven million men about to enter a job market that was tapped out.
One of those eleven million, a huge white guy named BB, with a left hand mashed by a drill press into a pancake-flap of useless flesh, woke Luther his final morning on the train by throwing open the door so that the wind blew into Luther’s face. Luther opened his eyes and saw BB standing by the open door as the countryside raced past him. It was dawn, and the moon still hung in the sky like a ghost of itself.
“Now that’s a sweet picture, isn’t it?” BB said, his large head tilting up toward the moon.
Luther nodded and caught his yawn in his fist. He shook the sleep from his legs and joined BB in the doorway. The sky was clear and blue and hard. The air was cold but smelled so clean Luther wished he could put it on a plate and eat it. The fields they passed were frozen and the trees were mostly bare, and it felt as if he and BB had caught the world at sleep, as if no one else, anywhere, bore witness to this dawn. Against that hard blue sky, as blue as anything Luther had ever seen, it all looked so beautiful that Luther wished he could show it to Lila. Wrap his arms around her belly and tuck his chin into her shoulder and ask her if she’d ever seen anything so blue. In your life, Lila? Have you ever?
He stepped back from the doorway.
I let it all go, he thought. I let it all go.
He found the fading moon in the sky and he kept his eyes on it. He kept his eyes on it until it had faded altogether and the wind had bitten clear through his coat.
Babe Ruth and the workers revolution
Chapter twelve
The Babe spent his morning giving out candy and baseballs at the Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children in the South End. One kid, covered ankles-to-neck in plaster, asked him to sign the cast, so Babe signed both arms and both legs and then took a loud breath and scrawled his name across the torso from the kid’s right hip to his left shoulder as the other kids laughed and so did the nurses and even some of the Sisters of Charity. The kid in the cast told Ruth his name was Wilbur Connelly. He’d been working at the Shefferton Wool Mill in Dedham when some chemicals got spilled on the work floor and the vapors met the sparks from a shearing machine and set him on fire. The Babe assured Wilbur he’d be fine. Grow up someday and hit a home run in the World Series. And wouldn’t his old bosses at Shefferton go purple with jealousy that day? Wilbur Connelly, getting sleepy, barely managed a smile but the other kids laughed and brought more things for Babe to sign — a picture torn from the sports pages of The Standard, a small pair of crutches, a yellowed nightshirt.
When he left with his agent, Johnny Igoe, Johnny suggested they pop over to the St. Vincent Orphan Asylum just a few blocks away. Couldn’t hurt, Johnny said, add to the positive press and maybe give Babe an edge in his latest round of bargaining with Harry Frazee. Babe felt weary, though — weary of bargaining, weary of cameras snapping in his face, weary of orphans. He loved kids and orphans in particular, but boy oh boy those kiddos this morning, all hobbled and broken and burned, really took something out of him. The ones with the missing fingers wouldn’t grow them back and the ones with sores on their faces wouldn’t look in a mirror someday and find the scars vanished and the ones in wheelchairs wouldn’t wake up one morning and walk. And yet, at some point, they’d be sent out into the world to make their way, and it had overwhelmed Babe this morning, just sucked the juice out of him.
So he ditched Johnny by telling him he needed to go buy a gift for Helen because the little woman was angry with him again. This was partly true — Helen was in a snit, but he wasn’t shopping for a gift, not in any store leastways. He walked toward the Castle Square Hotel instead. The raw November breeze spit drops of sharp, random rain, but he was warm in his long ermine coat, and he kept his head tilted down to keep the drops from his eyes and enjoyed the quiet and anonymity that greeted him on deserted streets. At the hotel, he passed through the lobby and found the bar almost as empty as the streets, and he took the first seat inside the door and shrugged off his coat and laid it over the stool beside him. The bartender stood down at the far end of the bar, talking to the other two men in the place, so Ruth lit a cigar and looked around at the dark walnut beams and inhaled the smell of leather and wondered how in the hell this country was going to get along with any dignity now that Prohibition looked a dead certainty. The No-Funs and the Shouldn’t-Dos were winning the war, and even if they called themselves Progressives, Ruth couldn’t see much progress in denying a man a drink or shuttering a place of warm wood and leather. Hell, you worked an eighty-hour week for shit pay it seemed the least to ask that the world give you a mug of suds and a shot of rye. Not that Ruth had worked an eighty-hour week in his life, but the principle still applied.
The bartender, a wide man with a thick mustache curled up so violently at the edges you could hang hats on it, came walking down the bar. “What can I get you?”
Still feeling a glow of kinship with the workingman, Ruth ordered two beers and a shot, make it a double, and the bartender placed the drafts before him and then poured a healthy glass of whiskey.
Ruth drank some beer. “I’m looking for a man named Dominick.”
“That’d be me, sir.”
Ruth said, “I understand you own a strong truck, do some hauling.”