Ben blushed again. He could feel his body sinking in the chair. He did not speak.
“I was talking with Mr. Ledford in the bank this week,” Martin Wade continued. “He told me that he planned to speak with you about consorting with the older members of the team. He doesn’t think it’s appropriate for someone in your position, and with the future you may have there.”
“Sir?”
“Seems he overheard some of the men talking about it. Now, you know how I feel about you, Ben. Like a son to me. Personally, I never had a gift for the playing of sports. Not like your father. In his youth, he was quite heroic, especially in the running matches we had. No one ever beat him, as I recall. He was quite good at baseball, also.”
“I don’t know much about that,” Ben said. “He doesn’t talk about it.”
“He wouldn’t,” Martin Wade said. “That would be boasting, and he’s too good a man for that.” He tapped his index finger over the tobacco in the pipe’s bowl and stared thoughtfully at the string of gray smoke, thin as a spider’s silk, that wiggled off his finger. “I always admired the skill and gamesmanship it required to be an athlete, Ben. Yet, I do have to say I’ve never cared very much for baseball. I’ve always been afraid it promoted the wrong influence. Of course, Milo’s playing, and I have to accept that, and I was always proud of you and Milo when you played together. You were good players, but you were also young. Some of the older men on the team are not the best citizens we have.”
“Yes sir,” Ben said timidly. He added, “But Spencer Franklin plays, and so does Wade Pilgrim and Charles Hill. They’re younger than I am.”
“And their parents keep a good eye on them, as we did on you and Milo, but not so close that you’d know it.”
The admission surprised Ben. He had never realized that he and Milo were being watched from a distance by their parents.
“I’m telling you this, Ben, so you’ll know. That’s all. I’ve heard some talk about Coleman Maxey making fun of you behind your back.”
“Sir?” Ben said in a weak voice.
“He’s that kind of man, Ben. Enjoys embarrassing people, and I don’t want to see you embarrassed. You’re a young man now. You’ll have to make your own decisions, as Milo is making his. Just be careful that you don’t put your job in jeopardy. You’ve got a fine future with Mr. Ledford.”
“Yes sir,” Ben said softly. “I appreciate it.”
The conversation ended with the appearance of Christine Wade. She swept energetically into the room and sat near Ben. She said, “No more men-talk. I want to know all about you, Ben. How’s your mother?”
“Uh—fine,” Ben said.
“And your father. How’s your father?”
“He’s fine, too.”
Christine Wade looked at her husband. “Did you explain things to Ben?”
“I did,” Martin Wade answered. “I told him about the move and about Milo.”
“I’m sure sorry about you leaving,” Ben said to Christine Wade.
“Oh, we’ll be back all the time,” Christine Wade replied happily. She reached to touch Ben on the hand. “And you’ll have to come to see us. We’re going to have enough room in that old house Martin’s buying to open a hotel. I can just hear Milo complaining about it, saying we’re giving up good enough for more than we could ever need.”
Ben smiled.
Martin Wade rose from his seat. “If you two will excuse me, I need to attend to the horse.” He extended his hand to Ben. “It was good to see you, Ben. I’m sure I’ll see you in town before we move.”
Ben stood. He knew it was the signal for him to leave. “Yes sir,” he said. “It was a good supper. When you write to Milo, tell him I said hello. Tell him I hope he stops by on his way to Boston.”
“Has he not written to you?” asked Martin Wade.
“No sir. I know he’s busy. Just tell him hello for me.”
Martin Wade frowned, then nodded once. “I will.” He turned and left the room, and Ben could feel a chill following him. It would be the last time Ben would ever see Martin and Christine Wade, except in photographs in newspapers. They would seldom return to Jericho. Martin Wade would become a state senator and a failed candidate for governor of Georgia. Christine Wade would die of a fall during a mountain climbing vacation in Colorado in 1915.
THE NEWS OF Milo Wade going to Boston to play for the Boston Pilgrims moved over Jericho like a flash fire from a comet that had tumbled unexpectedly out of a night sky. The Pilgrims, with the great Cy Young, had won the first American League Championship in 1903, and had beaten the Pittsburgh Pirates of the National League in the first World Series between the two professional leagues. The Pilgrims were again leading their league, but had suffered from injuries to key players. Milo Wade, eighteen, strong, aggressive, a talented hitter and runner, was cheap insurance.
“Not been playing a whole year,” the townspeople bragged, “and he’s going to the Pilgrims.”
“Word is, they’ve been planning on this since the first few weeks after Milo got to Augusta.”
“If anybody can make it, it’ll be Milo. He don’t like to lose.”
“Not many boys his age can play like a man, but Milo’s different.”
“Once he gets there, they’ll have to drag him away with a team of horses.”
The talk was lively, bright, jittery with excitement. From the talk it seemed that Milo Wade was not going to Boston alone; he was taking an entire town with him.
To Ben, it was proof that he had prophetic vision. Milo Wade wore the destiny of greatness like a dazzling garment, something spun from threads of light. No one could see it as clearly as Ben. No one had been as close to it. When people asked him about the news, Ben answered proudly, “I always knew it. Always.”
“You think he’s going to stop off for a little while when he comes through on his way to Boston?” the people asked Ben.
“I’d guess so,” Ben told them. “I don’t know. Takes a long time to get to Boston. Maybe he won’t have a chance to, and with his mama and daddy getting ready to move to Athens, maybe it won’t work out.”
“Sure hope he does,” the people said wistfully.
“Me, too,” Ben agreed.
Each day, Ben checked the schedule at the train station, annoying Akers Crews, the stationmaster.
“Ben, it’s the same as it was yesterday and the day before,” Akers griped. “Only thing I can tell you to do is meet every train. I can’t go looking for him and drag him off.”
When his schedule at Ledford’s Dry Goods permitted, Ben was at the station for each train. He stood on the station platform, watching the doors of the passenger cars, excited, but also apprehensive. He had written to Milo faithfully, but had not received a response to any of his letters. At first he had dismissed Milo’s failure to write as the stress of playing ball and traveling, yet he knew it was a feeble excuse. In the three weeks he had been in Augusta, he had written daily to his parents. There was time to write.
His mother had cautioned him, “Ben, maybe Milo’s decided to cut the apron strings and start out on his own without looking back. A lot of people do that, and we just have to accept it when it happens.” It was an ancient apology to explain the conduct of people who left their homes and refused to communicate with their families. From all the stories he had heard, Ben believed that every Southern family had such a person. In his mother’s family, it was her brother Wendell. Wendell had disappeared in 1897, telling a friend that he wanted to go to California to find gold. He had never written, and no one knew where he was.
“Milo wouldn’t do that,” Ben had insisted. “We been together too long.”
“Sometimes people change overnight, son,” his mother had replied gently. “If that’s what he’s done, you have accept it and go on with your life.”
Sometimes, standing on the station platform, the words of his mother would come to him and Ben would realize that he had stepped into a shadow, out of sight.
ON THE FI
FTH day of waiting and watching, Ben saw Milo Wade.
It was early evening, the eight-twenty stop.
Milo was sitting deep in his seat in the last passenger car, his face cloudy behind the window glass. He was gazing expressionless at the station.
Ben hesitated in the shadow. He looked around, but did not see Martin or Christine Wade, and he wondered if they knew that Milo was on the train.
Could have been a change in schedule, he thought.
Or maybe Martin and Christine Wade were in Athens, at their new hotel-big home.
Ben did not move. He saw Akers Crews busy with the loading of boxes on one of the boxcars. Akers was a small man who suffered from arthritis in his bowed back. The aggravation of pain colored his scowling face.
Steam hissed from the engine. A thundercloud of black-gray smoke boiled up like a tornado’s funnel, spread open in the humid air, settled around the station. Ben could smell the acid of the smoke.
In the train car, Milo turned away from the window.
And then Ben heard Akers shout something to the engineer. The engineer waved a hand from the cab of the engine.
Ben moved quickly, impulsively, from the shadow and stepped from the platform and crossed rapidly to the passenger car where Milo was sitting. He saw an older man, wearing a felt hat, peering at him from the seat opposite Milo.
“Milo!” Ben called over the noise of the train.
Milo did not look at him.
“Milo!” Ben called again. He waved his hand. He saw the older man lean toward Milo, reach for him, say something, and Milo turned to look through the window.
The train began to pull away.
“Milo!” The call became a shout.
Milo moved toward the window, then settled back. He lifted his hand.
“Good luck, Milo,” Ben bellowed. “I’ll be keeping up with you.”
The train lurched forward and Ben began to walk rapidly with it, waving to Milo. “Good luck,” he cried again.
IN THE TRAIN, the older man said to Milo, “Somebody you know?”
Milo glanced again out of the window. “We grew up together.”
“Looked like he was trying to tell you something.”
Milo turned back in his seat.
“That your hometown?” asked the older man.
“Was,” Milo said.
“Was?”
“My folks are moving,” Milo answered. He added, “So am I.”
“They still live there, your folks?”
“They do now, but not for long.”
“You didn’t get off,” the older man said. “They know you were coming through?”
Milo shook his head. “Didn’t tell them. Didn’t have time to stop off.”
“Well, they’ll know about it soon enough, I’d guess,” the older man observed. “Word gets about in a small town like that, and you being seen by your friend—”
“It won’t matter,” Milo said abruptly. “My folks are busy enough.”
The older man sat back in his seat. After a moment, he picked up the newspaper he had been reading and ducked his head to stare at it. The young man sitting across from him seemed detached and angry. Cold. The young man seemed cold.
“YOU SEE HIM, Ben?” asked Akers Crews.
“Yes sir, he was on the train,” Ben said.
Akers wagged his head in disbelief. “That boy should’ve got off that train, even if it was just for a minute. This is his home, where he grew up. A man ought never get too big to stand on the ground of his home.”
“I guess he didn’t have time,” Ben said softly.
“Time’s got nothing to do with it,” Akers argued. “He’s just got the big head because he’s going to Boston. You lucky you got out of that game when you did, Ben. Nothing worse than somebody that gets too good for his own kind, and that’s what’s happened to that boy.” He watched the train disappear around a bend. “I wonder why his mama and daddy wadn’t down here to see him?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said.
Akers began to climb the steps to the platform. He muttered, “Can’t understand why people turn against their home. Can’t understand it at all.” He stopped and cocked his head to look at Ben. “You not thinking about playing again, are you?”
Ben could hear the fading sound of the train vibrating in the tracks. After a moment, he said to Akers, “No sir. I gave it up. All that’s behind me.”
“Son, once you been somewhere, you don’t never leave it out of sight behind you,” Akers said solemnly. “You just drag it along with you, like a cranky old dog on a leash. You just better hope he don’t get to snarling and decide to bite you in the ass when you not looking.”
Akers Crews’s words were more prophetic than either he or Ben knew.
FOUR
THE CARNIVAL HAD unfolded its worn canvas tents in a pasture near the train depot and had begun to play its beckoning calliope music—lively and shrill—and the enticing spell of the music began to pull the people of Jericho and Caulder County to the wonders of a traveling event advertised by posters as the Marvels of the Earth Exhibition.
It was not a great carnival, not like the spectacles of Barnum and Bailey, with jungle animal acts and beautiful women doing acrobatics on the backs of white horses, or daredevil men walking steel cables that swayed in the high, trapped air of tents, or sideshows of part-people, part-something mutants.
Still, it was a carnival—game tents and food tents, the scent of fresh sawdust and peanuts and cotton candy, the yodeling singsong of show barkers, the yelping of children—and Ben walked alone among the late-afternoon crowd that moved languidly along the street of tents. He liked the closeness of the crowd, the gentle nudging of arms, the courteous sidestepping, the darting, wiggling bodies of boys chasing amazement. He liked the lavish, moving colors of dresses and ribbon streamers—ambers and reds and blues and yellows—swimming in the September sun.
Ben also liked the tricksters behind the booths and at the canvas tent doors, babbling like excited auctioneers—daring, inviting, promising. He liked the absurdity of the aging tiger, tail-swatting at flies like a drowsy cow, located next to the tent of scientific oddities that were certain to change mankind in the electric age that Thomas Edison had fathered. It was the twentieth century. The motorcar was real. George Franklin owned one and Branson Quitman had ordered one. The Wrights had flown an airplane across the sands of a place called Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. Men with genius, or madness, had predicted that voices would be picked up from the air—from the air, not from the wires linking telephone to telephone. At the Marvels of the Earth Exhibition, the twentieth-century world was on display in illusions of magic and in spectacular renderings of imaginative paintings and in toys of fantasy far grander than the grandest of dreams.
The crowd moved with the motion of a slow body of water, lapping in waves to the tents, and at each tent, the alluring oddity hidden inside was more splendid, more incomprehensible, than the oddities in the nearby tents. It was song and dance and laughter that flowed along the street of tents.
Ben followed the festival, permitting himself to float like a leaf in the gentle current of the onlookers. He did not enter any of the tents or stop to play their games. He watched and listened and wandered leisurely, speaking politely to people who floated with him, or against him. He could feel, in the heat of the late-afternoon sun, an almost surprising mood of relaxation. When he laughed at something unexpected or amusing, he could sense the weight of his hurt over Milo Wade leaving him.
And then he was at the end of the street of tents, moving with the crowd to a cleaned-off cornfield beside a single large oak. It was where he and Milo and other townsboys had played choose-up games of baseball as children. In the distance, he could see people pushing into a half-circle around something that commanded their attention.
“Ben, Ben, you got to see that,” a boyish voice near him cried.
The voice belonged to David Grubb, who was young and blond and often sang solos wit
h the Presbyterian church choir. David would be the first man from Jericho to die in World War I.
“What’s going on, David?” asked Ben.
“They got a baseball-hitting contest going on, that’s what,” David said excitedly. “Anybody that gets a hit off that fellow gets fifty cents. Cost a nickel for three strikes. I’m going to find my daddy, see if he’ll let me try.” He ran away, dodging into the flow of the crowd.
Ben could hear the unmistakable slap of a baseball hitting a leather mitt, and the gasps of awe from onlookers. He could feel his throat tighten. The muscles in his arms quivered. He moved toward the sound of the ball striking the mitt, a sound that called to him out of the crowd.
He stood at a rope line that fanned in a V, like the first and third base lines of a baseball field, and watched Frank Mercer standing at a wood home plate, waving a bat in the air, stretching the muscles of his shoulders. The man behind the plate wore a bleached baseball uniform and a mask that covered his bearded face. He was sitting on a stool. He looked awkward and deformed.
“What’s the matter with the catcher?” Ben asked a man standing beside him.
The man chuckled. “Looks like he’s about to topple off, don’t it? He’s just got him one leg.”
Ben looked more closely. The catcher’s right leg was missing at the knee. He could see a pair of crutches beside the stool.
“Well, you right,” Ben whispered.
“Shoot, that’s nothing,” the man beside him said. “Take a look at the fellow throwing the ball. Just got one arm.”
Ben turned to look at the pitcher. He did not have a left arm. His shirtsleeve had been pinned or sewn to the face of his shirt. He stood majestically, staring down at the catcher and Frank Mercer. Ben was stunned by his size. He was a giant. And then Ben saw his face. Scars. White ridges of flesh against a burning red skin. It was a face to turn from, to fear, to remember.
“All right, all right, all right,” a skinny man wearing a black suit and a top hat chortled through a megaphone. He was standing near the catcher. “This looks like a strong fellow. Maybe he’ll do it. Maybe he’ll get a hit off the One-Armed Wonder of Tennessee. But take my advice, folks, and don’t make any side bets on it.”