Ruth nodded, surprised.
“Twits!”
Then suddenly Ruth said, “They came by just like you said they would. Right after that man, Keeffe, gave me these.” He held up the threads and shook them. The versions of the past were overlapping, folding in on themselves. Ruth himself looked bewildered. He said, “I think I’ve worked too long today. Staring at the needle, some say, can make you feel batty like this.”
The score kept getting worse: 12–6. 13–6. 14–6. 15, 16, 17–6. The radio, kept at the dimmest whisper, announced a home run by Varitek, bringing in Ortiz; but it seemed way too late for a rally. Oscar was feeling desperate. It dawned on him that the Sox could lose this one; and if they did, they had all of history against a comeback.
Oscar stepped out of his hiding place and said, “Look, enough is enough.”
Auntie Fedelma gasped, and that threw her into a coughing jag.
Oscar went on, “We can go on messing with time until none of it makes any sense, until there isn’t a single version left. We’ll wear Ruth out, make him think he’s going crazy; and what good will that do to the future? Anybody’s future.”
“It’s you,” Ruth said. “You and that weasel and that tiny radio again.”
The transistor radio announced a Matsui homer that brought Crosby in with it. Oscar looked down at the radio in his hand. “I can’t believe we’re going to lose.”
“The Curse, right?” Ruth said, and he looked at Oscar as if he remembered their conversation. Oscar himself didn’t know if the conversation still existed or not. So much of the past had been meddled with.
“Right,” Oscar said.
Ruth looked at him with deep sympathy. He shook his head sadly, but then his face brightened.
“I got an answer,” Ruth said. He handed Oscar one of the threads, and the other he gave to Auntie Fedelma. “You two will have to fight for who gets the pair now.”
“Oh, no,” Auntie Fedelma said. “One will do just fine. He can’t break the Curse with just one thread.”
“I could maybe break mine in half. Get most of the job done,” Oscar said, examining the thread, pulling it to see if it was strong. It was. He wound it around his hand. “I wonder what would happen then.”
“There’s only one way to settle this,” Ruth said.
“How’s that?” Oscar asked, putting the thread in his pocket.
Ruth smiled—that big, wide smile. His eyes shone. “The only real game in the whole world: baseball. How else?”
Oscar looked at Ruth, then Auntie Fedelma, then the weasel—Auntie Gormley—then Auntie Fedelma again. They both looked haggard and weak, and he knew that he did, too. “Count me in!” he said.
Auntie Fedelma’s chest labored like an accordion. She sneered. “Count me in, too,” she said, glaring at Oscar. “I play a little ball. Nobody knows it, but I taught Ty Cobb a thing or two.”
“Ty Cobb,” Oscar said. “That figures.”
“Listen!” Auntie Fedelma shouted. “We don’t have much time. Here’s my team: me, Stickler, Weasel-man, and the Bobs—but the Bobs only count as one. Who’ve you got?”
“I’ve got, um, me, my dad, maybe Smoker.”
“Oonagh and Gormley will play for you,” she offered sweetly. “Put them together and they might count as one, which makes four.”
“I’d rather take him,” Oscar said, pointing to Ruth.
“I’ll play for you, sure,” Ruth said.
Auntie Fedelma smiled. “Then I’ll take Cobb.”
“But he has to be a kid,” Oscar said. “Like Ruth here and like me.”
“I’m twelve,” Ruth said.
“Me, too, so Cobb has to be twelve. You can go back in time and get him,” Oscar said.
“Okay then,” Auntie Fedelma said. “He’ll be twelve.”
“We’ll fill out the rest of our teams with twelve-year-olds then—any one we can get to come with us from the past. Let’s say we have two per team—two who aren’t future pros—on the field at all times. Fair enough?” She took a long rattling breath.
“Fair enough. And we need a fair umpire.”
“A fair ump?”
“A Hall of Famer,” Oscar said, his joints aching.
“No cheats,” said Ruth.
“Okay, okay. I’ll get one,” she said. “A Hall of Famer. Keep in mind that the Cursed Creatures can only play in Fenway Park or we’ll get too weak. And if you want to break the Curse, we can’t put off the game. Tomorrow night is your last chance. If the Sox lose tomorrow, then they’re out and the Yankees are in. The field will be filled with outsiders between now and tomorrow night…so we’ll all have to go into the past to play—at a time when the field was empty, all ours.” Fedelma then spread her old wings and flapped them behind her head.
Ruth stumbled backward. “What are those? Is that the way we’ll all be in the future?”
Auntie Fedelma bent down to the heating duct, about to slip inside. “I’ve got a team to get ready. Good luck,” she said. “You’ll need it!” With a tubercular cackle, she disappeared into the hole.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Roster of Twelve-Year-Old Greats
AUNTIE OONAGH FILLED A BOWL with warm, soapy water and set it on the table in front of Oscar, where it gave off steam. He dipped his arm into the water, wincing. And then the pain subsided and he let his arm settle in. One of the scratch marks was stub-born—still there despite all the time travel.
Auntie Gormley was Auntie Gormley again, and the weasel was just a weasel, padding around the place mats in a nervous circle. They both seemed to feel better. Oscar’s throat was no longer sore. His cough and fever had disappeared. He slipped his hand into his pocket to check on the thread. It was there, wound like a little nest.
His father put his elbows on the table and leaned in close to examine the scratch on Oscar’s arm. “I don’t know what’s come over Auntie Fedelma,” he said.
Auntie Gormley snorted and shook her head. With her eyes she signed, “Fedelma’s always had this in her.”
Smoker was pacing by the sink, patting down his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. He found one—crumpled and nearly empty. “We can pick anybody, you say?” Smoker asked. “Go back in the past and get any ballplayer we want when he was twelve?” He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag.
“No more smoking,” Oscar said. “You’ve got to play, too. We all do. We need your lungs to work, Smoker!”
Auntie Oonagh snatched the cigarette from his lips on her way by and dropped it in the wet sink.
“We’ve got Ruth,” Oscar went on. “We’ll pick him up tomorrow night. We did plan that much. And we should pick up the others during the night, too, so when we take them back they’ll think it was just a dream.”
“The best of the best,” Oscar’s father said, concentrating. “Anyone we want from all of baseball history when he was twelve years old?”
Auntie Gormley sat back dreamily and smiled. “The best of the best,” she blinked. “We’ll get to see them play. One last time.”
“I’ve always liked the heroes of baseball, the ones with the best hearts,” Auntie Oonagh said.
“Roberto Clemente, Joe DiMaggio, Hank Aaron, Lou Gehrig.”
“Oh, Clemente,” Auntie Gormley’s eyes—wet with tears—darted out his name. She made the sign of the cross.
“And Curt Flood!” Auntie Oonagh cried joyfully.
“Yes, yes,” Oscar’s father nodded. “The players with good hearts! If we’re going to win, it’s because we’ve got heart!”
“They made the game a thing of grace,” Smoker said. “Somehow made up for so many of baseball’s ills.”
There was a moment of silence then. They were all in their own worlds, thinking. Oscar was, too; and although it seemed right to go with the players with the most heart, it also wasn’t quite exactly right.
Auntie Gormley seemed to come to some conclusion. She looked at Oscar and shook her head. Oscar’s father took in a deep breath and held up one finger. And before he had
a chance to say anything, Auntie Gormley leaned in and nodded.
Smoker said, “What? What is it?”
And Auntie Oonagh said, “What we need is a cure for our ills.”
Oscar’s father said, “What we need are the players with some sorrow to heal, some sorrow that burrowed down into the dirt of Fenway Park.”
Oscar’s father reached into a drawer, pulled out an old Red Sox roster sheet and a pen. “We’ll pass around the paper. Put down the names. How many do we need? Six?” He passed the paper to Oscar. “You start.”
Auntie Oonagh gave Oscar a towel. He lifted his arm from the bowl. She took the bowl to the sink. He wrapped his elbow and then wrote down the obvious: “Babe Ruth” and passed on the paper. It made its way around the table. Everyone scribbled hurriedly, and when the sheet came back it was full. “I’ll read the names aloud,” Oscar said. “Then we’ll all have to agree on each one. Okay?”
Auntie Oonagh lifted the funnel to her ear so she wouldn’t miss a word.
“Babe Ruth,” Oscar said. “He’s an obvious choice. Isn’t he?”
“Yes, yes,” everyone said. “Of course!”
Oscar put a check beside his name and read the next: “Jackie Robinson.”
Oscar’s father said, “The spring of forty-five. Isadore Muchnick was on the city council, and said he’d vote against allowing Sox games on Sundays if they didn’t start trying out black players. So they brought in three to try out. Jackie was one of them.” Oscar’s father’s voice broke off.
And Smoker filled in. “We were there, watching from hidden spots all around the park. Beautiful to watch. But at the end of it, someone yelled out, ‘Get those niggers off the field.’”
Oscar felt the word in his stomach, in his chest. He felt suddenly hot.
Auntie Oonagh said, “He has to be on the team. There’ll be no peace without Jackie Robinson.”
Oscar checked the next name. “Willie Mays,” he said.
“Future Hall of Famer Willie Mays,” Auntie Oonagh whispered. “The Red Sox scout refused to wait out a rain delay to see black kids play, so he missed seeing Mays then. And later, when they finally had him come for a tryout, the scout said Mays wasn’t their type of player. Ha!”
They all nodded. Oscar checked the name and went on. “Ted Williams.”
“Everybody loves him now,” Auntie Oonagh said. “But they hated him back then—in the stands, in the press. He refused to tip his hat because they were cruel to him.”
Oscar’s father said, “When he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, he said, ‘I hope someday the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the great Negro players that are not here only because they were never given a chance.’ He was half Mexican, on his mother’s side. He knew he was lucky to be able to play at all and that others weren’t.”
Oscar hated the idea of those greats never getting to play in the majors. It reminded him of how it had felt to watch Little League all summer—to feel it in his muscles, his bones, but to be stuck sitting on the sidelines. All of that waste. “Ted Williams,” Oscar said, making his check mark. “Next is Johnny Pesky.”
“The goat. ’46 series against the Cardinals,” Auntie Oonagh said. “He held the ball too long on one play, hesitating on the throw home. They never ever let him forget it.”
Oscar gave a check. “Pumpsie Green,” he said.
Auntie Oonagh shook her head with a sad smile. “The first to integrate the Red Sox—and the Red Sox were the last team to integrate. Dead last.”
Smoker said, “When they gave him a tryout in Arizona, he had to stay seventeen miles away from the team in a boardinghouse because the Safari Motel didn’t allow black guests.”
“And when they finally took him on, it was ugly,” his father added. “Like they wanted him to fail.”
Oscar checked Pumpsie and read the last name. “Bill Buckner.”
“2,715 career hits,” Oscar’s father said. “More than Ted Williams! About 500 more than Joe DiMaggio. But he’s not in the Hall of Fame for an error. One ball going through his legs, one lousy mistake.”
Oscar checked Buckner’s name. “That’s the team,” Oscar said. “We all agree.”
“Too bad we don’t get a coach,” Auntie Gormley blinked. “Good old Harper.”
“The Elks Club in Winter Haven,” Auntie Oonagh said. “Every year during spring training, they invited the white players for free dinners, but not the blacks. Harper brought it up to management, privately, in the seventies. When Harper came back to coach in eighty, he found out that it was still going on!”
“But!” Auntie Oonagh exclaimed. “He filed a suit against the Sox, and he won.”
“We could use Harper, but we don’t get to have a coach,” Oscar said. “Anyway, we’ve got a great team.”
Oscar’s father looked nervous all of a sudden. “No team in all of sports history has ever come back in the playoffs from a three-to-zero deficit, except some hockey team once.”
“Hockey?” Auntie Oonagh asked. “Is that the thing they play on ice?”
“Exactly,” Smoker said.
“The Curse,” Oscar’s father said. “Each time we get close and we can taste the win, we lose.”
Oscar knew the part of the Curse he was talking about. It was the ending. It was the only part that had stuck with him word for word. Maybe it stuck because it hadn’t ever made sense to him before. It went: May you be close enough to taste the win but always, truly, lose before you even begin.
“There’s only one way to lose before you begin,” Oscar said.
“How?” Oscar’s father said.
“You lose faith. You give up,” Oscar said. “And we’re not going to do that.”
They looked around the table at one another, one by one locking eyes—Auntie Gormley, Auntie Oonagh, Smoker, Oscar, and his father.
“Promise not to lose faith?” Oscar asked.
“Promise,” Auntie Gormley flashed with her eyes.
Auntie Oonagh, Smoker, and Oscar’s father said it all together: “Promise.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Recruiting
OSCAR LEFT THE AUNTIES AND Smoker and his father behind so that they could talk strategy and maybe get some sleep before the game. Auntie Oonagh volunteered to greet the boys with hot dogs and pretzels and hot cocoa when they arrived. And so Oscar spent the night shuffling through the tunnel with his list of rhymes on a piece of paper and a flashlight to read them by.
Ruth was first:
If the ills of the Sox
are ever going to be healed,
I need to meet twelve-year-old Babe
on St. Mary’s ball field.
He came up from a trench in the ground at the far edge of the field at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys—one dug, it seemed, to put in new pipes, which sat shiny and new beside the trench. Ruth was sitting on the pitcher’s mound in the dark, waiting. It was a cold night and Ruth was ready to go, wearing a glove on his left hand, which was strange since Oscar knew he threw with his left.
Oscar gave a whistle. Ruth’s head snapped up, and he took off running toward Oscar. That’s when Oscar saw the large, shifting shape of someone looking on from the distant tree line. It looked like a giant woman wearing a long dress.
When Ruth got to the trench, Oscar asked him who was watching.
“Brother Mathias. He runs the place. I didn’t tell him, but there’s no fooling him. I told him I wasn’t running away this time. I told him that it was for the sake of baseball and that I’d come back by morning, and that I wasn’t going to tell any of the other boys.” Ruth jumped down the hole and was in the tunnel with Oscar. “I don’t like skipping out like that. I don’t like to let Brother Mathias down.”
The name was familiar to Oscar. “You write about him in your autobiography, I think.”
“I do? Figures. He’s the only one I got.”
Oscar said, “We’ll have to find you a lefty’s glove.”
; “It’s okay,” Ruth said. “I’m used to it. I just catch with it and then shake it off to make a throw.”
Oscar told him to crawl toward the light at the end of the tunnel. “Auntie Oonagh will be there with something for you to eat.”
I’ll wake twelve-year-old Jackie from sleep.
He’ll play with the others while his brothers count sheep.
The window in Jackie’s room was open. The curtain billowed in the night breeze. Oscar could see the lights of Pasadena not far off. The room was filled with bodies—lean and long and strong. Oscar looked for the smallest one and gave him a shove.
Jackie woke up groggy, and Oscar’s explanation of the reason why he was standing there in the middle of the night wasn’t helping to clear Jackie’s mind.
When Oscar told him about the Cursed Creatures, Jackie stopped him and whispered angrily, “Oh, Cursed Creatures, huh?” Jackie said. “Are they more cursed than us? Was their mother left by her husband with five kids to feed? Did they get called nasty names and almost get kicked out of their neighborhood?”
Oscar bowed his head and shook it; and then he lifted his head, smiling.
“Something funny?” Jackie said.
“No,” Oscar said, but he couldn’t hold back the smile.
“I’m in a gang. You’d better watch out.”
“It’s just that you’re Jackie Robinson,” Oscar said. “You’re going to change the world because of all that you just said.”
“Change the world? Don’t make me laugh. Change this world? You’re crazy.”
“You’re going to be the first black man to play in the major leagues.” Oscar told him.
“Right! Sure!” Jackie said, but there was a flicker of recognition in his eyes. His jaw set differently. “So, what’s this game about?”
Oscar went over it again; and when he explained about the Pooka being trapped and the aunties wanting their father back, Jackie said, “I can understand that.” He looked past his brothers’ sprawled bodies, off out the window. A dog barked out in the distance. “I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”