The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

The uncle – I’m not clear about which side of the family he was from – first charmed my father into playing catch, then into investigating the intricacies of the board game.

‘My uncle was named James John James,’ my father reported. ‘He owned nothing but a blue serge suit, a crumpled felt hat, and the articles to do with baseball.

‘My imagination had never been exercised,’ he went on. ‘My folks weren’t that kind of people. Uncle Jim pulled my imagination out of me like a magician pulling a string of light bulbs from my mouth. We played his board game, moving little nubbins of yellow and blue around the cardboard baseball field. Strange as it seems, it was through that board game that I learned to love baseball, for my uncle could bring that small green board to life. Every roll of the dice was like a swing of the bat. My uncle arrived with a tattered copy of the St. Louis Sporting News, and as we played we invented leagues, furnishing them with teams plucked from the Sporting News standings – teams from dreamy-sounding places like Cheyenne, Quincy, Tuscaloosa, Bozeman, Burlington, York, Far Rockway. We created players, gave them names and numbers and histories. They pitched, batted, ran the bases, were benched if they didn’t hit or made too many errors, or were moved up to clean-up if they hit like crazy. We drew up a schedule, had double-headers on July Fourth and Labor Day, played out a whole season during the few weeks that my uncle visited.

‘And then he took me to a real game. We went into Iowa City and watched a commercial league in action, and it was just like I’d discovered the meaning of the universe.

‘After my uncle left I kept on exercising my imagination. If you look around on the side of the garage, Gid, you’ll see a piece of board nailed to it in the shape of a strike zone, and if it hasn’t rotted away, you’ll find a piece of plank imbedded in the earth right in front of that strike zone. Me and my friend from down the street, we made our own baseballs, according to my uncle’s recipe. We soaked Life magazines in a mixture of milk and kerosene. Uncle Jim said that combination made the balls tough but spongy. They certainly smelled bad enough. Dried them in the sun, we did. We used a little piece of one-by-two for a bat. There were no bases or running or anything like that. It was pitcher against batter. I sneaked some lime out of the garage and we made white lines down the middle of the garden, like lines on a football field. If the batter hit the ball a certain distance it was a single. A little farther, a double, then a triple, and finally over the garden fence was a home run. We spent most of the time searching for the ball in among your grandmother’s cucumbers. In the fall, when we raked up the leaves and vines from the garden, we’d find a dozen or two of our baseballs. But, oh, the imagination we had.’

I played the same game; my father taught it to me. There was nothing surreptitious about our laying white lines across the garden until it looked like a golf driving range. Eventually I found a playmate with an imagination; his name was Stan Rogalski, and though he played real baseball, too (in fact, Stan is still playing semipro ball), he and I passed hours on summer afternoons and evenings, batting and pitching, searching for the ball among the cucumbers, keeping accurate box scores for our imaginary teams. Then, after the game, we would sit in either my or Stan’s kitchen and bring all our statistics up to date.

Neither my father nor I ever played anything but sandlot baseball. I was on the Onamata High School team, but only because there were just ten boys in our high school and one of them was in a wheelchair, making his handicap only slightly worse than mine, which was lack of ability.

‘Why not baseball?’ my father would say. ‘Name me a more perfect game! Name me a game with more possibilities for magic, wizardry, voodoo, hoodoo, enchantment, obsession, possession. There’s always time for daydreaming, time to create your own illusions at the ballpark. I bet there isn’t a magician anywhere who doesn’t love baseball. Take the layout. No mere mortal could have dreamed up the dimensions of a baseball field. No man could be that perfect. Abner Doubleday, if he did indeed invent the game, must have received divine guidance.

‘And the field runs to infinity,’ he would shout, gesturing wildly. ‘You ever think of that, Gid? There’s no limit to how far a man might possibly hit a ball, and there’s no limit to how far a fleet outfielder might run to receive it. The foul lines run on forever, forever diverging. There’s no place in America that’s not part of a major-league ballfield: the meanest ghetto, the highest point of land, the Great Lakes, the Colorado River. Hell, there’s no place in the world that’s not part of a baseball field.

‘Every other sport is held in by boundaries, some of absolute set size, some not: football, hockey, tennis, basketball, golf. But there’s no limit to the size of a baseball field. What other sport can claim that? And there’s no more enigmatic game; I don’t have to tell you that. I’m glad what happened to me happened to me, Gid. I created imaginary baseball leagues when I was a kid. Now I have a real imaginary league to worry about, if there can be such a thing. But I’m glad it happened to me. I consider myself one of the chosen. I’m an evangelist in a funny sort of way. It ain’t easy, but you should be so lucky.’

I am.

A few statistics on batting from A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy:

Batting Averages 1. Bob Grady, Husk .368 2. Simon Shubert, Blue Cut .360 3. Jack Luck, Iowa City .358 4. Horatio N. Scharff, Big Inning .357 5. Henry Pulvermacher, Shoo Fly .351 Home Runs 1. Ezra Dean, Blue Cut 27 (1906) 2. Orville Swan, Big Inning 26 (1903) 3. Jack Luck, Iowa City 22 (1906) 4. Bob Grady, Husk 20 (1905) 5. William Stiff, Frank Pierce 20 (1907)

In the summer of 1907, the Detroit Tigers, who were burning up the American League, were invited to Big Inning, Iowa, to play the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars on July 4. In May, the Tigers sent a former player of theirs named Norman Elberfeld, known as the Tabasco Kid, to Big Inning to scout the IBC. The Tabasco Kid sent back a report saying that though the players were for the most part unknown, the caliber of play in the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was so high that it could prove embarrassing to a major league team experiencing an off day. The Tigers politely declined the invitation.

My father submitted his thesis, his 288-page manuscript, to the University of Iowa, Department of History, in the spring of 1946. It was about the same time that my sister, Enola Gay, poured a large tin of Golden Corn Syrup into my crib, very nearly causing my demise.

A few days later, my father was called to the office of Dr. E. H. Hindsmith, his supervisor.

‘He looked at me over the top of his bone-rimmed glasses, his eyebrows like crusted snow, his face grizzled, snuff stains in the creases at the corners of his mouth.

‘“There is no evidence to indicate that the Iowa Baseball Confederacy ever existed,” he said, coming right to the point. “In fact, Mr. Clarke, it seems that I and my colleagues have repeatedly warned you against writing on such a topic.”’

My father could reproduce the exact inflections of Hindsmith’s voice. I interviewed Hindsmith after I became obsessed with the Confederacy, and it was like speaking with an old friend. Hindsmith’s voice inflections betrayed his roots, he having been born in a place called Breastbone Hill, Kentucky, the son of a miner. My father reenacted that conversation at least once a month for all the years I knew him.

‘His eyes met mine, sending out a frank, blue stare, solid as steel rods. “This is a masterfully written thesis,” he said, pausing dramatically. He did not pronounce the r in masterfully. “We have voted five to zero to reject it completely as historical fact. However, we are much impressed with your writing ability; in fact, we took the liberty of showing a copy to Paul Engle of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Mr. Engle, also, is very enthusiastic about your writing style. He suggests that with, say, one semester of study in fiction writing, you could use the same material as a novel and probably find a publisher, at the same time earning yourself an MFA degree in English.” He kept staring at me to see how I was reacting.

‘“But it’s the truth,” I wailed. “Every word of this thesis is true. I don’t care who denies it. I don’t care how many people are in a league against me, for whatever reasons.” Oh, I made a proper fool of myself.

‘‘‘We urge you to consider our recommendation, Matthew,” Dr. Hindsmith said. ‘It is the unanimous opinion of the History Department that your field of endeavor should be fiction.”’

Drifting Away remembers, stares around at a world cut into squares. The white man’s world is full of squares. The cities are measured out in squares and rectangles – houses, factories, tables, automobiles – the white man always obsessed with bending the lines of nature, attacking the natural circles of nature, straightening the curving lines into grids, breaking circles, covering the land with prison bars.

Squares have no power, thinks Drifting Away. Power lies in the circle. Everything in nature tries to be round – the world is round, the sun, the moon, the stars; life is circular; the birds build round nests, lay circular eggs; flowers are round.

Indians knew. Tepees, round, set in circles, a nest amid many nests. Drifting Away remembers the undulating trails, smooth and easy, long as rivers, bent as snakes. At first the white man followed the Indian trails, but, always in a hurry, he could not take the time to follow nature; he had to defeat nature. The white man’s trails were straight, no matter that the going was sometimes impossible. Then came the straight iron rivers, always intersecting at right angles.

Drifting Away, in one of his lives, built a round lodge, draped it with hides, was a proud hunter, rich, provided well for his squaw and children. Owned many horses. Built that round lodge on the edge of a grove filled with every kind of bird, near the gentle Iowa River, miles from the nearest white settlement.

But the whites carved the land into squares, claimed to own it, claimed it as their own, though everyone knows you cannot sell the land upon which the people walk. The land, like the sky, is not for sale. The white men came, riding across the hills, loudly, no fear in their hearts, for their guns and engines make nature cringe. They take measure of the land, stake out the earth as if they could tie it down.

They look at Drifting Away’s lodge, make solemn faces.

‘You can no longer live here,’ they tell him.

‘The earth is for all men,’ Drifting Away replies.

‘Not for you, Indian,’ they say. ‘For you, there is a reservation. By law you have to live on your reservation.’

Drifting Away pretends not to understand, prays they will go away. They do, but leave behind a warning, like a cloud bank groaning with thunder.

‘One moon,’ they say. ‘There will be trouble if you are not gone.’

* * *

How has my father affected my life? He has been like a giant smothering me with his shadow. For every inch my memory of him recedes, his shadow grows a foot taller. His memory holds me aloft; he is a Cyclops, a colossus, angry, tossing me in the air, dangling me by one arm while I struggle, tiny as a toy.

Still, it is very hard to take someone seriously who was killed by a line drive. No matter how macabre it is, there is something humorous about being killed by a line drive. It is much the same as being fatally struck by lightning. A couple of years ago, in Iowa City, a man really was fatally struck by lightning. He was walking up the sidewalk to his fiancée’s home when, splat, he was fried like an egg on her sidewalk, cooked like a hamburger, spread out like quicksilver to shimmer in the sun. Turned out he was a churchgoer, too – a deacon or an elder or something. I’ve often wondered what a preacher could possibly say, with a straight face, about someone fatally struck by lightning. It is so biblical. So prophetic. So funny.

I am the only one who knows this: that my father committed suicide. I have never told Sunny, or the Barons, my sister, my mother, or my best friend, Stan. I’m sure, on the bright blue September afternoon at County Stadium in Milwaukee, where the air was crisp with the memory of frost and tangy with the odor of burning leaves, that my father saw the line drive coming. Bill Bruton, the Milwaukee center fielder, swung late at a Harvey Haddix fast ball and sent it screaming over the top of the visitors’ dugout, at a speed of more than a hundred miles per hour. My father was writing on his scorecard and supposedly never saw the ball, which struck him full on the left temple, bursting a blood vessel and killing him instantly. But I was there, too. He had indeed been writing on his scorecard. I still have the scorecard, the final pen line wavering downward like the graph of a failing stock. I, for some reason, while pouring the last of my popcorn from the box into my right hand, was watching my father out of the corner of my eye. He sighted the line drive – I swear I saw the ball reflected in his pupil – and instead of ducking or pulling his head back, he almost imperceptibly moved his head forward, a weary gesture of resignation, and allowed the ball to strike him, thus ending his long and unsuccessful struggle against his tormentors, those craven bureaucracies which, for whatever reasons, refused to acknowledge the existence of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

As he lay crumpled there in his shirtsleeves in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, I knew he was dead, because at the same instant I was filling up with the information he alone had been party to for so many years; it was like water transferred from one lock to another. There in County Stadium, with the smell of fresh-cut grass and frying onions in my nostrils, I was suddenly illuminated like an old Wurlitzer, garish neons bubbling. I was overflowing with knowledge, and boiling with righteous indignation because not a soul in the world cared about what I knew.

Whatever had been visited upon my father was now visited upon me. The history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was transplanted into my brain like a pacemaker installed next to a fluttering heart.

If I had to choose a way to die, I suppose I would do the same as my father. What better way to go? The lulling quality of the sun, the crack of the bat, the hum of the crowd. Surrounded by everything he cherished. I don’t begrudge him his one instant of resignation, if that’s what it was. He had been chasing the elusive Iowa Baseball Confederacy for eighteen years and for all that time it had remained just out of his reach, the uncatchable mechanical rabbit of his dreams.

On the way back to Iowa City, I drove our green Fargo pickup truck while my father’s shell rode in a satin-lined casket on a railroad baggage car at double regular fare. I made the arrangements myself. I didn’t phone anyone. Who was there to phone? I would let the Barons know after I got back to Onamata. If I had let them know sooner, they would have insisted on coming to Milwaukee. After all, I wasn’t helpless.

It never occurred to me not to pursue legitimizing the Confederacy. At least I didn’t have to worry about money. My father certainly was not wealthy, but the big old house in Onamata and the small building that housed the insurance agency were both paid for. My father had employed a charming woman, Mrs. Lever, to manage the business. She was tall, flat as an ironing board, with gray hair combed back at the sides and mother-of-pearl-rimmed glasses. She was the wife of a corn farmer who retired to the city and let his eldest take over the farm. She must have been a lot younger than she looked, or perhaps at going-on-seventeen I thought everyone looked old, for she still runs the agency.

About four years ago I said to her, ‘Give yourself a raise of a hundred dollars a month. Keep running the business as you always have. At the end of the year we’ll split the profits.’

She fussed a little but she didn’t turn me down.

The next year I gave her another raise and sixty percent of the profits. Last fall I said, ‘It’s all yours. Just promise me you won’t change the name.’

My mother had remarried and apparently settled down. At what age? On her marriage license when she married my father, she listed herself as nineteen, but did she have to show proof or did they take her word for it? If nineteen was correct, then she was about twenty-two when I was born, twenty-seven when she deserted us for the last time, thirty-four when she married a man named Beecher, who, it was rumored, had some connection with the Wrigleys and the Chicago Cubs.

I know virtually nothing about my mother that my father didn’t tell me. I remember the warmth of her, her dark, hazy eyes. It seemed to me, when I got older, that she really didn’t know how to kiss. I remember her brushing her lips across my cheeks or forehead, but brushing was what she did, not kissing. I always felt as if her and Enola Gay’s leaving might somehow have been my fault. Perhaps I was so strange a child neither of them could stand me. Perhaps she hated my blondness, my potato-white skin, my hair the color of new stationery. What if she had good reason to leave? What if my father mistreated her? He was never violent, but mistreatment can take much subtler forms. What if she couldn’t stand being ignored? What if she couldn’t tolerate my father having a mistress, one far more demanding than anyone alive and sexual and sensuous, one she couldn’t fight either physically or mentally? The IBC is like that. I know.

Mother settled down at thirty-four, to life in a Chicago mansion.

Sunny isn’t thirty-four yet. Perhaps there is hope. Perhaps Sunny will settle down with me.

To my surprise, Darlin’ Maudie and Enola Gay returned for the funeral. I had thought of notifying them but didn’t. Certainly my father’s death didn’t make the Trib. Unless, of course, it was in one of those columns of oddities in the news: RABID FAN KILLED BY BASEBALL, or FAN KILLED BY RABID BASEBALL. There were six dark-suited, nervous men from the Milwaukee organization at the funeral. The Braves were so afraid I was going to sue them for some astronomical amount and win that they paid for my father’s transportation back to Iowa City, the hearse and the undertaker, and the silver-handled oak casket – that was a small settlement in itself. There were floral tributes from the owners, manager, and players which looked as if they belonged in the winner’s circle at the Kentucky Derby.

I was sent a sack of twenty-five baseballs, each personally inscribed by a member of the team, and a lifetime pass to a box seat, which, of course, expired with the team in 1965.

My mother and sister arrived in a black limousine, driven by a large-eared youth with a white, cadaverous face partially hidden by a chauffeur’s cap. They were both dressed fashionably in black and both looked much smaller than they had been in my memory. Mother was no more than five foot one, and Enola Gay was of identical height.

In the chapel of the Beckman-Jones Funeral Home in Iowa City, there was a curtained-off area for family members, but neither Mother nor Enola Gay sat there with me. In fact, they didn’t come near me at all. It was as if they were attending the funeral of a distant acquaintance, one whose family they had never met.

The Barons drove me to the funeral home. I sat in the back seat of their comfortable old Dodge, which smelled of dust and machine oil, as Missy hummed and smiled, twisting the skirt of her dark brown dress.

‘You don’t want to be all alone in that little room, Gideon,’ Marylyle Baron said to me. ‘Come and sit out in the chapel with us.’

‘You come inside with me,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel like having everyone stare at me. I suppose there are rumors.’ I smiled weakly. ‘It’s not every day the community’s number-one baseball fanatic gets killed at a baseball game.’

‘You don’t want to hear them,’ Mrs. Baron said. ‘People have small minds and mean mouths.’

So the four of us sat on pastel chairs in the curtained-off room, separated from the chapel by a peach-colored curtain translucent enough for me to recognize many of the mourners by their silhouettes.

I peeked around the edge of the curtain once: Darlin’ Maudie and Enola Gay sat about halfway back, demure and expensively dressed. They left as the pallbearers were preparing to carry the coffin outside to the hearse for the ride to Fairfield Cemetery in Iowa City. Their leaving was a good idea. The pallbearers might have mistaken their limousine for the hearse.

It was only a year or two later that Enola Gay became one of America’s first urban guerrillas. I have to admit Enola was a pioneer; perhaps she inherited her spirit from my father. She was years ahead of the Chicago Seven, the Weather Underground, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. She has also, as urban guerrillas go, been quite successful. Her first venture was to bomb a Dow Chemical subsidiary in Chicago – $250,000 damage and no injuries. She and her cohorts left a note, signed with their real names, with a P.S. : Catch us if you can!

They have not been able to catch Enola Gay, though one of the original bombers came forward in the early seventies and spilled his guts in return for three years’ probation and a reunion with his wealthy family. He is now vice president of a bank. Another member of the group blew himself up in 1969, near an Omaha packing plant where a labor dispute was taking place. Every post office in America has posters showing Enola Gay as she looked some fifteen years ago and as they imagine she might look today. Her list of offenses takes up two sheets of Wanted paper. There is a women’s collective named for her in Iowa City, and an abortion clinic in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, bears her name. Occasionally a car full of bedraggled-looking women in sloganed T-shirts stops in front of my home and a few pale faces peer at Enola Gay’s birthplace.

After the graveside services, Marylyle Baron grabbed my arm as I tried to edge away – from the Barons, from the polite condolences of neighbors and acquaintances who, having nothing to say, tried to say it anyway. It’s too bad there are no Hallmark cards saying, ‘Sorry your loved one was killed by a foul ball.’