herself into a corner. It is all right to mention my father’s obsession, but mine is never discussed seriously; certainly no criticism is ever offered. It is also all right to mention the strangeness of my mother, but Sunny is never mentioned, though she is my wife and, like my mother, a woman who comes and goes at will.
‘I caught the disease all at once. There were no symptoms.’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I always thought it was kind of like that polio that used to go around in the summers; it just snuck up and paralyzed your body. But what you got kind of affected your mind.’ She paused. ‘Well, now I have put my foot in it, haven’t I? But you really didn’t have personal knowledge of this baseball league until after your papa died?’
‘I knew only what he told me. I was just a kid, purposely uninterested in what my father was doing, kind of contemptuous, too, the way teenage boys are.’
‘And you were suddenly filled with it, just like religious fervor? But why keep at it? A smart young fellow like you should know when he’s beating a dead horse.’
‘I don’t think anyone knows when he’s beating a dead horse. But the reason I keep on trying to prove the existence of the Confederacy is that I’m right and everybody else is wrong!’ I laugh wistfully, trying to show that I do have some understanding of the futility of my quest.
‘Well, Gideon, I wish you luck. You still planning on having the town’s name changed?’
‘I don’t want to change the town name. I just want it acknow- ledged that Onamata is named for the wife of Drifting Away, the great Black Hawk warrior.’
‘I don’t suppose you have any proof that there ever was an Indian named Drifting Away?’
‘Not an iota. Except I know it’s the truth, and so did my father, and neither of us has ever been known to be a liar.’
It will take some monumental action on my part to have the Iowa Baseball Confederacy recognized and legitimized. I read of a man who climbed up a pole, vowing to sit on a platform twenty feet above the earth until the Cleveland Indians won the pennant. That was sometime in the mid-fifties. I assume he came down.
‘Well, I wish you luck, Gideon.’ And Marylyle Baron tightened up the strings of her speckled apron and hobbled up the steps of her farmhouse. I do odd jobs for the Barons. Out of love, not because I need the money. Today, I mow the big front yard; the sweetness of cut grass fills the air. I am bare to the waist and streaming sweat.
In the past year or so I have tried a new tack: I have begun to approach the subject of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy from an oblique angle. I liken it to driving a wedge in a rock.
Part of the information my father passed on to me concerned an Indian named Drifting Away, a Black Hawk warrior and chief. I know the facts I have about Drifting Away are true, but, as with the data about the Confederacy, there is not a shred of proof. But if I can get one person to acknowledge the existence of Drifting Away, if I can convince one person that the town was named for Onamata, Drifting Away’s wife, who was murdered by white settlers in the 1830s, I’ll have a real wedge in the rock.
From A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy:
Drifting Away remembers. He remembers the gentle, rolling Iowa landscape in days when buffalo still grazed idly, the only sounds the grumble of their own bones. The creak of the wheel was only a prophecy, the oxcart a vision, the crack of the whip and the crack of the rifle known only to those who made their eyes white as moonlight in order to stare down the tunnel of the future. Drifting Away remembers the haze of campfires hanging, smooth as a cloud, in the tops of dappled poplars …
Why baseball? Was it because of our obsession with the game that my father and I were gifted, if it can be called a gift, with encyclopedic knowledge of a baseball league?
I inherited my knowledge of the Confederacy and my interest in baseball, but what of my father? My grandfather never attended a baseball game in his life.
‘How did you come to love baseball?’ I asked my father repeatedly. And he told me the story of how his passion was roused by a visiting uncle, a vagabond of a man who parachuted into their lives every year or so. He would appear clutching a deck of cards and a complicated baseball game played on a board with dice and markers. He also arrived with an outfielder’s black glove and a baseball worn thin by time. He claimed the baseball was once autographed by Walter Johnson.
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.
