The All Nations Team
Michael Jasper
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Published by Michael Jasper at Smashwords
The All Nations Team
Copyright © 2010 by Michael Jasper
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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BONUS: At the end of this ebook, read excerpts from two of Michael's novels (also available in ebook format)!
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Also by Michael Jasper:
Gunning for the Buddha (stories)
Heart's Revenge
The Wannoshay Cycle
A Gathering of Doorways
Family, Pack
In Maps & Legends (a digital comic)
The Contagious Magic series:
A Sudden Outbreak of Magic
A Wild Epidemic of Magic (coming soon)
A Lasting Cure for Magic (coming soon)
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The All Nations Team
Chapter One
The final season of the World's All Nations team began with the terrible sound of a baseball striking a human skull.
A sound not unlike that of a book slamming shut.
Not a fancy leather-bound bible sitting in a rich white man's parlor, mind you. More like a small prayer book that's been snapped under your nose by your wife after she catches you dozing during the sermon again. An unholy sound, destined to haunt your nights and steal your sleep.
The lethal impact occurred as night approached in the final innings of my team's second exhibition game of the 1918 season, at the tail end of a long winter.
I remember the cold wood of the bench under me, and the competing smells of sweat and dust and flannel uniforms in my nose. Despite the shooting pain in my knees, I made myself get up and pace in the safety of the visitor's dugout.
In those moments before that popping sound shattered the night, my thoughts weren't on the game, but on the season's conclusion: settling down at last at the end of my travels next to a warm fire, surrounded by grandchildren I'd yet to meet, a book of stories in my hand instead of an incomplete roster.
My old heart kept trying to convince my thick head that I'd made the right choice in answering the letter tucked into my uniform pocket.
My thoughts raced and diverged like horses on a track. And as a result of my distraction, I took my eye off the ball.
Only for an instant, I lowered my gaze to my empty hands—imagining retirement, an ending—just long enough to miss the quality of my pitcher Donaldson's throw.
But after over fifty years of playing, nothing could stop me from looking when I heard the ever-promising pop of a bat making contact with a ball.
That pop brought me back to the game, just in time for the second sound of impact.
Next to the plate, the batter from the Kansas City Maroons was already down on one knee, the stub of his broken bat cradled in his dusky hands like a fallen bird. His eyes bulged white as eggs as he stared at a spot just outside our dugout.
In front of him, the area between the batter's box and the pitcher's mound held a thousand splintered slivers of wood that formed a jagged halo.
Silence coated the Kansas City ballpark. I felt the chill of the winter-tinged air as the wind changed direction, bringing with it the smells of popcorn and pine tar.
That day had been the first of April. April Fool's Day.
Thinking back on that moment now, I can still taste my own anger and bitterness, tempered by the strong bite of guilt. If I allow myself, I can even hear that sound, ringing in my ears, loud as a gunshot.
A prayer book snapping shut. A life stopping in mid-stream.
Worrell. You took your eye off the ball, you foolish white man. I wanted to tell you to get in the damn dugout. I should've dragged you in, though I never would've dared to even touch you in those days.
Nobody could have foreseen this, not even our prescient centerfielder Mack. Even if Mack was—as I suspect now—somehow responsible for what had just happened to our head coach. When I looked out into the brown stretch of dead grass that passed for centerfield, I saw Mack standing twenty feet in front the crooked white-picket fence of outfield, his skin gray in the fading daylight, his eyes...
His eyes—
No.
Let me stop a moment. I'm getting ahead of myself.
To recount this history properly, I must go back to before the line drive that went screaming past our dugout.
Before the endless series of foul tips, before the bunts and the squeeze plays, even before my distraction with that letter. Back before the crowd screamed for a win against my team and the air thundered from hundreds of boots and shoes and cold bare feet pounding on the ground and the wooden bleachers.
No, I need to start with the early innings of that second game, with my last face-to-face talk with head coach Abraham Worrell.
"George," he called to me at the bottom of the third. "Come here, please, and explain something to me."
The sun was already sagging toward the horizon behind us, above the six levels of bleachers and the line of bare oak trees beyond that, but still high enough to stab my outfielders in the eyes.
Worrell gripped our roster tight in one hand as I stepped closer, inhaling his soapy odor; he was always clean, without perspiration. The man was thin as a rail, blonde hair cut short and parted sharply. He stood just as tall as me, but I always felt like I had to look up whenever I talked to him.
"Who put Mack after No Small Foot in the lineup?" he said in his soft, scratchy voice. His words brought back a familiar tightness to my chest.
What I wanted to say was: Why, Mister Worrell, sir, since it's only you and me coaching this team, well, if it wasn't you, then it would've had to be me, now wouldn't it, sir? We could blame the Huns overseas, if you like. Or maybe an enemy spy lurking under the bleachers, for that matter. And while you may not have noticed that Mack has been hitting with twice the power of our Cherokee catcher lately, I did notice, and I made the switch. So perhaps we can quit pussyfooting around and get back to the game, sir, since we are down by two runs already?
What I did say was: "That was me, sir."
Worrell shook his head, now fatherly toward me with his smile, though the man was barely half my age. Patronizing, like so many of his kind before him. His eyes held nothing more than a gleam of contempt.
"George," he said. He was now holding tight to his trusty bible underneath the wrinkled-up roster. "Let's not make such decisions without consulting first. With his speed and ability to get on base, Mack should always be batting second or third. No Small Foot bats cleanup. That is how it is."
His hands tightened on the roster and the bible, and his watery eyes narrowed.
"You know that. Do not tamper with my winning combinations,—"
I could hear the missing word of his final sentence hanging in the air: "boy."
Worrell bit down on the word like a gob of spit before it slipped out between his straight white teeth and exposed him for the kind of man he really was.
I wanted to grab him by the front of his starched, spotless uniform, one hand on the big A and one on the big N, and press him against the metal of the dugout fence.
How does it feel, I'd shout into his pale face, to be always meek as a child at my age? To be unable to speak on your own God damn behalf? How does it feel now, to be helpless?
But all I did was turn and walk away from him without a word. My knees twinged with pain as my metal spikes bit into the cold, tobacco-stained ground, gouging out clods of dirt in my wake.
I did not wish for his death, then. But I did not wish him good health and longevity either.
The bottom of the inning began, accompanied by the five gongs of the big bell at St. Mary's Episcopal Church.
Maybe if I left this two-bit stadium here at the ass-end of winter, and just started walking until I arrived at the return address printed on the folded-up letter from Lizbeth in my pocket, then she could speak to Maddie for me, and we could all be together again.
But, as always, I stopped at the far end of the dugout, knees aching and chest pounding, and turned back to the game.
I couldn't think about Maddie right now. Twisting my fingers into the chicken wire of the dugout fence in front of me, I exhaled in a slow-forming cloud and gazed at the field and my players scattered across it.
My players. They were never Worrell's.
From behind the plate, No Small Foot the Indian flashed a sign for the next pitch to our colored southpaw on the mound. A burly Mexican man stood at first, a white woman at second, and a lanky amber-skinned fellow from the Philippines played shortstop. A Jew covered third. In the outfield, a compact Japanese man waited in left field, a light-skinned Negro with a trio of brown and white feathers trailing out of the bottom of his cap paced back and forth in right field, and the man I knew only as Mack prowled center.
The All Nations Team, the posters called us.
We were one of a kind, the only truly mixed team in those days filled with the constant, numbing echo of war from the other side of the world. If J.L., our team's owner, hadn't gathered these players for our team, they'd be working twelve-hour days in Chicago slaughterhouses or Pittsburgh steel mills or California orchards, or they'd back in their native lands, living in a slum or a tent or a shanty, trying not to starve to death on a daily basis.
Or more likely, they'd be stuck in a trench on the Western Front, aiming rifles instead of bats as they tried to hold back the German onslaught. But our team owner had a cousin in the draft offices, and he'd pulled some strings to shield most of my men from the draft. That was J.L. for you: a good man, even if he was white.
I considered all of them my players, though I'd always be their assistant coach, serving Worrell or some other white man. The unspoken fact was that a man like me could not coach a team with white players on it.
We'd already had two other white head coaches like Worrell since the team began in 1914. Our original head coach left with most of our share of the gate receipts before the last game of that first year, and his weak-spined replacement parted ways with us when we lost our Pullman car and most everything else that came with it near the end of the 1916 season. I can't even remember their names anymore.
As for me, I'd been here from the start: reliable assistant coach Grunion.
Still burning from Worrell's scolding, I gave No Small Foot behind the plate the sign for one of Donaldson's wicked curves. I limped past Jose Mendez, our Cuban pitcher, as he recovered after tossing over a hundred and fifty pitches in our first game that day, a 5-1 win. Each step I took sent needles of pain into my knees, but I refused to sit down. One of these times, I'd sit down and never get back up again.
My team—and the game itself, with all its amazing catches and minute strategies and close calls—were pretty much all that kept me going at the age of sixty-four, or, as I liked to think of it, sixty-sore.
"Come on, Donaldson," I called out. "Toss it in there."
I paced for a dozen more pitches before my sixty-sore-year-old body stopped cooperating. I had to rest.
The moment I sat down on the splintery wood of the dugout bench, the Maroons batter clubbed the ball deep into center, for what looked like three bases, easy.
I didn't bother getting back to my feet, however. Our man Mack chased the ball down in a dozen long strides, plucking it from the air with his gloved right hand as if it were a firefly. He'd made an impossible catch look easy. Again.
My smile dissolved when I looked at the chalk scoreboard above the home dugout and saw that we were being out-hit by these meat packers, factory workers, and day laborers. The Kansas City Maroons led three to one thanks to an unlikely home run that passed over our rightfielder Grant's head.
As the third inning ended, my team jogged to the dugout accompanied by scattered boos and hisses from the crowd. Even here, in our unofficial home town of Kansas City, the All Nations were seen as the villains, the team the fans loved to hate. I could allow the spectators that luxury, especially if it made them forget the bloody war in Europe for just a few hours. I was used to always being a visitor, and sometimes a villain.
But what I hadn't grown used to was losing, even in an exhibition game against colored players. I stood up and spat my plug of Red Man into the garbage barrel, suddenly furious that we were playing like such bush leaguers.
"Damn it all anyway," I said as I met my players filing back into the dugout. "Let's get off our sorry asses and knock the stuffing out of that ball, before I knock the stuffing out of each and every one of—"
"That's quite enough, George," Coach Worrell murmured from the far side of the dugout. My mouth snapped shut as Worrell continued speaking, soft as a saint. "Now, let's get some hits this inning, gentlemen, Miss Nation."
Worrell and his churchly ways. Why, to my knowledge, the man had never uttered any word stronger than "Dang" in his life, and he didn't even chew tobacco. That behavior only got you so damn far in this game.
And the little prayer book snaps shut, right under my nose.
Our rightfielder Charlie Grant raised my flagging spirits by taking my surly advice to heart. He pounded his first pitch deep into center field. Charlie raced around the bases, a blur in gray flannel, the three feathers stuck into his cap fluttering behind him like tails. He slid headfirst into third a heartbeat ahead of the throw, evoking a range of insults from the now-nervous crowd.
"Damned speedy redskin" was the tamest of the taunts.
"Atta boy, Charlie!" I called out, giving first the crowd, then my other players a pointed look. I pulled out a fresh gob of tobacco to tuck into my cheek. "Glad to hear someone was listening."
Dusting himself off, Charlie gave me a crooked grin as he adjusted the feathers under his cap. I nodded at him and swallowed a curse aimed at the white owners of the majors that excluded my people from the majors.
Even oddballs like Charlie, a colored man who once claimed he was a redskin after posing as "Chief Tokahoma" to make it into the big leagues a decade ago. He'd kept up his Indian act even after being exposed as a Negro by Sox owner Charles Comiskey and kicked off the team after only one game. He still insisted we call him Chief.
At the plate, the short young man nicknamed "Jap" Mikado stepped back to look at me to see if the squeeze was on.
My lips formed a bitter smile as I glanced at Worrell sitting with his chin in his hand, studying the other team like a doctor examining a patient. I turned back to the young man I insisted on calling by his real name, Goro. I ran a finger over the bill of my cap, wiped a hand across my chest, and scratched the side of my nose.
The squeeze was indeed on.
Goro stepped back into the batter's box and the pitcher released the ball. At the last possible instant, Goro squared up and dropped a beautiful, dribbling bunt that limped toward first base.
Goro bolted out of the batter's box as Charlie sprinted headlong down the third base line toward home. The bunted ball rolled onto the infield grass and died just as Charlie slid across home plate with a war whoop.
The first baseman, pitcher, and catcher for the Maroons stood over the ball, staring at it with their arms at their sides, as if trying to comprehend its sudden appearance there.
Kansas City Maroons 3, All Nations 2.
"Now this is turning into our sort of game," I said, pounding on our Cherokee catcher's broad back until my hand stung.
"Ol' Chief got a lucky break," No Small Foot muttered, working his threadbare catcher's mitt open and closed. He glared with squinting eyes at our panting rightfielder outside the dugout.
"Easy, there, John," I said. I spat a long stream of tobacco onto the ground, drawing a line in the dirt between the two men.
As Charlie swallowed a celebratory gulp of water from the ice bucket in the dugout, Rodriguez stepped up to the plate. Rodriguez was a big, round-headed Mexican who claimed that he lost a battle with the butt of a rifle during his country's revolution. He'd also claimed from the start that his first name was Buddha. He even had the smooth, hairless head to go along with the name.
What could I do? I called him Buddha, as did the rest of my team.
Perhaps it was blasphemy to those who believed in such things, but I wasn't one of those people. Not anymore. These days, I didn't believe in much other than the game and my players. The years had taught me that much.
I rubbed my arms to warm them in the cool air, and suddenly I had to sit back down again. I lost my breath and nearly swallowed my plug of tobacco.
No, I thought, as my vision went red. Not again.
I blinked to clear the blood from my vision and pulled myself up to my feet again. Had to be the damn cold around here. I couldn't wait to head south tomorrow for our first series of road games in warmer weather.
Rodriguez clubbed his first pitch straight up and back, foul, and I followed the hissing trajectory of the ball back into the bleachers.
Just like that I was caught, entranced by the dozens of dark faces in the crowd.
Sometimes, between innings, I would start counting them all, fascinated by all those lives gathered here for our game—the women in their feathered hats and long dresses, ankles demurely covered, and the men in their dark suits and dusty bowlers and fedoras. I wondered what kind of families these people had, what sort of homes they lived in, what class of dreams and passions guided them in their lives. I was never able to count them all.
And, as always, I entertained the wild thought that they might be out there as well: Maddie, Jacob, and Lizbeth. Impossible, I knew, but that never stopped me from daydreaming about it.
I was still gazing out at the crowd of colored men and women when a clear, confident voice spoke up next to me.
"You know, Coach, they will all show up at a game one of these days this season. Your family."
A wave of blood darkened my vision again for a painful instant. Now that the foul tip had been retrieved, I turned back to the game. Our Mexican Buddha gave the pitcher his best scowl while he choked up even higher on his chipped brown bat, adjusted his cap on his bald head, and dug in with the glitter of metal spikes.
I finally turned to the source of that familiar voice: Mack, who was now staring directly up at the low-hanging sun through the dugout fence.
"My family, Mack?" I said, spitting more tobacco juice and drawing a grimace from my odd centerfielder. "You can't know that."
"If only I could be more precise," Mack said as he picked up three scuffed bats and swung all three of them in a slow arc, "but you know, Coach, your family will attend one of our games. All of them, though not together in the manner that you might expect."
Mack's eyes seemed to catch the rays of the wintry sun, the whites around his brown-tinted irises almost glowing now. As he continued talking, my tongue felt glued to the roof of my mouth.
"Maybe not this month or next, but soon. And not before we lose quite a few of our own people right here on this team. They'll show up just in time, though, your family, along with many others, some of them unwanted and unwelcome. But all of them just in time. That's what I see."
"Mack," I protested, but he'd already stepped into the on-deck circle, leaving me—as always—with a handful of questions and a heart full of dread.
In the late afternoon light, Mack's skin looked darker than my own. I could've sworn that at other times the boy's skin looked as pale as one of our white players. I'd long ago given up trying to tell if Mack was white or colored.
The next pitch to Buddha went high for a ball.
Losing our own people? And just in time for what?
The kid always left me feeling flummoxed, as if he had jumbled the order of his words and left it to me to rearrange them properly.
As if reading my thoughts, Mack turned to me suddenly from outside the dugout. I caught a coppery whiff of his aftershave, and his eyes were abnormally bright.
"Have I been wrong before?" he said, his face now tinted red with emotion. "Like now, Coach. After Señor Rodriguez gets his hit, I'll knock the ball over the Butler-Flynn Paint sign in right. No joking."
Faced with Mack's unblinking gaze and shifting skin tones, I had to look away.
As if on cue, Buddha fouled the next pitch back into the stands. With his swing, a long, flatulent sound erupted from him, and the crowd broke into raucous laughter. With Mack's odd prediction still rattling around in my head like loose change, I bit back a smile.
Sometimes my colorful players were too much. If the crowd remembered anything about this game, they'd surely recall the farting Mexican.
I looked back at my centerfielder in the on-deck circle. Tall and lean, with broad shoulders and wide-set eyes that narrowed like a hawk when he was up to bat, Mack had been with the team since J.L. had formed it in 1914. I usually laughed at Mack's serious manner and his stories about the stars of baseball to come, men of all colors and nationalities; all playing together much like the All Nations did now. The kid had an imagination like nobody else I'd ever known. But today I found it hard to smile at his predictions.
Finally making solid contact that didn't go foul, Buddha drove the ball to the fence in deep center on two bounces. He thundered to second, breaking wind every few feet. Ahead of him, Goro made a beeline around the bases to tie the game at three apiece.
"That's my team," I said, grinning and rubbing my chest, which had gone tight in the past few minutes, thanks to my chat with my centerfielder.
Mack dropped all but one of the bats he'd been swinging and undid the top button of his collared jersey. His eyes caught the sunlight for an instant as he tipped his cap at me on his way to the left-handed batter's box.
As predicted, he knocked the first pitch over the billboard-studded wall at its deepest in right field.
"You make it look easy, kid," I said after he returned to the dugout. He was barely winded from rounding the bases.
His home run had passed ten feet over the painted image of a big black bucket with "Butler-Flynn" emblazoned on its side.
And you scare me sometimes, I thought, and not for the last time in that season.
* * * * *
At the bottom of the ninth of that second game, three outs away from a victory—and barely five minutes before our head coach took his eye off the ball for the last time—I sat heavily on the bench, hands itching to pull the letter from my pocket to read again about the end of this season. We led five to three, and the air grew cooler with each pitch. Except for Mendez, the dugout was empty next to me.
Outside the dugout, Worrell played catch with Boles, warming up. Worrell often insisted on pitching the final outs of a game, using every trick in the book to compensate for his lack of power. His favorites involved tobacco juice, bits of sandpaper, and even chewed-up licorice to slick up his pitches and make them harder, if not impossible, to hit. Whenever Worrell closed a game, the ball ended up black as my own skin.
Worrell, you foolish man. You never saw it coming.
I glanced out at the noisy crowd in the graying light, attempting to rally their beloved Maroons. The colored men in their dark suits could barely stay in one place, pumping their fists into the air or waving their hats above their heads. Someone leaned on the horn of one of the half-dozen Fords parked behind the bleachers.
Next to the men, the women had pulled on their overcoats to keep warm, and whenever they clapped, they'd touch their hats with delicate hands as if to make sure they were still there. Beautiful ladies.
I caught myself smiling, thinking of Maddie in her favorite blue dress, so many years ago. When I returned my attention to the game, the rumpled letter from my pocket was in my hands.
"Steeerike one!" the ump called, a black blur as he punched his fist. A wall of boos from the revived crowd answered him.
I glanced down at the name on the letter. Lizbeth, my daughter.
Whenever I was home, I used to tell her stories about the plantation where I'd lived as a child, working the fields alongside my family and friends for Mister Satler, along with tall tales about baseball that she never enjoyed as much. I blamed Maddie for that.
I'd been wondering about Lizbeth all this past winter, ever since receiving her letter at Christmas. She was married and a mother herself now, living her own life, according to her letter. She'd found me, after all these years. It took me a week to write her a letter in return, and another week to actually mail the thing.
Months passed, and I heard nothing in response from her, until opening my mailbox today to find this letter.
Donaldson finished off the first two Maroon hitters on six pitches, throwing as hard now at the end of the game as he had at its start. Worrell's shaky pitching services wouldn't be needed, after all.
The home team's fans remained standing, but their cheering had dwindled away. They could sense a loss in the air.
Outside our dugout, Worrell and Boles stopped playing catch and took a knee to watch the showdown. I caught young Boles fingering a bump on his forehead, a knot so big it pushed the bill of his cap up at an angle.
The white boy, still in his teens, was always getting hit by pitches, which I blamed on how he crowded the plate and how he ran his mouth on the mound. Of course, most white pitchers we faced were able to throw strikes to Boles and avoid beaning him altogether.
I watched Donaldson kick his right leg as high as his own head and then twist through his windup to uncork a curveball out of his left hand. The ball dropped like a bomb toward the plate.
The young hitter swung so hard—and missed by so much—that his feet became tangled and he fell to the dirt. A sigh traveled over the crowd.
The hitter kicked his way back up to his feet. He armed sweat from his forehead and took a quick series of swings with the bat as if to remind himself how the whole process worked. Then he placed one foot, then the other, back into the box like a man stepping into an icy ocean. He gave Donaldson the tiniest of nods.
Donaldson responded with another high kick and the hard blur of a fastball. This time, the hitter got a piece of the pitch, sending it back over the stands. Nearly five seconds later, a tinkle of glass tickled my ears. That had to be one of the houses on the next block.
The kid had strength, not to mention guts, to be standing his ground against John Donaldson, one of the best southpaws around—colored, white, or otherwise.
And so the duel began. By the fourth foul tip, the crowd was on its feet again.
"You got it, Eddie!"
"Stay alive, Edward!"
"Make 'em work for it, Eddie!"
"Ed-die!"
The ump called for time, waiting for one of the panting kids outside the fence to return the game ball to him once more.
"Hit it far, Eddie," the kid in faded overalls called out after tossing the ball to the ump. "An' hit it fair. We're all beat from chasin' the foul ones."
As the crowd barked laughter, I heard a foreign sound: Worrell's voice, calling encouragement to Donaldson on the mound. Usually Worrell had precious little to say to our colored players. I wondered if my ears deceived me.
Donaldson caught the returned ball from No Small Foot and wiped his brow, which was now furrowed by Worrell's sudden attentions.
Something struck me then, a strange prickling feeling, like the sense that you've just said the wrong thing and killed a lively conversation. The way the kid at bat was clobbering the ball had put me strangely ill at ease.
The ball could go anywhere. Fast.
Not necessarily a revolutionary thought, after so many decades of playing this game. But Worrell and Boles were sitting not twenty feet from the batter, exposed outside the dugout in the fading daylight.
I should get them to come inside, I remember thinking.
Then I thought of Worrell's talk with me earlier. The way he dismissed my attempts to lead the team more efficiently to a win. How he'd wanted to call me "boy."
Let it come, I thought. Let the ball go where it may.
Judging from the pounding roar now coming from behind me, every person in the crowd was stamping their feet on the bleachers or the ground. They stopped the instant Donaldson launched the ball.
In the sudden silence, Eddie made his best contact of the night, hitting the ball so hard he shattered his bat. Like an explosion of wooden fireworks, the broken bat showered the infield with slivers of wood, distracting everyone for an instant from where the ball had actually gone.
The sharp, popping sound that followed came from a spot directly next to the All Nations' dugout.
My hands clenched, crumpling the letter in my grip.
At that moment, I simply couldn't turn to look to my right. Instead, my gaze traveled from the countless shards of wood on the infield to Mack in centerfield. The young man dropped his glove as if he had been the one who'd been hit, and in the unnatural hush covering the ballpark, I could hear his mitt drop onto the dead grass surrounding him.
Mack. You should've seen this coming, son.
As I stared, a gauzy white light spread around Mack's darkened face, spilling out from his eyes as if he had a white-hot fire inside his brain. And the only way for that heat to escape was through his eyes.
My vision went blood red on me again. I felt myself slipping, falling.
Despite the distance between us and the haze of my own bloody vision, I could see Mack slowly nod at me.
I felt a stabbing pain in my chest, and the tobacco went bitter in my mouth.
Mack. What do you see?
Then I blinked, and the strange light disappeared from Mack's eyes. The frozen, timeless moment ended.
I needed all the strength in my tired old body to finally turn to the right, where head coach Worrell still stood, left hand tight against his temple, mouth forming indecipherable, soundless words.
Then, as if he'd been waiting for me to look his way, Worrell fell. He landed face-first in the dirt, five feet from the shelter of the visitors' dugout.
The park burst into motion and sound. My players rushed to Worrell, while the crowd exploded with shocked screams. Footsteps pounded all around me now, on the ground and on the bleachers behind me.
"Coach," Boles murmured from next to Worrell. "Coach?"
"Coach!" Buddha Rodriguez cried from first base, hands clamped to his bald head.
I realized he was calling me, not Worrell.
"Coach! ¿Qué debemos hacer? What should we do, Coach?"
All of my players turned to me. I spat my plug of tobacco onto the ground, gagging from its suddenly foul taste, and dropped my tattered letter.
I was going to warn him, but I didn't. I should have pulled him inside. He was half my age, and now he was dead, the life driven out of him by a ball faster than a bullet. Nobody should have to die that way. Not even a man like Worrell.
And now my players were looking to me for guidance. To lead.
I dragged my heavy feet through the dirt outside the dugout, thinking, I did not want this with each step, my knees aching in time with my thoughts. My future plans faded like old ink on dried-out paper.
Did not want it.
At last, out of breath and tight-chested, I reached Worrell's unmoving, prone body, with my players all huddled around me.
The man wasn't getting up; I knew this as sure as if Mack predicted it. Like a door slamming shut. A prayer book snapping closed.
Abraham Worrell, the All Nations head coach, was dead.
His spirit would begin haunting me later that very night.
Chapter Two
Until I met Maddie, I never took much stock in religion. I remember the hymns my mother would sing to us during those hot nights under the tin roof of our quarters in South Carolina. How I tried to keep still but went right on sweating on my blanket, wedged between my two older brothers. Mama sang of a balm in Gilead, of O-Mary-don't-you-weep, of Moses fittin' the battle of Jericho.
But they were just songs, stories to help us fall asleep and get through the day's labor. I didn't really put any faith in them.
Father, on the other hand, refused to talk about religion while we lived on the plantation. Not until much later, after we'd gotten our freedom and moved to Chicago, did the old man stop looking away when the topic of believing entered the conversation.
Then he'd listen in with a sudden intensity and start asking the kind of questions that would be difficult for anyone but a preacher to answer, and that would sour the mood for everyone.
Around that time, I started getting paid to play ball—not much, but at seventeen, I didn't require much—and ended up in Kansas, of all places. Where I met Maddie.
Working next to her in a Kansas City laundry one snowy winter between seasons, I would tell her stories about traveling the country and playing baseball, and she would tell me about Jesus and his desire to save our immortal souls. The way she talked, you'd think Jesus was a close personal friend of hers.
I admit, the combination of her closeness, her pretty face, and her melodious voice, even there in the noisy bustle of the great washing machines, made me want to believe. And if my faith made me more attractive to her, so be it.
Not even a year later, in 1875, I married her in the tiny church she'd attended since she was born. I was so full of the giddiness of love and the breathlessness of our lives opening up together that I promised Maddie I'd attend church every Sunday, even when I was on the road with my team.
She would take my hands in hers, and we would pray, and that would be enough for me. I felt man enough to fight like Moses at Jericho, so long as my Maddie never had to weep like Mary.
That was then.
If I were that same man now, over forty years later—a man of faith—I'd be whispering a prayer instead of watching my breath cloud in front of my face like a mask.
I'd be taken by the Holy Spirit in the presence of the dead white man in the pristine gray uniform, laid out in the square bed of a Ford Model T pickup, his lifeless body cushioned with my players' gloves and hats. Maybe I'd even get a sense of his soul, brushing past me on its way to the afterworld.
If I were a better man, I'd feel something for him, out of the goodness of my heart.
But, standing alone just outside the dugout, staring not at the truck and its lifeless burden, but at a darkened baseball field, I couldn't feel a thing other than a bellyful of guilt and a glint of relief.
As the pickup bearing his body finally sputtered off into the night, I swore I could hear his dry laughter drift toward me like a cool breeze against my cheek.
A moment later, the owner of the All Nations team approached me with his battered hat in his hand, walking with the slow stride of a pallbearer. His blue eyes were ringed with circles of sadness, like a hound dog returning home after a long, unsuccessful hunt.
I'd known J.L. Wilkinson for decades, going back to the days when we played in exhibitions against each other in the '70s and '80s. He'd been the new young white pitcher dogged by accuracy problems, while I was the veteran colored hitter who belted the ball deep into the outfield for extra bases whenever we met.
Then the so-called "Gentleman's Agreement" of 1887 ended those meetings. As far as I knew, colored men would never play ball with white men again. Not in a Major League game—the only kind of game that truly mattered. All we had were exhibition games in small fields scattered across the country, diamonds like this nearly deserted one here in Kansas City.
"You are the new head coach, George," J.L. said, stopping right in front of me. It was not a question.
In spite of the chill in the air, I could see sweat on his bald forehead as he looked up at me. He smelled like fried food and dust.
"I refuse to take no for an answer."
"No," I said anyway, feeling a tremor in my chest that ran down both hands. I didn't want to be the colored man who replaced the newly dead white man. "It's not... not my place, sir."
"What is this 'sir' garbage, George?" I could feel an edge to his voice, like sandpaper under silk. "You're not thinking of, well, going against my wishes, now, are you?"
I tried to smile, but couldn't. I kept seeing Worrell fall nose-first into the dirt, his left temple bulging and purple. He didn't even try to catch himself.
All in the blink of a distracted eye. All my fault.
"Sorry," I muttered. "I just—"
"Can't believe it. I know. In all my years of baseball, I've, well, I've never seen anything like that. He never saw it coming."
The strange ache in my chest that I'd felt earlier in the game returned, along with a stream of dark thoughts: What must it feel like to be alive one second, and dead the next? What had the poor man felt? And when did all feeling stop?
"George?" J.L. said, stepping closer as if to catch me. I'd been swaying, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, as if I were in the batter's box myself.
"I'm all right. Just a bit overwhelmed, that's all."
"I understand," he said, then added, "Coach."
"Thanks." I could barely hear my own voice for the growing buzz of the crickets around us. The cold night air infiltrated my sweaty uniform, as if sensing an opening and charging in.
Worrell was gone. Dead.
And I was head coach. At last.
"Do me one favor, though," J.L. said, his round face colored in the weak light by a familiar shade of frustration. "Tell Grant to lose those damn feathers, would you? We're not a gimmick team or a novelty team. People need to take us seriously, well, for who we really are. All of us. Including Grant. No more hijinks."
"Yes, sir," I said automatically, thinking of Charlie flying around the bases, feathers waving. How he'd ignited our rally, back when Worrell was still alive.
I heard that popping sound again and tried not to flinch.
I stood there with J.L. in the chilly darkness, not needing to speak. Our team owner was the only white man that I could truly consider a friend. Though I'd never call him "Wilkie" like his other friends or one of his many cousins.
He was a fair man for a team owner, making sure my players promptly received their portion of the gate for each game. He even understood my knee problems and didn't expect me to play like most coaches and managers did on other short-handed clubs. I hadn't picked up a glove for an actual game in years.
I exhaled, feeling the some of the pent-up tension drain from my tight shoulders and clenched jaw.
"That's quite enough," a voice whispered from somewhere down the first base line, ruining my moment of composure. "Boy," the voice added, this time from the vicinity of the pitcher's mound.
I froze, grinding my teeth once more. I looked first at J.L., but he was still staring down at his small, empty hands, and then I looked out at the empty bleachers behind us. We were alone.
When I risked a look back at the field, though, I could've sworn I saw—for a mad instant—a lanky white figure in a strangely glowing gray uniform, winding up on the mound, kicking high, arms akimbo.
But when I blinked and looked at the mound again, there was nobody there.
Just my tired brain, playing tricks on me.
"Look," J.L. began, toeing the dirt with one not-so-shiny black shoe. He hadn't noticed any of my contortions next to him. "I'd understand it if you wanted to, well, delay the start of the road trip. I can talk to my cousin down in Shreveport and see if we can't postpone—"
"No. We need to play." I swallowed, tasting more dust as I remembered my place. We were friends, but he was still white and I was still colored. "If that's all right with you, that is."
"Of course." J.L. said. "I'll do my best to see you gents off tomorrow, bright and early. That is, well, if I can get my flivver to crank in the morning. That car hates the cold." He shook his head, put on his hat, and turned to go. "Get some rest now, Coach. It's been a rough night. A terrible night."
As the cool blanket of night covered Exposition Park, I watched J.L. fire up his mud-spattered Ford Speedster. Most of the spectators, not to mention all of my players, had come here and left on foot. Flivvers were not so easy to come by for the rest of us, and our team bus was in the garage, waiting for our season of barnstorming to begin.
I'd watched my players leave while I was talking to J.L., some heading home with their families, while others went off with friends, most likely to find a tavern. All of them wore dull expressions of disbelief and loss on their faces. They reminded me of the grainy photographs of the soldiers in the trenches of Europe. Shell-shocked, they called it.
The game itself would remain forever one out away from completion. In my first act as head coach, I listed it in my records as a loss.
Back in the visitor dugout, with all my belongings packed up, I pulled out my pouch of Red Man, wincing at the profile of the feather-wearing Indian on its label. When I tasted the moist tobacco, I gagged. Like varnish mixed with dirt. Ruined.
Sputtering, I threw the whole works into the garbage barrel next to the bench.
Then I saw the letter.
I picked up the crumpled envelope I'd left on the churned-up ground next to the barrel. With a grunt, I tore it in half and threw the pieces into the barrel, on top of my pouch of spoiled chewing tobacco.
Enough with the letters. No more sitting up all night composing them in my head as sleep escaped me. No more waiting for responses that never came. No more getting my hopes up for some sort of reconciliation, after all this time.
With the letter disposed of, I could think about heading home at last; the team bus left tomorrow at five a.m. for our games in Shreveport. Our travels were about to begin I should be home, enjoying the comfort of my own bed.
Over the rightfield and centerfield walls, across the street from the ballpark, rectangles of light glowed yellow and warm from the rows of two-story houses. As I gazed at one of the windows and listened to a distant gramophone churning out a waltz, I wondered about all the people out there I'd never know.
Was a baby crying on the other side of that window? Was a father playing with his kids in that light? Was an old man or woman eating alone in that house?
And what about Worrell? Did he have a porcelain-skinned sweetheart somewhere in the nicer part of the city, wondering when he'd return?
Something skittered across the dirt outside the dugout, though it was now too dark to see anything. I nodded and squinted in the dark, as if I'd been waiting for this, now that J.L. was gone.
"That's quite enough, boy."
I held my breath as the dry voice of our former head coach floated through the night air toward me. Of course it was Worrell. There was no sense in denying it.
"You think she'd want to talk to you?"
The voice came from the pitcher's mound, and it froze me where I stood in the dugout. My old, arthritic hands began shaking. I tasted salty sweat on my lips.
"After all these years, and how you treated her, and the rest of them?"
The voice was in my ear now, coming from behind me. My heart thumped against my sternum, painfully.
I whirled, feeling foolish for chasing after my imagination like that, and paid the price with twin stabs of pain, one for each knee. I inhaled at last, but my breath remained short and choppy, like a panicking swimmer too far out in the waves.
"Especially," Worrell's bodiless voice taunted, "your boy. Boy..."
I'd half-convinced myself that someone actually was out there, floating above the brown grass of the infield, but in the light of the waning moon I could discern that the mound was clearly empty.
For a maddening few moments that seemed to last half a lifetime, I felt like I was surrounded by a whole team of angry, spiteful spirits, all of them echoing that last word: "Boy."
I waited for the disembodied voice to continue its scolding derision, but the only sound I heard was the wind and my own ragged breathing.
I was alone. I remained in the dugout, hoping that one of my players—Buddha Rodriguez or No Small Foot or even Mack—would come back and rescue me.
But ten silent minutes passed as I stood there in the darkness of the dugout, and no one appeared.
At last, chilled and aching in my old joints, I changed out of the scuffed pair of spikes that now belonged to the new head coach of the All Nations team and let my tired, sore legs carry me the sixteen blocks back to the small, mostly empty house I called home, and I did not once look back.
* * * * *
The next day, when the team bus rolled over the southern border of Missouri into Arkansas, I couldn't have felt more relieved. Outside the dirty windows, the land had turned to rolling green hills instead of the endless miles of flat black pastureland. The bus rattled down yet another gravel road, a route that our driver Blount insisted was a short cut.
The bus. That was a bit of a joke. This vehicle was actually a refurbished Double-T flatbed truck with four extra rows of unforgiving wooden seats and a reinforced metal frame.
The players' bags and equipment sat stacked onto the front seat next to Blount, along with the rolled-up tents and stakes we used on nights when a hotel was unavailable or too costly. I couldn't count the number of nights I'd slept in a tent on the same field where I'd play ball the next day. That was just a sacrifice you made to help your team succeed.
My players and I sat three to four to a row behind Blount. On each side of the exterior of the bus, bold black letters proclaimed the bus property of "The World's All Nations Barnstorming Team" (a title that would've been even longer if Blount hadn't run out of room and paint), and the roof was made from a chunk of billboard we had plucked from the road late one night.
This bus was a far cry from the Pullman car we once used to ride the rails in luxury just two seasons ago. But times were tough, and J.L. had to cut the expenses wherever he could.
Looking up at the fading circus broadsheets still affixed to the billboard ceiling made me think about the Chautauqua I'd taken Maddie to when we were first married. After paying our dime to get in, we'd sat at the back of the big brown tent. All afternoon we watched a parade of performers that included an opera diva, a ten-man band, a Plains Indian, a band of jugglers, and a magician.
While Maddie made a sour face at some of the more colorful performers, I reveled in the variety. So many fascinating people, with so many specialized skills. I felt like a rube, a simpleton who only knew how to smash a ball with a piece of hickory.
They saved the fiery inspirational speakers for last, as dusk approached.
"Find your happiness!" the first speaker had shouted, his voice already growing hoarse, his pear-shaped face red and shiny with perspiration. "You don't need to rely on your preacher, your teacher, or the latest "Perils of Pauline" double feature! Will you be able to say, on your deathbed, that you have found your happiness in life, and that your time was not all wasted?"
Maddie had not been particularly pleased when I'd told her my happiness in life was from baseball more than anything else. I should've known better, but back then I simply didn't think. I must've been such a disappointment to her. No wonder she left.
A hard lurch of the bus nearly knocked me out of my seat. Rubbing my chest and blinking memories and dust out of my eyes, I turned to look at the mix of light and dark faces crowded next to me and behind me on the bus.
Chief Charlie dozed on the end of the seat next to me, while behind him the lower part of my second-basewoman's face was obscured by a newspaper shouting "Germans Launch Another Offensive Against Allies." Above the paper, the blue eyes of the woman we knew only by her nickname of Carrie Nation were wide with a mix of shock and rage, a look similar to the look she wore whenever she went on about how women deserved the right to vote.
I felt a stab of sympathy for Carrie, even if she was a white woman, and as such, I didn't dare say more than a word or two her on a good day. J.L. had signed her on a tip from one of his many cousins spread out across the country. She'd never told me her real name, but whoever she was, she was strong enough to stand on her own against whatever curve balls the world threw at her. Even a world filled with marauding forces and mounting death tolls overseas.
Next to Carrie, Mack dozed. His skin was brown as a bruise today, catching and distorting the weak light of morning in its usual way. I looked away before he opened his eyes, remembering the unholy light coming from them at yesterday's game. I was in no mood for any more predictions.
Boles, Mendez, Goro, and Phil the Philippine all slept in the third row, like a bunch of oversized, snoring schoolkids.
In the last seat, squeezed between a snoozing Buddha Rodriguez and a frowning No Small Foot, John Donaldson looked up and caught my eye. I could see the furrow in his brow from here.
Oh boy, I thought.
An instant later, Donaldson got up and began squeezing through the tiny aisle of the bus, one hand on the ceiling and the other on the backs of each seat. He paused next to me, looking down at the space by the window where Worrell usually sat. He gave me his usual shy smile, about to speak.
I beat him to it.
"How's the arm, John?" I said, nodding at the empty seat.
"Hey there, Coach," he said, dropping onto the hard seat with a good-natured groan. Despite the fact that he'd just turned twenty-seven, he looked no older than seventeen. "It's good. Though these bumps Ol' Blount keeps hitting won't let me get any rest."
"Yeah. I think he aims for the ruts so he can test the bus's suspension." As if in response, the makeshift bus slid around a bend in the road, motor roaring as the wheels spun.
"I got it! I got it!" Blount shouted from the driver's compartment in front of us, like an outfielder chasing down a high pop fly.
We all held on for dear life, including the sleeping players—they knew the routine, even asleep. The air quickly filled with the stink of burning oil.
"So how are you, Coach? You okay?"
"I'm all right." I sighed. Might as well get this over with. "So... What's on your mind?"
"Coach," he said, glancing behind him for a second. He exhaled. "I really wish we could've stayed for Mr. Worrell's funeral."
I hid my surprise by looking through the dirty glass of the makeshift window next to Donaldson. The early-morning light painted the unfamiliar landscape golden.
I didn't have a single qualm about skipping the man's last moments on this earth before they planted him in the ground like a pale, bitter root.
"I understand. But we could all use the money from these games. The show has to go on, I'm afraid."
Donaldson didn't look convinced. In any case, I wanted to add, I doubted they would've let most of my team inside the white funeral parlor so we could pay our respects.
"Can't get paid if we don't play, I guess," Donaldson said at last, watching me. "Probably what Mr. Worrell would've wanted. So. You sure you're okay, Coach?"
"Just thinking about who's going to pitch tonight, now that we're short a relief pitcher."
I felt my smile melt away as the young man gave me another one of his piercing looks.
"He was a good man, wasn't he?"
"I'd like to think so," I said quickly, but all I could recall was Worrell's soft, judgmental voice. His patronizing tone.
That's quite enough. Boy.
"For the most part," I added. "I just wonder if he's at rest now."
"What do you mean?"
I suddenly wanted to check under the seat to see if Worrell had left his bible with his name inscribed into it, or if maybe Worrell himself was under there, hiding and waiting for just the right moment to spring out.
The ball popped off of Worrell's skull once more in my mind.
And then... silence.
"I keep speculating," I said, feeling like a weight had been removed from my chest, "about what happens when you die."
Donaldson sat up, stirring up wild motes of dust.
"Coach, you got something to tell us players? You're not sick, are you? We can't afford to lose you, too."
"No, just wondering, is all." I tried to keep a poker face as I asked, "What do you think happens?"
This wasn't Mack, I reminded myself. Donaldson has always been one to shoot straight.
"Well," Donaldson said. "I think a person's got some explaining to do before they let him through those pearly gates."
"Explaining? For what?"