The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. W. Kinsella P.

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ