The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. W. Kinsella P.

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СКАЧАТЬ at the rear of the house. And later, Maudie wild with passion in the big bed, her nails sharp against his shoulders, their bodies slick under the quilts as their sweat blended.

      As I listened to various versions of this story, time and again, told to me as other children were regaled with fairy tales, I was always embarrassed. I realized as I grew older that it was because, as with most children, I wanted to deny my parents’ sexuality. I reluctantly have to admit that even now as I recall my father’s voice I am embarrassed. It is only when I distance the story by using my own words that I am comfortable with the telling.

      There is one part of the story that wasn’t embarrassing, only puzzling. On that morning when Matthew awoke with Maudie beside him, he awoke with an awareness of something he knew was going to become the most important element in his life, more important than his business, than his home, than even the strange, fragile girl who, next to him, trembled as she dreamed.

      In Matthew Clarke’s brain, which that morning felt bright as chrome, full of white light and blinding metal, the complete history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was burned in, deep as a brand, vivid, resplendent, dazzling in its every detail.

      Two weeks later, on a humid August afternoon in 1943, Darlin’ Maudie and Matthew Clarke were married at the stone courthouse in Iowa City.

      ‘I tell you, Gid, during those two weeks there was a terrible volume of mail from Onamata to Miami. Everybody within a ten-mile radius of Onamata felt it their duty to let the old folks know what I’d done. I’d not only moved a girl into the holy confines of my father’s house, but I’d moved in what was known as a ‘carnival girl.’ A few of the more morally indignant canceled their insurance policies with my agency, but only a few.

      ‘After the wedding, the same straight-backed, blue-nosed women who had written scurrilous things about me to my parents came pussyfooting around the house bearing casseroles, pies, good wishes, and wedding presents.

      ‘After I wrote to them about the wedding, my mother added a little postscript to her next letter. “We hope you’ll be very happy,” it said. They never sent a present, never met Maudie.’

      The same week he was married Matthew was accepted as a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Iowa. He was accepted reluctantly, by a vote of three to two, strictly on his undergraduate record. At his interview he was bright-eyed and only moderately coherent as he babbled about writing a thesis on some kind of baseball league that had existed near Iowa City in the early 1900s. The majority of the committee blamed his exuberance and incoherence on the fact that he was to be married in a day or two.

      ‘By October he’ll be back to normal and we’ll convince him to write a thesis on the Civil War,’ said E. H. Hindsmith, the man who cast the deciding vote in Matthew’s favor.

      In the months that followed, Matthew Clarke continued to operate his insurance business from the dusty-windowed storefront in Onamata, not soliciting business but gently reminding local people when their fire, auto, farm, or crop insurance was up for renewal. He accepted new business when it came to him.

      ‘My Joseph’s gettin’ married next month,’ a sturdy farmer might say, standing awkwardly in the office, which smelled of varnish and paper and held a large, rectangular, wax-yellow desk, a wooden filing cabinet, and two severe wooden chairs. ‘He’ll be around to see you about life insurance. That is, if you’ll be in Tuesday evening.’

      ‘If Matthew Clarke sends you a bill, you know it’s an honest one,’ people said. They also said, ‘Matthew Clarke could have made something of his life if he wasn’t so interested in those baseball teams of his.’ They also whispered, in the gentle, misty heat of Iowa summer, ‘Matthew Clarke had a wife but couldn’t keep her.’

      Matthew was hard at work on a proposal to write his thesis on the history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, though occasionally, when he tried to confirm some detail by consulting various books on baseball history and was unable to do so, he had doubts. But he quickly put them aside. He didn’t need any confirmation from outside sources. The history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was carved on stone tablets in his memory. He couldn’t know such things if they were not true.

      During that time he also made Darlin’ Maudie pregnant.

      Try as he might, Matthew learned little of Maudie’s past.

      ‘Why do you keep asking?’ was the way she would answer his questions. Or else she would say, ‘Do you love me?’

      ‘Of course I love you,’ Matthew would reply.

      ‘Then what else matters?’ And she would stare across the oversized oak table in the dining room, her chin resting in the palm of her left hand, her fingers hooked on her lower lip, a smile, full of love, gently crinkling the skin around her eyes.

      It was Matthew’s nature to ask questions. He felt as if Maudie’s past was a rock that needed to be battered into gravel.

      It was years later, long after Maudie was gone for the last time, that Matthew realized how lonely she must have been. He had the business, his studies, his obsession with the mysterious baseball league. But he had few friends, and much of his life was lived in solitude. Maudie maintained the old home, which still smelled of his retired parents. But she had no friends. There were simply no friends for her to have. The young people lived on the farms; the houses in Onamata were occupied mainly by retired farmers and businessmen. There were fewer than ten children in Onamata. And the mothers of those children were tight-lipped Baptists with protruding teeth and hair pulled back until their eyes bulged. The women were the same color and texture as the dusty streets of the town. Maudie walked barefoot to the general store, wearing her celery-colored pantaloons. And she smoked in public.

      About the only change Maudie made to the house was to open the heavy, lined drapes with which Matthew’s mother had covered the enormous bedroom window that looked out onto a lilac-and-honeysuckle-choked yard. Maudie insisted the curtains remain open day and night. She opened the window, too. She brought a garden hose indoors and sprayed years of dust off the screens. In doing so she let the trapped odors of camphor, floor wax, and moth balls escape.

      In the rich mornings they lazed in bed, the room shimmering with sunlight; they made love slowly, Matthew taking a long time to get used to the light, to the trill of birds outside the window, the flash of a cardinal across the pane, a wren or finger-sized hummingbird staring in at them over the saucerlike edge of a hollyhock.

      Maudie’s skin, the color of creamed tea, both aroused and fascinated Matthew. He teased her about being Indian, remarked on her high cheekbones, her flattish nose, her sensual lips, hoping for some response that would reveal her past. In the huge bed, fragrant with their lovemaking, Matthew would lick his way slowly across her belly, thrilling to the salty sweetness of her, sure he could feel the life growing inside her, though she was barely pregnant.

      ‘My name is Maude Huggins Clarke. I’m nineteen, and I used to travel with a carnival. That was all you knew when you asked me to marry you; that’s all you ever need to know,’ Maudie would say in reply to whatever questions or implied question Matthew posed.

      ‘Hereditary diseases,’ Matthew cried one morning. ‘We have to think about the baby. Did anyone in your family suffer from hereditary diseases? Your mother? Father? Brothers? Sisters?’

      ‘Is clap hereditary?’ Maudie laughed.

      ‘You know what I mean.’

      ‘I don’t have any idea who my father was. I don’t think anybody has any idea who my father СКАЧАТЬ