Lovers of the Game
A light blue van freckled with rust pulled into my driveway. I recognized the driver right away. Carl Larsen lives across the street from my parents’ house in Yutan. He and his wife, Emma, moved in eight years ago after they retired from farming. Carl had a full gray beard and wore a red Nebraska baseball cap with a white N on it and a T-shirt that announced in big red letters, WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDPA.
“Good to see you, Carl.” I stepped outside and moved Katie’s Big Wheel off the sidewalk. “What brings you to Omaha?” I propped Katie’s doll up in the seat the way she’d left it.
“Emma is getting her hair done. Her hairdresser took a job here, so I drive her in once a week.” Carl didn’t use the railing as he walked up the four steps to our front door. “I’ve gotta kill three hours. Your dad said I should stop in.”
“I’m glad you did. Carl gave me a firm handshake. “You just missed Kimberly. She took the kids to the pool. How are the grandkids?”
Carl’s forehead was red, and a bead of sweat had trickled down the right lens of his glasses. “Our oldest one is getting married in September.”
“Congratulations.”
“Nancy’s marrying a nice fellow. An accountant. “
“Would you like something to drink?” I asked.
“Do you have Coke?”
“Diet.”
“That’ll be fine.” Carl followed me into the kitchen and looked out the patio window. “I like the house,” he said. “Big back yard.”
I dropped three ice cubes into a glass and poured Carl’s Diet Coke out of a two liter bottle. “The kids have room to roam, and we have more space, too. Four bedrooms and a bath and a half. I’ll show you my office.” The ice cubes clinked together as Carl followed me to the basement. “Can Nebraska make the Series this year?” I asked. He and Dad attended the College World Series together every summer.
“They’ve got some promising young pitchers, but I don’t see them making it this year. Maybe next season.”
My office is a square room with paneled walls and deep green carpeting. An oak desk sits in the center of the room. A two-drawer filing cabinet is to the left of my desk. On the desk is a reading lamp, my MacBook Air laptop, a Manila folder full of papers to be graded, a cottage clock Kimberly and I bought at a garage sale, a picture of her and the kids, and an old baseball as yellow as a smoker’s smile.
“Looks like you get serious down here. No TV.” Carl picked up the baseball.
“This is my get serious space.” I adjusted the picture of my family. “When I’m down here, I’m working.”
Carl noticed the faded writing, switched on my reading lap, turned the ball under the light, squinted, and said, “Coach.” I heard the cottage clock tick as he inspected the second word. “Tells.” I offered to say what was written on the ball. Carl held up his hand. “I’ll get it.” He took off his glasses, licked each lens, and polished them with the end of his T-shirt. He placed the bridge of the frames low on his nose and studied the ball.
I knew once he figured it out, I’d be telling a story.
The story started the summer I turned twelve.
I played ball every day in my backyard with Mike McHenry, a skyscraper of a boy with pointed elbows and sharp knees who came over to work on his pitching. He came from a family of seven, which was why he didn’t play ball in his yard. Still, his mom let him have a double bed to himself because he tossed and turned in his sleep, stabbing his little brother. Mike had red hair and tired easily, things he blamed on being closer to the sun than I was.
Because of his height, his dad played basketball with him, but Mike wanted to be a pitcher. They struck a deal: if Mike shot baskets and accepted his dad’s coaching for half an hour every day, then every Saturday morning they would stop at Scheels, and his dad would buy him a baseball. Mike said he needed to practice with new ones because in real games pitchers didn’t throw crummy balls.
I squatted as he wound up with his jerky motion, a tangle of arms and legs, and pitched the ball. He threw the ball over my head into my mom’s strawberry patch. I tiptoed after it, parting the leaves gently with my hands and breathing in the fresh scent of strawberries. I picked up the ball and fired it back to him.
When he finished pitching, he hit me fly balls so I could become a great centerfielder like Ken Griffey Jr.
The day school let out, Mike lined a baseball through my bedroom window, so Mom ruled there’d be no more hitting in the backyard. A week later, she took my glove away for three days because her strawberry patch was flat.
So we started playing on an empty lot at the edge of town. Frank Horsham, a truck driver who had his car worked on at my dad’s service station, owned the lot and lived in the house next door. He was gone for weeks at a time driving his semi across the country, so he said we could play on his property if we kept an eye on the place for him.
Beyond the blacktop road running in front of the lot was a black iron fence that went around the Methodist cemetery. Behind the field, where Frank’s property ended, weeds grew as high as my waist. Beyond the weeds were the Burlington Northern Railroad Tracks. When I stood on the blacktop and faced the weeds, Frank’s garage, which attached to his house, was to my right. To my left was a gravel road, and across the road lived Mary Scanlan.
She was about seventy. Mary and her husband, Wilbur, newlyweds of three months, moved from Iowa to Yutan. Wilbur had decided it was time to give up his dream of playing major league baseball after being stuck in Triple A for three years. The Yutan lumberyard hired him as an assistant manager, but on the third week on the job, a fifteen-foot stack of two-by-fours fell on him and crushed him.
Mary wasn’t the same after Wilbur died. She turned down social invitations, stopped attending Sunday mass, and kept the blinds drawn, curtains closed. People expected her to move back to Iowa, but she never did. Rumor had it that her only living relation was a stepbrother in Boston who took no interest in Mary Scanlan.
As the years went by, sightings of Mary Scanlon became legendary. Adults Dad’s age told stories of their teen years. Cruising late at night, they spotted Mary Scanlan shining a flashlight and walking across the outfield of the high school baseball diamond.
For forty years, players returning to their field after dark to retrieve forgotten gloves and jackets alleged to have seen Mary Scanlan sitting on the bleachers.
Henry Rouse, my Little League coach, left a bag of balls in the dugout under the bench. We finished practice at dusk, and Rouse, upon discovering the balls missing, returned twenty minutes later to retrieve them, but they were gone. “Mary Scanlan got them,” joked Ralph Cramer, our shortstop, the next afternoon when Rouse told the team that whoever took the balls could return them, “No questions asked.”
Mary Scanlan stayed in the two-story white house. A three-foot-high wooden railing fenced in the front porch. Four steps cut through the middle of the porch and led up to the front door. Evergreen bushes grew against the front of the house, and the giant oak tree that seemed to touch the sky, shaded her home and half the front yard. To the left of the house, a blacktop driveway led up to the garage.
I’d heard Mom and Dad talk about Greg Delaney, the high school kid who cut Mary’s lawn and brought her groceries. She called Delaney’s after Greg’s picture appeared in the paper for making the all-conference baseball team. She needed someone to mow her grass and buy her groceries because the boy who did it for her was leaving for college.
After Greg cut her lawn, he received a check in the mail. Stapled to the check, typed out a note card, was a grocery list.’ He would go to Silker’s Store, pick up the groceries, and charge them to Mary's account. He’d set the groceries on her front porch, ring the doorbell, and leave. In a day or two, he’d receive another check in the mail. People said Mary turned crazy and ugly. I didn’t care much one way or the other until that first day we played baseball on Frank’s lot.
The lot sloped up gently from the gravel road for thirty yards and then leveled off. Mike said pitching downhill would be like throwing off a mound. I squatted down and hoped I wouldn’t get sprayed with rocks if a car sped by on the gravel road. I caught eight pitches in a row and was thinking that throwing downhill helped Mike’s control when his next pitch hit the ground right in front of me. I turned my head. The ball kicked up a puff of dust as it bounced across the gravel and rolled onto the edge of Mary’s yard. I decided to let it go until later.
‘I’m ready,” Mike said, which meant he’d finished his warm-up tosses and was ready to start our imaginary game where I called balls and strikes. We played five innings. Every batter either struck out or walked. If Mike gave up three runs or less, then our team, the St. Louis Cardinals, won.
Mike picked up the shiny ball his dad bought at Silker’s Store on Sunday and fired it so high and outside that I didn’t even jump for it. I hustled across the road to get the balls.
I swiped the first one off the ground, grabbing a handful of cut grass at the same time, and fired a high pop-up to Mike. I didn’t watch to see if he caught it but jogged over to the new baseball on the grass near the bushes.
A window to the right of the door had been cracked open, and a pair of white curtains fluttered like an angel’s wings in the breeze.
As I reached for the ball, a rock hit the grass in front of me. I turned to yell at Mike, but he had picked up the bat and faced the garage as he imitated Derek Jeter’s batting stance.
I turned around in time to see a rock the size of a nickel jawbreaker fly out the window. I ducked and ran.
I didn’t stop until I crossed the road. “I didn’t get the other ball!” My breath came in gasps. “Someone in the house…throwing rocks at me.”
“Out of crazy Scanlan’s house?”
“Out the window.”
Mike combed his fingers through his hair like he did when he thought over a tough question at school. “A girl can’t throw very hard. Especially an old girl.”
I felt stupid. Mike was right. She couldn’t throw a rock very hard. Still, I could see the rock flying out of the window, fast and hard. I wouldn’t have wanted to get smacked by it.
A pickup truck with a camper on the back kicked up rocks and dust on the gravel road, leaving a haze between her yard and us. I couldn’t see the windows because of the branches of the oak tree. “You get the ball.”
“I will, “Mike said. “I’ll pitch this one first. When I throw a wild one, I’ll get ‘em both.”
He threw four strikes and a ball, low and outside. Then he pitched a low one that bounced past me and landed across the road. He ran past the ball he’d just pitched and went after the ball by the bushes. I followed him across the road and watched from behind the tree. The white curtains still streamed out the window.
“Where’s it at?” Mike asked. He blew on a blade of grass, made a loud vibrating sound.
The ball was gone. I kept my eye on the window, moved one, two steps closer.
“Rock!” Mike teased. He poked at the bushes with his glove. “You just didn’t want to get scratched up.”
I chewed on a fingernail, expecting a rock to fly out the window at any second. I figured Mary Scanlan didn’t want anyone on her lawn, just like Mom didn’t want anyone in her strawberries. “Someone threw a rock,” I said. “Two of ‘em.”
Mike thrashed around in the bushes. “Did you see where it went,” he asked.
“No.” Soft music floated out the window.
Mike, with a long scratch from an evergreen branch on his arm, started back toward me. He didn’t have the baseball with him.
The following afternoon, after Mike fired his first wild pitch, he sprinted after it right away. He stopped dead in his tracks at the oak tree. He didn’t bend over to reach the ball but stayed standing straight up as if he were frozen. He backed up slowly, still facing the house., like a cowboy trying to make it to the saloon door before getting shot.
I joined him behind the tree. “What’s wrong?” I asked, although I already knew.
“Look at that rock!” It was the size of a walnut.
“I told you she threw rocks at me,” I said. Mike’s baseball was in plain view on the grass like a full moon on a clear night.
“She’s got a slingshot. I saw it.” Mike turned and ran down to the road with me hot on his heels. “She can have the ball,” Mike said. He gulped for air. “I got a whole box of ‘em at home. Saturday I’ll get a new one.”
The window curtains fluttered in the breeze. “If I get it, can I keep it?” I asked.
I left Mike standing on the road, in clear view of anyone looking through Mary’s window but far enough back to be out of range of her rocks.
I walked down the road and made my way over the uneven, rocky surface at the edge of the railroad tracks. When I was lined up evenly with the corner of her house, I trampled through the weeds, dropped down on all fours, and crawled across the grass to the corner of her house. I wormed my way along the edge of the bushes until I was only twenty feet from the ball but in a position where she couldn’t see me from the window.
I waved at Mike. He stepped onto her lawn and moved toward the ball. A rock whistled over my head. I darted over to the ball, grabbed it, and looked at the window.
Mary gripped the empty slingshot in a puffy hand lined with blue veins that stuck out as far as the seams of a baseball. She had a creased forehead, dimpled cheeks, and penetrating green eyes.
“Run!” Mike’s shout broke the spell.
I dashed to the corner of the house and sprinted down to the weeds, snapping them as I plowed through them. I fell on the ground by the tracks, bloodying my knee, but not losing my grip on the baseball.
The next day, Mike had a dentist’s appointment, so I went to the field alone. I threw the baseball I’d escaped with the day before high into the air, used my bare hand to block the sun, and shagged the ball in my glove.
A blue Volkswagen rattled across the railroad tracks, picked up speed, and then slowed down as if the driver saw something interesting in Mary Scanlan’s yard.
She was sitting on her porch.
I threw the ball up again and chased after it. I got right under the ball, but it hit the side of my glove and fell to the ground.
I picked the ball up and fired it onto her lawn.
When I reached the oak tree, I heard the soft, dreamy music playing.
She leaned back in the wooden lawn chair with her eyes closed. She held against her heart a baseball as yellow as an old newspaper.
I recognized the look on her face. I’d seen it on Mom once when I’d glanced up from playing in the backyard and unexpectedly found her watching. Years later, the same expression appeared on my wife’s face after I’d surprised her with a fistful of roses or warmed her car up on a wintery Nebraska morning.
I picked up the ball, slapped it into the pocket of my glove, and tossed it high into the air. I staggered two steps to the left and one back to the right, but I caught the ball. I looked at Mary Scanlan.
Our eyes met.
Her lips curved into a smile. She cradled the yellow baseball in her arms and rocked her upper body, ever so slightly. Her eyes fell shut as if she wanted to return to a pleasant dream.
On Friday morning a red Mustang with its rear end jacked up pulled into Mary Scanlan’s driveway. Greg Delaney stepped out of the car with his arms wrapped around two bags of groceries.
Mike and I watched him set the groceries down on the porch and return to the car for another load. After his third trip to the house, he rang the doorbell and drove away.
We waited ten minutes, but Mary didn’t open the door. I chased two baseballs Mike slugged onto her yard. One of the balls rolled all the way to the bushes in front of the open window, but I never saw any sign of Mary Scanlan.
That afternoon, I rode my bike to her house. I went up the sidewalk and looked on the porch. An army of ants crawled in the puddle of melted ice cream on the porch.
I told Mom and Dad about it as supper.
“We’d better check on her,” Dad said.
Dad rang the doorbell and pounded on the door with his fist. “Mrs. Scanlan! Mrs. Scanlan! You okay? Mary? The grocery sacks were an island in a lake of melted ice cream. Dad’s right foot was in the mess.
Dad spotted the open window. He climbed in and disappeared into the house.
I waited on the lawn chair. Finally, the door opened, and Dad came out the front door. “We’ll wait here until I call the sheriff,” he said.
“Is she sick?”
“No, she’s dead.”
Dad had just finished moving the groceries to the side of the porch and throwing some towels over the melted ice cream when I heard the sheriff’s car kicking up rocks on the gravel road, his lights flashing.
Dad went over to the driveway to meet him.
I stepped inside the house while Dad talked to the sheriff in the driveway.
The shag carpet in the living room was as soft as long grass. On the coffee table in front of the tweed couch was the yellow baseball I’d seen Mary Scanlan hold on her porch, and a framed black and white picture of a man with neatly trimmed hair and a tight-lipped mouth.
His soft eyes stared out from under a cap that had a big CS on it. On the front of his collared shirt on each side of the buttons was a letter—C on the left side and S on the right. He wore baggy pants and a baseball glove on his left hand.
I picked up the baseball and used the light from the open window to read the scrawled, faded writing. “Coach tells me to keep my eye on the ball, but he doesn’t know how pretty you are! Love, Wilbur.”
“David,” It was Dad’s voice.
“Coming,” I said. I set the baseball on the table.
Dad followed the sheriff into the house. “You don’t belong in here,” Dad said to me. He put his hands on my shoulder and guided me to the door.
“How did you get the ball?” Carl asked. He held the ball in his cupped hands.
“Mary’s stepbrother from Boston didn’t attend the funeral. He wanted everything auctioned off. He didn’t even want photos. Nothing except money.
I eyed the balls in Carl’s hands. “The day of the auction, furniture and boxes were scattered across her yard. Mike and I played ball on Frank Horsham’s lot while the auctioneer sold everything.
The next day the yard was empty. Everything of Mary’s was gone. Dad said they auctioned off three barrels of baseballs they found in the cellar. The auctioneer also filled a box with baseballs he found scattered around the house. She must have been collecting stray baseballs for years. Dad bought the box of balls. I found this one in it.
“She loved the game,” Carl said.
“Yes,” I said. Or at least, she loved one who loved the game. “I took the ball from Carl’s hand and gently set it on its stand on the desk where it belonged, next to the picture of Kimberly and the kids. “And that’s enough.”