Madewell Brown Page 8

  “I know that.”

  “Then what are we talking about?” he asked. “Even if Madewell Brown was your grandfather, he never did come back like it says here. This letter is just another Obie story.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not.” She reached out and took the letter and held it in her lap. “Story after story Obie told me. How Madewell did this. How Madewell did that. And for so long I didn’t believe a word he said. Now I know at least a little bit of it was true.”

  Sewell just sat looking at her. He could smell his onions starting to burn. He could see that Rachael had stopped smiling and was leaning over the table. He knew, even if she didn’t, that she’d always held on to what that old man told her the same way Obie had, like it kept something solid beneath her feet, like it kept her from being another lost soul who’d come out of the South Cairo Home.

  He stood up slowly and went over to the stove. He scooped up the pile of green peppers he’d cut before and tossed them into the pan. “Sewell,” Rachael said, “here’s where my granddaddy was. Where it says on the envelope.”

  Sewell stirred what was in the pan and turned around. A hundred sad thoughts were going through his head, but all he said was “I’m glad you got the letter, Rachael. Maybe now you can rest a little easier about all this.”

  The next morning before dawn, Rachael threw a blanket, a pillow and Obie’s old suitcase that she’d packed the night before into the trunk of her car. She wiped the dew off the windshield with her hand and then climbed into the front seat. It was damp and still out, the sky to the east was hazed and dark. The crickets had fallen quiet, and the only sounds were the dripping of water and the muffled wails of the infant next door. Rachael unfolded a tattered road map and laid it out on the passenger seat. She put Madewell Brown’s letter beside it. Then she folded her hands in her lap and looked at the darkness around her.

  There’s nothing about this place I’ll miss, she thought. Next door, a light came on in the bathroom. Through the shade, she could see the shadow of the woman moving about. “I’m leaving,” Rachael whispered and took one last look at her house.

  The porch lit up in a halo of yellow, and a second later, Sewell walked out the front door in baggy underwear that hung low on his waist, his skinny legs sticking out. He stopped at the edge of the steps and peered around in the darkness.

  “Rachael,” he called out. “Rachael?” His voice was hoarse and sad, like he’d spent the whole night thinking something like this might happen. When his eyes finally settled on the windshield of the car, Rachael started the engine and backed the car around.

  “What are you doing, Rachael?” Sewell said.

  “I’m leaving, Sewell,” she said out the open window.

  “Don’t do that, baby,” he said. “Come back in and we’ll talk.”

  “I don’t want to talk,” she said, her voice calm. “I’ve got to go see for myself.”

  Sewell’s shoulders slumped and he shook his head. “There ain’t nothing to see, Rachael,” he said coming down the porch steps. “There ain’t a damn thing out there.”

  Rachael pushed the car into gear. “Good-bye, Sewell,” she said softly. As she pulled onto the road, she could see him in the rearview mirror standing at the edge of the porch light. A tall, thin man watching her drive away.

  Right off, Rachael found that it wasn’t so hard to be gone. She took the bridge over the river and a few miles down the road crossed into Missouri, leaving South Cairo behind.

  Other than a couple of stops for gas and roadside coffee, Rachael drove straight through the morning. Long before the sun had risen, she’d rolled down all the windows, letting the wind pull at her hair and run cool down the back of her shirt. And as she drove that highway, the day passed soft and easy and full of promise.

  By noon, she was out of Missouri hill country and into Kansas. The land began to flatten out, and the air grew hot and dry. The highway stretched out for as far as the eye could see, and the sun glared off it in the distance like a shimmer of water. The towns she passed by were stark little places set among squat grain silos and railway track crossings. The houses were small and sun blistered and had a closed-up look to them. Battered pickups were parked on swathes of burnt grass, and laundry hung lank on backyard lines. But not once did Rachael see anyone moving about in those sorry places. She wondered what it would be like to live with all that open space and without a river to look at, live where the only thing to do was hang laundry. She pictured herself inside one of those frame homes, her hands cracked from dish soap, dreaming her life into every passing car or truck, as if the road itself was a river flowing by.

  Rachael kept on through the afternoon. She drove by old freight cars standing in fields of cropped grass, by crippled windmills and abandoned farm machinery sitting rusted, grown through with weeds. Every fifty miles or so, she came across stockyards with herds of cattle standing in heat and muck, the stench so bad that she rolled the car windows up and breathed through her mouth. She drove by billboards with pictures of Sweet Jesus and others that said to get ready, the end was coming.

  The end already came here, she’d think. It already came and sucked this place dry, and you people still living here.

  Late in the day, as she drove through western Kansas, she passed by an abandoned ball field. It was set a half mile or so off the highway in a dry wasteland of dirt and dead grass. Six tiers of wind-tossed bleachers lay along one side, and behind the plate was a stooped wired backstop. There wasn’t a town nearby or even a scatter of houses, just a ball field all by itself in the middle of nowhere. Rachael slowed down when she spotted it, and if she hadn’t, she never would have noticed the man standing in the center of the infield.

  He was dressed in dark clothes and wearing a cap pulled down. He held his hands over his belly and his head was bent low as if he was getting ready to wind up and throw a pitch. His face was shadowed, so it was hard to tell who or what he was. In the stubbled grass behind him, a flock of sparrows picked up in a flurry and then lit down a few yards away. Further off, the sun was setting in a wash of red. As Rachael stared, her car began to drift into the other lane. A semi hauling hay swerved around her, blasting its horn. Startled, she jerked the steering wheel and then eased the car back where it belonged. When she looked back, the man had left the mound and was walking off into the outfield. Craning her neck, she watched him for as long as she could. He just kept on going, his arms hanging loose, through a field that seemed to stretch forever.

  For miles afterward, Rachael kept thinking she was seeing that man again, but each time it turned out to be an old fence post or something blown by the wind. Her eyes were tired and grainy, her body tight from sitting. She laid her head back on the seat rest and left one hand low on the steering wheel. She drove to the slap of tires on asphalt, thinking that once upon a time Obie and Madewell and Syville and all the rest of them might have traveled this same road. They might even have played a game back where that man had been.

  Did you, Obie? she wondered, her eyes half closed. Or am I telling myself the same lies now?

  She spent the night in a rest area not far from the Texas-Oklahoma border. Threading her way through a maze of semi trucks and trailer homes, she parked by a picnic table beneath a thin-branched willow tree. It was dark, and a dry chill was in the air. She lowered the front seat and covered herself with the blanket. A slight breeze was tossing the willow leaves, and from the parking lot came the steady rumble of trucks.

  Sometime in the night, she woke with the certainty that she was lost. The feeling was so intense that she twisted onto one side and drew her legs up, cradling them with her arms. For a long time, she lay wide awake on the car seat staring out the side window. It wasn’t until her eyes finally came to rest on a sky full of stars that she was able to sleep again.

  At daybreak, she woke tired and hungry. She tossed off the blanket, raised the seat and took a look at herself in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were webbed with fine red lines and her bra
ided hair was knotted. She threaded her hands through it and pushed it away from her face. Then she started her car and made her way out of the rest area to the highway. Four hours later, she drove out of north Texas and into New Mexico.

  For miles upon miles nothing changed. She was driving on a narrow, two-lane highway through the same flat, barren country that made up Kansas and Oklahoma and the little bit of Texas. The only traffic on the road was slow-moving pickups driven by weather-beaten men in no hurry to get anywhere. Every so often, her mind would wander back to South Cairo, to the river and the damp heat that hung in the air. She’d remember Obie dripping with sweat and the torrents of rain that would flood the streets. There was none of that here. This was a place where the wind whipped raw and the sun sucked up every bit of moisture before it could fall.

  The countryside began to change almost without her noticing it. Gradually, the land began to swell and out of it rose sloped hills scattered with dwarf trees and scrub brush. She drove down into wide gullies with dry creek beds layered with white rock and the stripped limbs of trees that looked like bones. By late afternoon, she could see the mountains. They sat low and dark on the horizon, like a bank of storm clouds running far to the north and south. Rachael reached for the map and hunted for the name of the mountain range until she found it.

  “Sangre de Cristo,” she read aloud. “The blood of Christ.” She put the map down and looked out at the road, at the mountains rising in the distance.

  I’m almost there, she thought. After so long, I’m almost there.

  Just south of the village of Guadalupe, Rachael’s car broke down. One moment she was cruising along and the next the engine died as if it had been shot. She pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road and sat listening to the ticking beneath the hood. She had stopped close to a steep slope covered with small pine trees and loose rock. Ahead the road rose gradually before winding out of sight around a foothill. Off to her left was an immense valley grown over with sagebrush. A wind-torn mesa grew out of it a few miles away.

  Rachael glanced down at the gauges on the dashboard and then switched on the key. The engine turned without starting. She leaned back in the seat and slowly counted to fifty. This time when she tried the key, the ignition gave a single click and was silent. Cursing softly, she pushed open the door and stepped outside.

  The road was empty in both directions, and there wasn’t a sound coming from anywhere. Back home there would have been a racket of birds and bugs, but here was just stillness. She walked out to the middle of the highway and stood on the center line. The sky was a clear blue, the air hot with a thin feel to it. Up ahead was a faded sign— “Guadalupe, two miles.”

  “You should see me now, Sewell,” she said out loud. A sudden breeze swept down the hillside, pushing through the pines and against the side of her body. She closed her eyes and felt a sense of freedom that she’d never felt before, as if anything could happen and whatever that was would be just fine with her. She stood out on the empty road for a moment longer and then went to her car, took what she needed and started walking.

  The highway was quiet for a while before a vehicle finally passed by. It was a truck driven by an old man, his wife sitting close beside him. They drove by without even a glance toward Rachael. A few more followed, and with each one it was the same, as if the shoulder of the road had rendered her unseen. By the time she got to where the road curved around the foothill, the side of her leg was chafed from the suitcase rubbing against it. Her arm ached from the weight and she was slightly out of breath, as though the air here was too thin to breathe. She set the suitcase down and looked out at the village below.

  Guadalupe sat in a small valley cradled on one side by high mountains and surrounded by foothills. The road she was on cut through the center before disappearing far to the north. Cows and horses were pastured, and in one field a man walked slowly, dragging a shovel behind him. There was a scattering of old mud houses shaded by big trees with junked cars and heaps of firewood in back. At the bottom of the hill were four small cabins set back against a creek, a sign out on the highway read “Lucille’s Cabins.” The whole valley sat still and quiet, as if waiting for her.

  Rachael’s hand wandered to her back pocket where she’d put Madewell Brown’s letter. “Obie,” she said softly, “I am coming home now. I hope to find you there when I do.”

  Obie Poole

  You want to know who Madewell Brown is. Well I’ll tell you a little bit. Hes the one who told us theres safe places on this earth where you can lose yourself and no one be able to find you. Yes sir he said that. He said that when we still boys back in South Cairo. He told us the game of baseball and the fields its played on is one of them. To this day I remember him saying that. And I remember thinking Id go any damn place as long as Madewell went with me.

  For a long time what Madewell said was true. But I was there when he left us in the dirt and heat of El Paso Texas. By then there wasnt no more boy left in Madewell or any of the rest of us. We got ourselves lost all right and then got left behind. So where’s the damn sense in all that.

  Youd think by the time I got to be an old man Id see things clearly. But I dont. Maybe its the river that done this to me. With its running flat and smooth one day and the next gushing downstream like it dont care about nothing. If a river cant make up its mind how can I. But I tell you a thing. Whether we playing colored boys down south or those white boys up north it all come to the same thing. Even those sweet years we played down in Mexico wasnt no different. We just playing ball. We just playing the game of baseball. And truth be told those boys against us were too.

  Some days I think I seen it all. I seen a man get beat by his own for missing a ball that should have been caught. Him twisting on the ground with his head covered and his legs pulled up and those with sticks swinging away. I seen old men drop dead in the stands from the heat it get so bad. I seen a baby get struck in the face by a broke bat in Ohio. His poor mama holding him outstretched like there something we can do with how hurt he is. A herd of pigs once broke down a center field fence and chase Hightop all the way to the dugout like he done something bad to them that they not forgot. I seen grown men dress themselves up in clown face and ladys clothes. And I seen the sorry folk who pay to watch them play. I played games in mud and snow and torrents of rain and in places so damn hot there wasnt nothing to breathe but heat. Yes sir I seen it all all right. I surely did. And if somebody were to ask me if I had one thought about all of it maybe it come down to this.

  It like that pitched ball that just nick the corner of the plate. It just nick it a little bit and everyone hold a breath with waiting. The batter he let it go by thinking that ball outside. The pitcher he stand out there thinking look at that I just made the perfect pitch. I put that damn ball in a place where no one can hit it and it still be a strike.

  And all that fine and good except for one thing. That umpire he not say one word. He still crouched down behind the catcher seeing in his mind where that ball went. Thats right. He like God out there and nothing going to happen less he say so. And even then no matter what he say someone out on that field or in those stands not going to like it one bit. And if you so dumb you argue or give him your back or kick some dirt his way well I tell you what happens then. That umpire he going to sprinkle you with pestilence. Send you some locusts. Then every damn ball that cross the edge of the plate will be just what you dont want it to be.

  I think it all like that. I surely do. You can figure all you want about how things should be. But when everything said and done all you got to do is do your job. Just play the game and let things be. But I ask you whos going to let you do that.

  Right there is where Madewell got it wrong. Him telling us there wasnt no safer places than a ball field. Safe aint got nothing to do with it. You listen to Obie Poole. I tell you a thing. Those fields was never safe from the get go. The minute we step out there safe goes running off. That not even counting those damn fools in the stands watching. The
only time I think it safe is when nobody out there at all. And even then that field lies there with its green grass and white lines and empty seats. It lies there quiet waiting for us to come back.

  Five

  At the moment Rachael stood looking down at the valley, Cipriano was sitting at the kitchen table in his father’s house. He was holding a beer in his lap and had one leg slung over the edge of the table. His clothes were filthy with soot and plaster dust, and fibers from old insulation were digging into his skin. It was late afternoon. The door to the house and all the windows were wide open. The breeze that moved through the three rooms stirred up dust from the floor and carried in the heat from outside.

  Cipriano took a long drink from his beer and looked around the room. In the last week, he had moved into Rufino’s house and hauled nearly everything that was inside out into the yard. Then he began tearing the old man’s place apart. With a sledgehammer, he shattered the buckled plaster off the walls and tore down the plasterboard ceiling, letting loose a slide of rotted insulation crusted with hives from mud wasps and stinking of rodent piss. When he was done with that, he wheelbarrowed the mess outside and then ripped the cracked linoleum from the floor.

  Now, with the room empty and the vigas arched overhead, the walls and floor stripped clean, the place looked bigger to him. It seemed cleaner, younger, and it made him wonder why the old man had spent his life covering up the things his own father had built. Cipriano took another drink of beer and looked over at the photograph of the black ballplayers.

  They were still up on the windowsill, but turned so that they faced the room. They were covered with dust, and the light in the room made it seem as though they were leaning forward. A crucifix dangled from one corner of the cardboard. Jesus and the fourteen men seemed to be staring toward the door as though they were planning an escape.

  “You jodidos will never make it,” Cipriano said. “The door is farther than you think.”