The Hush of Spirits Rising

by Gary Bolick

Opening the FedEx Box, he smiled as he extracted the bottle and the attached card:

Why so long? I know it’s been difficult, but you can still write, e-mail or call. Sorry. The Power Point presentation you sent on the St. Moritz project sparked a standing ovation. Thanks. It was so thorough a monkey could have done it. Don’t say a word! We can start immediately. Sorry. Take all the time you need. Time. Always in the way, isn’t it? Either stopping you cold or circling around to take a bite out of your ass. Never simple or easy or forgiving.

Hope you like the OBAN. You better! Check the year. Called in a huge debt from a friend in Glasgow. Only two bottles left. Scratch that. One now. Hope it helps. Speaking of help. A friend of mine, Jean-Marc, he worked on the Super Collider. You know, the guys trying to walk matter back to the Big Bang. It was in an e-mail I got from him last week. It reminded me of our last talk before you left for the States. I’m worried, you need to come up for some air, let in some light.

Anyway, it was something Einstein tossed out: If light cannot get from one region to another, no information can. Thought of you. Yeah, you! Are you really OK? Miss you pal. Be in touch.

Etienne

He brushed his hand over the dusty, yellowed label: OBAN, his favorite single-malt scotch. He looked at the date: 1910, just five years younger than old Jays stadium. Easing the cork out, he swore a genie slipped out. Even the apartment walls sighed over the mixture of peat, sherry and, ‘Could that really be . . . jasmine? The hard blue of a Hebrides morning?’ He raised his glass to admire the color, ‘My God those legs!’ Turning the glass, holding it up to the light, soft glycerin-like trails of yellow-brown with just a hint of auburn were glued to every inch of the interior of his glass.

He smiled, sipped and closed his eyes. There, all of it just there . . . gone. The burn was sweet, soothing. Shit, it’s back. Pouring another glass, he closed the box, folded the card, put it in his nightstand and returned to the kitchen table.

Fifty four rectangular tiles stacked into a tower. Yes. A children’s game: JENGA. His version, though, was a little different. Each tile was assigned a name, memory, place or event. After finishing up at the stadium site, he returned, here, to this cold water flat. Where? The same studio apartment he rented shortly after graduating from college. After an exhausting day, a few drinks, dinner and JENGA before going to bed.

This was the place where it all started. Here is where he decided to refuse the full partnership in his father’s real estate business. The next day he left for Paris, never intending to return. He didn’t until his mother called and used that voice; the one he heard the day his little brother, Andy, died.

Scanning the room he took another sip and tried to smile. ‘I was right to leave,’ he thought. The trick, now, was to figure out the return. Removing his shoes he dragged his bare feet across the floor.

‘Nothing’s changed, it’s all still buried here, nothing’s budged or filtered out of these warped and scarred hardwood floors. Still whispering.’ Freeman Hawkins reached up to slide the next tile out. Again a voice, no not mom’s . . . dad’s this time . . . “Not that one . . . son, not just yet.”

‘What better game . . . better way to remember him? Smooth rectangles. Each tile fits cleanly beside the next. A life easily re-imaged so that it can be, finally, accepted. Authentic? Is that really possible?

‘Home? Fifty-nine years and counting and still no tiles for my years. His, mom’s, Andy’s . . . mine? Maybe that’s why I’m here . . . my own little purgatory. Is there ever a shared tower? Were any of us ever really a part of each other?

‘All this . . . these hardwood coffins, is there something buried in them that begins to describe . . . a life in time that feeds more than one spirit . . . is that possible?’

Freeman put down his glass, steadied his hand. He stared at the lone, centered tile. Anchored. Somehow it would . . . no, could never move.

‘Son-of-a-bitch! Yes . . . him, always comes back to him!

‘Sure it does, tomorrow’s the dedication, he missed it by . . . . hours . . . fucking hours! Easing up and away from the table, careful not to disturb the tower, he crawled into bed and slept hard, not moving until morning.

Alone, on the mound, beneath the stare of strangers, Freeman felt something new and uneasy, but before he could study it, one drop, followed by another, then suddenly a momentary, cartoonish rain. He never moved. The cloud burst arrived and departed in thirty seconds time. Light. The crowd burst into applause. He bowed. More applause.

Turning to look at the stadium crowd, he wondered, ‘Is water a form of liquid time? Does it . . . can it tell us where we all began, and where, perhaps, we will end? Or does it take something more? A shadow, maybe? Something to step out of the liquid? An informed wraith to whisper . . . direct us to the collision of real and supposed memory?’

Looking down at the red clay mound, then up into the cleared, hard blue sky, he remembered the cobalt blue of those miraculous windows. Freeman whispered, so that he could be sure it was his own voice, “No . . . it is here . . . now as it once was there . . . with him.”

Gazing up at the right field bleachers, he picked out their seats: 15 A, B and C. For ten years, the last ten years that the Dunham Jays played there, Freeman, his father Lloyd and Muriel his mother sat there.

Up there meant on Sundays a double-header and a picnic supper. Saturday nights? A thermos of iced tea mixed with ten fingers of Jim Beam for dad, a hotdog and RC for Freeman and the evitable nap, even as the crowd grew vocal and angry, for Muriel. All right there. Now, rising up in front of him like some alchemical mix of time and love, shadow and . . . light.

“Is it just for the moment?’ “Put your back into it . . . son, dig!”

As director of the Phoenix Project, Freeman Hawkins had been asked to throw out the first pitch at the new Jays stadium. ‘Walk up to the mound, wave, throw the ball, and leave. Simple, right?’

Just last week, his cellphone rang for the hundredth time, “Mister Hawkins! Sparky, my field man, was spading up the infield. When he got to the mound, he let his tiller grind good and hard. Wouldn’t you know it! Ping and pop. Tiller froze up. He found a flint-lock and powder horn. Seems some ol’ boy, who the hell knows how long ago, had to pick up and run. Both had the initials D.B. on ‘um. Figured you’d want ‘um for the exhibit, all the old stuff from the original stadium. Kinda of spooky. You really think it was that Boone? Heard say he did hunt and fish these parts. Yes, sir. Will do.”

‘And now? Let’s see . . . take two hundred and fifty years minus five, subtract what? Nothing? It all counts, doesn’t it? There. See?’

Five years ago, Lloyd Hawkins and Freeman sitting in the Chartres Cathedral, a place, ‘No, not a dream of his. It was just something Dad saw on the History Channel. Why not? Anything to try and help him remember . . . himself.’

Freeman looked up from the mound, ‘That blue . . . again.’

Yes . . . at Chartres. Blue glass that can never be duplicated, let alone . . . described.

“Piece by piece they saved it during the war. Put it all back and never remembered how it was made. History Channel, son.”

Freeman reached over to fold his father’s withering hand into his own, and heard the hush of spirits clamoring for the potion. This place reminded him of a line from Homer. Odysseus in hell, trolling for the spirit of Achilles, searching for a way back home, “With drawn blade I spaded up the votive pit, and poured libations round it to the unnumbered dead.”

He whispered to Lloyd, “Let’s save her, Dad, you know the place where the big cats once growled. Your team, the Detroit Tigers. The Jays were their farm team. We saw so many of the great ones pass through there on the way to the show. Why if you and I put our heads together. Push, fight and press . . . call in all our markers . . . why everyone in Dunham will see what we once saw there . . . here, now!”

Turning to Freeman, Lloyd was a freshman baseball player, again. For an instant, his Alzheimer’s was gone; for a brief moment, he was the complete measure of all that he had experienced and loved. Smiling brightly, he squeezed Freeman’s hand—hard.

“Damn right, son!” he said. “The two of us—together!”

Then as now, and seemingly forever, suddenly stilled, “Son, sometimes I think I can actually hear the bleachers . . . breath! There’s Kaline, just pulled a low, outside fastball deep. And Greenberg, there, tipping his hat as he’s rounding third.”

Achilles drank long and hard, smiled and stood tall when summoned. As asked, he spoke, as though still standing on the battlefield, the victor, not the vanquished. He offered guidance to the lost sailor, then slept again, Sunday last.

Last Sunday morning, the April sun plated the new infield grass with a soft, lemon sheen. Walking out of the stadium, Freeman was anxious to tell his father, Lloyd, the news. He paused for several minutes at the entrance to the hospice to take in the spring morning, a second time.

‘We’ve done it. The two of us, together. It’s really done. Finished,’ he thought. ‘The painters put on the last coat yesterday. Dad will be so happy. Some way, somehow we’ll get him there, we will. He will be with me . . . there.’

After giving his father the good news, Freeman fed him breakfast. The tonic had worked, after making Freeman repeat all the details twice, Lloyd remained unusually lucid, speaking in complete sentences as he dredged up memories from a not so distant past that actually occurred seventy years ago. Freeman knew the dance and simply followed.

“Here, like this,” he said to Freeman as he placed his hands on the bed railing. “Cobb held his hands slightly apart, he showed me how on that day, the one I told you about—the slide.”

“Of course I remember, Dad, it seems like it was just yesterday when you told me and Mom and all those people in the stands . . . like yesterday.”

Lloyd smiled, nodded his head, whispering, “It all suddenly seems to be here, right now, here with you, son. It really does.” He squeezed Freeman’s hand and then fell asleep. He never woke up again.

Holding the ball up, Freeman smiled at the smattering of applause. Shaking his right arm, readying himself for the throw to home, he paused, and looked down through the mound, up at the sky, and then over at second base.

A boy of fifteen, a high school freshman, Lloyd Freeman, crept up silently to within ten feet of the aging icon who had, earlier in the day, thrown out the first pitch of the Sally League All Star game played at Jays Stadium. It was sunset. Alone and brooding like a warrior who had beaten the odds into middle-age, he had paused on yet another battle field for a moment before sweeping up his memories and walking away.

“Mr. Cobb,” Lloyd, finally pushed out from the back of his throat. His words barely covered the ten feet between him and the man in the white linen suit standing on second base looking up and over the centerfield roof. Again, the name, “Mr. Cobb . . . I, ah . . . my name is Lloyd . . . Hawkins . . . Hawkins, sir. Lloyd Hawkins. I’m tryin’ to make the varsity next

year . . . this summer I’m playin’ Industrial Ball, second baseman for the Ranes Raiders. Sir, I’m no threat to hit the long ball, but I’ve got an eye, a good one, and I’m fast . . . fastest in these parts and I—”

He stopped talking as the ancient Detroit Tiger, still looking out into the twilight, held up his right hand motioning for Lloyd to be silent. Finally Cobb turned his head and looked at the young boy who had the temerity to walk out and disturb him.

“Son, are you really sure you know who I am? What with all has been said and written ‘bout me . . . you still had the gumption . . . the nerve to walk out here and disturb me?”

Cobb’s eye bore down hard on Lloyd. Shaking, Lloyd quickly gazed up at the legend their eyes locking for a moment, then back at the ground. All the stories his father had recounted of the star’s legendary temper, of how this man actually went up into the crowd after a heckler, came flooding back to him. Still, Lloyd pressed on.

“No, sir, I just . . . you’re just Cobb to me. Excuse me, I meant Mr. Ty Cobb, sir. Ty Cobb is the man, my daddy said was the best all round player and base stealer the game’s ever seen. All I wanted to ask you was—”

Cobb held his hand up, again.

“Dead son. Your daddy was right to say: ‘Was.’ Those days are dead and gone for me. So tell me, why would a greenhorn like you want to walk out and talk to a dead man? I’m still breathing, but the man you’re looking to see is . . . just plain dead, son. I’m a middle-aged memory who everyone says is a broken down version of the piss and vinegar son of a bitch

that . . . ‘scuse me, son, but what they really said is so foul . . . oh, never mind!”

The freshman and the angry, forgotten icon stared at one another. Lloyd, desperate to see a legend up close, and learn his secrets, had inadvertently stumbled onto a master enraged by the simple and indifferent act of aging. In the twitching eyes and uneasy posture of the great Tiger he saw complete resignation.

But in Lloyd, Cobb saw the same spark and desire that he had once used to overcome the opposing team’s hatred and the barbs of the jeering fans.

‘My word,’ he thought, ‘fifteen! Goddammit, fifteen, what I’d give to have that back! At that age it was all . . . it was a game! The game! The one I owned! Held it in my hand like a hawk its prey. Fifteen.’ The staring continued.

Closing his eyes, Lloyd steeled himself one last time and mumbled. His words fell straight to the ground, but Cobb’s face remained unchanged. Another attempt and the words “hook slide” and “third base” finally succeeded in making it to the legend’s ears.

Tyrus Cobb’s eyes softened. He shook his head, slowly, deliberately, before laughing out loud, before repeating back to Lloyd Hawkins, “My hook slide? Is that what you want to ask me about, son?”

Twisting his neck to the left, then turning his back to the right, Cobb bounced up on the balls of his feet, bent over to touch his toes, then leaned back, and straightened up. He looked into Lloyd’s eyes, held them in his own for a moment, then asked, “So you want to know how to hook slide? How to tear into the bag so hard and fast you scare the hell out of the third baseman, make it impossible for him to tag you out? Even bring a passed ball, and the dream of taking home plate into the mix? Here, son, hold this for me.”

Cobb tossed his suit jacket to Lloyd, tucked his tie into his shirt, and in one step exploded off towards third base. High stepping, his patent leather shoes, miraculously, holding the loose infield dirt, his trousers and shirt the white-hot head of a comet, suddenly, swinging three feet out to the right of the bag, he became a falcon spying on its prey as he dropped straight down, his right leg barely skidding across the surface while his left foot deftly planted itself just inside the corner of third base. His body continued to move to the right of the bag as his left foot miraculously held its place turning him into a wondrous, living centrifuge as he swung out and away while still holding the center as though bolted to the ground. A moment later he was atop the base, laughing, dusting the red clay from his trousers, shouting, “Like that, son . . . just like that!”

Freeman looked long and hard at the empty bottle of hundred year old single malt scotch sitting next to the tower.

‘Yes . . . we’re both empty now.’ And that tile? Hard and fast, the top of the tower steady and holding true.

“S’OK . . . son. You’re home, now . . . yes . . . s’OK, yes . . . that tile! Go on . . . pull it!”

BAL	CHW	LAA
BOS	CLE	OAK
NYY	DET	SEA
TBR	KCR	TEX
TOR	MIN	HOU

ATL	CHC*	ARI
MIA	CIN	COL
WSN	MIL	LAD
NYM*	PIT	SDP*
PHI	STL	SFG