Death in Foul Ground by Ted Walker
Death was a hell of a hitter. He really buggy-whipped that reaper through the zone. He could hit the ball for average, for power, whatever. It was a sight, Death at the plate. If you thought Baby Ruth filled up the batter’s box, you should see old Death with his hood and tattered cloak—all of that business. I know I wouldn’t want to pitch to Death. I saw any number of youngsters fresh from the farm altogether lose their stuff down two balls and no strikes to the big fellow. Hell, I’ve seen the same from veterans with a pension. And the line drives he hit, sweet Lord. I’ve never seen the ball jump from a bat like they did from his gnarly reaper. A screamer from Death could cut you right in two, and I mean that literally. He was dangerous. And not just when he hit the ball, either. Skip Bingle was catcher for the Mutuals, out of Kansas City; I once saw Death take a swing at an outside curveball and lop old Bingle’s head clean off. Bingle leans out to grab the pitch and the reaper blade finds him with a grimace on his face. Death didn’t even hit the ball—he swung right through it with a lightning sweep—and Skip’s caught it with a soft hand like a professional. But there goes his head rolling out towards the pitcher’s mound like it was a sacrifice bunt. But for my own good sake I wasn’t a pitcher. My arms weren’t long enough. I played second base, where the short guys and the quick guys like me found their reward. It’s been a while since I felt second base between my ankles, and I miss it sure enough. The Afterlife is well and good, but it doesn’t offer much that you couldn’t find by scratching at the infield dirt with your toes on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. You see, I’m dead. Death come and got me. It sounds worrisome, and it should, but there aren’t any rain-outs where I ended up, and you don’t ever get benched. Benching was something I knew. I was quick, and sure-handed alright, but I had my faults. And on a team like our Excelsiors, out of Chicago, any kind of fault was a one way ticket to Benchville. There’s a respect in which me and Death were opposites: he could hit the life out of the ball, and me, I couldn’t hit New York with a Knickerbocker. The bat never felt quite right in my hands, I can’t know why. I worked as hard at it as any man, but it never took. I got as far as I did—all the way up to the Excelsiors—with glove-work, pure and simple. No one was better than me at lassoing a hard skipper up the middle and turning to throw it on to first for that reward I was talking about. Show me a sleepy first base umpire holding up his fist and thumb, and I’ll show you a man who’s grinned into his mitt more times than Ruth has shuffle-stepped around the bases, tipping his cap. But here I was talking about Death on the ballfield. I remember the first day he showed up. We see him at a Monday practice one day, milling around down the right field line, not talking or advancing on our game. He was a spectator of the oddest kind. He wasn’t loitering, or lagging about. His attention was rapt, and I could see him scanning the field back and forth with the black, empty spot where his face should’ve been. There was one moment when I thought I heard him whispering—hissing, even—to himself from that distance. But that may have been in my own head. “Tall one, isn’t he,” said Harry Wright, our managing left fielder, after a week or two’s gone by of Death out there daily. “Must be hot in that outfit.” “Must be,” I say. It wasn’t often that Wright lent his attention to a single thing outside the foul lines. He was of that grumbling school which denies itself any matters of only a satellite influence. “All that black gonna absorb the most heat,” he goes on. “White’s the way to go.” “Yep,” I say. “The lighter colors, they bounce the sun right off. Gotta know that.” I couldn’t see Death from my positioning at second base. I was faced away from him, and I can admit that it made me nervous. I’m the type that likes to keep an eye on the front and back doors even if it’s a walk-in closet, and the last thing to put me at ease was having my back turned to such a surly looking fellow as that. Like I’m saying, I’m nervy by nature. Especially when there’s Death waffling around in foul territory. Once, I looked back at him and felt something that was more than strange: I wanted off that baseball field right there and then. If that’s not a revelation, then I don’t know what is, for the ballfield was more my home than my empty old home was. Whenever the time comes that the final out of the day is marked, that’s the time I start counting the minutes before tomorrow’s opening pitch. Death had a way of that, of getting himself tangled up in your own personal business and screwing things around in your head. Just when a man’s got to think that his brain is shut up tight and locked down, that he’s got his free range thoughts penned into the old brain corral, that’s when some big son of a bitch saunters up with the smell of burnt timber around him, holding out a frosty mug of doubtfulness. Baseball is what I had, and the cold water in my spine said that Death was there to take it from me. But my pop taught me against such sort of thoughts, so I played hardball. The days passed along, until the morning comes when Death has moved himself to standing right there by the bench where we kept all our gear. He was taller up close. I forced myself, as a sociable man, to nod hello, but all I got back was a kind of grunt and a wisp of smoke from up under his hood. Where I come from, that’s hardly a proper greeting to a fellow citizen. As a baseball man, however, I could look past poor manners like a banker past a beggar if the fellow can hit or field. And I’m no banker, but I had a feeling that Death had some kind of a baseball trick up his dusty sleeve. “Well,” says Harry Wright to Death when he sees him encroaching on our game after all. “Are you here to play ball, or to stand around like a Sunday lady watching?” That was all Death needed. He took his reaper in hand from under his cloaks and veritably floated up to the plate. “Shit,” says Frank Walcott, our finest hurler, who’s pitching for the practice. “Okay,” he says. “Alright. Shit.” Walcott was always one to embrace a sense of the mysterious on the pitching mound. He had a handlebar mustache straight from the Vaudeville stage, and he called himself “The Magician.” But Death himself stepping in was a whole new thing altogether. Walcott’s mystery—the showy stuff with the spidery fingers, the wink and the wave of the cape—wasn’t devilishness to tug at Death’s sleeve, for the big murky fellow simply oozed a mystery deep enough to send a man to church on a Tuesday. I never knew Walcott to attend a Sunday service, but he had a look on that suggested he might soon mend his ways. Death had no such look, and he stands in there heavy. So like men do when they know they’re outmatched, Walcott sends a few scroogies inside, to try and show Death that he’s not fooling around. Death takes them both all the way. Death can take his time, is how I guess at it, and he did. So taking his time, he grunts a little, bends at the knees a hair—if he had knees under there— then proceeds to slice at a high fastball and drive it as far as I’ve ever seen a ball travel. Making that kind of contact with a long, funny reaper no thicker than a broom handle? No problem for old Death whatsoever. I looked for the reaction around me, and Harry Wright, with his mind all the time on the team and the sale of tickets, well he seems to be working out the figures in his head already. Or the headlines: “Death New in Left; Wright’s Signing a Genius Maneuver.” “Big boy can hit,” says Wright with all of the gentlemanly restraint he can muster. I could see the twitch at the corner of his mouth that meant he was working through it already. Of course, no matter how smitten with a talent, a manager is beholden to his owner. Wright’s owner was Larson Applebee, a conservative old codger not far from the grave himself. “If he can catch a thing at all in left field, could do us some good,” says our trusty manager. I could already see Wright standing before old spectacled Applebee, hat in hand, pitching a moderate salary for a rookie left-fielder: young man goes by the name of Death, not sure where he’s out of. I had to chuckle to myself at that one. As it turns out, Death was all thumbs and ankles in the outfield. He got to the ball quick enough, but once there he’d swing at it with the reaper like a child chasing crickets with a butterfly net. There was one I had up on him. It’s a patient man that puts in the care and effort to excel in field-play. Death went out there every inning, but sometimes that isn’t enough for a man. At that time we had a right fielder, a Fred Whipple, who got a thorough brow-beating from Harry Wright, one after the other, for mock-swinging while in the outfield. Whipple was obsessed with line drives in the same way that I was obsessed with slow rollers and high choppers, and he let it show. The point is, to do something right you’ve got to find that it’s an obsession. Death sure wasn’t obsessed with fielding his position. He pursued his affairs with what was more like a strange kind of fascination. For one, I’d often find him staring at our shortstop, quick-handed Givens, or watching like a child the way that Harry Wright tossed batting practices pitches one after another. Or Death’s checking the edge on his reaper-blade with a wispy thumb, instead of watching the flight of a ball through the air or making sure to hit his cutoff man on throws to the infield. Most of the time I didn’t know where his head was. Harry Wright, it turns out, could’ve cared less about Death’s work out in the field. A week from that first real entreaty—to the shock of our Excelsiors—Death moves his effects into the locker stand at the end of the row. I say moved in, but really there was barely a thing he brought along. I even had to let him borrow my extra mitt on occasion, he was so ill-prepared. And he left it with a fearsome stink. The next day Cincinnati comes to town, and Death like a veteran is penciled in for left field duty, hitting sixth in the order. I remained unnerved at his strange—and take this to mean it how you’d like—his strange appearance. And if I was still unaccustomed, imagine the Red Legs of Cincy. Their man on the loudspeaker announced him, with his trademark growlishness, as “Left field, number double-naught, Deeth.” Our boys give a chuckle, and the announcer says, “Ahem, correction. Left fielder, Death. Death in left field.” The Cincinattis didn’t know what to think about the dour old boy, and then with a creaky lash of his reaper he sent a curveball rattling into the right field bleacher seats. Hell, after that the Cincinattis knew even less what to think of him. Death’s debut, like all of his debuts, was quiet and unquiet, both and neither. We won in Cincinnati by a ten to two margin, sticking it to Key Langtree, the best young pitcher in baseball. Then it was off to Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.. Every new ballpark with Death in tow brought new days of victory, as well as gasps of displeasure from the few women in attendance and disgruntled conversation from under the straw hats in the grandstands. In Philly, as we walked our bags of bats and balls through the front turnstiles for a Saturday double-header, Death stops short in front of me. Staring up at him was a young lad no more than eight years old. I don’t have enough in my employ with which to describe the expression on his little square face. I will say that all the roaring grumblings of hatted men all cigar-smoke cloudy in their own uncertainties and fears could never equal that young boy’s face with a smear of vanilla ice cream on his cheek in the shape of the Spalding double stitch regulation baseball. But there were games to play despite it, and on the field we were tearing through the competition like regular League champs. Death was such a hitter—two man’s worth of hitter—that I found my way into games all the more. My jersey was dirtied daily again, my fingers sore come every nightfall, harkening to my days in the independent leagues, when there were no ticket sales, and no grandstands save for the patches of grass down the baselines. The repeated chorus of our afternoon games came to be thus: Death lashes a four-bagger with several men on base ahead of him, then I struck out to end the inning. Not a soul would notice my shortcoming for the general amazement that hung like the smoke from a firecracker even after Big Darkness was back in the dugout chewing sunflower seeds. I come up with that nickname, by the way. It seemed to fit a guy who could suck the light from any bulb within ten feet; for a guy who popped the next breath from your chest if you didn’t see him walking up behind you. Big Darkness. No face to be seen for the hood, no fingers for the cloak-sleeves, no talking for the grunts and whispers. All in all, Death was a sour fellow, but he was willing, and he carried us to a championship like it was ours all along. Harry Wright was ecstatic, and as quick as you could pawn a shotgun, he and old man Applebee sold Death to Pittsburgh for a Vanderbilt’s wage. It was quiet after Big Darkness moved on, like nighttime giving way to morning. I maintained my spot at second base and the Excelsiors signed several gray-haired hitting veterans on Death’s profit. We won a few, and we lost a few, and folks came out to see us and went home with a belly full of baseball like they thought it should be. Harry Wright, always eager for the Wise and Worldly moniker, found the ears of the local sports beat reporters veritably chanting: “Death hasn’t a place in baseball. I’ve said it all along. Let those Pittsburghs stare daily into Death’s ugly mug. I’ll not have the distraction among my nine.” There was gossip of a day game in Boston where a row about a third strike called on Death led to the umpire’s immediate demise, but who could tell. I knew that umpire. He was a fat son of a bitch whose heart and kidneys must have been working double time as it was. In the end, Death come and got me too. In fact, I went to him. To Pittsburgh. We were there on the ugly end of a ten-game losing skid. A dearth of hitting—for old hitters only grow older and never younger—kept us low in the standings. It was Harry Wright’s great, untimely insight that my particular brand of staunch defense can only keep a team in sight of the lead; it can’t do the work that puts you in it. And Pittsburgh was the latest juggernaut of speed and Death’s new power. Our aged Excelsiors wearied and wilted in the hot afternoons. The Pittsburghs ruled the League and emanated invincibility, morning, noon and night. In short, we were in their town to lose. In the Pittsburgh daily news rags, Death made up every headline. Wherever he went, it seemed, he stirred up a strange celebrity. It was a bright and sunny day when we took the field. Popcorn smells from the grandstand, good-natured louts calling for Death’s success, the odd evangelist calling for his outright ousting. In the second inning, Death rewarded all of them with a screamer through the right side for a single. Next up was Hal Langston, a kid only just called up from the minors, with forearms that could squeeze a paycheck from a pauper. You could tell Langston was still a newbuck to the Pittsburghs, because he couldn’t take his eyes off Death. His baby blues flickered over to first base between pitches and even during. It was as though Death were a pretty lady and the diamond were a dance hall. It is long proven that a lack of concentration will almost always rob the powerful of their gifts, and this beefy kid was no exception as he sent a snappy groundball to our shortstop, an Italian called Valenti, on the next pitch. I moved over to second base just as quick as I do. In the natural motion of a double play, I’ll turn my back to the oncoming runner to receive the throw from the shortstop. It is after receiving this throw that I’ll glance at the runner and see if he’s going to come in with a hard slide, shoe spikes up, or if he’s peeled away and ceded the out. The double play in motion is like the turning over of an engine. Once it gets moving it’s a thing without a brain, a kind of altogetherness with the grass and the dirt, with the base and the runner and the umpire and every soul in the grandstand. It’s maybe my most favorite thing that ever was. When that young kid shot a grounder to short that day, my last day, it was like I was finding my way home at the end of a long day at the sandlot, with my dear mother’s roast in the crock pot awaiting my return. Feeling that kind of goodness and warmth in the middle of a double play, I turned to check the oncoming runner. There it was that I realized again that it was Big Darkness himself coming for me on the move. If you will forgive me an aside: When I was a child, my father, on some kind of adult business, carts me and him alone from my home town of Florence, Alabama, northwest through the plains and up to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. On the way there was the state of Kansas. Halfway across that farm flatness, with I up on my father’s driving bench with him behind the horses, the day went purple and the horizon lost its center and spat a run-across rain that stabbed at my young face. To my right, the sky opened like a sluice and down it dropped a tube of the most violent, sucking darkness I have ever seen. Dad saw the tornado on the flat plain just when I did, and he whipped the roughest stock of his stables—a biter called King Kelly after a ball player from his time—on to his fullest effort to spirit us away from danger. I’ve thought on it for years, and the best I could do for an image would be to say that on that day the Good Lord in a fit of anger plunged a screwdriver into a tabletop. That is how Death came at me from first base to second: like a big, black Kansas tornado. Valenti, flips me the ball and I grab it and then I’m underwater. I’m floating, and maybe I’m on my back. I’m a little dizzy, a little double bourbon dizzy. I wonder still if I held on to the ball and got the out, but I can’t really know. But then I can’t move my arms, and I’m not even so sure I’ve got arms anymore. I’ll tell you, it took some getting used to. The baseball is different where I ended up. No contracts to put off the factory for one more year; no reserve clause to make a slave out of a tax-payer and a patriot. Round about the Upstairs, you’re set for the long haul. I haven’t hit a round-tripper in ages, but still here I am, a fixture at second base just like everyone else is a fixture where they are. As for Death, I hear he outstayed his welcome in Pittsburgh and moved on to Rockford, where they’ve got a good club in the making. It’s quiet in Rockford. I spent the night there once on a tour with a lady friend. Separate quarters, naturally, and above the board. But we strolled all casual through Rockford’s main square among the blooming wildflowers and the homes. There’s time in a town like that for a young man to learn to play the game well-paced, without distraction. The word up here is that there’s a lot of youth and vigor among that Rockford nine.
