spoke the languages they wanted to hear. English was a second language they learned in school.
The point is we thought locally as a matter of instinct. And baseball was no exception to the rule. Every town had its own team, and the teams played each other whenever the farmers could spare their sons. Plus there was a county team of all-star players that played teams from other counties.
In Louristan, the games took place on Saturday afternoon at the school baseball field. The players wore patched uniforms—when they had uniforms to wear—and the bean ball was part of every pitcher’s arsenal. Spats were common among the spectators gathered at the edge of the playing field, as well as between the players. And heroes? We had plenty. In our hearts we knew Louristan’s best pitcher, Ernie Sullivan, couldn’t hold a candle to Hippo Vaughn, the Chicago Cubs’ best pitcher. So what? We cheered for our team so hard they might have thought they were playing in the World Series.
I can’t say I was ever that much of a baseball player, but I surely loved the game. I’d put on a raggedy glove inherited from my dad and swung a bat whenever I had the chance, usually hitting nothin’ but air. As I said, town kids weren’t overly burdened with chores like farm kids, so I had plenty of chances. We played in a lot behind the feed store because the ball field at school was reserved for the big kids. Our pitcher’s mound was a line in the dirt and we marked the bases with feed sacks. There were no foul lines, so we fought all the time about fair and foul balls.
And we never had enough players to make two full teams, either, so you could only hit to left field, which made it hard on left-handed batters. True, some of the older boys occasionally knocked the cover off the ball. But that’s only because the cover was halfway off before the game started.
* * *
It was late in spring—Momma’s tomatoes were past flowering—when Dad made one of his dinner announcements. Usually these announcements had to do with some aspect of our behavior he found wanting. Eggs, for example, left uncollected, or the pea patch choked with weeds. Fidgeting in church was a big problem, too. As families in Bear County went, the Taylors weren’t exactly the most religious, though we attended church on Sundays along with almost every other sober resident. Going to church was respectful; a failure to sit still when Reverend Masterson launched into one of his rambling, fire-and-brimstone sermons was disrespectful. Case closed.
But Dad’s announcement on that night had nothing to do with our failings for once. I remember him looking from Annie to me, then at Momma, whose grin matched his exactly.
“We’re going to Chicago, Illinois,” he said.
Ever the skeptic, Annie asked, “Who is going to Chicago, Illinois?”
“All of us, young lady. We’re going to spend two days in Chicago. I’m going to attend a farm convention on the first day while you and your momma and your dear brother see the sights. On the second day, you and your momma are going to go shopping while I take Lucas to watch the Chicago Cubs play the St. Louis Cardinals.”
“When?” I could barely breathe.
“Ten days from today.” He paused, his timing perfect, before delivering the punch line. “And if you’d like Lucas, Eddie Enstrom can come with us.”
* * *
You talk about time slowing down? Every one of those ten days was an eternity. I wasn’t quite young enough to ask what day it was, but the question repeated itself with every beat of my heart. Mine and Eddie’s, too. See, Eddie Enstrom was my best friend, a farm boy, though still too young to be weighed down with many chores. Besides, spring planting time had come and gone, and haying season wouldn’t begin until July. We were in a kind of slack season given to repairs on the barns and the fences and farm machinery.
Not that me and Eddie turned our attention to the why of it. No, what we did, every chance we had, was play baseball. Eddie was bigger than me, a freckle-faced kid with a shock of straw-colored hair that stood straight up in the front. He was stronger, too, but I was faster. In those days, even Major League baseballs were much softer than they are now, and they didn’t get thrown out after every other pitch. It was almost impossible to hit them very far. I remember that much later on, I looked up the statistics for the 1917 team. The Cub’s slugger, Larry Doyle, hit six home runs, while the whole team only hit seventeen.
Bottom line, me and Eddie were about equal as seven-year-old country baseball players, and we tried to play on the same team when sides were chosen.
We were definitely on the same team the day we walked to the train station to begin our adventure.
CHAPTER 4
Been thinking on those days we spent in Chicago. Golden days they were, days of wonder. Funny thing about wonder—kids have so much and grownups so little. Fact is we spent four days on our trip, two traveling and two in Chicago, and every minute brought another revelation. My guess? If I had been a little older, I would have been embarrassed about coming off as such a hick. “Close your mouth, Lucas, or you’ll be catchin’ flies.” If I heard that once, I heard it a hundred times, but it didn’t do any good. I tell you, I was almost senseless. Me and Eddie both.
Our wonderment started at Louristan’s train station. Playing near the tracks was forbidden for Annie and me, but I’d watched many a train come through, usually from the top of a hill near Eddie’s farm. Up close, though, the situation was different by a far degree. Eddie and I were playing catch when the locomotive appeared from behind the trees near the creek and sounded its whistle.
“Holy horseflies,” Eddie whispered. “Boy, oh boy—ain’t she a beauty?”
I don’t recall my reply, if I did reply, but I remember edging closer to my dad. Louristan didn’t have any kind of platform. You stood on the ground a few yards from the tracks until the train stopped and the porter lowered the steps. Well, that locomotive was a mighty thing alright. My poor, little brain could barely contain the fact humans had made it. The top of my head came to about halfway up the driving wheel and when I leaned back, the engineer in his cab might have been perched atop Eddie’s barn.
The engine’s smokestack was even higher, and it was blowin’ out steam in little pulses. Behind the engineer, a fireman shoveled coal from the coal car into the engine. I watched him for a moment—his face was black with coal dust—and was reminded of the Beckmeyers. The man’s labor was that regular. Then a face appeared at the front of the passengers’ car, a pleasant face with dark skin and a wide grin. The man was dressed in a navy-blue suit with a shiny-brimmed cap that positively glowed. A watch chain ran across his chest and he consulted his timepiece as he lowered the steps.
“Howdy, folks,” he said. “Goin’ my way?”
Nobody got off and we were the only Louristan residents getting on, so he must’ve been talkin’ to us. Only I was too flummoxed to recognize the fact. I looked down the tracks, at a line of boxcars that ran behind the trees. The world had just gotten a whole lot bigger and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I’d been doin’ pretty good where I was.
* * *
We changed trains in St. Cloud, a real city even back then. I didn’t get to see much of it, though. We pulled into the depot a little before midnight and left an hour later. Our new train was pulled by a Baldwin locomotive that dwarfed the one before. This was a passenger train and speed was how the passenger lines attracted riders. Now I’ve been told there’s a train in Japan that goes two hundred miles an hour. By comparison, the train we were on didn’t approach the speed of a turtle. But to me and Eddie, sitting across the aisle from my parents and Annie, that locomotive might’ve been pulling us at the speed of light. The car rattled and shook on the straightaways. Its wheels screamed goin’ around the curves. The roar of the engine was with us every minute, and a plume of gray-black smoke trailed overhead like the mane of a flying horse.
The closer we came to Chicago, the bigger the world got. We saw factories first—mills would be my guess—out on the prairie, their smokestacks pouring black smoke into the sky. We didn’t think it was pollution—back then nobody thought about it that