“Maybe,” Obie muttered, but he couldn’t recall playing so much as an inning up in Harrisford.
The boy’s eyes stayed steady on Obie like there was something more he wanted to ask. But then he grinned and pulled back inside the cab. “Hey, old man,” he said, “you ever see that nigger up in Milwaukee play ball? Hot damn. I’d like to see something like him. I tell you, that nigger had himself some kind of a year.”
“Yes sir,” Obie said, nodding slowly. “He surely did. But I never did see that boy play. He come along after my time.” He looked down at his feet. They were wet and seeping water. He wondered if he would spend the rest of his life out here talking to this white boy.
“Yeah,” Lee said. “I guess some of us don’t have no luck except the kind we don’t want.” He shifted his body and dug a crumpled dollar bill out of his pocket. “Here,” he said. “You go on and take this. Don’t say nobody never gave you nothing.”
Obie stared at the bill hanging between the boy’s fingers. Well, lookee here, he thought. A dollar bill for Obie. He took it from the boy and balled it up in his hand. “I thank you,” he said.
“Yeah,” the boy said. “Well, it’s nothing much.” He switched on the engine and shoved the truck into gear. “I just stopped to pass some time,” he said, without a look at Obie. “I didn’t stop to give you no trouble.” He wiped a fist at the moisture on the inside of the windshield. Then he let the truck roll forward slowly.
“It’s going to snow all night, old man,” he said. “You better find yourself someplace warm or you’ll catch your death.”
Obie stood in the falling snow and watched the truck drive across the bridge and disappear among the trees of Cairo. He let the wadded-up dollar bill drop from his hand to the wet mud. And then he hefted his suitcase and, once again, began his slow walk back home.
A few months after Obie returned, he bought an abandoned house that sat up from the river on the outskirts of South Cairo. It was a small, rundown old place, but he didn’t see the need for more than what it was. He didn’t mind that the wood floors in the three rooms were warped or that the supports beneath the porch had rotted out. Or even that the stretch of ground that ran all the way to the river’s edge wasn’t much more than swamp full of bugs and snakes. That house was the only thing that Obie had ever owned in his life, and he felt as if he was finally in a place where he belonged.
After settling in, he began to ask around about what might have happened to folks he’d known from years before. What he found out was that thirty-seven years is a long time in a place like South Cairo. No one seemed to remember who he or any of those other people he asked about were.
For a while, those he’d stop on the streets or hacking weeds in their yards would listen to him kindly. But when his talk drifted to baseball, as it always did, a thin look of impatience would cross their faces. They’d shake their heads and give him a smile that meant nothing at all.
“You and that colored ball,” they would say. “Open those eyes of yours, Obie Poole. There’s black men playing in the World Series now.” And then they’d go back to what they were doing, leaving Obie to wander off. And as he made his way home, he knew that they all thought he was just another crazy man who had fallen into their midst. That there wasn’t a soul on earth who could have done all the things he claimed to have done.
The only one who bothered to help him out at all was the crippled lady who owned Peter’s Grocery. Lydola Peterson told him that she recalled hearing about a bunch of boys once taking to the road to play ball. But for the life of her, she couldn’t remember who those boys had been or who their families were or even where she’d heard such things. What she did remember, though, was that back in 1936 two events had occurred that had forever changed South Cairo.
“The Cairo Slaughterhouse burned down,” she told him, packing his bag with canned soup and tobacco. “It burned down one cold winter morning and left every last family in South Cairo out of work and owed money they never was going to get. I was newly married at the time this happened.” She ticked out some air and shook her head. “The flames were so big it looked like the river was on fire.”
Lydola was years younger than Obie, but her hair was bone white and sparse, her spine so twisted it kept her half bent over. Her skin was discolored, and one foot was clubbed and hidden away in a thick leather shoe. There was never anybody in the store but Lydola. What became of her husband, she never did say. She told Obie that the boiler in the slaughterhouse basement had blown and in no time at all the flames had eaten up the paper-thin walls to the roof. She said it happened so fast that there was nothing to be done but stand back and watch.
“There was a white man got himself burned up,” she went on. “I don’t remember his name, but no one cared about him anyway. He was a poor, dim-witted soul who wasn’t much use to anybody. All they found of him was some charred bones.”
She leaned back against the counter and twisted her head around to look up at Obie. “Rain and sleet was falling that morning,” she said. “But even so, you could feel the heat come washing across the river. And the sounds those poor animals made. Cows and lamed horses and old hogs screaming like crazy women. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a few months later the floods came.”
In the spring of that same year, she told him, the river rose ten feet over its banks and flooded nearly all of South Cairo. Whole houses were dragged away by the current, and those that weren’t were left bloated with mud and water and a white mold that got deep into your lungs and sickened whoever breathed it. River rats swarmed everywhere, and coils of water moccasins hung from tree limbs. It took two months for the water to finally get back to where it belonged, and by then most everyone who lived near the river was gone.
“I don’t know who you asking about, Obie Poole,” she said. “Most likely they all gone after so long. But what I do know is you might want to think about keeping your stories to yourself. This place has had enough bad times. It don’t need to be reminded of lost souls that might have lived here or even that Negro ball you always talking about. You go home and sit on that porch of yours and let the sun warm your bones. Find yourself a little peace, Obie Poole.”
For the most part, Obie didn’t much care what people said about him or what they thought. He had a lifetime packed away in his skull and if no one was interested in what was in there, then that was their own bad luck. He’d lived his whole life moving about in crowds, and he was done with all that.
He spent his time fixing up his house and driving out the wasps and snakes that had taken to nesting in the walls. He kept the swamp grass cleared back to keep down the bugs and cut paths through it so as to have a place to walk
In the late afternoons, he’d rest out on his porch. He’d chew his tobacco and gaze off at the river that never stopped flowing, thinking that the years passing him by weren’t all that much different from one of those ball games where not one damn thing would happen. The comfort in those games had nothing to do with the score but was in the quiet wait for what might come. Then Obie would wonder what Syville or Madewell or any of those other boys would say about a thing like that.
“I guess it don’t matter what you’d say,” he muttered. “You all gone anyway.” He leaned forward and let loose a thick stream of tobacco juice. “I got myself a nice slow game going here. And it ain’t ever going to end.”
Obie would think like that right up to the moment Rachael Parish came strutting her way into his life.
Obie had been back in South Cairo for twenty-eight years when he and Rachael met. The day she came messing up his life was no different from any other. As usual, he’d gotten up early and made himself a pot of coffee and two slices of toast. And then he had gone outside to take a look at the morning.
The air was cool and still. The grass was folded over with damp. A thin haze hung over the river and above it the sky was beginning to swell with light. The sad moan of a mourning dove came from the trees down by the river, and from far off came the dull barking of a tied-up dog.
For