The Youngest Hero Read online

  “If I’da stayed off the bottle, El,” he told me more than once, “I’d be a big leaguer today.”

  I wanted to believe it, of course. “Is that true?” I’d ask Momma later.

  “No doubt,” she’d say.

  I was impressed that a born liar could speak the truth at all. Watching Neal field and throw and hit with effortless fluidity, I was carried back to seeing him in a Pirate uniform, posing for his spring training pictures. He started in the rookie league and moved all the way up to triple-A ball, but his scrapbook was full of pictures of him in the big-league uniform even the minor leaguers wear during spring training.

  I didn’t need the Pirates to tell me Neal Lofert Woodell had been a bona fide major-league prospect. But now he was a sand-lot player, a race driver who made twenty-five dollars a night Fridays and Saturdays and barely enough more to live on by bagging groceries.

  In Elgin’s eyes, of course, his dad was a giant.

  “I’m praying you’ll forgive him, Momma,” he’d say.

  “I’m bitter,” I told him. “And it tears me up. But I don’t believe the man, and I don’t think I can ever forgive him. I know I can’t trust him. I don’t even like you bein with him. You ever smell liquor on his breath, you get away, you hear?”

  “I asked him if he still drank,” Elgin said.

  I looked at him. ‘You did? Good for you!”

  “I told him he didn’t have to tell me if he didn’t want to.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he told you. But did he tell you the truth?”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He said he was a lot of things, but that he doesn’t lie when he’s sober. He has a six-pack every night after ball games to help him sleep, and he says he knows enough to stay off the road. On Fridays and Saturdays he has only a couple of beers because they’re testing drivers at the track now, and any more than that shows up.”

  “He can’t afford to lose that ride.”

  “That’s what he said, Mom. He needs the money.”

  “What about weekends? He drinkin on weekends?”

  Elgin nodded.

  “Saturday night after the races and all day Sunday he drinks a good bit. He says he’s pretty wiped out till he goes to work on Monday mornings.”

  I’d seen Neal in the grocery on Mondays, his eyes red and puffy, tiny slits against the sun that streamed through the plate glass.

  On muggy summer evenings in Hattiesburg, I had taken Elgin to the library where I taught myself the tax return filing business. For a year I couldn’t get him to read anything but baseball books: how-to’s, biographies, histories, you name it. If it had to do with baseball, Elgin read it, including every baseball novel for children.

  When he ran out of stuff at his reading level, I moved him up to adult baseball books. He expanded his vocabulary by checking with me on words he didn’t recognize. I’d been an honor roll student and had dreamed of college. When I didn’t know a word, I made Elgin look it up. Whenever I felt impatient or frustrated with him, I hid it. I had to do the loving for two parents, and I wanted Elgin to feel deeply loved.

  “Momma,” he would tell me, “there’s no game like baseball. It has so many things happening at the same time. It’s a team sport but every play is also individual. You know what I mean?”

  All that talk of baseball made me think of Neal, but I worked at never shutting Elgin off.

  “No,” I’d say. “What do you mean?”

  “Tennis and golf are sports you play alone. I mean you’re against everybody else, but it’s just you and the ball and there’s no team to help or hurt you. Baseball is a team sport, but when the ball is hit to you, it’s an individual sport until you catch it. Then it’s a team sport because you have to throw it to someone else. And when you’re batting, it’s all up to you. You have to get the sign, do what you’re told, and get on base. But then it’s a team sport because the next hitter has to do something or you die on base.”

  I understood what he was saying, but I couldn’t see the beauty, the importance of it. That was all right. Someday I would see him play, and that would be even better than watching Neal play. My love for him was long gone. Elgin often asked if I liked watching his dad play.

  “Everybody likes watchin your father play, Elgin. He’s gifted. But I suppose I resent that he’s that good at anything. Sometimes I wish he was as bad a ballplayer as he is a race driver.”

  Even Elgin had to laugh.

  Neal hardly ever won a race, but I guess his sponsors kept him in because he was so daring. He was always on the brink of disaster, scraping guardrails or tapping other cars into the infield. Fans loved him. He seemed to love to drive fast without having mastered the sport. Two guys he drove against graduated to the NASCAR circuit, but Neal drove for beer money and for fun.

  Elgin badgered me into taking him to Neal’s baseball games, but he was an obnoxious fan. He combined play-by-play with desperate coaching from the stands, trying to urge on his dad’s awful Zephyrs. They won about half their games.

  “Full count and two outs,” Elgin would holler. “Runners will be going! Runners should be going! Runners aren’t going! There’s the hit! C’mon, Shaw! Move with the pitch and you score on that play!”

  After each game, Elgin would debrief with Neal.

  “Outfield was too deep for their shortstop in the sixth, weren’t they?”

  Neal nodded.

  “Would you have taken Crawford out so soon in the seventh, Dad? Why not let him walk the hitter to load the bases and give Mehlis a little more time in the bull pen? Mehlis wasn’t ready. He got behind on the first guy and then had to come in with that candy pitch.”

  I could see Neal was impressed. “You saw that too, huh?” he said. “You also see that I’ve lost a step to first and that my arm has no pop anymore?”

  “You’ve lost two steps, Dad. But your arm is as good as ever. Ask Ernie.”

  Ernie was the Zephyr catcher who had taken a throw from Neal to cut down a runner. Ernie had made the tag and come up shaking his hand.

  At the park in town, Neal hit Elgin harder and harder grounders and line drives. He pitched faster and faster until we were forced to save our money and get Elgin a batting helmet.

  The helmet gave me a feeling I can’t describe. Dad told me to open my stance and make sure I was getting both eyes on the pitch. Now I could do that without worrying about getting beaned. It made Dad laugh, though, the way I stuck my face right into the pitch before trying to drive it somewhere.

  I loved to hit!

  3

  My family and my church taught me God hated divorce. Well, I didn’t believe in divorce either, but I knew something about hate. It was what I felt for Neal. As for biblical grounds, I happened to know I had those too, but that was nobody’s business but mine.

  I lived with the pain and the embarrassment as long as I could. Neal quit trying to get me back. I guess I convinced him I was through with him, and I hoped he was grateful he still had some contact with Elgin.

  A bad marriage was good gossip in Hattiesburg. I saw scorn on faces, heard it in tones of voice. I was a failure, pitiable, wife of that violent drunk who washed out as a professional baseball player and was now just a good ol’ boy, racing cars, bagging groceries, and playing a little ball on the side.

  I guess there was irony in my choice of a lawyer, but I didn’t know anybody else. Billy Ray Thatcher was an old friend of Neal’s family and had been his agent. He had worked on Neal’s contract with the Pirates, a five-figure deal that let Neal live like a king until he drank his talent away and the money ran out.

  Billy Ray’s claim to fame was that he had represented Bernie Pincham, a poor rural basketball player who became a six-time NBA all-star and was now worth millions. The newspaper said the agent’s commission on Pincham’s salary and endorsement deals alone more than doubled Thatcher’s firm’s gross receipts for several years. Billy Ray had also advised Bernie on investments. Pincham
was worth many times in retirement what he had made playing basketball. The Woodells had assumed the same would be true for Neal.

  Mr. Thatcher had done his best, but unlike Bernie Pincham, Neal had not listened. He had not heard Billy Ray when he insisted that “everything, all of this—the bonus, the salary, the deals—hinges on what kind of a steward you are of your talent. If it doesn’t happen on the field, it doesn’t happen in the bank.

  “The bonus is yours. You can pay your bills and put the rest away. You know as well as I do that the odds are one hundred to one against a rookie-league player making a living as a big leaguer.”

  “I’ll make it,” Neal had told Billy Ray and me as we sat in his office so many years before.

  “I believe you very well could,” Mr. Thatcher said. “But you want to be smart with this little nest egg. It looks like a lot to you now, and if we’re careful with it, it can be a cushion for you if anything happens to your career.”

  “Do I get it in cash or like, what?”

  I saw Billy Ray Thatcher’s eyes roll.

  “It comes to me in the form of a check, Neal. I recommend that you allow me to subtract my commission, pay your debts, put a quarter of it in a savings account, put a few thousand in your checking account, and invest the rest in some safe, conservative stocks.”

  Not only did Neal refuse, but it was like he was insulted.

  “No way, Jose! Huh-uh! We agreed on your percentage. You take that and you give me the rest. And you can tell me one more thing: how to get a check that size cashed. I tried to cash a big check at the bank one time, and they said they needed a couple of days’ notice.”

  “They would require a week’s notice on a check this size, Neal, but surely you don’t intend to—”

  “You’re gettin your cut, so just let me know when I get the cash.”

  “I’d be doing you a disservice if I allowed you to—”

  “You’ll be fired if you don’t. Now stick with me, Billy, because we gonna make lots more money together.”

  Neal was up and out of Mr. Thatcher’s office that day without even waiting for me. Billy Ray stood when I did and touched my elbow as he held the door for me. “Miriam, if he squanders that money, he’ll ruin his career.”

  I just nodded. If I’d tried to say anything I would have burst into tears. It seemed like Mr. Thatcher was putting the responsibility on me to keep Neal from messing up. No one else knew yet that Neal beat me when he was drunk and that he was drinking during the week for the first time. Nobody could tell him anything. I had quit bringing up even minor things. We lived in the same house. That was it.

  I watched Neal slide from the frittering away of his signing bonus to borrowing ahead on his small, minor-league paycheck, and finally to where he began asking the ball club for his daily meal money in advance.

  The day after the Pirates first warned him his career was in jeopardy, he hit four home runs in a rookie-league double-header. That had to be why they stuck with him as long as they did, that and what they had invested in him. Neal rose to triple-A but soon dropped back to double-A and then A, and finally the Pirates told him they weren’t going to make room for him again with the eighteen- to twenty-year-olds in the rookie league.

  I was amazed he could come back to Hattiesburg with his head high, admitting, admitting that drinking had done him in. I finally figured out that the last thing Neal wanted anyone to think was that he hadn’t had the talent to make the majors. The saddest thing was that he was right. Someone less gifted became that one in a hundred from the rookie league to make the big leagues.

  After years of beatings, drinking, lost jobs, and bankruptcy, I could hardly recognize the person I had been so attracted to in the first place. He had been the best-looking boy in high school, a star in three sports, homecoming king. He was my dream from the day I first tutored him in algebra. I didn’t help him as much as I distracted him. He said he couldn’t take his eyes off my red hair, my freckles, and my figure. His algebra grade went from an F to a D. I felt like a failure.

  He was charming and funny, and he claimed he believed in Jesus, but he was not bright. In the end, Neal Woodell was only physical. And when alcohol had left him just a better than average local jock, and me a struggling young mother with no more sympathy or patience, I got an appointment with Billy Ray Thatcher.

  “How long since you threw him out, Miriam?”

  “More’n two years, plus his jail time.”

  “He sendin you any money?”

  I snorted.

  “Can I talk you out of this?” Mr. Thatcher said. “Tell you he’s worth the effort, that you don’t wanna be a divorced, single parent in this town?”

  “I’m not going to be in this town much longer, Mr. Thatcher. Soon as I can get some money saved, I’m sellin that trailer, and Elgin and I are going to Chicago.”

  “Why there?”

  “I had an aunt who moved to Chicago with her husband when I was little. She wrote the most beautiful letters about it. The culture and all.” I sat with my hands folded, eyes focused on the floor where my tears puddled. “I just want to get as far away from here as I can,” I managed. “My family knows what I’m doin, and they don’t like me for it. Well, they can just hate me long-distance.”

  Mr. Thatcher sat with his legs crossed, fingers entwined. “Can he accuse you of adultery?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “He accused me of a lot of stuff when he was drunk, but he knows better.”

  “Could you use adultery as grounds?”

  “I wouldn’t, but I probably could. You know that girl at the grocery with the blonde hair and—“ I caught myself. “Mr. Thatcher, I don’t want any more mess.”

  “But he beat you, didn’t he? Isn’t that what he did time for?”

  “I don’t want charges and countercharges. I don’t want anything but to be out of this for as little money as possible.”

  “Miriam, I could never charge you.”

  “I didn’t come to you for any deal.”

  “I know, but please, let me do this for you. I would be hurt if you insisted on trying to pay. Don’t give it another thought. I’ll throw a little stationery at Neal and follow through with the paperwork. It shouldn’t take long.”

  “Stationery?”

  “I send him a letter on my office letterhead and use lots of legal jargon designed to convince him he has nothing to gain and everything to lose by contesting this. Now what do you want from him? At least child support.”

  I shook my head. “He has nothing.”

  “You’re too generous.”

  “But he really doesn’t. If he gave up drinkin he’d have a little extra, but I really want to be done with him.”

  “Just the same, I’m going to get a list of his assets. You can decide then if there’s anything you want.”

  I couldn’t imagine anything of Neal’s I would want. Everything would remind me of the horror years. I didn’t even want his money to help raise Elgin. I thought of Elgin as mine alone.

  The letter from Mr. Thatcher sent Neal into a spin. He said he was offended that his former agent would take my side. He pleaded for the chance to make our marriage work, hired a local public defender, and threatened to sue for custody of Elgin.

  “I’ve talked to his representative,” Mr. Thatcher told me. “You’re right that he has little to offer, but I can tell from his lawyer’s language that at least he knows they have no hope. Here’s a list of assets and debts.”

  I hated even looking at the sad list of junk and obligations. I had no interest in his eight-year-old car. I wouldn’t need that in Chicago, and I had already promised my beater to my little sister. Neither was I interested in his Harley, which he had bought off a junk dealer and never had the money to get into running condition.

  “So, he’s still got that old pitchin machine,” I said, studying the sheet. “Wonder where he keeps that.”

  Mr. Thatcher studied his own copy. “At a community college in Mobile. Friend of his coa
ches there and borrowed it. It’s in storage, not being used, but probably still worth a thousand dollars, so it’s listed.”

  “You got him that thing,” I said, “didn’t you?”

  Thatcher leaned back in his chair and smiled. “I was rather proud of that,” he said. “Got it thrown in with his signing bonus. Helped Neal a lot, at least for a while. He’d forgotten about it, though. I had to tell his lawyer I knew Neal had it somewhere. It’s of no worth except to the team that borrowed it.”

  “I want it,” I said.

  Mr. Thatcher shot me a double take. “Whatever for?”

  “For Elgin.”

  “Oh, Miriam,” he said, “Elgin’s a lot of years from being able to use that. This isn’t one of those toys they use in batting cages. It’s a monster. Where would you put it?”

  “Wonder if that coach would store it for me.”

  “Maybe, but do you really want me to go after it? It’s gonna look a little silly in the divorce action. And won’t it remind you of Neal anyway?”

  “I don’t want money, not even child support. I just want Neal to admit the trailer is mine, give me that pitchin thing, and let me have this divorce.”

  “I could get you more.”

  “I don’t want anything more.”

  When the divorce was final, Neal left town without a word. I was insulted. When his career blew apart because of his drinking, he had come back home without a second thought. When I had kicked him out of the trailer, he found a cheap room and stayed in town, working at a grocery where everyone knew him. Most knew he had beat me. Some even knew I believed he had killed my unborn girl. But now, after his year-plus in jail and a couple more years living apart, I finally divorce him, and he gives one hour’s notice at the grocery and leaves town.

  I began planning my own escape to Chicago. I slowly paid my debts and started salting a little away each month.

  Neal visited one more time and played catch with Elgin, not even telling his son he had moved away. I heard nothing more of him until Mr. Thatcher drove out one night with the news. The rest of Neal Lofert Woodell’s sorry life would be spent in the Alabama State Penitentiary. That news would get around soon enough. It was time to move on before time passed us by.