Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [82]
We played a doubleheader the Thursday I arrived. In between games, a man came out of the stands to introduce himself. Said his name was Jeremiah, and it would be. You could see he had spent his life working outdoors. He was flat-faced, as if the wind had eroded his profile. His eyes were set close together and grooved at the sides from too many days spent squinting in the sun. When Jeremiah clasped my hand in a firm grip, I noticed his fingers: bronzed, squared-tipped, and streaked with nicotine stains dark as bittersweet chocolate. They felt as if a sculptor had hewn them from granite. Farmer’s hands.
Pain had drawn Jeremiah to me. At one point during the first game, someone took pity and finally allowed me to take a turn at the plate. I hit a line drive off the wall that should have been a double, but all that pitching had exhausted me. I had to stop at first after taking a wide turn. As I stepped back toward the bag, my daughter darted out from the crowd to leap into my arms. “I love you, Daddy,” Anna said as she planted a kiss on my cheek.
Suddenly you had this funny picture of a middle-age man standing on first base unable to see second for all the tears in his eyes. Only five weeks before, my wife had taken Anna and the furniture and moved out of our house. Pam left behind only a letter from a lawyer I didn’t know she had engaged. Can’t say that I blamed her. Many professional athletes are self-centered. Our livelihoods depend on our bodies, so we obsess over every twinge, cramp, or hangnail. That sort of narcissism does not make for a well-rounded individual. No doubt it made me difficult to live with.
Yet after Pam gave birth to Anna, I immediately changed. Our daughter was cute and tiny, so very much there. When she looked at you, her eyes said nothing else existed but that moment. Anna was so magical, I surrendered my adolescence at forty-eight. No more late hours. The smoking and carousing stopped. I devoted myself to her. Once, after appearing at a fantasy camp in Florida, I drove twenty straight hours up to Craftsbury just to return in time to watch her wake up that morning. Nothing gave me a greater kick.
When I came home to find my wife had taken Anna without writing where they had gone or when I would see them again, my lungs stopped pumping. Something sucked the oxygen out of that empty house until there was nothing to breathe. My stomach roared into my throat. I doubled over retching and crawled off to bed.
Or at least I would have crawled off to bed, but Pam had taken that too.
I spent the next month wasting away. Drinking again, smoking again. Thirty pounds slid off me so fast, people mistook me for the victim of a flesh-eating virus. My guess is that I eventually would have evaporated, but, soon as I agreed to a divorce, Pam and her lawyer relented and allowed me to see our daughter. Coming to Landisburg was our first trip together with me as a single parent.
Jeremiah had observed my anguish as well as my joy in that moment when Anna planted her lips on my face. Turned out he had recently endured his own divorce, so he understood the anguish a father feels when he can watch his child grow up only in intervals. We talked beneath the shade of a tree overlooking a piebald hummock on the side of the field. He had a gentle, almost somber look to him as I explained how my wife had left.
But before too long, Jeremiah’s eyes took on a different cast. Flame suddenly imbued them with the merry, blazing gaze of a plastic dashboard Jesus. Turned out that when he was not tending his farm, Jeremiah moonlighted as a country minister. Not a Pentecostal, mind you, but a true believer nonetheless. No one who saw him could doubt his conviction, though he did exude the air of a reformed alcoholic. All the telltale signs were present—he chain-smoked filterless Camels and consumed one diet Coke after another.
I have seen this many times before. Addicts must replace their addictions with other opiates, be it smoking,