ONE SATURDAY Teddy took Ethan up Allen Mountain to the woods above E.A. and Gypsy’s special place and showed him a stand of white ash trees, tall and straight and good for making baseball bats. He told the boy that ashes favored sunny, south-facing clearings, out of the wind. Wind stressed their grain. He said that white ash liked a loamy soil, not a clay base. And that a good sawyer could get twenty bats out of one tree.
“How is it,” E.A. said to his father as they sat on a log under a yellow birch and looked down the mountainside, “you come to know so much about ash trees?”
“Oh,” Teddy said, “when I was staying with my great-uncle, old Peyton Williams, up in Lord Hollow, he cut ash trees for the bat factory down to the Common.”
This was the first time Teddy had ever mentioned his family to E.A.
“Teddy? How come you never talk about your people?”
“My people?”
“You know. Your folks.”
Teddy shrugged. “I never really knew my people, Ethan. My ma, she passed on when I was little. I don’t hardly recollect her at all.”
“Then what happened? After your ma died?”
“Well, I got shifted around from one shirttail relation and foster home to the next. Finally I landed up with old man Williams.”
“Was he good to you?”
Teddy broke off a yellow birch twig and sucked on the wintergreen-flavored inner bark. “He weren’t nothing to me one way or the other. He weren’t mean when he was sober, and I learned pretty quick to steer clear of him when he was on a binge. I reckon I was a handful myself, Ethan.”
“What happened to your great-uncle?”
“He was old when I first went to stay with him, and a year or so after I got sent to jail, he up and died.”
Ethan hesitated. Then he said, “What about your pa?”
“What about him?”
“You said your ma passed on when you were little. What became of your pa?”
Teddy stood up. “He dropped out of the picture before I was born. I never knowed who he was.” He flipped the yellow birch twig at a nearby ash. “There, Ethan. That’s a better than average baseball-bat tree.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. Same’s you know how to throw a baseball. Let’s go get your pitching in.”
Ethan knew from his geology lessons with Gypsy that a great glacial lake had once covered the entire Kingdom Valley from Lake Memphremagog’s south end all the way to the fixture site of Kingdom Common. Where Gran’s house and barn now sat there had been one hundred feet of water with melting icebergs drifting in it. As the Great Wisconsin Ice Sheet retreated, the lake gradually withdrew to its present location north of Gran’s, leaving the river and, in the adjacent fields, huge deposits of sandy soil.
Trouble was, for a proper pitcher’s mound you needed something firmer than sand. Under Bill’s supervision Teddy and Ethan brought five wheelbarrow loads of clay from the riverbank to Fenway. They dug down three feet, removing the sandy loam that Gran’s Cannabis thrived in, and filled the hole with clay, heavy and blue-gray, the color of Allen Mountain on a cloudy November morning. Teddy built the new mound up as carefully as if he were burying a beloved hunting dog beneath it. He got out his tape and made sure that the distance to home plate was correct.
Surveying the finished job, Teddy said, “Pitcher’s mound has to be just right, Ethan. An inch high will throw off your stride and cause the ball to rise up in the strike zone, where the hitter likes it. Hold the tape, will you, Bill?”
Bill stood on the new rubber Teddy had lifted from the mound on the common and held the metal tag at the end of the Stanley tape, while Teddy started back toward the plate, unwinding the reel. He squinted and turned his head aside to avoid the smoke from his Lucky.
“You ought to quit smoking,” E.A. said.
“I ought to do a lot of things,” Teddy said.
It was sixty feet six inches from the rubber to the back of the plate. E.A. wondered, Why the six inches?
“That’s baseball is why,” Teddy said.
“Baseball,” Bill said. “Run your legs off to get back where you commenced from no further ahead than before you started.”
“Wrong,” Teddy said, straightening the plate. “You’re at least one run further ahead, Bill.”
Teddy had borrowed the plate from the common, too.
The Kingdom County nights were still cool. Some of the days, too. Teddy hung a round outdoor thermometer on the side of the barn, a green and blue and red affair that looked like a hex sign on a Pennsylvania barn. If the temperature was a degree under sixty he wouldn’t let E.A. pitch.
Their routine was always the same. Teddy would stand behind the plate, his catcher’s glove belt-high. E.A. would stand twenty feet away and in line with the new mound. They’d start to toss. By degrees E.A. worked his way back. When he reached the mound, it seemed a long way from the plate.
“It’ll get closer every year,” Teddy told him.
Teddy was careful not to teach the boy too much at a time. E.A. had a naturally smooth, over-the-top delivery. He started with his right foot slightly slanted on the rubber and his left foot a few inches behind it. His wind-up was economical. He threw exactly the same way every time. Teddy didn’t let him throw too hard. He didn’t let him experiment with breaking balls.
One morning a brand-new pair of size-eight spikes appeared on the mound. Inside each shoe was a new sweat sock. E.A. sat on the Packard seat to put them on.
“Teach me something new today,” he wheedled.
“All right,” Teddy said. “Wear them socks inside out the first few times.”
E.A. looked at him.
“Cuts down on blisters,” Teddy explained.
E.A. turned the new socks inside out.
After the boy’s arm was loose Teddy said, “Want to pitch an inning?”
E.A. nodded.
“You pick the team.”
“’Fifty-two Yankees.”
“All right.” Teddy squatted down behind the plate and turned his baseball cap backward. “First batter’s who?”
“Phil Rizzuto.”
“Book on him?”
“Pitch him away. Work the corners.”
He got Rizzuto in five pitches. Fanned Billy Martin, fanned Yogi, didn’t have to face DiMaggio. From that day on, Teddy let him pitch one or two simulated innings at every workout. Sometimes Gypsy and Gran watched from the dooryard, Gran disputing Teddy’s called strikes.
At first Teddy was generous with his strike zone. If E.A. had Mickey Mantle down on the count, one ball, two strikes, and Teddy set up for the next one on the outside corner at the knees and E.A. missed wide by three or four inches, Teddy’d jump up and say, “Mantle swings and misses, strike three.”
As the summer progressed Teddy’s strike zone shrank.
E.A. began throwing three innings at a stretch. They went through the Yankees of 1960 with Mantle and Maris. The ’50 Cardinals with Musial and Mize. Sometimes, on a low pitch, Teddy’d say, “He swings and hits the ball back to the mound.” He’d throw a grounder, and E.A. would grab it and fire it back, Teddy stretching out like a first baseman. Or Teddy would flip the ball out of his glove along the third-base line, a surprise drag bunt, and E.A. would sprint off the mound and pounce on it and whirl and make as if to throw to first.
Once, when Gypsy was watching, he began to throw harder.
“Let up,” Teddy told him. “Accuracy first. Speed second.”
If E.A. threw a pitch in the dirt, Teddy’d nod and say, “Better down there than up in Jackie Jensen’s wheelhouse.” Or, “Even Joe D won’t hurt you down there, Ethan.”
The last day they threw that fall, Teddy squeezed him on a couple of pitches.
E.A. stared in at him. “Sir,” he called. “Where was that last pitch?”
Earl No Pearl was big on calling the umpire sir, then demanding to know where the pitch was.
Teddy came partway out to the mound. “Don’t speak directly to the umpire, Ethan. It won’t help you. When your half of the inning’s over, have your catcher say to the ump, quiet-like, ‘My pitcher’s got a late-breaking curve’—or slider, or whatever—‘it catches the corner of the plate.’ You just pitch. Don’t show nothing in your face over a call. Don’t shake your head or slap at the ball with your glove when the catcher throws it back. Don’t stare in at the umpire. Just pitch.”
“Good sportsmanship, right?”
“Sportsmanship’s got nothing to do with it. You don’t want to break your concentration is all. Plus, you start getting into pissing contests with the umpire, he’ll always win. Even your catcher shouldn’t argue too much. I don’t much mind locking horns, but I don’t never lock horns with the umpire. I’ll speak to him quiet, once or twice a game at most. Maybe hold a pitch in my glove an extra half second, give him a good look.”
“How come when I miss close you don’t jerk your glove quick back into the strike zone, like Cy does for Earl?”
“Because that’s the surest way to get a good ump to give the pitch to the batter. The umpire isn’t stupid. Or blind, either.”
“What if my catcher won’t speak to him at all? Or jerks his glove back into the zone? Or won’t call the right pitches?”
Teddy shrugged. “Get a new catcher. I’m heading to Texas tomorrow, Ethan. Be back in the spring.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Can I do it? Go all the way as a pitcher.”
Teddy looked up at the mountain, hazy in the fall mist. Long Tom seemed to hover about halfway between the mountaintop and Gran’s farm. “Time will tell.”
He touched his cap with his index finger and was on his way.