THE SUMMER AFTER Grade 7, my adopted family moved to St. Catharines, Ontario. I’d been happy on our rented farm in Bruce County, the happiest I’d ever be as a kid, and the city terrified me. I needed the land as an anchor, and the fields and woods I loved seemed very far away. I spent most of that summer pedalling around on my bike. It was lonely. The layout of the city was foreign to me. Whatever neighbourhood kids were around had their cliques already established. But I discovered Lake Ontario one sunny afternoon. After that, I went there often just to sit on the rocks and gaze at the wide expanse of water.
I didn’t know how to fit in when school started. I’d come from a farming community where cool was lemonade on the back porch and hip was what Grandfather broke in a fall. Once again, as in the other schools I’d attended, I was the only Indian kid. I was odd. I felt awkward and ugly and stupid. Most of the kids just left me alone, and if it hadn’t been for baseball, that might have been the whole story of that first school year in St. Catharines.
It was the fall of 1969, and the hapless New York Mets were making a run at the World Series. My team, the Boston Red Sox, had finished third and were out of the contest early. Now the Mets were on their way to becoming the Miracle Mets, and the baseball world was in a frenzy.
I snuck my transistor radio into my classroom. I ran the earphone cord up through the inkwell hole in my desk, then leaned forward on my elbow, with one hand over my ear. I was listening to the game when I looked up and saw Gerry Haycox staring at me from across the aisle.
Gerry was a big baseball fan, too, and at recess I lent him the radio. After that, we shared the risk of getting caught. The one with the radio would smuggle notes to the other whenever someone scored or something big happened. We were both cheering for the Mets, and it was hard to contain our glee when they did well on a play.
The World Series was the catalyst for our friendship. While other kids moved on to football or soccer or the other games of autumn, Gerry and I spent hours after school honing our pitching skills in his backyard. We’d take turns squatting in the catcher’s pose while the other hurled his best stuff. We worked on two kinds of fastball, the two-seamed “sinker” and the four-seamed “gas,” and both of us threw a passable curveball.
But the pitch we were desperate to master was the exotic-sounding knuckle curve. We’d never seen one, but we’d heard a pitcher named Dave Stenhouse had thrown a knucklecurve for the old Washington Senators back in the early 1960s. Knuckleballs are gripped with the fingertips, and the ball is pushed towards the plate rather than being hurled. Their lack of spin makes knuckleballs unpredictable, and the knuckle curve sounded absolutely deadly to us.
What we imagined was a pitch that sailed and floated like a knuckleball but had a vicious break like a curveball. A knuckle curve isn’t a knuckleball at all, actually; the pitcher just approximates the grip. But we didn’t know that then. So, hour after hour, we’d try to throw the miracle ball.
We’d each toss fifty balls, then switch, following the system we’d devised. You’d throw the sinker first, then the gas, then the curve. When you were ready, you’d start sailing knuckleballs. We’d cheer when a ball floated in and then dropped or darted unpredictably. We’d both get anxious when whoever was pitching announced he was ready to attempt the knuckle curve.
Fall turned to winter, and we still threw. We practised with snowballs on the street and in the schoolyard, wearing thin gloves inside our mitts. Our arms got strong and our aim got accurate. We could generally put the ball where we wanted by then, but we never unlocked the secret of the knuckle curve. In all that concentrated passion, though, Gerry Haycox became my best friend. We fell together because of the magic of baseball, and in the pitch-perfect love of that game we came to love each other, too. Of course, we never used that word for it. At fourteen, you don’t often throw words like that around.
The Haycox family welcomed me into their home. Every time I sat with them at supper and heard them laugh together, I wanted that for myself. My home life was a classic case of square peg, round hole. It’s not the pounding in that process that hurts the most; it’s the bits of you that get shaved away. I was scraped raw by fourteen, though I didn’t know how to tell anyone that. My adopted family were staunch white Presbyterians. They led a regimented, no-nonsense, linear life that brooked no disorder. Punishment was swift and harsh, and the wounds I suffered went far beyond the scars on my buttocks. Many times I wanted to beg the Haycox family to take me in, to shelter me. But I just watched them love each other and basked vicariously in the glow.
Once we started high school, Gerry and I grew apart. He went to Lakeport and I went to Grantham, so we saw each other only on weekends and holidays. The loss was another in a long line of them in my young life, and I felt it keenly. My high school days were marked by a deep sense of inferiority and shame. I did a thousand outrageous things and got into big trouble at home. When it all got to be too much, I ran away.
I went on welfare and tried to find a job. Mostly, I lived on the street. One night, in a cold drizzle, I stood at the head of Gerry’s driveway and looked at the lights of the living room. I heard laughter. I wanted to knock on his door and tell him what was going on. I wanted to trust him with my desperation and my loneliness. But, in the end, I just walked away.
I played baseball until I was fifty, for the sheer joy of it, but I never learned to throw a knuckle curve. When I catch a game on TV, I still pay strict attention to the pitcher, just in case he makes that miracle pitch. And sometimes, when the nights are long and the quiet is pervasive, I remember my friend Gerry Haycox.