I walked straight out of Stumptown and down to the river road, the moon lighting my way. Someone had mowed his grass nearby. I like that good, clean smell because it usually means summertime when there’s no school. Cut grass smells like freedom to me.
Nobody’s outside much this time of night, and the street was deserted. The only sounds were the crickets in the grass and the breeze whispering through the trees overhead. Once, the headlights of a car stabbed the darkness a block away, so I ducked behind a tree in case someone in the car knew me and my mom. I didn’t want them asking Mom if I was supposed to be out so late.
I came to the slope above Luther’s camp and made my way down the path through the trees.
When I came to the clearing, I called out, “Luther? Are you here?”
Nobody answered.
Luther’s lean-to was a dark smudge in the shadows near the river. I walked up to it slow so I wouldn’t startle him if he was asleep.
“Luther?”
“What? Charlie?” I turned and saw Luther’s shadowy form sitting on the tree stump outside his lean-to.
He stood up and set something on the stump, then came toward me.
“Hi, Luther.” It was good to see him.
“Does your mama know you’re out this late?” he asked.
“Well …” I didn’t want to lie, but if I told him no, I was positive he’d send me home right away. “I wanted to talk to you.”
He stopped in front of me. “I asked you, boy, if your mama knows you’re here.”
He knew the truth.
“No,” I said. “But I won’t stay long, okay? I just wanted to see you.”
“I’d like to see you, too, Charlie,” Luther said, “but not when you sneak out. I don’t want your mama mad at me.”
I looked past him at the stump where he’d been sitting. “What are you doing?”
“Got me a crystal set,” Luther said. “I was listenin’ to the Cardinals game. They’re playin’ the Cubs tonight.”
“Really?” I asked. Excitement bloomed inside me. “You’re listening to the game?”
Sometimes after I went to bed at night, Dad and Mom would listen to ball games on the radio out in the living room.
“Where’d you get the crystal set?” I asked him. Will’s brother tried making one once, but it didn’t work too good.
“I made it,” Luther said. “Brought it with me. It’s just an old Quaker Oats box, a crystal, and some wires and stuff.”
“And you can pull in the Cardinals?” I asked. “All the way from St. Louis?”
“On a good night,” Luther answered. “Your town has a strong radio station nearby.”
“Where’s the antenna?”
He turned and pointed. “There’s a wire strung between two trees over there.”
I laughed. “I thought that was where you dried your clothes.”
“That is where I dry my clothes, but it’s an antenna, too.” I could see Luther smiling. His white teeth shone under the moonlight. “Want to listen for a minute to the game?” he asked me. “Then you gotta go.”
“Yeah, I’d like that,” I said.
I followed Luther to the stump.
“Sit down there,” he said. I thought I smelled liquor on him, but he seemed okay. He handed me the earpiece and I listened.
“I don’t hear nothing,” I told him.
“It fades in and out,” Luther said. “Give it a minute.”
Then I heard it. A little voice off in the distance. I couldn’t hear what it was saying. But in a few seconds it got louder, and pretty soon I heard the announcer yell out, “And Musial jacks one out of the park!”
“I can hear it,” I whispered. “Stan the Man just hit a home run!”
Luther beamed in the darkness. He reached down to pick up a bottle on the ground and moved a little ways off. Then he sat on the ground and leaned against a tree. “Pretty nice, ain’t it? No electricity and no batteries, it don’t cost a thing. Just comin’ through the air and wires for free.”
Luther took a drink from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I shouldn’t oughta drink in front of you, Charlie,” he said. “Your mama wouldn’t like it. Don’t you ever take up drinkin’. It’s not a good habit to get into, y’know.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m not plannin’ on it.”
The game had faded out again, and I put the crystal set on the ground at my feet. I wanted to hear the game, but I was more interested in talking to Luther. I was afraid he’d make me go home, so I said real fast, “Luther, would you tell me about meeting Jackie Robinson?”
“Okay. You ever hear of Satchel Paige?”
“Sure,” I said. “He’s a great pitcher.”
“Well,” Luther said, “I faced ’em both back in forty-five when I was playing for the Memphis Mockingbirds. What a game that was!”
He stopped and took another swallow before going on. “Satchel was pitching. Our number three hitter nubbed one off the end of the bat, and it spun around in the grass like a crazy top for our only base hit. It was a lucky hit, too, ’cause with Satchel’s arm, he could prob’ly throw a strawberry through a freight train.”
“Wow,” I said.
Luther laughed. “Satch didn’t throw nothin’ but smoke that night,” he said. “When he fired his fastball, it hit the catcher’s pud and cracked like a dry stick somebody stomped on. If he would’ve had a changeup, why, our hitters would’ve fallen on their faces in the dirt. And if he had other pitches, we didn’t see ‘em. Fact is, we hardly saw any of the pitches. Looked like he was throwin’ aspirin tablets, they come so fast.”
Luther drank again from his bottle. I didn’t even want to breathe and remind Luther I was here so he’d send me home. I just wanted to hear more.
“We had some pretty fair country hitters,” Luther said. “But Satch sawed ’em off on the inside, high and tight. We broke five bats that night. Manager seemed more worried about where we was goin’ to get the money to buy more bats than what Satchel was doin’ to our hitters. He was annihilatin’ ‘em!”
“And Jackie Robinson was there, too?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Luther said. “He was the best stick I ever saw, Charlie. Nobody—and I mean nobody—could get a fastball by him. “I was young o’ course, but I could throw heat with the best of ‘em. But first time up, Jackie hit a frozen rope, right up the gut. It went over my head—sounded like bacon sizzlin’. The ball tore up the air and kept risin’ like a kite into the sky till it disappeared into no-man’s-land behind the center-field fence. I mean, he creamed it. So much for Luther Peale’s best fastball in the state of Tennessee! Jackie owned it—and he owned me, too. It was somethin’. That ball could only have been caught by one of the dippers up there in the sky.”
He laughed low in his throat.
“The second time Jackie come up,” he said, “I laid my slider right on the outside corner just below the knee. That was the best slider I ever threw. Jackie banana-sliced it down the right field line—it was a chalk shot. It careened out of the corner, heading toward short center field, and passed the charging right fielder. And that was all she wrote.”
Luther smiled and shook his head. “It was a standin’ up inside-the-parker. Ol’ Jackie didn’t even break stride. Third base coach was revolvin’ his arm like a windmill in a tornado, hollerin’ ’Go! Go! Go!’ And the on-deck hitter, with his palms turned toward the sky, was pumping them up and down like he was liftin’ air, sayin’, ‘Stand up! Stand up!’”
A sound like a laugh came out of me. That’s when I realized I was leaning as far forward on the stump as I could without falling off.
“I’m tellin’ you, Charlie, Jackie had wheels. His legs looked like tree trunks on the top and fence posts on the bottom. And he run just a little pigeon-toed, too. But he was flyin’ around those sacks. He touched every base on the inside corner. That dirt was spittin’ from his cleats like grass out the back of a fresh-sharpened lawn mower.”
The way Luther described things, I could see it all happening in my mind.
“I do have somethin’ to be grateful for that night,” Luther said. “In the eighth inning, with three ducks on the pond and two outs, Jackie was due up. Well, the sky opened up like Niagara Falls. Game was called. Four-zip.”
He laughed, took another drink, and leaned his head back against the tree.
“You were lucky to play against Satchel and Jackie,” I said.
“Sure was.”
“How’d you hurt your arm?” I asked him.
He didn’t say nothing for so long, I wondered if he would answer. I couldn’t see him too good while he sat in the shadows, and I even wondered if he’d gone to sleep.
But after a minute, he said, “Well, Charlie, I guess I ought to tell you the truth about that.”
The way he said it made me curious. I had a feeling there was something bad tied up with what happened.
“It was an exhibition game we were playin’ against the Nashville Lions. They’re a white team—barnstormers, they call ‘em. They travel around and play other teams.
“I was pitchin’. A player by the name of Sam Brody come up to bat. He’d been drinkin’ and was pretty well gone.” Luther held up his bottle. “Tennessee moonshine, Charlie. It’s powerful stuff. Like I said, don’t ever get started.”
I shook my head and said it again. “I won’t.”
“Well, this Sam Brody come up to bat, an’ he was so snockered, he couldn’t hardly stand up straight. He was tauntin’ me, callin’ me names, bad names. I threw him a fastball—like I said, I was a powerful pitcher—but his head was hangin’ over the plate, and the ball hit him hard right in the head. It was a good pitch—not wild. The ump called a strike, and Sam Brody dropped like a sack o’ bricks on the ground.”
“Was he hurt bad?” I asked.
Luther sat quiet for a minute. When he started talking again, I noticed that his words were getting slurred together.
“Sam’s brother was there,” Luther said. “Ruckus was his name. Or nickname, I guess. He made a ruckus wherever he went, they told me. Well, Ruckus Brody come up and started yellin’ at me, threatenin’ to kill me. By this time, the sheriff was there. The ump told the sheriff it was a good pitch. So the sheriff took me off a ways and said, ‘I suggest you make yourself scarce for a while.’
“I went home, but that night, a player come by and told me Sam died at the hospital, and Ruckus was comin’ after me. My daddy give me some money and told me to get goin’. So I hopped a freight train comin’ this way, and I jumped off here in Holden.”
I tried to put all this together in my mind. “What about your arm?” I asked.
In the dim light, I saw Luther shrug his big shoulders. “I don’t know, Charlie,” he said quietly. “Ever since I threw that pitch that killed Sam Brody, I haven’t been able to move it so good.”
So he couldn’t play ball anymore. That must have made him feel even more terrible.
“I’m sorry about your arm,” I said. “But you didn’t mean to kill Sam. He was drunk, and you threw a good pitch.”
“Yeah,” Luther said. He sighed heavily. “But I can’t get used to the idea that I killed a man, even by accident.” He held up the bottle. “I didn’t start drinkin’ this stuff until that day.”
He got quiet again. I sat there and tried to think of what to say. Nothing came into my head. I finally decided to change the subject, so I said, “I have some of my dad’s war medals from Korea. He was with the 9th Infantry Regiment. He saved a friend’s life when they were fighting near the Naktong River. You want to come over sometime and see his medals?”
But Luther didn’t answer. He was asleep, still leaning against the tree and snoring. I got up and went over to him.
“Get up, Luther,” I said, “I’ll help you to the lean-to.” He stirred and muttered something. “Come on,” I whispered.
I pulled at him till he got to his feet, grumbling words I couldn’t understand. He leaned heavy on my shoulder, and we walked slow over to the lean-to. I felt a blanket under my feet and had him lie down.
“’Night, Luther,” I said when he was on the ground. “Thanks for tellin’ me about Satchel and Jackie.”
He muttered again and breathed heavy in his sleep.
I stood up.
“It was good seein’ you again,” I said, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me.
Then I walked out of the lean-to, climbed the slope, and headed for home.