Chapter One

THE FAMILY GUN

Nobody felt harder pain. The boy was dead certain. Who else, not nineteen days gone, lost a father the way he did? Taking two blasts from 4 a shotgun, dead on, at just paces? Do people know what a shotgun can do at that distance? Do they have a clear picture of the nightmare? And who had to watch his own mother being taken in, then, and charged with this kind of killing? Or had to read in his hometown paper words that spun rumors like those spun by the Royston Record about the Cobbs? Unstoppable little whispers, racing off like lightning all across the state of Georgia, about a wife and a lover. About a husband who'd been warned in secret to "watch his house." For when the husband wasn't there, what? Why didn't the paper just go ahead and say it! That his wife's lover would be right there for him, taking his place in his own bed. Why didn't the Record say that right out loud! It went ahead and floated off third-hand things about a pistol that was supposed to have been seen in his dead father's coat pocket but that was now, supposedly, missing. Pure rumor. When you don't stop at that, why not just make yourself happy. And damn say that Senator Cobb had set up his wife so he could catch her in the act of adultery and then murder her, or her lover, or both of them in his bed—but that instead it was his wife who surprised him, two times, with the family shotgun, as he stood on the roof outside their bedroom window. His wife with her lover by her side.
The boy knew every word from the Record exactly. And these—that "Mrs. Cobb's claim that she thought it was a burglar in her window is doubted by many"—these he'd repeated to himself in raging anger more times than he could count in the two weeks now since her arrest. "By many." He wished it were by all, Joe Cunningham, his best friend, included, so he could write off every last one of 'em until the end of time. Friends. Call them former friends. What do they all want, anyhow? They want a tragedy—their little bit of small-town Shakespeare. You can't get a good story out of a mere accident.
But where in hell did he find himself now? Ironies he'd had enough of in the preceding two days to last him for the next thousand years. For, hour after hour, Augusta to Atlanta, Atlanta to Cincinnati, Cincinnati to Toledo, and Toledo on toward Detroit (just some few miles still to go), he'd been reading the book he held now closed on his lap. His father's book. William Herschel Cobb, Turning Points of His Life, Commencing With His Coming into His Profession. It was the running story of his life that his father had kept up for over twenty years, marking what he called those turning points, beginning with the beginning of his teaching career in "The Narrows" of Banks County, Georgia, where his first son was born. And now that son, with this book on his lap (his finger held for near forty minutes to a page he couldn't get past, one he knew was close to where the writing stopped), was coming into his own profession. And the ironies in every one of his father's words of hope and expectation, for Georgia education, for the South's rising from the dead, for his son Tyrus, almost made the boy laugh out loud, or break down crying. Only he wouldn't let these Yankees riding now with him, crowding him, on the Michigan Central's late-night Toledo-Detroit, get the chance to think of him as crazy. He was dead certain someone would use that to deny him the opportunity of his life.
And let him spit at the damned, cheap neatness of irony, it made it hurt so much more that right now was supposed to be the happiest moment of his life. His father had done everything to talk him out of becoming a ballplayer, to get him to go to university and make himself ready for one of the learned professions. But, as his mama knew, there was no talking him out of it. He was born to be a ballplayer. And when you've heard your calling—when you know that difference between how dead and small you are when you're doing what somebody else wants for you and how alive when you're going your own way—well, then, there's no stopping you. And now he was just a handful of hours from putting on a major-league uniform, though he was still only eighteen. How many had made it so far, so fast? You could count 'em now maybe on a single hand.
But no good—such sweet, dream things. With all the other sad and godforsaken horrible things that had happened these last days, Jesus Lord help him, please, Jesus, he was feeling not just shattered in his heart but confused far down in his mind—to the point of something strange. Like the way he felt now—as if he were on two trains at the same time. The first—the one now speeding him to the end of his father's book, the last two words of which story he knew were a sick-ominous, darkly scrawled BURN THIS (and he knew this because among the hundred guilty temptations to be curious that he'd felt in the last twenty days, going ahead and looking at those last words was one more he couldn't resist). And the second—the train that was actually now carrying him to Detroit, driving him on and on through territory more and more foreign the farther north it went (for he'd never in his life before been north of Chattanooga). But this second train he couldn't really feel. Couldn't, hours on end now, sense the real motion of it much at all, even though for a ballplayer there is no time in his whole life like the time of his call-up to the major leagues. It was as if this train to Detroit, impossible but true, ran only alongside the one he was really on. And, Christ, how could it be that he couldn't even much sense the dream of his life coming true? Right this instant, though, he thought that the reason he couldn't much notice the motion of the Toledo-Detroit was that it ran exactly parallel to the train of his reading his father's book, and at exactly the same speed—in that way trains have of seeming not to be moving when they are moving right with us. And somehow, which was strange too, he suspected that the moment he arrived at the Tigers' Bennett Park would be the moment that he came to the end of his father's story, and that the two arrivals would be at the same place. Don't ask him what that place would be.
It tore him, too, though, made his heart feel still more sadness, to think back on how he had killed train-time and distance when he was playing in the South Atlantic League, before the accident. Just Charlie, that's all it would be, just his beautiful girl, Charlie, Charlotte Lombard—he could think of Charlie for hours, and hours, and hours, nonstop. And he wouldn't know that he was on a real train, then, either. Easily he could spend two hours on a word he might say to her and how she might laugh or smile when he said it. That soft turn of her lips, so wonderful. Or all the way from Augusta to Chattanooga, just on the kind of day it would be, and where they would be, when he asked her to marry him. Or on how gentle he would be the first time he made love to her. On that he could spend a day. And on the kisses they'd begun to share now, not clumsy like that stupid first one, but cool as the clean taste of her soft lips and then warm with their passion, and tenderness. Hours and hours on that unbelievable feeling. And on how beautiful she looked on her chestnut, Highlander, when they rode together at The Oaks, her family's home outside Augusta. And could the girl ride! It had made his eyes tear up with warm pride to watch her.
He had confessed to Charlie now that he loved her, and she had told him that she loved him. And she would move heaven and earth, she said, when they parted three days ago, to get the schedule of her and her mother's upcoming junket to New York matched to the schedule of the New York games between the Highlanders and the Detroit Tigers. "Heaven and earth." She told him this again when they held each other and kissed good-bye on the platform in Augusta, with the locomotive vibrating on the track, the roar of its whistle about to sound its impatience with their tender farewells.
But this whole northbound journey now, and these last two and a half weeks of hell, he could only rarely think of Charlie the way he had for months and months. It could only be for the briefest moments now, because everything seemed to be another version of this present turning point of his life, the point at which he became the son of a mother rumored to be unfaithful and facing twenty years in prison for the voluntary manslaughter of his father (who may have been, when he died, intending to kill her, at least). That is, everything best seemed so close to something worst, to be infected by it, to become it in some bitter irony. So he had to put the good things of his life on some other train. And he knew he had reason to fear that if this kind of thing kept up it might drive him insane (a word he didn't use as just a word). That he might find one part of himself talking in some strange way to the other part of himself, as if he were two different people. And in fist-gripping anger, right now, he wondered what mood of the Prince of Darkness made it happen that the best and the worst times of his life would be the same time?
But, his hand still tight-gripped, now sweating hard, he thought that some use had to be made of bad things. Or maybe he'd end up with nothing. He had to use the threat of shame to the Cobbs, even keep the idea of this threat raging in his heart, to give himself enough power to shut shame's mouth.
Of course, Charlie knew about his mother and father. Everyone in the state of Georgia had to know, thanks not just to the Royston Record but the Atlanta Journal (and if the boy understood that it would be newspapers that spread his fame, if he ever came into fame, he hated newspapers right now to the death). And the Journal picked up the word from the Record and spread it statewide, because his father, former mayor of Royston and, when he died, prestigious member of the Georgia state senate, was a very-much-celebrated man. But though Charlie obviously had to know the full word about his family, the boy never fully opened his heart to her about what happened.
He broke down in her arms, the first day he came to her about it, after returning to Augusta from Royston, and the funeral, and the arraignment. She held him like a pitiful little baby. For a long time he didn't move his face from her shoulder, and he didn't care that she'd seen him cry. But he never confessed to her his real misery and fear. The Lord knows he wanted in the deepest part of his soul to admit things to her. Say the words. Confess all. Every fear. Every shame. Say it all. And he was so sure of a certain feeling he had that he believed truly it was the Lord who put the feeling in his heart: bad things would go out of him if he just spoke them out to Charlie. The flower-smell of her dress, too, when he broke down on her shoulder…Till the day he died, he would remember the way that flower-smell softened him.
But the same way he did with the team when he played his last ten days' of games with the Augusta Tourists, acting before them all as if not a first word had been said anywhere in the world about how his father died, he kept the center of himself silent, closed down tight, and separate from Charlie. The accident, in their closest conversations, for all that warmth and tenderness, was never anything but an accident. He never once said even that his mother had been arrested.
But then those last eight games with Augusta—he played them like a man driven by the terrors of the earth, leaving all his rivals for the batting title of the South Atlantic League in the damned, sorry dust, hammering out multiple hits in all eight games, stealing bases to a point near insanity (proof of which he had in a five-inch spike gash on the back of his right thigh, the only thing in this call-up journey that did keep on reminding him that his calling was a ballplayer's). So as a ballplayer he had made fine, burning use out of shame. It set him going hard as hell—hard enough to prove the righteousness of the name Cobb. And when he broke down soft with Charlie, he sensed it as deep as any other feeling in his heart, that if he opened himself up completely even to her, who would be the one he'd talk to first in the entire world, he would lose all use of his anger and he'd have nothing, no power or energy, and he would die. As a ballplayer, he would die.
But always with him now, there was that fear that he might make himself sick, too, keeping things in. And not just keeping things in but now waging an hour-after-hour battle against anybody who might want to get him to open up. Because if he broke down and opened up, it would be like surrendering to that whore called apology. And, yes, it energized him, like fire, this warfare against accusation, or even the hint of accusation. He found himself even liking it that words could spread as fast as they had through Georgia. But in himself alone, he knew he'd been at times terrified that he could lose control of his mind.
He looked around the train car. Yankee faces. Cold. He felt the train rock. It was moving all right, high-speed north to Detroit.
And these Yankees. All his thinking life he'd known deep, deep bitterness over North and South. He was brought up on it. Fed on it. But especially now, since he'd waved good-bye to Charlie and begun this, his first-ever south-north journey, if he had a moment free of the book, or even when he was in the book, since his father's life was so passionately devoted to the South's rising from the grave, he'd been thinking that what Yankees want most in the world is to hear exactly that last surrender of apology or confession from the South. He could admit to himself, and why not, that his own miseries probably made him crazier right now with this particular thought. But he looked around and he did think sure enough that what these people would all love is just for the South to get down on its knees and beg forgiveness for all its so-called sins and shames. To admit and admit, until it couldn't admit any more. But damnation to hell on earth, he'd been thinking, the South would rather go insane than say words that somebody else had thought up for it to say, as if they came out from its own true conscience.
He withdrew still further back inside himself. And he let himself hear now his father's rebel yellin' in the Georgia senate, where they were dead set, in these first years of the new century, to give the Solid South some iron backbone and establish by state law the supremacy of the best. And history—Yankees ought to know from their good luck in it—is as full of accidents as anything else. So the hell with confessing to what somebody who loves tragedies would just love to call a "crime," and have you call a crime. Think instead of Atlanta on fire. Think of that, his father would say when he departed from the Yankee-written American history books he had to use in his schoolmaster days. And still again before the senate. Think of the pillage, of daughters and wives taken in rape. Think of being invaded. Think of being occupied and sullied for years and years by a half-breed militia and the money-grubbing minions of sordid vengeance. The boy saw also in the newspaper, and he put to hard memory sometimes, the words of his father's speeches. He could see the man at the podium, hands gripped to the lectern. And hear that voice: "Indeed let this be the whetstone for our sword. Let grief convert to anger, blunt not the heart, enrage it." So don't apologize, he thought now. Don't ever, Tyrus Cobb. Because there is nothing to apologize for, or to confess to, no matter what every self-satisfied mind in the world might love to think.
But why why why why, if his mother was innocent, as she was, did he feel like he had so much to be ashamed of, and apologize for?
False conscience. He knew all about that. We're all such sorry suckers for guilt. You have to fight hard against idiot guilt, which would make a pure sucker out of you, to the point of draining your energy dry. Making you pure soft. Crippling you with weakness so deep that you could never find the hard grit it takes to vindicate your name, when you need to. And then you'd never walk a triumph over that filthy world of words spun out against your family. And maybe to walk that triumph someday was why he was on this Toledo-Detroit right now—and there was, maybe, even some deep destiny in everything that had happened to him. And wouldn't irony have to swallow some of its own medicine if that proved true.
He felt the train once more. It was moving into a bend, and he had to catch himself to fight off a lean into the man next to him. Some time back—how long?—when they pulled out of the Toledo station and there was this huge body of water, like an ocean, to the right, this man, who seemed like a banker type, had caught him gazing. The big water was beautiful in the sunset light, streaming from the left. It was one of the Great Lakes (the boy didn't know which one). And he had had no idea they were so big. He saw a number of huge, long steamers passing, too, maybe as big as the ones in Charleston Bay (though he didn't think so). Then the bankery man, who must have known from the way he was gazing that he wasn't from these parts, sort of leaned over him a bit, pointing, and said, "Mostly ore or wheat, heading south. Coming north it's coal, up from West Virginia."
And he was being friendly. That was all. So the boy felt a natural inclination to be friendly, too, and start up a conversation. But he didn't go soft or start up any conversation with the friendly Yankee, whom he kept himself from touching now. Nor did he when the man tried again later, as they saw what, for the boy, was a true, true rarity, that is automobilists. There were two of them, in long white coats and goggles, stirring up dust into the rows of high corn along a dirt road that ran along the tracks. And the man pointed to one of the automobiles and said, "Oldsmobile. Gasoline engine. And word's all over Detroit—Olds just sold his company for a cool million. Just this past week. Not bad, eh?"
What was that but again just plain old friendliness—North, South, what's the difference. It's the same everywhere. The boy knew it perfectly well. He wasn't a fool. And the subject of a cool million, coming out of Detroit, interested the hell out of him. You could get your hands on court records and even buy the silence of newspapers with that kind of stock. But he didn't respond to the man, not with more than a nod. He just thought again what he thought when the man first boarded and asked him, as he stood at the two seats the boy was occupying, "Mind?"-which was "Mind plenty," though he didn't say this then, or when that gasoline-driven Oldsmobile was raising those dust clouds that fell over the high green corn.
The train now pulled straight once more, so he was free of its listing. He looked out on the dark. The North. He was feeling differences, all right. And he thought now of last night when he crossed the Ohio, which was one point along this three-day journey that had sure awakened him, and not just because he would have to stop in Cincinnati and spend the night.
It was late, and full dark, like now. And from the Covington station, on the south side of the big river, the lights of Cincinnati, all spread up and down its seven hills, were to him, he had to confess it, beautiful. And thrilling. For what was Cincinnati but the home of Mr. Ban Johnson, founder of the American League. And of the great, great Cincinnati Reds. Harry Wright and all those Yankee boys had gone 76-0, and when they did, they made possible professional baseball. They made the market that made it possible for Tyrus Cobb to come into the profession he was born for. Sweet gratitude he felt at that moment for those Yankee boys, and sweet admiration along with the sincere thanks. And even for a second actually just to stop in his heart the damned War Between the States felt good, as it had to smell the soft, beautiful flower-smell of Charlie's white sundress. Good even like a kiss, he had to admit. Or like listening to those words of the Lord in his heart. Healing words—he knew why they called them that. He knew the difference between right and wrong, as well as any Christian.
But the energy that came to him with refusal to surrender brought more weight to the balance, as he knew it would. He began watching for the black-glimmering river's midpoint, as the train slow-chugged and clanked in its tremendous weight across the black-iron railroad bridge. He fixed his eye on what he figured to be the exact line where the South ended and the North began. He let himself hear the five-hundred-drum drum corps from his father's description of the great Confederate Reunion in Atlanta, which he had been reading just moments before in the man's book. He let himself be Caesar, of whom since his last days of school he'd been a student (and so he carried with him now a volume of Plutarch's Lives that he'd taken from his dead father's library, and in which he knew there was the story of Caesar's world-famous accomplishments that went back to revenge for things done to his family). The Die Is Cast. He let the Ohio be his Rubicon. And then for even more and even hotter fire, he let himself be Stonewall Jackson. He let himself be Nathan Bedford Forrest, with all nineteen battle horses shot dead beneath him. And he let himself be Robert E. Lee, the Christ Savior of the South, which would rise again because it was baptized in the blood, a fact known by every single soul south of the Kingdom of Mammon, which began at the Ohio River.
"Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen today?" His father taught him these words and made him put them hard into his mind, for these were the words said by General Lee himself over the grave of the brigadier Thomas Reade Cobb, one great name among a number in his ancestry, who died at Fredericksburg at The Stone Wall, who was facile princeps at the University of Georgia, who was first to codify the state's laws, and who in the War Between the States was the wildly brave and famed commander of Cobb's Legion.
Always the thought that Robert E. Lee had said those words over the grave of a member of his family stirred him deep in his heart. Time would pass, and some place—on the way home from school, or in the woods—it would make him cry. He was sure it would still make him cry some place when he was old.
He felt pain from the pressure on his finger as he held it still to his place in his father's book. But he took a newspaper clipping that he'd tucked in the book's beginning and set it at his reading place. Then he put the book away in the leather grip that he'd set beneath his feet. It was—in truth—some kind of real and deep sin to read this book in the first place (for the book was as private as the drawer of his desk that his father had kept it locked in till the day he died), but to read its end in front of these cold foreign faces would be an unforgivable violation of the man's privacy. And he intended to lodge as close as he could to Bennett Park, so if he read the end of the book from where he could see the park, he would still be arriving on both his trains at the same place and the same time.
There was a long, loud roar of the whistle. But just another hard running then through another small, darkened Ohio town. He looked only a moment, without really looking. Then, letting his mind drift where it would, he found himself back in his father's library—back now at that day when he was twelve and his father read to him from a history writer named Grote the story of the ancient Tyrians' defense of their city against Alexander the Great, when not a single Tyrian dishonored himself by cowardice—or surrender. He let himself hear again his father's question as the man sat in his old green morocco, reaching out his huge hand and setting it warm on his boy's shoulder, squeezing it gently as he asked, "Can you think, son, of anyone whose name sounds like Tyre?"
The boy remembered, or felt perfectly his own smiling, and felt the returning warmth of his father's smile. The bravery and honor of those ancient Tyrians. Such courage to do right. These were the things his father wanted him to think of whenever he thought of his own name, which he whispered silently to himself, as the northbound train drove on through the dark.
But not a month later, his father off in Athens at the University, the boy stole into the man's library and took, from right next to the Grote, a copy of Homer's Iliad. He went then and sold the book to get money for a ball glove.
"Lord God Almighty! Doesn't this just write large and spell out clearly the point I've tried to press on you." His father, having detected the crime not an hour back from Athens, hurled this chastisement at him in bitterest anger. "Do you know what it means, boy, to forget what's right and what's wrong? Do you know what you're left with when you move away even a small, first step from doing things right? Well, I'll tell you what you're left with. You're left with nothing but your own selfishness. And that's small, boy. That's very, very small."
He never would have forgotten this, so it needed no repeating. But over the years he heard it in so many words again and again and again, not a few times to the tune of birch whips in the woodshed—because it was hard to be a schoolmaster's son and not be any slick achiever in school, to be, truth to tell, bored stiff by school most times. He recalled now sitting in the cellar stairwell of the house when they lived in Harmony Grove, so when he was maybe eight years old, and repeating in that damp place sort of like a cave, till he almost hypnotized himself with his own words, that the son of a teacher should never, never, never, never, never, never, never have to go to school where his father was master.
He could see, clear to the small scratches of black ink, a certain page of the man's story—the one dated "December 18, 1886, The Narrows." It was the day he was born, and the place. And he now read that page verbatim with his mind's eye (for he had that photographic capacity, almost as weird, Joe Cunningham said, as the spooky-blue stare of his eyes—though it was a gift that sometimes frustrated his father, because it made easy for his son things that should have taken discipline and time). "Bright sun today, but bitterest cold and wind. Great limbs of pecans, heavy with ice, can be heard groaning and then cracking. But in our cottage a warm stove, and a cause for inexpressible joy. Today, this seven days before Christmas, a son was born to us. And if there could be a day more wonderful with promise, then I cannot imagine it. I have named our wonderful boy ‘Tyrus,' for the honor of the ancient Tyrians, defiant against Alexander to the end. Un-surrendered. And I have dreamed. I have dreamed for my students—but they are not my son. I have prayed for my students—but never in a lifetime as in a single hour for my son. Not ever like this. Never have I cared like this for anything, or anyone. Or hoped like this. He will be a truly educated man, my son. He will be a free man who finds God in the truth, as no other child I have known. Lord forgive me, but I dream of a doctor. Or of a West Point commission and degree. Of a life of ennobling, fulfilling labor and just fame: a life that knows and never loses its point. I have dreamed of professional fulfillment for my students, too. But I am not their father. And they are not my son."
If he just closed his eyes and thought appear, the boy had this page right with him, immediately. But now here he was, heading off not to university but to the life of a ballplayer, which his father so much despised, not just for what it was itself, which he indeed despised, but because it so deeply disappointed him that his son would choose this instead of a calling to his honor.
His mind went back again to the man's library, and now to their night of argument, lasting nearly till the dawn itself when he would head off for his first assignment in the minor leagues. With his fingers and palm pressing hard against the edge of his father's desk, Tyrus had pleaded with him to see that he wasn't going wrong, at what his father called "the absolute crossroads" of his life, in deciding to be a ballplayer. "It's the toughest go there is, Father. It's the toughest go there is—and so maybe the best way to test one's worth, if the best test is the toughest competition there is."
His father had dismissed such a notion as "a preposterous falsehood," adding contemptuously that a ballplayer was "a synonym for a drunk and an ungentlemanly, brawling rowdy, the whore's game, and the gambler's easy touch."
But with his hands continuing to press down hard on the man's desk, the boy kept insisting: "Maybe sometime in the past. But what the game may have been in the past, Father, doesn't change the fact that what it is now is the toughest go there is anywhere around. People in this country look to great players not as tramps but as heroes because they know how much it takes in brains and guts and character to play the game right. And what it takes to get to the top. You've always wanted me to understand that doing things right is everything, and doing them wrong is worse than nothing. But I want you to believe that I'll never know this as well as I could if I go into something that has only half my heart in the first place. That's what's been wrong. Everyone's different, Father. And that's what's been wrong all along. I've been in things for you, and not for me, and with only half my heart. But this game's got all of me. It's got all of me, and I'll find out who I really am only if I play it. You talk about discovering true individuality, because finding that—it's what makes your soul come alive. But here I am pursuing things with only half my self. And this…It's living in a cage! A cage!"
And the boy now felt again his passion. It was as if his fingers pressed down hard still on the top of the man's desk, and felt the pain, because he knew that his father had not been persuaded, for all his sincere pleading to him, and that he had not run out of bitter remonstrances and warnings. The man was well aware of the war between the National and4 American Leagues, which had just been fought, and just settled—an agreement between the "Senior Circuit" and the "Band of Upstarts" having been fixed on what looked like a solid and permanent basis.
"You'll be a purchasable and tradeable commodity, boy," he said. "A property. A property of men with money, which isn't so fine a thing for a white man. This contract, which you say gives you such a feeling of self-esteem, have you read it? Do you understand this business of their ‘reserving the rights' to you? They'll give you a hundred pious reasons for it. They'll tell you it's for the good of all, and for equity in their league as a whole, and for unity and loyalty forever and ever amen. But they'll beggar you with it, my fine young man. Trust that: They'll ply you like a slave. They're not Christians dealing with souls, but businessmen dealing with properties. And if you think you can alter that, they'll blackball you forever and sixteen days. You'll wish you were some sorry runaway nigger with the hounds at your back. That's what you'll wish."
"Monopsony." A strange word that the boy would now know forever. "It's from the Greek terms," his father told him, "meaning ‘one' and ‘buyer of food.‘ One buyer of food. When you're the farmer, one buyer doesn't make much of a market, does it?" The boy shook his head. And his father said, "Right you are, sir." And, once again, he explained to him that with their war over, with their monopsony in place, which was their own peculiar little institution, "those rugged-individual, blaring hypocrites of silk-hat Yankee moguls of this game that you so love will have you at their mercy. And all that," the man said, his fist clenched hard, "would be fine if you were ordained by the Almighty for service essentially, but you are not. You are not some peon, Tyrus Cobb! You are my son!"
But when the dawn came, the boy was gone. And now he was still going, because, as his mama told him, it was his truest, deepest happiness. That, she said, was why he would be a great, great ballplayer. The greatest ballplayer who ever was, she whispered to him, as she held him a last time two weeks ago at the Royston whistle-stop. Her eyes were swollen and raw from her days of tears but still blue as his (blue, Gramma Chitwood had told her, as the wings of bluebirds). But so strange, oh, God Jesus, to see those eyes looking out from behind that black veil.
And what possibly on this damned and rotten earth could break his heart more than his so-called "truest, deepest happiness?" What possibly, Lord. What on earth could more rip open his heart. Tell me that I can make her words about greatness come true, tell me how I can make those words come true without anger. And I will. But you tell me how, because I have got to make those words come true. Nobody on this sorry earth knows how much.
He bowed his head and squeezed his temples fiercely tight with his forefinger and thumb. For some time he pressed his temples. Some time. Hard. And harder. But he wouldn't let these Yankees catch him breaking down. He stopped, looked right up. But then instantly he seemed to want more grief to weigh him down again, because he just let his mind's eye, for the hundredth, for the thousandth time, these last eighteen days, start to picture himself in the telephone office at the Augusta station, when he'd had to make a call home. A call to his father.
A call because he had failed in that first test in the minor leagues, with the Augusta Tourists. They cut him right out of Organized Ball, in about no time flat, which memory made his gut tense hard now and made him feel the rumble and hear the clacking, clacking, clacking of the Toledo-Detroit. Detroit, where he could fail again, this time for good. But still now, with that thought and fear tensing his gut hard as if readying for a brutal punch, he kept picturing himself in that phone office in Augusta, from which he had had to call Royston to give his father the word. And to tell him pitifully that he was going to Anniston, Alabama, to see if he could still find life for himself on some outlaw team that somebody said needed an outfielder.
And what would he say, the severest critic of "the dead end and damned waste of mind that baseball was?" Wouldn't he seize his advantage and insist that the pink slip was a dead, cold sign that the boy was pursuing some false and worthless calling? As the phone rang, the boy felt a total fool and wholly shamed. Truth was, he'd been cut just about clean out of existence. But (and if he ever wrote his own story, here would be a turning point; or he prayed now that it would be the turning point, as the Toledo-Detroit sped on), his father did not take the advantage. So easily the man could have. But he didn't. Rather over that scratchy phone line he made just a few quiet inquiries about what remained of the six fifteen-dollar checks he'd written when, after that night in the library, he knew that he couldn't break his son before he started, which is what he'd wanted to do. And now, when he heard that forty-four dollars and some odd cents was still left, he surprised the shut-out seventeen-year-old "free agent" even more, and breathed the spirit of life into him, for he gave the boy's dream his sanction. He told him he should go to Anniston, that there was "a clearly perceivable worth in the quality of the ambition." "I cannot say, son, that this is what I wanted. You know it isn't. But I respect your desire. You've proven to me this: It comes deep out of your heart."
The boy hadn't known what to say. He just trembled. There had been so few times when he felt that his father had bought him as his son. He turned away from the faces in the phone office and, pressing his eyes fiercely with the cuff of his shirt, he said, "Thank you, sir. Father…Thank you.… So much."
There was silence for a moment on the other end of the line. Just scratches—then—"I know how much this means to you, Tyrus. I do. So now, whatever happens…Whatever happens, Son…Don't come home a failure."
The boy couldn't say good-bye. And after some moments, at the other end, there was a click. But with this it was started, truly. And yes, let his mama whisper her prophecy about the greatest who ever was. Let her say it out loud. Make it a binding contract. For when his father gave him this inspiration in his hour of defeat, he created more determination and new will in him than he would ever know. And—he wouldn't let these Yankees see him damn cry—he was sure that every thought he had of his father's beautiful distance and iron reserve was one of love so deep there weren't words for it. And gratitude every bit as deep. For rare approval made Tyrus Cobb exactly what he was. Not no approval. Just rare, kept back the way diamonds are hidden deep. And for those rare diamonds, thank you, sir, so much.
He thought now, too, with fiercest satisfaction and pride how a certain educator and senator's son then tore like hell on earth through the Alabama-Tennessee League, leading it in hitting every day of the three months and nineteen days that he was there. And how with this he found himself in one very great hurry. Even those hundred and ten days, he didn't want to wait. That league, too, was no more than a mayfly. "A quick bug to die," he warned his roommate. So before he could be somebody or rise, he had to get noticed again and get back into Organized Ball. He had to scheme, fast. He began to write letters and cards under various and sundry signatures, all of an "interested following," to Grantland Rice at the Atlanta Journal. "Elmer Smith" and "Harper Jones" and "Finley Brown," et alia, each in his individual and distinctive script, would extol "the phenomenal eye," "the unmatched speed," "the uncanny power of the rapid-thinking mind" of a player over in Anniston named Tyrus Raymond Cobb.
And even now, in all the tight grip of his pride and heartbroken pain, Tyrus was able to smile a moment thinking of what pleasure there'd been in making a whole world of different people sing through those fabrications and forgeries just exactly the tune he wanted them to sing. Real and true reputation-building, which he was praying every second now that his father would be watching from the other world, would depend upon the real measure of magic in his black ash bats; nonetheless, he had learned with a kind of wicked joy the power of advertising and of tactic—of (by hook or by crook) making, rather than just letting things happen in other people's minds. Granny Rice eventually responded with a notice in his column of a "young fellow over in Alabama named Cobb who is showing an unusual amount of talent." And not three days later came the telegram from the Tourists offering the contract that would bring him back to Organized Ball and give him life once more.
He remembered in hot anger now, though, his covering the bottom of that telegram paper tight with his thumb as he read the good news. If, at the end of that paper, he saw that the invitation back into The One and Only, Holy and Great Baseball Organization came from Mr. Con Strouthers, the one who'd cut him, he wouldn't go back. He'd tear the invitation in a million pieces. He'd tear his damned life to shreds before he'd go back and play for that sonofabitch. "Truth is, Cobb," Strouthers had said, so high-and-mighty-like, taking a God-the-Father attitude, "you're just not made for it. You're just not professional material. And that's all there is to it. I'm afraid it's something you'll have to swallow." But he wouldn't swallow it. He'd spit it out—and spit it out because denying so-called God's truth until it became a goddamned lie, he'd discovered, was sometimes the only way to keep on living. But he'd give up any life in baseball whatsoever, any life at all, rather than breathe a whisper of gratitude to Con Strouthers. That he knew. He'd heard word, though, that Strouthers was no longer managing the team and was gone. That's why he'd read even the first line of the telegram. And as he came to the last line, and slowly lifted his hard-pressing thumb, he felt a joy about as sweet as anger to see it was from a new manager, Andy Roth.
The deep gash on the back of his right thigh was starting again to call steady attention to itself. He could feel an ache and a pounding. He wore lead weights in his shoes because with that dead weight he could make himself fly, when he took the weights out. And there was the good building of muscle, day after day, that came from the weight, too. But he lifted his heavy, leaded feet now, deliberately to put more throb into his pain. And long enough—what?—to make the blood drip? Nearly. Then he set his feet down again and checked his wallet, which he'd done maybe a hundred times on this three-day journey. He arched his back against the seat, to dig his watch up from his front pocket. And as he was fingering out the timepiece, the sound of the train broke into his ears. Then he sat straight and snapped open the brand new gold watch. It was the trophy he'd received from the mayor of Augusta and the brass of the Tourists for winning the Sally League batting crown. And what the watch said—as the black-arrowed second hand moved one, two, three ticks more—was 11:15. So exactly a half hour to go, if this Toledo-Detroit, whose pocketah pocketah once again now broke in on his ears, was on time.
He read the inscription on the watch case, cupping the gold in his hand so it wouldn't glitter in his seat's sconcelight. The date, august 26, 1905. And the words, let 'em know where you're from, tyrus cobb, in the big show. But quickly now he snapped the watch back shut and stuffed it again in his pocket, for he had the feeling that some of the Yankee faces in this car might think he'd stolen it.
Having thumbed the timepiece deep and safe, however, he let his mind ponder those words cut for the inscription. Where he was from? Royston, Georgia. That's what he'd let ‘em know, in the Big Show. But what he was from? It was to find out this that he'd broken into his father's secrets.
He'd come to despise secrets. Like deep hell despise them. But then who knew more about the need for privacy than someone whose family name was a dirty newspaper word? Nobody. And what is it, privacy? What but the chance and the damned right to keep secret so-called truths that could murder you? Who isn't a sinner, after all is said and done? And a criminal? Who hasn't in his thoughts, at least, been a killer or a thief? Who isn't a failure? But we have a right to keep these things secret because every one of these so-called truths, given time, can be proved a lie. Or turned into a lie—because we can trample them over with other truths. Stronger, better truths. Batting titles after what that fool Strouthers said was the truth about Tyrus Cobb, who'd put a lock on Con Strouthers's yap, all right. So no so-called word of truth gets to be the final word about a free soul, no matter how many curious little readers of that so-called truth might like to have it so.
But how much he'd failed, himself, to resist curiosity, and not to break into someone else's privacy. Just as he'd leapt to the end and read, so eagerly, the last words of the man's book, he'd leapt in in the first place, weak before his own temptations, and sought the key to his father's locked desk drawer. And this drawer was the man's closest privacy, no matter that he was no longer in the world. Even more cheap and sinful to play detective on a dead man. Or to read his private words, which the boy was beginning to think was like killing the man all over again.
It was in the quiet time before the visitation began. They'd placed the coffin in the library; and the boy would always remember the odd situation of the green morocco, which Cunningham and Son, Joe's father and Joe, cabinet- and coffin-makers, had put the chair in—in the back left corner.
"The only man whose bidding I'd ever do." "The only man I've ever loved." These were his two phrases for his father, as Joe knew well. And Charlie now knew the second. But he didn't always do the man's bidding. And in that library become a tomb, though he thought the man might rise out of that coffin and like the old, blind prophet call him fool and warn him to stop looking, he didn't stop looking.
He sat at his father's desk a long, long time—but then took in his fingers the rolltop's oaken knob, and slowly pulled up the wooden desk cover. He found nothing on the green-leather writing surface but a half-empty bottle of ink. The pigeon holes held nothing except a box of envelopes and a few dry pens. He tried the brass-handled drawers beneath the pigeon holes and saw only boxes of clips and bands, and an old punch. But when he lifted and moved the punch slightly, he found the small copper-colored key that he was sure fit the side drawer below.
Temptations. Hell, yes, they bring on feelings of guilt and sickening shame. But they, too, can bring on a feeling like a destiny. And what all was waiting to be born out of that drawer of secrets, which was heavy and sagged down hard on its runners when the boy had it freed? There was the book, which he knew would be there, but which seemed then—as he saw its worn, brown-leather cover actually appear—to have been waiting mysteriously in silence for this exact time when he would come for it, and to be intending now finally to speak. It was thicker and heavier than a Bible. And his hands were as nervous on it as his left would be on the Good Book in a court of law, if maybe he'd come to that court to tell lies.
But, still—even with the man coffined not ten feet from him—another sin after a sin—he opened the book's cover, wishing as he did, that this was one of those books that itself had a lock on it, like a secret diary, which it was (though not of day after day, just of turning points). And there, beneath the cover as slowly he turned it back, was that title in his father's strong hand. And then, right there, the first entry, "November 8, 1882, The Narrows." So, yes, from that time when his father began his first school, in Banks County. And from the time, too, that he met his wife-to-be; for the boy's mama, still then a child of eleven, was a pupil in his father's first school.
But the boy wouldn't read a word more now, not where the ghost of a slaughtered man might rise up and say things to him. Or not read more than what his eye, in a single flash, caught beneath the entry heading, his father's first words: "Today is a day that will mark things off. There'll be the time before it, and the time after. Having waited for years, I feel now that I am someone." Just this. Then a quick closing back of the cover, which the boy would not open again until he was alone at the Inn of the White Camellia, in Atlanta, nearly two weeks later, sometime past midnight on the first night of this three-day journey.
But in the drawer, having lain buried between his father's book and a heavy stack of what the boy would see were Georgia-senatorial papers, was a newspaper clipping, pasted on a blue backing. It was indeed that clipping that right now, still pasted to its backing, marked the boy's place near the endpoint of his father's story. And were it not for something else's having been hidden in that drawer, he might need again now to press his cuff hard into his eyes to keep back tears, no matter who on this train might see. For where was this clipping from but that Atlanta Journal article, by Grantland Rice, that gave notice of "a young fellow over in Alabama named Cobb, who is showing an unusual amount of talent." And what was penned in the clipping's margin, in the same strong hand that wrote the book of secrets that sat now in the boy's grip, beneath his seat, but the words "My son."
But that "something else" was hidden in the grip now too. And what it was, was his father's loaded pistol.
The boy didn't know if he'd ever get over any of these things that had happened to him. Ever in his life. But sure as he was alive at all, he couldn't get past his father's handgun's lying hidden too in that locked drawer, in a cloth sack behind the senate papers. It shouldn't have been there. But it was. And somehow—by the fact that it was—the boy was not surprised. The gun too seemed to be waiting for him, like another part of his destiny. Even before he loosened its pull string, finger-spread open its mouth, and felt inside it, the sack did not fool him. As he'd taken the sack up, the weight of the hidden object inside had let him know.
But why—why would the gun be there, when it shouldn't be? His father always kept his revolver high on a shelf in the library's closet. Always. Nor did he ever carry it with him. So what was it doing there secreted away in the drawer? The boy couldn't help himself. He rushed ahead and damn sinned himself into an imagination—a picture of his mother actually stepping out on the roof where her dead husband lay twice-shotgunned, as much as decapitated and in a godforsaken lake of pouring blood, because of her, and retrieving from the man's pocket the gun that protruded from it. For what would that gun be but a dead cold sign that there was some shameful tragic hell at the heart of the Cobb family. That gun in the man's pocket didn't say the first word about any accident. It spoke the word intent and the word murder. So it was the gun of dead solid disgrace. His mother never said a word about self-defense against a husband with a gun. For that would be an admission of pure shame. So she made the man a housebreaker, whom she couldn't see and who never identified himself, or showed a gun.
Or that was what he did appear to her as. He did appear to her as a housebreaker. So easily this could be pure and complete truth. So damned easily. And Royston would never prove otherwise, for all its hot desire to put some stir into its dead life.
The Cunninghams lived next door to the Cobbs, and Joe was the first to come running after the shotgun blasts broke the silence that night to all hell and gone, sometime after midnight. Joe was the one who first looked at the body. And why, the boy wanted to know, would he be jealous of Joe Cunningham's being the one to see that godforsaken horror of a body? Why? Joe, who could barely make sense when asked, just said over and over again it was "the worst thing I ever saw." But it must have been Joe—when he went running back then to get Joe, Sr.,—who said he'd thought he'd seen a gun on the dead man, for it was Joe, Sr., who mentioned the gun to Constable Crichter but who said that when he went back to the roof, there was no gun to be found.
The boy imagined his best friend on the witness stand. And he imagined himself carrying under his coat at that trial, as he carried it in his grip now, the handgun that Joe would say he saw. He'd show Joe Cunningham that gun all right! Full loaded. But no, Jesus, he didn't want to hate Joe Cunningham. He didn't want any sick, filthy jealousies either. And what explained those feelings of envy! He wanted to vomit the filth of them out, for good, and spit his mouth clean. And he wanted what he always had with Joe, which was the warmest, best friendship there ever was anywhere between a cuss and a saint. For who was Joe Cunningham but the one the Lord had in mind when he said the meek shall inherit the earth. But do the meek inherit the earth because they tell lies?
He thought of the three black ash bats, so beautiful with their black shine, resting on the rack above him now, in his canvas bat bag. Joe had milled these true, pure black angels as a gift for his friend. And his friend had a superstition about these ashes—that when he touched them he'd get the good luck to be a touch like Joe Cunningham, or a touch less like himself, which would be a pure relief once in a while. Another thing he knew because he was no fool.
But it must have been Joe, too, who talked about the interval. The damned time between the two blasts. Long enough "for someone to walk back and forth across a room." These were the words in the Record. Whose words could they have been but Joe‘s? He pictured himself in that courtroom again, wearing under his coat the gun that, yes, he'd taken from the locked drawer. Taken it, no stopping him, no matter what his mama might think—if she was the one who hid it there. Which she was not. Which she could not have been. Couldn't. She could not fit that picture in his mind, of the woman on that roof, reaching into the pocket of that worst thing Joe ever saw—that blown-apart, bleeding, dismembered thing that used to be a man. A father. They're all liars who said there was a gun sticking out of his pocket!
But time. Intervals. Long enough to walk back and forth across a room. How long is that Long enough to take the accident out of things. That's how long they all want it to be. Long enough for her to have seen exactly who was in that window. To have gone up and looked, hard. God damn them all forever.
And their intervals. If he'd learned one thing on this three-day journey with its two godforsaken trains it was this: If time makes us, we also make it. The clock keeps ticking, all right. And the train north keeps moving. But hours and hours we don't know where we are, or anything about any clock or gold watch. Heaven. Hell. That's where we are. And I guess that proves we have a mind, Father, eh! That proves we have a soul, all right! And isn't that a sweet little joke on us. We're not just bodies that can run out in gutters of blood, and have our heads taken off, and our guts all shot wide open. We have souls that know the story of heaven and hell, and how the trains run on strange, strange time between these two places. Quick time—accident time—heaven. Murder time—long enough to walk back and forth across a room—eternity in hot, burning hell. She knew perfectly who it was, because she had time to look hard. She and her lover, who, if he existed, which he didn't, Tyrus would damn find someday for a deadly pistol whipping.
He bowed his head again and vice-squeezed his temples. He thought why. Why any of this? And if there were turning points what were they? He had read that book searching. Damn him forever for a sickening detective. But he was searching for those points of time when he might have been able to go back and whisper some word of warning, if there needed to be any. But not, goddammit, watch your house! Not that, whoever you are! And I'll find you, too, someday. You can be dead sure of that, if you exist, which you don't. Those so-called words of warning, as Uncle Chit-wood said, just some sick spew from the Record, hearsay passed along from a dream.
But what would they have been, the turning points and the right words of warning? As many times as he'd counted money in his pockets he'd counted in his life the number of years, the damned interval, between the time his parents were married and the time he was born. Because his mama was only twelve years old when she was married. That's why he let in the sick curiosity of ever even thinking when his father first…God Jesus, why did he ever have to put his mind on this? And why did his mother have to say so many times—how many times?—ten thousand?—that she would never, never, never let a girl of hers marry as young as she had?
And why had she? Girls back then did, sometimes. It wasn't the most unusual thing in the entire world, back then. But why? Why his mother? What was the cause? Forever, he would remember the picture of his mother's last two fingers on her left hand. Both of them locked into a severe crook because they'd been broken and the tendons, which had been torn, had frozen rather than healed. And in itself this was a thing one did not forget. But the reason he would carry the picture of the hand even past his grave was that she'd told him a secret about it.
For years she'd said that her fingers were mangled in a fall when an old rose trellis she'd often used to climb from her childhood bedroom broke (and five hundred times in these last weeks the detective in him had connected this trellis insanely with the one his father climbed the night he died). But one day, when he was twelve, his mother told him that it was no broken trellis and no fall (so only an insane thought would make connections with the other trellis, for there was no first one). No. Not a fall. It was her own father, who deliberately, even though he had no reason on earth to do so, took her hand and wrenched it with enough violence to half-cripple it for the rest of her life. That was the real cause.
Captain Nehemiah Pylades Chitwood. His mother's father. The man served under Lee from Antietam to the end, after which he walked the hundreds of miles home with only calluses and blood for boots, and almost totally without food, a huge, powerful man brought down to an unrecognizable ghost. So no one was supposed even to think a word against him, not against one who for The Cause had taken bullets on two different occasions and, on a third, at Gettysburg, when things, as he said, "got mighty tight and narrow," a stab wound deep in the back. The boy remembered a sudden instant of wishing, after his mother told him about her hand, that the Captain had died of that stab wound. This even though a war death for the man meant Tyrus Cobb would never have been born.
His grandfather's battle grays, wearing the same scar-stitchings as those of his flesh, were hung in a huge oaken wardrobe at the Chitwood plantation. The wardrobe had a large, black, circular lock that his father told him, proudly, was "embossed after the shield of Achilles, in Homer." His mother, though, told him that one time the Captain locked her inside the black dark of this oaken coffin for the better part of an entire day. And when he asked her what she'd done that made his grandfather do that, she sort of smiled and laughed, in a nervous way that made the boy, maybe ten at the time, think she wanted to take back the secret she'd just told him, or was anxious to make it seem not to be that much of a thing. But when, her smile turning down a bit to a frown, she said she'd done "nothing," the secret settled in hard again, and for good. And maybe two years later, there was the revelation of the real cause of her broken and torn fingers (which revelation, as it turns out, she shared with the boy after one of those hard visits to the woodshed: a coincidence that his mind had lately recalled, and had kept recalling).
It was, then, odd that his father never said a word against the Captain. It always seemed in fact that his father would rather knock a man down and break him than hear him say a word against Nehemiah Chitwood. The boy could recite the litany of praise: Besides the heroic battle record, there was, after the war, the Captain's fierce, unyielding determination to overcome the degradation of carpetbagger tyranny, and to get past the Yankees' filthy thieving of his cotton stores, and the Yankee tariff gouges, and their banking gouges, and their rail transport gouges. And then the misery of the financial panics, and the rock-bottom cotton prices, and the tired soil.
His father had it, always, in fact, that his wife's father was nothing but a powerful and true knight-hero of The Cause, for which he three times nearly made the ultimate sacrifice. And so the boy always thought—after he found out things himself—that his father must never have found out the real truth about the Captain: that he must just never have questioned that story of the rose trellis, never having been told any other. Secrets about them, after all, get kept for the great and powerful. The boy knew this, even young, from how strange and surprising, even weird, it felt when his mother actually told him the secret. And, as time passed, he knew it from the fact that he himself never breathed the secret to another soul, which fact helped him understand "false conscience," the first time he heard that term. For how in God's real world could he be as guilty as he knew he would feel if he ever exposed such a man?
But his father's stubborn reverence for his father-in-law turned out to be not just odd but disturbing, truly, truly disturbing to the boy; for in his book his father made it clear he did know—that in fact, not believing the story of the trellis at all and seeing numerous danger signs, including other physical wounds, he was moved to propose as early as he did to his future girl-bride because he felt he needed to get her free of a "hard and very real peril in her home." And there was a grim night of the Captain's drunkenness that his father witnessed, the two of them alone at the plantation, the others all having gone to bed, and that his father recounted in his book with rage and revulsion. Tyrus almost stopped, but he didn't stop reading about the Captain‘s, his own grandfather‘s, leering, drunken confidences about his "understanding" how schoolmasters must be driven by a need to "mold" and "control" young life, especially when that young life had such a "fetching woman shape coming on." And then a sickening, laughing-drunk prophecy about the schoolmaster's no doubt finding it too hard to "wait the fair time" once he had secured his sweet prize by a marriage contract, which made the boy count once again that interval between his parents' wedding and his birth, which was a safe two and three-quarters years, but as if numbers could change and get better, or worse, if you kept counting them over and over and over.
For pages after, his father referred to his grandfather in such terms as "that miserable, pathetic grotesque." So odd, then, and so painful, that his father would never cease to hold the man up as the kind of "solid, self-sustaining force" that the South so desperately needed to raise itself up from the dead, no thanks to anything on this earth but its own independent strength.
It was no doubt not just love but salvation from this "force" that his mother sought when she married. His father told, too, in his book, how his child bride, after their marriage, revealed to him what it was like in the house sometimes when the Captain had been startled, which was a very peculiarly frequent thing. How the man would sometimes turn violent in an instant and maybe rage through the plantation house. And then, after the rage was over, quite likely seek his chair to sob in (sometimes with his war rifle—Which would always be returned later to its set place against the hearthstones—resting across his knees). And sometimes, finally, seek the bourbon bottle, which meant the house could go seas over in terror for who knew how long. And how it was particularly his youngest, and his only girl, who seemed to bring out a strange character in the man, especially when she'd committed such grievous sins as smiling, or laughing, or moving, or making a sound, or breathing, or being there at all. She recalled for his father one time when the Captain raised his rifle and pointed it at her as she stood in the parlor doorway arch, some long time, and then, not lowering the gun, made the sound of a click with his mouth.
But almost worse than these nightmares-something that plain stabbed the boy as he read-was his father's confession that his young bride's bitternesses against the Captain were things he "could not like" after a while. "Could not like at all." The boy would have whispered warnings right then. Strong warnings.
And it seemed to be so fast that things changed. His father's words about his mother before they married were all like love poems. From the moment he saw her, young as she was, he knew. And if he thought she would have him, after a time of waiting, he would wait, no matter how long. Five years. Ten. He had never in this world seen "so great a power of beauty, deep, deep as the blue of her miracle eyes." Nor if he walked the world over and lived all time would he find a gentleness, "a putting of herself out of the way," that so touched his heart. Tenderest love words, beautiful pages of them. And this language, which did not surprise him, not one bit, made the boy think of those things about his father that he so deeply loved himself. For he never doubted that his father was hard on him only out of love. And the reason he never doubted it is that his father would never not soften in time. It would be so long coming sometimes that the boy felt tensions he thought would just about tense up his entire life and future. But then there would be the smile, the kind word, the encouraging word. Gentle, healing words. "My son." Those words of acceptance and warm pride in the margin of that clipping wouldn't have stayed silent secrets any longer than was needed for the man's purposes. The boy was sure of this. And maybe he loved most that those purposes were to make his son not stop until he'd found real and true greatness, which might be the hardest thing.
But his mama—and, if it was just in his mind, just to himself, he could whisper this—maybe didn't share such a faith in the man. Maybe not for years. For things seemed, as the boy read them, so quickly to change after the marriage. No more tender words, almost just like that. And why? The boy thought about a strange, sharp turnaround the Captain, his grandfather, made. The man had been shocked, indeed outraged by the schoolmaster's asking for his child's hand in marriage. But not a month later he was all for it. Wanted it to take place, his father wrote, "Soon. Soon as possible." What explains the way people go from one extreme to another? Had his grandfather suddenly found some satisfaction in Herschel Cobb's marrying his daughter? And did his father fall in love with his opposite (which the boy knew could be a deep need) and then find, just like that, he hated his opposite?
He had seen his parents fight. Why not just say it! He'd seen them fight for years. Go ahead, say it! Don't keep secrets for the great and powerful forever! And he knew his beautiful mother, though gentleness of heart was her name, was not always likely to put herself out of the way.
But how could he Jet his mind not Jove this—for how many times had it been for him. For her son. He couldn't count the times she'd been his comfort after one of his father's disciplinings. Or how many times she'd actually prevented one of those disciplinings, though she had had to hear it more than once that it was never to be her business to stand between a father and his correcting of his child. And he had thought that maybe he'd remember forever the flower-smell of Charlie's dress because it was like the perfumed smell of his mama's dresses, which it was.
In his private silence, riding only the train of his thought and recollection, the boy was now sickened by himself. He couldn't believe what he was doing, what he had done and was still doing. Trying to find a tragedy. A story. Just like all the Royston rumormongers. Playing detective. And why? What was all this dreaming of his about finding points where he could have whispered words of warning? You don't stop a pure accident with warnings like the ones he was thinking of. Accidents don't hang on people's feelings and damned sick motives, those things godforsaken Royston wanted so much to see. But why did he want a story, too? Why! So it would kill his heart and end his damned life? So he could not be? Not being-that was our opposite all right.1 And don't we feel a sort of love for it. And then a hatred for it, just like that. Or maybe he wanted enough godforsaken grievance so, like Caesar, he could imagine for himself a great destiny, a story with real train-drive, which no doubt needs more pain and misery than accidents can provide. You don't avenge an accident, or blame the cause of an accident. He felt so worn out he could die. He thought he might be dead already. So maybe he was seeking energy wherever in sorry desperation he could dig it up from. Because he so much needed it, if he was ever going to prove a thing.
And what had Tyrus Cobb made it all come to now in his imagination, but Tyrus Cobb in the middle. Casus belli. More fancy words of his father‘s. And he knew their meaning. "Reason for war." That's what his father called his first son in his account of the night after this son had left for the minor leagues. His mother and father had fought when the boy left. And fought hard, over Herschel Cobb's son's following his own dream. And his father wrote it all out. Every bitterness of the argument. The man was writing everything out toward the end. Their fights. His suspicions. Why? Why do you write out horrible words? It tends, like reading horrible words, to give the things described a life that they wouldn't otherwise have. Why in hell do you want to give them that life? But shouldn't he know, the son who put his father's words in his mind, and for himself gave them a life, by the hardest reading he'd ever done. Better not to read words. Or write them. Or say them. Just forget them, or let them die before they get started.
There was this boy named Cutty Hay ward his mother had known in school. His father, spying through a window, had caught them kissing once. And the boy thought when he read this that if he'd been there in that schoolyard he'd have whipped that kid himself. He and his mama were playing catch with a baseball. He'd have whipped that kid himself. Kissing his mama. But his father took this boy from so many years past and brought him back into his mind. He thought he'd seen this Hayward in Royston, after all the years, and he put the boy in his mind, as if he were a present rival. He didn't know if it was the boy, now a man. He just saw someone on the streets of Royston who reminded him. No more. There wasn't anything else to go on. No words exchanged. No proof. It was crazy stuff the man was writing sometimes. Stuff he just imagined. And angry as crazy; for he considered this Hayward, who never showed "even the rudiments of respect for true culture," his natural enemy.
And if it was war now with his wife, his son was the casus belli. That's what the boy had been reading when he closed the book's cover and for a long, long time just held the mark hard with his finger. And tried to recover himself. To regain his faith, which he did, and always would.
But there was another strange truth. For hadn't he, for some long time before he came to those words, imagined himself, already, to be the cause? The casus belli. The one to blame for all the trouble? Hadn't he been blaming himself already, maybe from the moment Uncle Chitwood called with the news of his father's death? And so those words, didn't they hit him like something he'd long suspected? And wasn't his suspicion, by his father's words, proved true? As true, say, as his finding a gun in a locked drawer? Imagination may know something then. What? What did it know? He thought of his imagination as itching for a target, the way we get a crazy, haunting itch, when we carry a gun, to use it on some target.
His mama, who wanted salvation from her miserable, war-destroyed father, wanted no gun at all in the house. She told her husband that she feared deeply what kind of things a gun in the house could do to a mind. But the man who came to imagine and fear that an old ghost out of his wife's childhood was haunting their town-he brought a shotgun into their first house. And it was no long time, not a month, after their marriage. The boy could picture that house perfectly, the little white-clapboard cabin down the road from the school, in The Narrows. He could imagine his mother as his father described her. He could see the beautiful, blue-eyed girl crying and pleading with the man not to bring a gun into their house. And then, when he just did it, not even waiting for her to come round, her not crying another tear. Maybe this was the point, the boy thought, when his mama's childhood ended. And with a true hatred of himself, he now took satisfaction in an irony right out of hell's own story, regarding the Cobb family gun; for it was his father, once his girl-bride's tears had dried, who had taught her how to use it.

Copyright © 2002 by Patrick Joseph Creevy