‘“But it’s the truth,” I wailed. “Every word of this thesis is true. I don’t care who denies it. I don’t care how many people are in a league against me, for whatever reasons.” Oh, I made a proper fool of myself.
‘‘‘We urge you to consider our recommendation, Matthew,” Dr. Hindsmith said. ‘It is the unanimous opinion of the History Department that your field of endeavor should be fiction.”’
Drifting Away remembers, stares around at a world cut into squares. The white man’s world is full of squares. The cities are measured out in squares and rectangles – houses, factories, tables, automobiles – the white man always obsessed with bending the lines of nature, attacking the natural circles of nature, straightening the curving lines into grids, breaking circles, covering the land with prison bars.
Squares have no power, thinks Drifting Away. Power lies in the circle. Everything in nature tries to be round – the world is round, the sun, the moon, the stars; life is circular; the birds build round nests, lay circular eggs; flowers are round.
Indians knew. Tepees, round, set in circles, a nest amid many nests. Drifting Away remembers the undulating trails, smooth and easy, long as rivers, bent as snakes. At first the white man followed the Indian trails, but, always in a hurry, he could not take the time to follow nature; he had to defeat nature. The white man’s trails were straight, no matter that the going was sometimes impossible. Then came the straight iron rivers, always intersecting at right angles.
Drifting Away, in one of his lives, built a round lodge, draped it with hides, was a proud hunter, rich, provided well for his squaw and children. Owned many horses. Built that round lodge on the edge of a grove filled with every kind of bird, near the gentle Iowa River, miles from the nearest white settlement.
But the whites carved the land into squares, claimed to own it, claimed it as their own, though everyone knows you cannot sell the land upon which the people walk. The land, like the sky, is not for sale. The white men came, riding across the hills, loudly, no fear in their hearts, for their guns and engines make nature cringe. They take measure of the land, stake out the earth as if they could tie it down.
They look at Drifting Away’s lodge, make solemn faces.
‘You can no longer live here,’ they tell him.
‘The earth is for all men,’ Drifting Away replies.
‘Not for you, Indian,’ they say. ‘For you, there is a reservation. By law you have to live on your reservation.’
Drifting Away pretends not to understand, prays they will go away. They do, but leave behind a warning, like a cloud bank groaning with thunder.
‘One moon,’ they say. ‘There will be trouble if you are not gone.’
* * *
How has my father affected my life? He has been like a giant smothering me with his shadow. For every inch my memory of him recedes, his shadow grows a foot taller. His memory holds me aloft; he is a Cyclops, a colossus, angry, tossing me in the air, dangling me by one arm while I struggle, tiny as a toy.
Still, it is very hard to take someone seriously who was killed by a line drive. No matter how macabre it is, there is something humorous about being killed by a line drive. It is much the same as being fatally struck by lightning. A couple of years ago, in Iowa City, a man really was fatally struck by lightning. He was walking up the sidewalk to his fiancée’s home when, splat, he was fried like an egg on her sidewalk, cooked like a hamburger, spread out like quicksilver to shimmer in the sun. Turned out he was a churchgoer, too – a deacon or an elder or something. I’ve often wondered what a preacher could possibly say, with a straight face, about someone fatally struck by lightning. It is so biblical. So prophetic. So funny.
I am the only one who knows this: that my father committed suicide. I have never told Sunny, or the Barons, my sister, my mother, or my best friend, Stan. I’m sure, on the bright blue September afternoon at County Stadium in Milwaukee, where the air was crisp with the memory of frost and tangy with the odor of burning leaves, that my father saw the line drive coming. Bill Bruton, the Milwaukee center fielder, swung late at a Harvey Haddix fast ball and sent it screaming over the top of the visitors’ dugout, at a speed of more than a hundred miles per hour. My father was writing on his scorecard and supposedly never saw the ball, which struck him full on the left temple, bursting a blood vessel and killing him instantly. But I was there, too. He had indeed been writing on his scorecard. I still have the scorecard, the final pen line wavering downward like the graph of a failing stock. I, for some reason, while pouring the last of my popcorn from the box into my right hand, was watching my father out of the corner of my eye. He sighted the line drive – I swear I saw the ball reflected in his pupil – and instead of ducking or pulling his head back, he almost imperceptibly moved his head forward, a weary gesture of resignation, and allowed the ball to strike him, thus ending his long and unsuccessful struggle against his tormentors, those craven bureaucracies which, for whatever reasons, refused to acknowledge the existence of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.
As he lay crumpled there in his shirtsleeves in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, I knew he was dead, because at the same instant I was filling up with the information he alone had been party to for so many years; it was like water transferred from one lock to another. There in County Stadium, with the smell of fresh-cut grass and frying onions in my nostrils, I was suddenly illuminated like an old Wurlitzer, garish neons bubbling. I was overflowing with knowledge, and boiling with righteous indignation because not a soul in the world cared about what I knew.
Whatever had been visited upon my father was now visited upon me. The history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was transplanted into my brain like a pacemaker installed next to a fluttering heart.
If I had to choose a way to die, I suppose I would do the same as my father. What better way to go? The lulling quality of the sun, the crack of the bat, the hum of the crowd. Surrounded by everything he cherished. I don’t begrudge him his one instant of resignation, if that’s what it was. He had been chasing the elusive Iowa Baseball Confederacy for eighteen years and for all that time it had remained just out of his reach, the uncatchable mechanical rabbit of his dreams.
On the way back to Iowa City, I drove our green Fargo pickup truck while my father’s shell rode in a satin-lined casket on a railroad baggage car at double regular fare. I made the arrangements myself. I didn’t phone anyone. Who was there to phone? I would let the Barons know after I got back to Onamata. If I had let them know sooner, they would have insisted on coming to Milwaukee. After all, I wasn’t helpless.
It never occurred to me not to pursue legitimizing the Confederacy. At least I didn’t have to worry about money. My father certainly was not wealthy, but the big old house in Onamata and the small building that housed the insurance agency were both paid for. My father had employed a charming woman, Mrs. Lever, to manage the business. She was tall, flat as an ironing board, with gray hair combed back at the sides and mother-of-pearl-rimmed glasses. She was the wife of a corn farmer who retired to the city and let his eldest take over the farm. She must have been a lot younger than she looked, or perhaps at going-on-seventeen I thought everyone looked old, for she still runs the agency.
About four years ago I said to her, ‘Give yourself a raise of a hundred dollars a month. Keep running the business as you always have. At the end of the year we’ll split the profits.’
She fussed a little but she didn’t turn me down.
The next year I gave her another raise and sixty percent of the profits. Last fall I said, ‘It’s all yours. Just promise me you won’t change