I found out early on I had the same easy ability with the trumpet as my father. Neither of us ever took a lesson. When I was barely school age, after we had returned from a weekend of watching baseball in St. Louis, I picked up the horn and tooted ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ My version was as muted and sad as anything my father had ever played.
Instead of blood grandparents, I had John and Marylyle Baron. Only for the first five years of my life did I have a blood sister, but for all my life I’ve had Missy Baron. Missy, the eternal child. Like Raggedy Ann she has a candy heart with I LOVE YOU written on it. One of my first memories, perhaps my very first, is of Missy staring down into my crib, cooing to me in a voice of universal love. Missy, her straight red hair dangling like shoelaces across her bland, freckled face, her pudgy hands touching me as if I were made of gossamer. Missy is well over fifty now, an advanced age for one who suffers from Down’s syndrome, as it had come to be called.
The Barons, both over eighty, still live on their farm a mile out of town in the direction of the Onamata Catholic Church, which was built in anticipation of a new railroad and never relocated after the fickle iron highway chose another route.
‘We always tried to be a friend to that mama of yours,’ Mrs. Baron said to me just recently. ‘She was a strange lady, Gideon.’
In small towns, events that would be forgotten by all but intim- ate family members become community property, remain ripe for rehashing. My mother deserted us, taking my sister with her, when I was going on six.
‘Your papa was a fine man, a bright young man too, until he started carrying on about that baseball league of his. You know, Gideon, I trained as a nurse for three years, in the hospital in Iowa City, back when I was a girl. We were taught to look for symptoms, and I used to watch you with a professional eye when you were growing up, looking for signs of the same disease in you.’
She stops. She has talked herself into a corner. It is all right to mention my father’s obsession, but mine is never discussed seriously; certainly no criticism is ever offered. It is also all right to mention the strangeness of my mother, but Sunny is never mentioned, though she is my wife and, like my mother, a woman who comes and goes at will.
‘I caught the disease all at once. There were no symptoms.’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I always thought it was kind of like that polio that used to go around in the summers; it just snuck up and paralyzed your body. But what you got kind of affected your mind.’ She paused. ‘Well, now I have put my foot in it, haven’t I? But you really didn’t have personal knowledge of this baseball league until after your papa died?’
‘I knew only what he told me. I was just a kid, purposely uninterested in what my father was doing, kind of contemptuous, too, the way teenage boys are.’
‘And you were suddenly filled with it, just like religious fervor? But why keep at it? A smart young fellow like you should know when he’s beating a dead horse.’
‘I don’t think anyone knows when he’s beating a dead horse. But the reason I keep on trying to prove the existence of the Confederacy is that I’m right and everybody else is wrong!’ I laugh wistfully, trying to show that I do have some understanding of the futility of my quest.
‘Well, Gideon, I wish you luck. You still planning on having the town’s name changed?’
‘I don’t want to change the town name. I just want it acknow- ledged that Onamata is named for the wife of Drifting Away, the great Black Hawk warrior.’
‘I don’t suppose you have any proof that there ever was an Indian named Drifting Away?’
‘Not an iota. Except I know it’s the truth, and so did my father, and neither of us has ever been known to be a liar.’
It will take some monumental action on my part to have the Iowa Baseball Confederacy recognized and legitimized. I read of a man who climbed up a pole, vowing to sit on a platform twenty feet above the earth until the Cleveland Indians won the pennant. That was sometime in the mid-fifties. I assume he came down.
‘Well, I wish you luck, Gideon.’ And Marylyle Baron tightened up the strings of her speckled apron and hobbled up the steps of her farmhouse. I do odd jobs for the Barons. Out of love, not because I need the money. Today, I mow the big front yard; the sweetness of cut grass fills the air. I am bare to the waist and streaming sweat.
In the past year or so I have tried a new tack: I have begun to approach the subject of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy from an oblique angle. I liken it to driving a wedge in a rock.
Part of the information my father passed on to me concerned an Indian named Drifting Away, a Black Hawk warrior and chief. I know the facts I have about Drifting Away are true, but, as with the data about the Confederacy, there is not a shred of proof. But if I can get one person to acknowledge the existence of Drifting Away, if I can convince one person that the town was named for Onamata, Drifting Away’s wife, who was murdered by white settlers in the 1830s, I’ll have a real wedge in the rock.
From A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy:
Drifting Away remembers. He remembers the gentle, rolling Iowa landscape in days when buffalo still grazed idly, the only sounds the grumble of their own bones. The creak of the wheel was only a prophecy, the oxcart a vision, the crack of the whip and the crack of the rifle known only to those who made their eyes white as moonlight in order to stare down the tunnel of the future. Drifting Away remembers the haze of campfires hanging, smooth as a cloud, in the tops of dappled poplars …
Why baseball? Was it because of our obsession with the game that my father and I were gifted, if it can be called a gift, with encyclopedic knowledge of a baseball league?
I inherited my knowledge of the Confederacy and my interest in baseball, but what of my father? My grandfather never attended a baseball game in his life.
‘How did you come to love baseball?’ I asked my father repeatedly. And he told me the story of how his passion was roused by a visiting uncle, a vagabond of a man who parachuted into their lives every year or so. He would appear clutching a deck of cards and a complicated baseball game played on a board with dice and markers. He also arrived with an outfielder’s black glove and a baseball worn thin by time. He claimed the baseball was once autographed by Walter Johnson.
The uncle – I’m not clear about which side of the family he was from – first charmed my father into playing catch, then into investigating the intricacies of the board game.
‘My uncle was named James John James,’ my father reported. ‘He owned nothing but a blue serge suit, a crumpled felt hat, and the articles to do with baseball.
‘My imagination had never been exercised,’ he went on. ‘My folks weren’t that kind of people. Uncle Jim pulled my imagination out of me like a magician pulling a string of light bulbs from my mouth. We played his board game, moving little nubbins of yellow and blue around the cardboard baseball field. Strange as it seems, it was through that board game that I learned to love baseball, for my uncle could bring that small green board to life. Every roll of the dice was like a swing of the bat. My uncle arrived with a tattered copy of the St. Louis Sporting News, and as we played we invented leagues, furnishing them