Shoeless Joe Read Online Free Page B

enthusiastically. Bases cost $28.95 for a set of three, starched and glazed white as the smock of a fat baker. It was weeks before the stadium appeared again in the cornfield. Each evening I peered surreptitiously through the kitchen curtains, like a spinster keeping tab on her neighbors, waiting and hoping. All the while Annie kept reassuring me, and I would call her a Pollyanna and tell her how I hated optimists. But I find it all but impossible to be cross with Annie, and we would end up embracing at the kitchen window where I could smell the sunshine in her snow-and-lemondrop curtains. Then Karin would drag a chair close to us, stand on it, and interrupt our love with hers, a little jealous of our attention to each other. Annie and I would stare in awe at the wonder we had created, our daughter.
    Karin is five going on sixty; the dreamer in me combined with the practicality and good humor of Annie. We would both kiss her soft cheeks and she would dissolve in laughter as my mustache tickled her.
    “Daddy, the baseball man’s outside,” Karin said to me.
    It was still daylight, the days longer now, the cornfield and baseball diamond soaked warm with summer. I stared through the curtains where Shoeless Joe softly patrolled the left field I had birthed.
    I swept Karin into my arms and we hurried to the bleacher behind the left-field fence. I studied the situation carefully but nothing appeared to have changed from the last time. Shoeless Joe was the only player with any substance.
    “What about the catcher?” I call down.
    Joe smiles. “I said we’d look at him, remember?”
    “I’ve finished home plate. What else do you need?”
    “I said we ,” reminds Joe. “After the others are here, we’ll give him a tryout. He’ll have a fair chance to catch on.”
    “All the others?” I say.
    “All the others,” echoes Joe. “Get the bases down and sand and level that ground around first base. It’ll deaden the hot grounders and make them easy for old Chick to field.”
    But I have more questions than a first grader on a field trip: “Why have you been away so long?”; “When will you come back again?”; and a dozen more, but Joe only shifts the cud of tobacco in his cheek and concentrates on the gray-uniformed batter 300 feet away.

    I did sand the first-base area, sometimes cursing as the recalcitrant wheelbarrow twisted out of my hands as if it had a life of its own, spilling its contents on the rutted path leading to the baseball field. My back ached as if someone were holding a welding torch against my spine, turning the flame on and off at will. But I sanded. And raked. I combed the ground as I would curry a horse, until there wasn’t a pebble or lump left to deflect the ball. And as I finished I ignored my throbbing back, triumphant as if I’d just hurled a shutout. I’d stand on my diamond, where just beyond the fence the summer corn listens like a field of swaying disciples, and I’d talk to the sky.
    “I’m ready whenever you are,” I say. “Chick Gandil, you’ve never played on so fine a field. I’ve beveled the ground along the baseline so that any bunt without divine guidance will roll foul. The earth around the base is aerated and soft as piecrust. Ground balls will die on the second bounce, as if they’ve been hit into an anthill. You’ll feel like you’re wearing a glove ten feet square.” I wave my arms at the perfect blue Iowa sky, and then, as I realize what I’m doing, I turn sheepishly to look at the house. Annie has been watching, and she flutters her fingers at me around the edge of the curtains.
    The process is all so slow, as dreams are slow, as dreams suspend time like a balloon hung in midair. I want it all to happen now. I want that catcher to appear. I want whatever miracle I am party to, to prosper and grow: I want the dimensions of time that have been loosened from their foundations to entwine like a basketful of bright embroidery threads. But it seems that even for