37

On Sunday morning, when the Brown Bomber pulled into the parking lot at McKissic Field, the stadium and its barbecue pits had the look of a birthday bash in a military zone. Lots of Highbridgers had paraded off to church, but many hadn’t. We Hellbenders, Mister JayMac’s public piety aside, fell into the second group. We’d substituted a talk by Colonel Elshtain and some prayers on our bus ride for attendance at an honest-to-God worship service. Anyway, at the field, we saw folks standing in queue for the barbecue (which wouldn’t be served until one), vendors peddling all kinds of gewgaws, and several soldiers in battle dress standing guard along a cordoned lane through the lot to the place where Darius always parked.

As soon as we’d stopped, Mister JayMac spoke to us from the front: “President Roosevelt has spent the last two days at the Little White House in Warm Springs. Given the demands of the war, this’s been a hard time for him to get out of Washington -except for shipboard conferences with the rulers of our allies or his battle commanders. For reasons I don’t think require an explanation”-Mister JayMac wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief-“the President only rarely visits Georgia at the height of summer. He came for one day in August five years ago; usually, however, he confines his expeditions down here to the spring or fall. His presence this Fourth of July weekend bespeaks his strength as a man and his integrity as a patriot. It honors every soul born or resident in the South.”

“Holy cow!” Trapdoor Evans blurted. “That goddamn polio’s not going to be at our games today, is he?”

Colonel Elshtain stood. “He’ll be here for at least one of your games and maybe both. I’d suggest a more respectful form of address than ‘that goddamn polio’-should you have occasion, gentlemen, to meet him.”

“How about ‘Your Highness’?” Buck Hoey said.

“Criminy,” Muscles said. “We have to win. If we lose, we’ll shame ourselves in front of the President of the United States.”

“Losing won’t shame you,” Colonel Elshtain said. “Cracks like ‘that goddamn polio’ and ‘How about “Your Highness”?’ will far more effectively do that. Whether you personally find the man now in office an ornament to or a blot upon that position, it nonetheless remains that…”

And blahblah, blahblahblah.

A couple of seats up from me, Turkey Sloan raised his hand.

“What is it, Mr Sloan?” Mister JayMac said.

Sloan stood up. “Not too long ago, sir, I wrote a tribute to the Leader of the Free World, his administration, and the first family. To settle Colonel Elshtain’s doubts about Hellbender loyalty, I’d like your permission for me, Mr Hoey, Mr Evans, and Mr Sosebee to recite it for him.”

“How long’s this gonna take?” Mister JayMac said.

“Not even a minute,” Sloan said. “Sir, you know I always write tight.”

“You do everything tight,” Hoey said.

“If you’re going to do this, Mr Sloan, proceed,” Mister JayMac said. “It’s too hot to dawdle till Halloween in this four-wheeled inferno.”

Sloan made a humming sound, like a music teacher blowing on a pitch pipe. His pals stood up, at smirky attention. “ ‘The Battle Hymn of the Repugnant’ by Nyland Sloan, as performed by the author and his Disgusting Associates.” In the farce that followed, Sloan recited the first two lines of each stanza of his “tribute,” while Hoey, Evans, and Sosebee joined on every third-line chorus:

“Tip your fez

To the Prez?

Shout, ‘Glory Hallelujah!’

“Whose New Deal’ll

Make you squeal?

Why, Frankie Rooz-ah-velt-ah’s!

“Cordell Hull

Is a cull

Who’ll downright coldly screw yah!

“Eleanor

We deplore.

Hey, huddy, what’s it to yah?

“We regret

Eliot,

Their sorry naval joon-yah!

“Let’s debar

FDR!

Make flea-bit Fala Pooh-Bah!”

Taking the whistles and applause, Sloan and his Disgusting Associates bowed to this side and that. (Fala was Roosevelt ’s Scotty dog and traveling buddy, a regular Fido Firstus.) Henry and I stamped and clapped along with the others. The colonel sank into his seat like a punctured bounce-back toy, rigidly facing front.

Mister JayMac shook his head and shooed us off the bus. “Beat it, yall! Quicklime!”

We filed down the aisle stamping our feet. As we jostled along, every player but me chanted “Shout, ‘Glory Hallelujah!’ ” or “Make flea-bit Fala Pooh-Bah!”

Mariani pitched the first game, and I started at short. Pregame ceremonies included a War Bonds spiel by a wounded vet, Mister JayMac’s welcome, and the colored accordionist Graham Jackson playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a black choir, dressed in phony plantation garb, sang the lyrics.

The President and his party hadn’t arrived yet; and few folks in the stands understood we expected such a distinguished visitor and sports fan, one of the men who’d kept pro baseball from shutting down for the war. Still, Mister JayMac refused to delay the doubleheader’s start.

Bottom of the first, I poked one down the right-field line with my new Red Stix bat. It felt good, that double, almost like it wiped from my past everything that’d happened on Friday night: my gin binge, the trip to The Wing & Thigh, my no-show at Phoebe’s house, and Henry’s cavalry-to-the-rescue routine. Charlie Snow drove me home with a single up the middle. In our first at bat, in fact, we sent another six men to the plate and scored two more runs.

Between innings, I heard sirens screaming just outside the stadium. They came closer and closer, eking up higher in pitch and volume until yard dogs began to howl and many people in the stands covered their ears.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Frye announced over the PA system, “it’s the one hundred and sixty-seventh anniversary of this great nation, but the first time ever that the President of the United States has attended a baseball game in Highbridge or any other CVL city. All rise!” As if FDR was a judge and McKissic Field a courtroom.

I’d already made my way to my shortstop position. When our old military-band recording of the national anthem began to play, I didn’t have to rise. The fans, though, buckled upward en masse, craning their necks trying to catch sight of the most famous man-forget John D. Rockefeller or Clark Gable-in the whole United States. The sirens outside the stadium stopped about the time the anthem’s rockets began to glare red and its bombs to burst in air.

Then, because the President hadn’t made his entrance by song’s end, Frye played it again. And a third time, with folks forgetting proper hand-over-heart protocol, before a guard of uniformed Marines and helmeted soldiers marched in over the brand-new ramp system. Behind them, some wheelchair outriders in suits appeared at the top of a plywood slope. They ushered in the waving President, a man until then bashful of exposing himself in such an “unmanly” state. On that Fourth, though, he rode, head high, to the caged box seat behind our dugout. Once the military guard’d peeled off, in fact, I could see the Prez as well as, or better than, anybody else in the park.

I couldn’t believe it. Me, a kid from nowhere, standing maybe fifty yards from the only three-term chief executive in the history of our land. My nape hairs did the Wave decades before that cheer even got invented.

Know what kept rippling through my gray matter, though? He didn’t see my first hit. What if I don’t get another?

Except for the smudges under his eyes and the dents in his cheeks, Mr Roosevelt looked spiffy, a lot like Francis X. Bushman or some other silent-screen actor. Cool white linen suit, dapper straw snapbrim, fluffy polka-dot bow tie.