The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. W. Kinsella P.

marriage license when she married my father, she listed herself as nineteen, but did she have to show proof or did they take her word for it? If nineteen was correct, then she was about twenty-two when I was born, twenty-seven when she deserted us for the last time, thirty-four when she married a man named Beecher, who, it was rumored, had some connection with the Wrigleys and the Chicago Cubs.

      I know virtually nothing about my mother that my father didn’t tell me. I remember the warmth of her, her dark, hazy eyes. It seemed to me, when I got older, that she really didn’t know how to kiss. I remember her brushing her lips across my cheeks or forehead, but brushing was what she did, not kissing. I always felt as if her and Enola Gay’s leaving might somehow have been my fault. Perhaps I was so strange a child neither of them could stand me. Perhaps she hated my blondness, my potato-white skin, my hair the color of new stationery. What if she had good reason to leave? What if my father mistreated her? He was never violent, but mistreatment can take much subtler forms. What if she couldn’t stand being ignored? What if she couldn’t tolerate my father having a mistress, one far more demanding than anyone alive and sexual and sensuous, one she couldn’t fight either physically or mentally? The IBC is like that. I know.

      Mother settled down at thirty-four, to life in a Chicago mansion.

      Sunny isn’t thirty-four yet. Perhaps there is hope. Perhaps Sunny will settle down with me.

      To my surprise, Darlin’ Maudie and Enola Gay returned for the funeral. I had thought of notifying them but didn’t. Certainly my father’s death didn’t make the Trib. Unless, of course, it was in one of those columns of oddities in the news: RABID FAN KILLED BY BASEBALL, or FAN KILLED BY RABID BASEBALL. There were six dark-suited, nervous men from the Milwaukee organization at the funeral. The Braves were so afraid I was going to sue them for some astronomical amount and win that they paid for my father’s transportation back to Iowa City, the hearse and the undertaker, and the silver-handled oak casket – that was a small settlement in itself. There were floral tributes from the owners, manager, and players which looked as if they belonged in the winner’s circle at the Kentucky Derby.

      I was sent a sack of twenty-five baseballs, each personally inscribed by a member of the team, and a lifetime pass to a box seat, which, of course, expired with the team in 1965.

      My mother and sister arrived in a black limousine, driven by a large-eared youth with a white, cadaverous face partially hidden by a chauffeur’s cap. They were both dressed fashionably in black and both looked much smaller than they had been in my memory. Mother was no more than five foot one, and Enola Gay was of identical height.

      In the chapel of the Beckman-Jones Funeral Home in Iowa City, there was a curtained-off area for family members, but neither Mother nor Enola Gay sat there with me. In fact, they didn’t come near me at all. It was as if they were attending the funeral of a distant acquaintance, one whose family they had never met.

      The Barons drove me to the funeral home. I sat in the back seat of their comfortable old Dodge, which smelled of dust and machine oil, as Missy hummed and smiled, twisting the skirt of her dark brown dress.

      ‘You don’t want to be all alone in that little room, Gideon,’ Marylyle Baron said to me. ‘Come and sit out in the chapel with us.’

      ‘You come inside with me,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel like having everyone stare at me. I suppose there are rumors.’ I smiled weakly. ‘It’s not every day the community’s number-one baseball fanatic gets killed at a baseball game.’

      ‘You don’t want to hear them,’ Mrs. Baron said. ‘People have small minds and mean mouths.’

      So the four of us sat on pastel chairs in the curtained-off room, separated from the chapel by a peach-colored curtain translucent enough for me to recognize many of the mourners by their silhouettes.

      I peeked around the edge of the curtain once: Darlin’ Maudie and Enola Gay sat about halfway back, demure and expensively dressed. They left as the pallbearers were preparing to carry the coffin outside to the hearse for the ride to Fairfield Cemetery in Iowa City. Their leaving was a good idea. The pallbearers might have mistaken their limousine for the hearse.

      It was only a year or two later that Enola Gay became one of America’s first urban guerrillas. I have to admit Enola was a pioneer; perhaps she inherited her spirit from my father. She was years ahead of the Chicago Seven, the Weather Underground, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. She has also, as urban guerrillas go, been quite successful. Her first venture was to bomb a Dow Chemical subsidiary in Chicago – $250,000 damage and no injuries. She and her cohorts left a note, signed with their real names, with a P.S. : Catch us if you can!

      They have not been able to catch Enola Gay, though one of the original bombers came forward in the early seventies and spilled his guts in return for three years’ probation and a reunion with his wealthy family. He is now vice president of a bank. Another member of the group blew himself up in 1969, near an Omaha packing plant where a labor dispute was taking place. Every post office in America has posters showing Enola Gay as she looked some fifteen years ago and as they imagine she might look today. Her list of offenses takes up two sheets of Wanted paper. There is a women’s collective named for her in Iowa City, and an abortion clinic in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, bears her name. Occasionally a car full of bedraggled-looking women in sloganed T-shirts stops in front of my home and a few pale faces peer at Enola Gay’s birthplace.

      After the graveside services, Marylyle Baron grabbed my arm as I tried to edge away – from the Barons, from the polite condolences of neighbors and acquaintances who, having nothing to say, tried to say it anyway. It’s too bad there are no Hallmark cards saying, ‘Sorry your loved one was killed by a foul ball.’

      ‘You’re coming home with us,’ Mrs. Baron said. ‘You’re not going back to that big, lonely house. In fact, I think you should come and live with us. You can finish your schooling. Only thing is, you’ll have to walk a mile instead of a block to school.’ John Baron stood behind her, nodding his big, gray-thatched head.

      ‘I’ll bake you cookies,’ said Missy. ‘Gideon won’t be so sad if I bake him cookies, will he?’ she said to her mother, smiling her innocence, hopping a little in her excitement.

      Missy bakes wonderful gingerbread cookies; always has. Marylyle was able to teach her how to mix the ingredients, divide the dough into small balls, flatten the balls with a rolling pin, make tracks in each cookie with the tines of a fork, and place the tire-tracked cookies on a greased cookie sheet ready for the oven. I’ve watched her countless times; she sings under her breath as she performs the ritual, concentrating, brows furrowed like those of someone puzzling over a mathematical problem.

      ‘You always make me feel good, Missy,’ I said to her and patted her arm.

      I lived with the Barons for two years, until I finished high school in Onamata. I insisted on paying my own way. It was the least I could do.

      It was during that time that Marylyle Baron told me what I call the oral history of Big Inning, Iowa. From her I learned that I wasn’t quite as different as I at first thought. I shared my stories of the Confederacy with her, and though she had no memory of the events I knew as fact, she was able to add some rather astonishing folk tales to my repertoire.

      Drifting Away remembers the shining desert, the Dakota Hills roiling with green and silver grasses. Drifting Away fought beside Crazy Horse, rode with him into the wilds, shared his deepest dreams, was there when Crazy Horse’s only daughter, They Are Afraid of Her, lay dying, strangling on her own phlegm, not yet five years old.

      Drifting Away was there when Crazy Horse died, murdered by a soldier named Gentles, held from behind by his traitorous brother, Little Big Man. With a knife blue as moonlight Drifting Away cut out the noble heart, carried it to Crazy Horse’s elderly parents, who buried it in the clear, sweet water of Wounded Knee Creek.

       3

      ‘I think I’ll turn in,’ I said to the Barons, early on the evening after