Sweeter Life (12 page)

“Here,” he said one day, handing the fielder’s mitt out the window of the truck. “Never had much use for this. You might as well have it.”

Riley turned it over, studying the intricate lacing of the web and fingers. He held it to his face and breathed in the aroma of good leather. Then he handed it back. “Don’t think I better.”

“Why’s that?”

“Ain’t mine, is it?”

Clarence studied the glove a moment, then held it out the window again. “Then maybe you could do me a favour, Riley, and break it in for me. The leather’s awful stiff.”

Riley jammed his hands into the pockets of his overalls. “Could do,” he said, his eyes darting from Clarence to the glove and back again. Finally he reached out and took the mitt. He put it on his left hand and pounded the leather with his right. “When you need it back?”

Clarence looked into the distance like he was doing some heavy figuring.

“Hard to say, Riley. Maybe next week, the week after. See if you can whip it into shape, will you?”

It became one of the signatures of their friendship. Once a month to start with, less often as the years went by, but continuing even after they were grown men with their own farms, Riley would ask, “You want that glove back yet?” And Clarence would shake his head and say, “No, not yet. You keep it awhile longer. Needs a bit more seasoning.”

And of all the pictures that Clarence had seen in his fifty-six years—the babies, the weddings, the birthday parties and graduations—none had brought him more joy than the photograph Riley sent him the spring of 1940. Clarence had just graduated from the agricultural college in Guelph, and Riley was a tall muscular farm boy who could throw a baseball through the eye of a needle and near a hundred miles an hour. In the picture, he was kneeling on the grass of Briggs Stadium in Detroit, home of his favourite team, the Tigers. On his right was Hank Greenberg, and on his left, Charlie Gehringer. Riley was grinning from ear to ear, having just signed a minor league contract. Soon he would be heading south to play with the Toledo Mud Hens, but for that golden moment in the photo, he was a Tiger. And there in front of him on the grass was the glove.

Clarence got to his feet and began to walk through the orchard toward the house. He’d heard it said more than once that Riley Owen had been born with a pure talent for baseball. But Clarence had his doubts about that. To his mind, talent was like faith—it only showed itself after a lot of practice. Hard work uncovered the nugget of one’s talent, and the same hard work expressed it.

Equally untrue, at least by Clarence’s reckoning, was the idea that talent was always such a good thing. What if all your hard work uncovered the wrong kind of talent, the sort that could twist your life out of shape and make you unfit for the workaday world? What if, like Riley, you were born with a talent for play—not quite enough to make a go of it, but enough to ruin your taste for honest labour? What then? And how would Riley, in light of his own mistakes, have instructed his son about the future?

According to Isabel, and even a few people in town, Cyrus had some musical ability (though no one, to his knowledge, had ever suggested it
was anything more than a passable talent). And while there was nothing inherently wrong with the boy’s desire to be a musician, it made Clarence ache with sadness, the thought of all the disappointments he was sure to face. After all, if Riley hadn’t made it with pure talent and a full set of tools, what chance did Cyrus have? That’s why Clarence had been grooming the boy to work in the orchard.

Of course Clarence couldn’t imagine how it felt to reach so far beyond one’s grasp. Unlike Riley or Cyrus, he had been born into a life he loved, a job he relished, a world that pleased him daily. All his life he had known who he was and where he was going; and though his talents were much the same as his father’s and grandfather’s and were applied in the same daily routines of farm life, it was a great source of comfort, he felt, to have his talent and his life in agreement.

For Riley, every day had meant trouble of some sort. In time it had knocked the stuffing out of him and made him a sorry man. Clarence could only hope that Cyrus would be spared that grief.

RUBY LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW
to the apple shed. Still no sign of Clarence. She wandered to the back door and looked down the driveway. Her car was just where she’d left it, beside the pickup. No traffic on the road at all. The school bus had rumbled past long ago.

She had work to do but couldn’t face it, so she drifted through the house, touching this, straightening that. In the bathroom she took Cyrus’s deodorant from the medicine cabinet and inhaled the brisk athletic scent. She smelled his shaving cream, which he used about once a week to scrape off the fuzz. She lifted his toothbrush from its holder and then put it back, a lump catching in her throat.

Upstairs, she worked her way down the hall, poking her head into each room. At the sight of her big queen-size bed she remembered Cyrus sleeping among the coats that one Christmas, could have been the last time they were all together, all the Owens, all the Mitchells. She remembered, too, how he used to come visiting with his mother, before he was old enough for school; and as Ruby and Catherine chatted over tea, he’d dress up in Clarence’s jacket and dress shoes, looking so adorable she
had wanted to squeeze the living daylights out of him.

His room was just the way he had left it. His guitar was in its case under the bed. His stereo was immaculate, his records neatly arranged. Ruby had always hoped he would do more with the room. Wouldn’t another boy have put up baseball pennants or pin-ups or something? Wouldn’t there be a street sign maybe, or a notice on the door warning everyone to keep out? With Cyrus it was like he was just visiting. Well-mannered, polite, but not really committed. No calendar on his desk, no doodles on his blotter, no clutter, no photos. There were a few books on a shelf above his bed, things Isabel had bought for him. There was a compass, too. A gyroscope. And a cardboard tube full of Pick-Up sticks.

Without thinking, she grabbed the tube and shook it like a rattle. Ruby had never been one for games, and most especially that one. For some reason, it had always made her feel sad. But Cyrus loved it, even as a teenager. You wouldn’t think there would be much to get excited about.

She returned to the kitchen and made tea. When the phone rang, her heart skipped a beat. But it wasn’t Cyrus, it was Janice Young.

“Hello, Mrs. Mitchell, any word?”

“Not much. He called to let us know he was safe. Campenola, I think he said. But that’s all we know. No school today?”

“Well, yeah, but I was thinking I could come out there this afternoon. I don’t want to bother you or anything. I just thought we could talk.”

“About what, dear?”

“About Cy.”

Ruby felt a secret thrill at the thought of the two of them playing hooky. “Why don’t I come and get you?” she said. “We could go for a drive or a walk or a cup of tea. Whatever you like.”

They met at the Three Links Hall a little before noon and drove to the town pier for a hot chocolate. For the first while, Janice looked out the side window, not interested in her drink. Finally she said, “I woke up this morning and realized my whole life had changed. I lost my best friend. The band is dead. I don’t care about school or summer vacation or anything, not even my folks. How does that happen?”

Ruby squeezed her hand. “You’ll be fine, dear.”

“I know,” she said. “But what I mean is, you think your life is pretty cool, everything pretty much the way you want it, and if somebody asked you to point to the coolest part, the part that makes all the other parts cool, you couldn’t do it, could you? Because it’s all just your life, one thing, like I see a pair of jeans here and not a million threads. You know?”

“I think I do.”

“So how can it be that there
is
one thing, one thread, and you pull on it and the whole fabric comes apart? How could we not know our lives depend on something like that? Shouldn’t they teach us that at school?”

“They teach us that at church, dear.” Ruby reached out to run her hand across the girl’s lovely red hair, wishing she could do more to help her through this pain. “Why don’t you come with me this Sunday? You might enjoy it.”

“Church? We’ve never been a religious family.”

“That hardly matters, does it? Lots of people aren’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still attend the service. And if you don’t find religion, maybe you’ll find something else.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I know sometimes I just like to get up on a Sunday morning, put on a nice outfit and fix my hair. I’ll talk Clarence into coming along but usually he can’t be bothered. And it feels so good to be there at the church, whether I listen to the sermon or not, as if I was doing the best possible thing I could ever do.”

Ruby felt foolish, talking to a young girl this way. After a long moment, she said, “You’re about as thirsty as I am. Shall we walk along the pier?”

They strolled arm-in-arm, the air tangy with fish and fuel and creosote. As they walked, Janice told Ruby everything she knew about Cyrus’s plan, how he had taken the cheque and bought the new guitar, how he had intended to put up a few signs in the music stores announcing his availability. But he had said nothing about leaving Wilbury so soon. She had thought he would wait until summer.

“Yes,” Ruby said, “but that was before we had our argument. Who knows what we’ve driven him to? Campenola is hundreds of miles away. Hounslow would seem like just around the corner.”

Janice turned to face Ruby. “I’ve known Cy a long time,” she said, “and if you ask me, there’s no driving him to anything unless he’s already made up his mind. He can be awful stubborn.”

“Cyrus? He was always such a sweetheart.”

Janice laughed at that. “You’ve never been in a band with him. When it’s something he really cares about, he’s like a bulldog.”

This was a side of the boy Ruby had never seen. “But he was always so sweet and considerate. He talked to me. We were close.”

The obvious response, though unspoken, hung between them nonetheless. What mattered to him was music, and he had kept Ruby in the dark about that. How close could they have been?

WHEN CLARENCE CAME IN FROM THE ORCHARD
, Ruby’s car was gone. He fixed himself a sandwich and called Frank Pentangeles and asked him if he could help out awhile. Frank, who was older than Clarence and had worked at Orchard Knoll for more than forty years, was supposed to be retired. But he jumped at the opportunity, and they made plans to start next day setting up the sprayers. Then Clarence walked out to the shed and turned on the radio. He had it tuned to the mellow sounds of WJR in Detroit, but he wasn’t really listening. He was remembering when he was ten years old, the day he and Frank first learned how to prune.

Frank’s dad, Domenic, who had worked at Orchard Knoll for as long as he’d been in Canada, showed them the proper technique. He led them through the orchard until he found a suitably overgrown tree, then quietly began to prune. He didn’t go at it like a barber, standing on the outside and trimming here and there; he got right in to the trunk, right into the thick of things, and cut his way out. When he was finished, he turned to them and said, “This is good. Like so.” He moved his hand through the gaps he had created with his saw and shears. “So a bird can fly.”

T
he dressing room of the Campenola Armoury had seen more prize fighters than musicians. The apple-green walls were speckled with bloodstains; the air was rich with mildew and sweat and the overpowering sweetness of urinal pucks. But Cyrus noticed none of that. He was staring at his hands. His first show with the Jimmy Waters Revival had been a nightmare, and if not for the people milling about, doing their best to ignore him, he probably would have cried.

Right from the opening vamp he’d been off balance, both literally and figuratively. The stage, displaying the kind of bounce you might expect of a boxing canvas, set up a complicated wave form that threatened to knock over the amplifiers the moment anyone so much as tapped his foot. Cyrus didn’t get his sea legs until a good ten minutes into the performance; and musically, he never found his balance. Just when he started to think that everything might be fine, the song would mysteriously shift key and tempo. Or Jimmy would start one of his vocal riffs—not singing really, hard to know what to call it—lumbering here and there along the front of the stage and shouting to the audience, waving his arms while the lights flashed and the music crashed. And all the while the audience sat as stiff as could be, like folks who had walked into the wrong movie or wrong funeral even and couldn’t quite work up the
gumption to walk out again. Then right near the end of the show, Jim did this thing, this truly weird thing: he climbed down from the stage and wandered into the crowd, over to a grey-haired lady and, what, it was almost like he was massaging her scalp, his fingers flying a mile a minute, his eyes rolled back, as the lady swatted his arms and chest, and howled disapproval.

With all that going on, Cyrus messed up so often that, by the end of the show, Eura was the only one who would look at him—and her sympathetic smile was worse than nothing at all. He had half a mind to grab his gear and go home and save himself further humiliation. But before he could do that, Ronnie walked into the dressing room and sat beside him.

“I have heard music in my day,” he said, “but I have to tell you, that was a truly remarkable spectacle. Such feeling. Such abandon. The audience was not all I had hoped it would be, I confess. This is our first time in Campenola, and I fear our show is a bit of an acquired taste. But I can tell you without reservation that I was transported, young man. And you?”

“It couldn’t have been worse.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about the finer points. Opening-night jitters and all. These things happen to a novice. But the overall direction, the energy, the vision—Jim was very impressed.”

Cyrus snorted in disbelief.

“Truly. He told me himself. ‘That boy is a keeper.’ So, there you have it. Basically, it’s the same thing tomorrow, back here at the Armoury. Sound check at four-thirty.” He clapped Cyrus on the shoulder. “You will do better, my musical friend. I have no doubt about that. Besides, we can’t break in a new guitar player every night, can we? Oh, and by the way—” he handed Cyrus a hotel key “—you will bunk with Sonny for the time being.” At Cyrus’s look of despair, Ronnie laughed and said, “Believe me, he is a pussycat when you get to know him.”