The Youngest Hero (2 page)

Work kept my mind off being lonely, but getting supper on the table wasn’t enough to keep me from missing Elgin. He played
only a few blocks away, but five minutes after I expected him, I would think about heading out to find him. I fought darker
thoughts, thoughts of something happening to him. I couldn’t risk embarrassing him again. I had wandered over to watch him
once, but the game stopped until the others found out who the
woman was. They teased him unmercifully. No adults allowed. Not even to watch.

Elgin always made it home just before dark. Every day he told me that the next day he would get the letter he wanted so bad.

“You think Dad still loves me? Could he forget about me?”

“I never knew anybody who could forget about you,” I said. “I’m sure he loves you the best he knows how. He was never much
good at lovin anybody but himself.”

I knew I shouldn’t bad-mouth Elgin’s daddy, but I was tired of covering for him. For a year before we moved to Chicago, we
lived in a trailer park in Hattiesburg with bad memories. Before Neal had moved away and then been sent to prison for what
was probably the last time, he had raced stock cars on a dirt oval and hit something like .550 in a local semipro league.

I never thought I asked for too much. Just a husband who kept a job and came home after work and didn’t get drunk. When Neal
got drunk, he got crazy. He had never attacked Elgin, but I know Neal terrified him when he was drunk. Even when I was pregnant
with our second child, I felt like I was Elgin’s protector, keeping Neal’s attention. I swore I’d leave and take Elgin with
me if Neal dared hurt him. I wouldn’t even let Neal spank him. “I don’t trust you,” I’d tell him. “You could kill that boy
and call it an accident.”

One night, drunk and sobbing, Neal fell on his knees in front of me when I said something like that. “You can’t hurt me more’n
sayin I could ever hurt my own child, Miriam!”

“You can hurt
me
and I shouldn’t think you’d hurt
him
?”

“He’s my own flesh and blood! You’re not!”

“I’m your wife!”

“That was my mistake,” Neal said. “We’re only related by law.”

“You can say that after all we’ve been through?” I said. “The nights I’ve bailed you out, put you to bed, made excuses for
you, forgiven you?”

Neal was still on his knees, but I saw his muscles tighten. “I had a momma,” he said, rising. “I don’t need another.”

I told him I didn’t want to mother him, that I didn’t want to have to. Neal cursed me and called me ugly names. That I could
take. I’d done it many times. But when he punched me in the stomach, the pain shot through me and made me dizzy. As I lurched
forward he drove his knee into my abdomen and I slammed to the floor, desperate to protect my baby. Lying there I saw Elgin,
standing frozen in the doorway of his tiny bedroom.

Neal immediately started in with his apologies. “Oh, honey, sweetie, I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Forgive me! I’ll kill
myself if I’ve hurt you! Oh, God! Oh, please! Jesus, don’t let anything be wrong with the baby!”

I fought for breath as I struggled to my knees, keeping an eye on Neal. He reached for me, but I wrenched away. “Don’t touch
me,” I said. “You will never touch me again.”

While he cried, I dialed the phone. “Yes, sir,” I told the cop, “I’m willin to press charges this time.”

Neal sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, sobbing. He said, “Forgive me, Mir, I swear I’m sorry. I’ll never—”

“If anything happens to this child, Neal,” I said, “I hope you die in prison.”

Neal spent sixteen months in the county jail that time. And I lost the baby, a girl. The prosecutors couldn’t prove the beating
caused the miscarriage.

It seemed to me Elgin was as sad and almost as mad as I was, but he believed his dad was sorry. “That’s what matters, right,
Momma?” he’d say. “If he’s truly sorry, we have to forgive him, don’t we?”

“I don’t,” I said, though I knew I shouldn’t be countering what he learned in Sunday school. “Someday you’ll learn to never
believe a drunk, no matter what he says.”

During more than a year in jail, Neal went to the hospital twice with delirium tremens. I never visited, wrote, or called.
A sheriff served papers on me, requiring me to let Neal see his son. I let him go with his great-grandmother Lofert.

Elgin told me Neal spent each visit holding him, crying, and pleading with him to try to convince me he was truly sorry.

“Tell him it’s too late,” I said. “Better yet, don’t tell him anything.
Don’t even promise him you’ll give me his messages. He has no right to ask you.”

When Neal was finally set free, I got a court order to keep him from coming to the trailer. We’d bought it used, eight years
before, in my name because I was the one with a job.

I let Elgin visit Neal at a park close to town, while I watched from a distance. I didn’t change my feelings about Neal, but
at least something good was happening. Elgin was learning to play ball. Not only that, but I had to admit he was learning
the game from one of the best players I had ever seen.

Against everything I ever knew as a Christian, I had grown to hate Neal, but I could never deny he was a marvelous baseball
player, born to the diamond, a man everybody loved to watch play.
Play
was the perfect word for what Neal Woodell did on a ball field. He was a center fielder, but he could play any position.
He knew what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. He was fast, graceful, powerful, and smart. Most of all, he seemed to
truly love the game. If only he had loved me as much.

Even when it was just Elgin and his dad, playing catch, hitting fly balls, pitching, and batting, I watched in awe. I did
not, could not, would not ever again love or accept or even want to talk to Neal. But as he taught Elgin rules, strategy,
technique, even style, I had to watch. Whenever he noticed, he hollered something to me, often something about Elgin’s progress.
I just stared, acknowledging nothing. He finally quit trying to connect with me and concentrated on Elgin.

“Aggressive, boy!” he would say. “Always look for the extra base, the advantage.”

Elgin threw right-handed and batted left. Neal taught him to switch-hit. “See how you can see the ball better, El?”

When Dad and I would take a break and sit under a tree, he would tell me his favorite stories—of childhood games, of incredible
plays, of his four home runs in a rookie-league doubleheader.

“If I’da stayed off the bottle, El,” he told me more than once, “I’d be a big leaguer today.”

I wanted to believe it, of course. “Is that true?” I’d ask Momma later.

“No doubt,” she’d say.

I was impressed that a born liar could speak the truth at all. Watching Neal field and throw and hit with effortless fluidity,
I was carried back to seeing him in a Pirate uniform, posing for his spring training pictures. He started in the rookie league
and moved all the way up to triple-A ball, but his scrapbook was full of pictures of him in the big-league uniform even the
minor leaguers wear during spring training.

I didn’t need the Pirates to tell me Neal Lofert Woodell had been a bona fide major-league prospect. But now he was a sand-lot
player, a race driver who made twenty-five dollars a night Fridays and Saturdays and barely enough more to live on by bagging
groceries.

In Elgin’s eyes, of course, his dad was a giant.

“I’m praying you’ll forgive him, Momma,” he’d say.

“I’m bitter,” I told him. “And it tears me up. But I don’t believe the man, and I don’t think I can ever forgive him. I know
I can’t trust him. I don’t even like you bein with him. You ever smell liquor on his breath, you get away, you hear?”

“I asked him if he still drank,” Elgin said.

I looked at him. ‘You did? Good for you!”

“I told him he didn’t have to tell me if he didn’t want to.”

“Oh, I’m sure he told you. But did he tell you the truth?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“How do you know?”

“He said he was a lot of things, but that he doesn’t lie when he’s sober. He has a six-pack every night after ball games to
help him sleep, and he says he knows enough to stay off the road. On Fridays and Saturdays he has only a couple of beers because
they’re testing drivers at the track now, and any more than that shows up.”

“He can’t afford to lose that ride.”

“That’s what he said, Mom. He needs the money.”

“What about weekends? He drinkin on weekends?”

Elgin nodded.

“Saturday night after the races and all day Sunday he drinks a good bit. He says he’s pretty wiped out till he goes to work
on Monday mornings.”

I’d seen Neal in the grocery on Mondays, his eyes red and puffy, tiny slits against the sun that streamed through the plate
glass.

On muggy summer evenings in Hattiesburg, I had taken Elgin to the library where I taught myself the tax return filing business.
For a year I couldn’t get him to read anything but baseball books: how-to’s, biographies, histories, you name it. If it had
to do with baseball, Elgin read it, including every baseball novel for children.

When he ran out of stuff at his reading level, I moved him up to adult baseball books. He expanded his vocabulary by checking
with me on words he didn’t recognize. I’d been an honor roll student and had dreamed of college. When I didn’t know a word,
I made Elgin look it up. Whenever I felt impatient or frustrated with him, I hid it. I had to do the loving for two parents,
and I wanted Elgin to feel deeply loved.

“Momma,” he would tell me, “there’s no game like baseball. It has so many things happening at the same time. It’s a team sport
but every play is also individual. You know what I mean?”

All that talk of baseball made me think of Neal, but I worked at never shutting Elgin off.

“No,” I’d say. “What do you mean?”

“Tennis and golf are sports you play alone. I mean you’re against everybody else, but it’s just you and the ball and there’s
no team to help or hurt you. Baseball is a team sport, but when the ball is hit to you, it’s an individual sport until you
catch it. Then it’s a team sport because you have to throw it to someone
else. And when you’re batting, it’s all up to you. You have to get the sign, do what you’re told, and get on base. But then
it’s a team sport because the next hitter has to do something or you die on base.”

I understood what he was saying, but I couldn’t see the beauty, the importance of it. That was all right. Someday I would
see him play, and that would be even better than watching Neal play. My love for him was long gone. Elgin often asked if I
liked watching his dad play.

“Everybody likes watchin your father play, Elgin. He’s gifted. But I suppose I resent that he’s that good at anything. Sometimes
I wish he was as bad a ballplayer as he is a race driver.”

Even Elgin had to laugh.

Neal hardly ever won a race, but I guess his sponsors kept him in because he was so daring. He was always on the brink of
disaster, scraping guardrails or tapping other cars into the infield. Fans loved him. He seemed to love to drive fast without
having mastered the sport. Two guys he drove against graduated to the NASCAR circuit, but Neal drove for beer money and for
fun.