The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

His example taught me well, for no matter how futile his efforts seemed, he would not be moved from his goals, just as I shall not be moved from mine. I will pursue the elusive dream of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy until it is admitted that the Chicago Cubs traveled to Iowa in the summer of 1908 and engaged in a baseball game against the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars.

As there are stages in grieving, in aging, in acceptance of illness, so there seem to be stages in the development of the inherited obsession of which I speak. I began my investigation by making the same polite written inquiries to the Chicago Cubs and other sources who should have known of the Confederacy, and ended with the same personal confrontations and shouted accusations, which resulted in my being firmly escorted from the Cubs’ offices.

Two years ago, I learned, by eavesdropping on a conversation in the box next to mine at Wrigley Field, that the Cubs were in the process of hiring a junior public relations person. I applied for the job; in fact, I submitted a twelve-page letter of application, outlining some of the facts I knew about the Chicago Cubs, past and present. The personnel department didn’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge my application. However, by phoning the Cubs’ offices on various pretexts, I was able to learn that the person hired was to begin work the following Wednesday. I also learned that the executives held business meetings on Monday mornings.

I showed up on Monday, dressed in a rented three-piece suit, looking as eager, expectant, thrilled, and breathless as I anticipated the new employee would feel.

‘Hi! I’m supposed to start work this morning,’ I said, smiling brightly. For the occasion I had had my hair cut and dyed a neutral brown. My hair is usually shoulder length, white as vanilla ice cream, which makes it difficult for me to appear inconspicuous. I am not an albino, for though my skin lacks pigmentation, my eyes have color: a pale, translucent blue.

My job – or, rather, the job of the new public relations person – was to write copy for the Chicago Cubs yearbook. A young woman whom I remembered having a confrontation with a few years before kept checking the dates on her calendar and staring at me, trying, I’m sure, to place me. She assigned me back issues of the yearbook to read, promising to give me more substantial employment after lunch when the public relations director returned.

As I glanced at the yearbooks, I eyed the rows of foot-locker-green filing cabinets, my mouth watering for the opportunity to leap into history. Shortly before lunch I made my way to the supply room and secreted myself behind several thousand Chicago Cubs yearbooks. I lay on the floor and covered myself with the glossy little magazines, their slick surfaces smelling like new-car interiors. I slept for a while, dreaming I was in the hold of a fishing vessel, covered with slippery tropical fish.

When the fluorescent hands on my wrist watch showed 6:00 P.M., I ventured out. The offices were deserted, silent, smelling of paper and coffee grounds.

I spent the entire night skimming through the filing cabinets, reading everything I could find concerning the years 1902–1908, which were the years the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was in existence.

It was sad to find out that, to the Cubs, baseball was not the least magical; it was strictly business. The files contained little but contracts, tax forms, medical expense forms. There were no elaborate personnel files, no newspaper clippings, no fan testimonials.

Here was the Cubs’ greatest pitcher, Mordecai Peter Centennial ‘Three Finger’ or ‘Miner’ Brown, in a manila folder labeled M. BROWN and smudged with fingerprints. Not even a first name. No mention of his 239 victories or of his induction into the Hall of Fame. No mention of his injury, the cropped finger that allowed him to put a special spin on the ball. Just a file with the barest of records.

I did find some of my own correspondence in a file labeled CRANK LETTERS, filed away alongside a letter claiming the Chicago Cubs would win the last pennant before Armageddon and another containing what purported to be conclusive evidence that Ernie Banks and Billy Williams were extraterrestrials. Seeing them side by side, I had to admit that those letters made as much sense as mine.

There were penciled notes on one of my more inflammatory letters: Dangerous? F.B.I.? Relative of E. G. Clarke? My sister, Enola Gay, is a fugitive from justice.

I emerged at 6:00 A.M., disheveled, dry-mouthed, redeyed, and without one shred of evidence that the 1908 Chicago Cubs ever visited Big Inning, Iowa, or, for that matter, that there ever was a Big Inning, Iowa.

‘It is a fact that there are cracks in time,’ my father repeated endlessly. ‘Weaknesses – fissures, if you like – in the gauzy dreamland that separates the past from the present.’ Hearing those words like a musical refrain all through my childhood, I came to believe them, or, rather, accept them; it was never a matter as simple as belief. To me they weren’t remarkable; after all, some children were taught to accept the enormities, the absurdities, the implausibilities of scripture as fact.

‘Time is out of kilter here in Johnson County; that’s my conclusion,’ my father said to me often. ‘But if something is out of kilter, there’s no reason it can’t be fixed. And when it’s fixed I’ll be proven right.’

Briefly stated, here is what my father believed: through those cracks in time, little snippets of the past, like small, historical mice, gnaw holes in the lath and plaster and wallpaper of what used to be, then scamper madly across the present, causing eyes to shift and ears to perk to their tiny footfalls. To most people they are only a gray blur and a miniature tattoo of sound quickly gone and forgotten. There are, however, some of us who see and hear more than they were ever meant to. My father was one of those, as am I.

My father, Matthew Clarke, dreamed his wife. He lay in his bedroom in the square frame house with green shutters in the Iowa town called Onamata, which, long ago, before the flood, when everything but the church was washed away in the direction of Missouri, was called Big Inning. Wide awake, eyes pressed shut, Matthew Clarke dreamed his ideal woman, conjuring her up from the scarlet blackness beneath his lids, until she rose before him like a genie, wavery, pulsating.

‘There’s always been a strangeness hovering over all this land,’ he used to tell me. ‘Even before I dreamed Maudie, before I learned of the Confederacy, I knew there were layers and layers of history on this land, like a chair with ten coats of enamel. And I sensed some of those layers were peeling off, floating in the air, waiting to be breathed in, soaked up like sunshine. I tell you, Gideon’ – and he would scratch the tip of his long, sun-bronzed nose and run a hand through his black curls, which were as unruly as twitch grass – ‘there are all kinds of mysteries dancing around us like sunbeams, just beyond our finger tips.’ When I’d look at him as if I didn’t quite believe him, he’d go on, ‘They’re there, like birds in a thicket that you can hear but can’t see.’

And I would listen to him and marvel at his energy and dedication, and I’d believe him or at least accept what he told me, but with a total lack of awe. If my father insisted that he alone was in step, the rest of the world a ragtag of shabby marchers, who was I to disagree? Nothing, including the resurrection of the dead, would have surprised me.

My first experience of the floating magic he talked of was when the hollyhocks sang to me. I suppose I was eight the first time I heard those hollyhocks, tall, sturdy flowers the color of sun-faded raspberries. They grew high and physical outside my father’s bedroom window, their stocks like broom handles, saucer-sized heads bowed silently, gathered together like a freshly scrubbed barbershop quartet. ‘Ooooooh, ooooooh, ooooooh,’ they sang at first, softly as a choir.

As I listened I knew they were performing for me alone, that if a playmate appeared he would hear nothing. I remember thinking, Why shouldn’t the hollyhocks sing? And I pictured a nebulous rock wall, desert-rust in color, cracking open like an egg, the tall flowers ducking their heads as they emerged, eerie as aliens. As I sat cross-legged on the lawn in front of them, their song grew louder, the tempo increased: ‘DA da DA da DA DA, DA da DA da da, DA da DA da da, DA da DA DA DA.’ It would be years before I discovered the source of their music.

One thing I don’t understand is that I did not tell my father of the experience. How he would have loved to have had me as an ally. In that credulous way children have of accepting what life offers them, it didn’t occur to me then how lonely my father’s quest must have been. By the time I realized, my mother had long since left us and taken my sister and my cat with her to Chicago. Father was devoting his whole life to proving the existence of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy and having precious little success.

I didn’t understand his obsession well enough to be the kind of son I should have been. Now, years after his death, after he has been dead for more years of my life than he was alive, after I have come to have an obsession of my own, I understand all too well what he went through, and I sympathize, too late though it may be.

But back to my father’s dream. I won’t tell what I know about the Iowa Baseball Confederacy just yet. It is more important to explain about my father and my mother, the woman he dreamed to life.

‘She was so real sometimes, I could smell her and taste her and do everything but touch her,’ he used to say to me. ‘When you get older you’ll understand what it was like, Gid.’ I wonder if all parents tell their children things the children don’t understand but will when they get older. I wanted to understand then.

Matthew Clarke knew he wasn’t likely to find his dream among the residents of Onamata, or even in nearby Iowa City. It was the summer of 1943, the war was raging, and Matthew Clarke was just graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in American history.

‘I had a choice to make and make quickly,’ he used to say to me. Some of my earliest memories are of hearing this story. We – when we were still a family – used to sit on the wide verandah on humid summer evenings, Mother and Father on slatted wooden chairs, hers enameled white, his vermilion, while my sister and I sat on the floor, our legs in front of us in V shapes, rolling a ball back and forth.

‘It was either the army or graduate school,’ my father would continue. ‘In fact, I had the graduate school application, all filled out, in the back pocket of my pants the night I dreamed your mother to life.’ He’d laugh a low, soft chuckle, and look across at my mother, who would be sitting forward in the white chair, dusky as an Indian, her eyes unfathomable and molasses-black.

I have often imagined Matthew Clarke as he lay on top of the old black-and-red patchwork quilt, which still graces the bed and still looks as if it might at one time have served a Gypsy as a cape, the graduate school application folded and stuffed in his rear pocket, crinkling to remind him of its presence each time he moved slightly.

‘That evening, I was just like a bear gettin’ a whiff of honey, Gideon. I stood up, my arms out in front of me like a sleepwalker, and I headed for the truck, drove off to Iowa City, went to the carnival, and the rest is history.’

That was the short version of the story. The tale became longer and longer, I think in direct proportion to the time my mother was absent from us. As the years passed, my father recalled more and more about that fateful summer night. And as I grew older he supplied more details, and told more and more about what he felt on that magical evening.

After telling the short version, my father would look over at my mother and down at us children and smile. He would wipe imaginary sweat from his high forehead, raise his hands palm up in a gesture of wonder. I would stare at my dark-haired father, at my dusky mother and sister, who would blend into the summery shadows of the porch until I sometimes wondered if they were there at all, and silently question why or how I came to have lank blond hair and eyebrows the color of corn silk.

Matthew Clarke had lived all his life near Iowa City, where sun-blond girls with browning skin and endearing overbites flocked around the campus of the University of Iowa. A few even lived in some of the two dozen houses that made up his home town of Onamata. In the summer of 1943, those sweet, sincere, interchangeable young women wore saddle shoes and pleated skirts. The skirts were made of red, yellow, or green plaid, often with a six-inch safety pin worn just above the knee to keep them modest. Many of these young women were beautiful; most were scrupulously laundered, smelling clean as fresh ironing. They were cheerful, dutiful, God-fearing, and ravenous for husbands. Matthew Clarke wanted none of them.

He knew what he wanted. He had even gone to Chicago in search of her.

‘I ever tell you about the fat woman in Chicago?’ I remember him saying to me. We were on our way to St. Louis to see a Cardinal double-header. It was a Sunday and we’d left Onamata at five A.M. to be sure to get there in time to buy good seats.

‘Fifty times,’ I was tempted to say, but didn’t. I was about fourteen and thought anyone as old as my father must be partially fossilized and fully retarded. But I was cautious. He didn’t wait for an answer from me.

‘Seemed like every street I walked on in downtown Chicago there were women every forty feet or so, posed like statues, in suggestive stances. And there were loud women in the bars I went to, women with quarrelsome voices and stringy hands. But they weren’t the kind I was lookin’ for. Stay away from those kinds of women, Gid. They’re nothin’ but trouble.’

‘Your experience with women hasn’t exactly been trouble free,’ I thought of saying, but again, didn’t.

‘Then I met this woman, Gid. And I think she was the start of this whole thing with the Confederacy.’

‘She’d slipped through one of the cracks in time,’ I said, staring out the window, resisting the temptation to say something about its being a wide crack.

‘I was just off State Street, I think. A dark street with sidewalks covered in grit and glass fragments. There were boarded-up buildings, and bars with blue neon beer bottles bleeding down their windows. She ambled out of a doorway, wide as she was tall, so ash-blond I swear she gave off light, an aura. She was as blond as you. She had bangs to the middle of her forehead. The rest of her hair was straight and chopped, as if a bowl had been set on top of her head. She might have been twenty-five or she might have been fifty. Her face was wide and mottled, her nose flat as a baby’s. She was wearing a tentlike dress that stopped above her pale knees; the dress was a swirl of color, like scarves blowing in the wind.

‘Her eyes were a pale, pale blue, and she was barefoot. She walked splay-legged right into my path, her stubby feet with their gray, sluglike toes grinding sand. She’d come out of a run-down building where dirty velvet curtains were strung across a storefront. A few stars and triangles were painted on the glass in front of the curtains. The words FORTUNE TELLING had been hand-lettered on the windowpane by an amateur.

‘That woman looked a little bit like Missy, you know, except she was a lot fatter than Missy, and she wasn’t a … a mongoloid, although before she spoke I thought she might be. As I stood staring at her, the only thing I could think of was a white Gypsy, an albino Gypsy.

‘‘‘Excuse me,” I said, and tried to step around her. But she didn’t move; in fact, she leaned into my path until I had to stop.

‘‘‘No, no,” she crooned, like she was talking to a child. And she put her pudgy hand on my arm. Her fingers were white as fresh fish, the nails chewed down to the quick.

‘‘‘I came to meet you,” she said in that same purring voice. “I could feel you getting nearer.” Her bottom lip was turned down like that of a child about to cry. Her teeth were short, crooked, and stained.

‘‘‘Go home to Iowa,” she said. “You’re not supposed to be here. Go home.” I glanced down at her huge knees; they were dimpled and scarred.

‘‘‘What are you talking about?” I said. But she was gone. I swear it, Gid. Gone, vanished. There I was, standing on that sleazy sidewalk, lookin’ like a fool, talking to a parking meter, a big, prehistoric, beast-headed thing, all pitted and ugly and metal-smelling.

‘I got out of there, let me tell you. But I never forgot that woman or her voice. And she was right. Because I no sooner got back to Onamata than I dreamed your mother. And then went out and found her.’