The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

‘I didn’t know it would be like this,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not from around here.’

Matthew kissed her then, awkwardly, his lips touching her nose before covering her mouth. The rain hurtled down around them; a few drops leaked through the leaves, dripping onto the frilly grass at their feet. Maudie wrapped her arms tightly around Matthew and returned his kiss. Her tongue felt small and hot against his own.

I’m so happy I could die, Matthew thought. At that moment there was a violent, ripping, crunching sound, as if kindling was being broken right next to their ears. The tree screamed. Afterward, Maudie claimed it was her, or possibly Matthew. But Matthew knew it had been the tree, a long, shrill sound like a rabbit’s death cry.

The tree was struck behind and above them. The lightning ripped off a huge limb. Matthew found himself on the grass, staring up at a fresh white scar where the limb had been. The fallen branch lay beside him, some leaves brushing one arm.

He was nauseated; his left arm and leg felt full of pins and crawling ants. When he tried to blink he realized his left eyelid was paralyzed. In another second or so he discovered that the only part of him he could move was his right eye, and it was full of Maudie.

Darlin’ Maudie stood in the drenching rain at the edge of the corn, her arms raised above her head, her legs braced as if she were supporting a monstrous weight on her upturned hands. From where he lay, it looked to Matthew as if she held lightning in each hand, bolts the color of molten silver, crackling like cellophane, long as the sky. They stretched from her hands clear to the clouds, which were wild and black and rolling like locomotives.

Matthew felt heavy drops of rain hit his face. The drops sizzled as they splattered on his lightning-seared skin. He watched from his one good eye as Maudie’s eyes blazed in some kind of mystical triumph, her fingers dazzled with lightning.

‘I won’t!’ Matthew heard her say. ‘I won’t! I won’t!’

He never knew whether she was drawing the lightning in or warding it off.

The next thing Matthew remembered, Darlin’ Maudie was kneeling beside him on the wet grass, her cheek against his, whimpering like a puppy, alternately kissing him and imploring him to show some sign of life.

As he came around, Matthew realized he could see from both eyes, that he could blink his left eyelid. The pins were retreating from his left arm and leg, leaving an ache in his hip and knee. His fingers and toes on the left side felt like candles that had been lit and then extinguished.

‘I’m all right,’ Matthew said as Maudie planted more kisses down his cheek.

Matthew could feel her hot little breasts against his chest, burning right through her blouse and his shirt. He managed to get his right arm around her shoulders and pull her even closer to him. Her breath was warm against his cheek and holding her was like clutching an armful of flowers. The odors about her were somewhere between sweet clover and heaven. But painted on the inside of Matthew’s eyelids was the frightening image of Maudie, arms raised to the sky, joined to the lightning.

When the rain stopped, Maudie helped Matthew to his feet. He was limp as laundry and had black dots the size of floating tapioca in front of his eyes. As they moved down the rows of corn toward the carnival Matthew said, ‘I can’t carry you this time,’ and tried to muster an apologetic smile.

‘No need to,’ said Maudie.

‘But your shoes … ’

‘To hell with my shoes. I ain’t goin’ back,’ she said, looking down past her mud-splattered costume to where her shoes were all but covered in muck. ‘That is, if I can come with you?’

Matthew took her hand. ‘It’s a long, messy walk to my truck, especially if we avoid crossing the carnival grounds.’

‘I’m with you,’ said Maudie.

An hour later, wet, bedraggled, mud-scoured, Matthew Clarke and Darlin’ Maudie arrived at Matthew’s home in Onamata. As he helped Maudie out of the truck he glanced at the sky, which appeared troubled: dark fleeces of clouds glided across the night, covering and uncovering a tangerine-colored moon. Matthew tucked Maudie into the huge, black-walnut four-poster, which still dominates the downstairs bedroom, and covered her with the Gypsy quilt.

‘How do you feel?’ he kept asking.

‘It was you got struck by lightning, not me,’ Darlin’ Maudie replied.

* * *

I still live in the town of Onamata, two miles south and west of Iowa City, a hundred miles east of Des Moines. I am the only person who knows the origin of the name Onamata; yet explain as I might, no one will pay the slightest attention to me. In Place Names of Iowa, Onamata is described thus: ‘Origin unknown. Possibly a corruption of the Black Hawk Indian word for magic. Town established 1909.’

Onamata now consists of thirty houses, a general store, a café, a Conoco service station, a John Deere subagent, and the Clarke & Son Insurance Agency, of which I was until recently the proprietor. My grandfather was the original Clarke, and my father the son. Then Matthew Clarke was the father and I was the son. Now I am the Clarke and there is no son. The agency fronts on the main street of Onamata, a hundred yards from the banks of the Iowa River, where the water runs placid, the color of green quartz. The false front of the insurance agency building is painted a vibrant peach. The building once housed a bank, and before that an undertaker. Underneath the peach paint can still be seen BANK OF ONAMATA, the dark letters looking as though they want to push themselves to the surface.

Only I know that long ago Onamata was called Big Inning. That was before the flood of 1908, before the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was erased from human memory for thirty-five years. When the Confederacy did resurface, its origins, history, and secrets were known only to my father. His knowledge of the Confederacy destroyed his life, and some say my knowledge of the Confederacy is destroying mine. Personally, I feel somewhat like a prophet, and prophets are meant to be derided and maligned.

I have spent the past seventeen years of my life trying to prove the existence of my inherited obsession. Whatever was done to erase the Confederacy wasn’t enough. Bits and pieces have survived, like rumors, like buried evil unearthed and activated.

My grandparents, Justin and Flora Clarke, retired to Florida in 1942, leaving my father the insurance business and the two-story white frame house with a wrought-iron widow’s walk centered by a tall silver lightning rod. From a distance the top of the house resembles the helmet of a medieval soldier.

Grant Wood, the world-famous Iowa artist, could have known my grandparents. They could have posed for American Gothic. They were dry, meticulous people. My grandfather retired precisely on his sixty-fifth birthday, which was a Wednesday. He had been forty-one and my grandmother thirty-nine when my father was born. There had been an older child named Nancy-Rae, born to them in their late twenties, who, shortly after her fourteenth birthday, when my father was a toddler, stole off in the dark of night, walked out to the highway, where someone they knew saw her hitchhiking toward Chicago, and disappeared from the face of the earth.

‘Our greatest sadness,’ was how my grandmother described the loss of my aunt Nancy-Rae.

I saw my grandparents only once. When I was about eight my father and I drove to spring training in Florida. I saw Curt Simmons, Robin Roberts, Allie Reynolds, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Yogi Berra, and my grandparents.

They lived in a very small house on a side street in Miami. There was an orange tree in the back yard. The house and my grandparents smelled of Listerine, peppermint, and Absorbine, Jr.

They left Iowa irrevocably behind them when they retired. They never returned for a visit, never invited anyone from Onamata to visit them, including us, I suspect, although my father never said so.

What he did say, on the drive back, as if he was trying to explain something to me but was not exactly sure what, was, ‘We are haunted by our past, which clings to us like strange, mystical lint. Of the past, the mystery of family is the most beautiful, the saddest, and the most inescapable of all. Those to whom we are joined by the ethereal ties of blood are often those about whom we know the least.’ I think he was talking about much more than just my grandparents.

I listened to my father’s tales with half an ear. I knew he was obsessed with something no one else cared about. He wrote letters, articles, talked of a book, which he eventually wrote. Complained. I didn’t pay half the attention I should have. Children, thinking themselves immortal, assume everyone else is, too. He died when I was a few months short of seventeen.

The morning after being struck by lightning, Matthew Clarke woke in the cavernous double bed in the front bedroom, one of his long arms draped over the frail shoulders of Darlin’ Maudie. He stirred slightly, his finger tips touching her ribs. At his touch she moved closer to him. He had to restrain himself from counting her ribs with his fingers, one, two, three. Her body felt cool as it curved against his.

He could see her back, the skin the soft brown of tanned leather; her ear, protruding through tangles of coal-colored hair, seemed anxious to be kissed.

Matthew remembered the carnival, the rain, the lightning, the drive home with Maudie, scruffy as a drowned muskrat, at his side. He recalled adding whiskey to the coffee he made in the spacious kitchen at the rear of the house. And later, Maudie wild with passion in the big bed, her nails sharp against his shoulders, their bodies slick under the quilts as their sweat blended.

As I listened to various versions of this story, time and again, told to me as other children were regaled with fairy tales, I was always embarrassed. I realized as I grew older that it was because, as with most children, I wanted to deny my parents’ sexuality. I reluctantly have to admit that even now as I recall my father’s voice I am embarrassed. It is only when I distance the story by using my own words that I am comfortable with the telling.

There is one part of the story that wasn’t embarrassing, only puzzling. On that morning when Matthew awoke with Maudie beside him, he awoke with an awareness of something he knew was going to become the most important element in his life, more important than his business, than his home, than even the strange, fragile girl who, next to him, trembled as she dreamed.

In Matthew Clarke’s brain, which that morning felt bright as chrome, full of white light and blinding metal, the complete history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was burned in, deep as a brand, vivid, resplendent, dazzling in its every detail.

Two weeks later, on a humid August afternoon in 1943, Darlin’ Maudie and Matthew Clarke were married at the stone courthouse in Iowa City.

‘I tell you, Gid, during those two weeks there was a terrible volume of mail from Onamata to Miami. Everybody within a ten-mile radius of Onamata felt it their duty to let the old folks know what I’d done. I’d not only moved a girl into the holy confines of my father’s house, but I’d moved in what was known as a ‘carnival girl.’ A few of the more morally indignant canceled their insurance policies with my agency, but only a few.

‘After the wedding, the same straight-backed, blue-nosed women who had written scurrilous things about me to my parents came pussyfooting around the house bearing casseroles, pies, good wishes, and wedding presents.

‘After I wrote to them about the wedding, my mother added a little postscript to her next letter. “We hope you’ll be very happy,” it said. They never sent a present, never met Maudie.’

The same week he was married Matthew was accepted as a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Iowa. He was accepted reluctantly, by a vote of three to two, strictly on his undergraduate record. At his interview he was bright-eyed and only moderately coherent as he babbled about writing a thesis on some kind of baseball league that had existed near Iowa City in the early 1900s. The majority of the committee blamed his exuberance and incoherence on the fact that he was to be married in a day or two.

‘By October he’ll be back to normal and we’ll convince him to write a thesis on the Civil War,’ said E. H. Hindsmith, the man who cast the deciding vote in Matthew’s favor.

In the months that followed, Matthew Clarke continued to operate his insurance business from the dusty-windowed storefront in Onamata, not soliciting business but gently reminding local people when their fire, auto, farm, or crop insurance was up for renewal. He accepted new business when it came to him.

‘My Joseph’s gettin’ married next month,’ a sturdy farmer might say, standing awkwardly in the office, which smelled of varnish and paper and held a large, rectangular, wax-yellow desk, a wooden filing cabinet, and two severe wooden chairs. ‘He’ll be around to see you about life insurance. That is, if you’ll be in Tuesday evening.’

‘If Matthew Clarke sends you a bill, you know it’s an honest one,’ people said. They also said, ‘Matthew Clarke could have made something of his life if he wasn’t so interested in those baseball teams of his.’ They also whispered, in the gentle, misty heat of Iowa summer, ‘Matthew Clarke had a wife but couldn’t keep her.’