Called Home

This week’s new flash fiction is out now in The Under Review sports lit journal. For baseball’s Opening Day.

Called Home

My dad was a great man. Let’s start with that. But this story is about my Uncle Donald. I had some of his DNA, sure, but the gene we shared completely was baseball.

My father did not like the game. There was no baseball in Krakow. As a boy he knew only soccer. And Nazis, of course. He associated baseball with the free-swinging American soldiers who liberated him. He loved America, that went without saying. But he didn’t like being rescued.

Uncle Donald had no such baggage. But then he’d grown up in Milwaukee, spending carefree summers on the sandlot. My mom and he had an easy American life. He went into the most American of all trades. Sales. Not a trade at all. Making nothing. Except promises. False promises my father would say. But to my dad’s credit he saw my connection with his flashy brother-in-law and never got in the way.

He wasn’t threatened. This was the true measure of my old man. And he knew only he could break the news to me that rainy April Friday in 1959. I wouldn’t be attending the game with Donald as planned. It was to be my first in person. Opening day for my beloved Yankees. I was aware enough last fall to celebrate their 18th World Championship right about the time of my 8th birthday. But there would be no game today. And not only due to weather, though ultimately the game would be rained out. It was Donald. Never woke up that morning. Aunt Gigi said he just lay there. Handsome as ever. Handsome as a sheik.

A victim of his times. A workday of sales lunches, highballs, Chesterfields and rib roast. His only aerobic exercise was flicking his lighter, or swatting Gigi on the behind whenever she passed.

It was my first pass with death.

The funeral was Sunday afternoon. 3:30. So there would be plenty of time to clear the church after the last weekly mass. After a second day of rain, opening day had been rescheduled for 2:00 that day. Of all days.

I had my father’s new Motorola transistor, with its long white cord and single-bud earphone, and nothing could keep me from listening in. We arrived at the church early. I plugged in and slipped away from the family. Into the sanctuary. At 3:00 the coffin was wheeled in front of the altar on a folding metal gurney, then draped in a long, woven shroud. I crawled in underneath. Hidden. I was determined to keep our date.

The Yankees took and held a 2-0 lead on a pair of run-scoring singles from Throneberry and McDougald. Boston was diluted that day. The great Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, was home nursing a crick in his neck.

Shortly after 3:30, all rose in the church. No doubt my mother had scurried off to look for me. The priest began his incantations. I shifted my cramping leg. The side of my head caught against the underside of the coffin and my cord unplugged. Just then the sixth inning ended. Phil Rizzuto, in just his third year in the booth, briefly shilled for Ballantine beer, extolling its lightness and flavor, then handed over the reins for the seventh inning to the estimable Mel Allen. It was his mellifluous Alabama cadence that boomed throughout the church from my unmuted radio.

“Hello there everybody. First half of the seventh inning, it’s the Red Sox top of the order.”

The priest was, of course, a conduit for omnipotence. But he knew how to read a room, and how to recognize another formidable benevolent force at work. He stood quietly still, as did they all, listening to Turley quickly retire the Bosox in the seventh. Then as Mel let us know the crowd in the Bronx stood and stretched, the father and his flock of mourners did the opposite. He simply closed his Bible, and he and they took their seats, his on the side of the altar, theirs in what passed for the bleachers. And we all listened as “The Voice of the Yankees” ushered my uncle to his heavenly home. Flipped down the slatted wood stadium seat. Dusted it off with a handheld whisk broom. And let him settle in for eternity.