Twelfth Angel Read online

  I pointed up at the scoreboard high above our heads in center field and actually smiled. “Remember how our dads had to climb that ladder alongside the scoreboard platform and post the score, inning by inning? The parents would draw for that duty before the game, and the person whose name was drawn, the ‘loser’ he was called, was given the numbers on wooden squares, and he would climb that ladder after each inning and hang the proper number of runs scored.”

  “They’re still doing it, John.”

  I walked slowly toward the infield until I was standing at my old position, shortstop. Bill stepped back on the grass to the left of where second base would be and we stared at each other. Suddenly and impulsively I slapped my hands together, crouched as if to field a hard-hit ground ball, swept it up in my hands and tossed the invisible ball to Bill, who had moved over and was standing on “second base.” He reached up as if to take my throw, turned and threw toward where first base would be. Double play! I applauded.

  Arm in arm we walked slowly toward the pitcher’s mound. “Look at the grandstands,” I said with a sigh. “They haven’t changed them a bit! Twenty or so rows high, from behind third base all around the wire backstop behind home plate to just behind first base. Wow!”

  Bill nodded. “Seating capacity hasn’t changed. Those grandstands hold slightly under a thousand fans. Not bad for a town of only five thousand. Let’s go have a seat,” he said, pointing to the dugout behind third base.

  “Now those are different,” I said. “We just had benches, but these are real concrete dugouts, sunk into the ground with steps up to the playing field and a roof overhead. Big-league stuff!”

  We stepped down into the dugout and sat on the wide green bench. “The field is in great shape,” I said. “This place must get a lot of tender loving care.”

  “Yes, they’re just about ready for the season’s start in three weeks. Tryouts are this Saturday morning. The field is ready—but I’m afraid the league isn’t.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, with the exception of one year in the past twenty, we’ve always been able to come up with enough kids to fill our four-team league with at least twelve players on each squad, and it looks like we’ll have enough personnel again this year, just barely.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “John, my two boys are now in college, so it has been many years since they were involved in Little League. I can’t say the same for their father. As you remember, it is tough for many of the players’ dads to offer their services as coach or manager because they have jobs that would make it difficult for them to be at most practice sessions, whereas I pretty much make my own hours. So each year I continue to offer my services as coach, and if any of the four team managers can use me, well, I’m his for the season.”

  “Bill, I think that’s great. With your knowledge of the program and experience dealing with these kids I’m certain you’re a great asset to any team.”

  “I hope so,” he said. “Anyway several months ago Tom Langley, whose boy was the league’s all-star catcher last year, had been selected by the league president and board members to be one of the four managers this year, and he asked me to assist as coach. I agreed of course. Then my angina acted up, and I was pretty sure I’d be out of it this year, if not forever. But when I heard about your … your trouble, I had to come home in case I could help in any way, and now there’s another reason for staying. The league needs me. It seems that Langley was promoted by his company, a month ago, and has already put his house up for sale and moved to Atlanta. So, one of our teams needs a manager, and there’s not much time.”

  We had been friends for many years. I was almost positive I could sense what was coming. Bill leaned close to me and said, “John, remember I told you that I needed a favor?”

  I couldn’t look at him. “I thought you just wanted to take me for a ride.”

  Bill chuckled. “Well, I do in a way. A twelve-game ride. The league officers were a little bit intimidated by your position and success and were hesitant to contact you, especially in light of your great loss, so I offered to explore with you the possibility of your managing a Little League team this year.”

  “Old friend,” I said sadly, “I can’t even manage my own breakfast, much less deal with a dozen hyperactive kids straining to break loose from parental authority. I could never do it.”

  “John, we’re all convinced you would make a fine Little League manager. With your background you are familiar with the program and its goals, would be a wonderful teacher and role model and your players would certainly learn plenty from your baseball savvy as well as how to handle victory, defeat, and how to treat your teammates and your opponents. I remember a lot about you, my friend. I know the kids would love you.”

  “But that love has to flow both ways, Bill, and I’m afraid all of mine is now buried in Maplewood Cemetery.”

  “I’ll help you, John. I’m a damn good coach. And now that Millennium has given you the summer off, this would be a great way to fill your time for the next couple of months. Might be the best kind of therapy for you, old friend.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry,” I muttered, “I just can’t do it.”

  Bill stood, walked slowly up the dugout steps and headed toward home plate. Suddenly he paused, turned toward me and said, “John … our last year of Little League together. Remember it? We went undefeated. League champions. Do you happen to recall our team’s name?”

  “Of course I do. We were the Angels.”

  Bill nodded. “Well, that happens to be the team that doesn’t have a manager this year!”

  I closed my eyes for I don’t know how long. Then I heard myself asking, “Did you say tryouts were on Saturday morning?”

  Bill leaned toward me and said softly, “Saturday at nine. Please consider it, John. I’ll drop by around eight-thirty in case you’ve changed your mind, okay?”

  “What day is today?”

  “Thursday.”

  I was several steps behind Bill as we walked slowly on the thick green grass toward the right-field opening and parking lot. Suddenly I saw Bill stumble, quickly regain his balance and reach down. When he turned, he was holding the most bruised, battered and weathered baseball I had ever seen. He placed the ball in my hand and turned away without saying a word.

  IV

  I couldn’t bring myself to go inside, after Bill dropped me off at my front door, so I circled around to the rear of the house and walked across the lawn toward the meadow. Dense clusters of tiger lilies in full bloom formed their own aimless and natural maze all the way back to the tree line, and already a dozen or so tall wild blueberry bushes were covered with white blossoms. I stepped closer to one of the bushes and rubbed the palm of my hand gently against the frail flowers. Sally and Rick and I had walked this same path before we had even moved in, and I still remember how excited Sally had become when I showed her the blueberry plants. She had waved both arms high in the air, extended outward to include every nearby bush, and shouted, “You two guys pick them when they’re ripe and I promise to bake all the pies and muffins you can eat!”

  After gently snapping off a tiny branch of buds and placing it in my shirt pocket, I walked hesitantly down a small slope to the oval pond and sat on the same flat granite boulder, at water’s edge, that the three of us had shared that day. We had been told by the realtor that there were both perch and bass in the water, and I had promised Rick that soon after we moved in, he would have his own fishing rod and I would teach him how to use it. I never got the chance.

  When I finally returned to the house, I entered through a side door of the attached two-car garage and tapped the overhead light switch. Since I hadn’t driven my Lincoln in more than three weeks, I walked around it slowly, checking to be certain that none of the tires had gone soft. The other parking stall, of course, was now empty. Except for two tiny brown oil spots on the cement floor, there was no sign that a car had ever parked there. Along the left wall, ne
arest the hallway entry to the kitchen, was Rick’s red twenty-inch still-scratch-free Huffy “Street Rocker” bicycle, his seventh-birthday present.

  In the kitchen I made myself a cup of instant coffee to wash down what had become almost a daily diet: saltine crackers and peanut butter. As I sat at the antique pine harvest table that Sally had insisted on buying, with its matching six chairs, after she had learned that it had been made before George Washington took his first oath of office, I found myself staring at that unique and decorative piece of needlework called a sampler that was facing me on the kitchen wall. More memories. Some were of my beloved mother, sitting in her wicker rocker after the day’s work was done, humming softly as she cross-stitched rows of alphabets, flowers, country landscapes, fruit, and even entire poems on face-towel-size squares of tea-dyed linen, using threads of every color imaginable. Her patience, when handling the tiniest of details, as well as her talent, had won scores of ribbons at county fairs throughout New Hampshire despite some very tough competition.

  The sampler in our kitchen, consisting of twelve rows of different-style letters of the alphabet, both upper and lower case, had been my mother’s wedding gift to Sally and me and it had hung in every kitchen we had ever occupied throughout our married life. “Some people hang old horseshoes in their home for good luck,” Sally had once told my mother, “but in our house it’s the precious sampler you gave us.” In none of our many kitchens, through the years, had it looked as much at home as it did in this country setting. At the bottom of the framed piece, framed but with no glass—“like they did it in the old days,” I remember my mother saying—was her name and date when the work had been completed, Elizabeth Margaret Harding, August 1954. I had been all of four years old.

  Sitting in that very still kitchen, sipping coffee and making cracker crumbs, I was staring almost hypnotically at the busy sampler I had lived with for so many years of my life when I suddenly remembered how my mother had always dealt with death, even the loss of my father. Mom was very religious, and whenever there was a death in Boland, of either a stranger or a friend, she would make it a point to attend the wake, whether it was at a funeral home or at the person’s house. When I was very young, she would often take me along rather than leave me in our neighbor’s care. Now, sitting in my kitchen with her sampler before me, it was easy to remember how she went about comforting those in mourning. I’m pretty certain that her powerful words of consolation never changed throughout the years, and recently I caught myself using them to accompany my sympathy at a friend’s loss.

  My mother, after embracing the grieving spouse or child or parent, would say, very gently, “You must cry no more. Wipe away your tears. Just remember that where your Robert is now, he wouldn’t change places with any of us!”

  I leaned forward and buried my head in my arms. John, I could almost hear my mother’s soft voice again, you must cry no more. Wipe away your tears. Just remember, please, that where your Sally and Rick are now, they wouldn’t change places with any of us!

  On Friday morning I was awakened by the guttural roar of power mowers. Bobby Compton and his Homestead Landscaping crew were doing their weekly thing. Instead of pulling the pillow over my head, as I had done in the past few weeks, I rolled out of bed, showered, shaved, put on fresh blue jeans and a clean sport shirt and went outside to greet Bobby. When he saw me, he put down his weed trimmer and hurried toward me, extending his hand and saying, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Harding.”

  I nodded. “Thanks, Bob.”

  “We’ve been mowing here each Friday, even though I didn’t have any luck trying to contact you. Was that okay?”

  “Of course. I’m glad I’ve got you. The place looks great!”

  “Is there anything special you’d like done?”

  “No, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  “Mr. Harding, I ran into Mrs. Kelley at the village store yesterday. She’s awful worried about you. Said she’s come by here several times and also tried to phone you often but had no luck.”

  Rose Kelley had been hired by Sally to be our one-day-a-week cleaning lady. Within only a few weeks we had grown to love her, had virtually adopted her into our family. Rick had even begun calling her Nana.

  “Thanks, Bob. I’ll get in touch with her. You guys have a good day.”

  “You, too, sir.”

  I had orange juice, coffee, and two dry bagels before calling Rose.

  “Mr. Harding, oh, dear God, it’s so good to hear your voice again!”

  “It’s good to hear yours, too. I miss you and I know I need you. Please forgive me for not calling you before this.…”

  “Oh, I understand, sir.”

  “Anyway, the place is getting messy and dusty. I haven’t done much around here since … since …”

  “I know, and I’m so sorry. How about today? Can I come now, or would it inconvenience you?”

  “Now is fine … or come whenever you like. Just knock hard on the front door, Rose. There’s something wrong with the doorbell.”

  She was at the front door in less than twenty minutes. After a long hug and a few tears, she straightened her green bandanna and headed for the downstairs broom closet. Although Rose was over sixty and couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds, she was incredibly strong and she proved it again by the way she muscled our powerful vacuum cleaner through every room in the house. Before dark, with only a short pause to eat a small lunch she had brought, as always, in a paper bag, the place was looking immaculate. When the old girl came into my studio, to say good night, I jumped up, went over to her and kissed her cheek.

  “Next week?” she asked. “Thursday as usual?”

  I held out my hand. In it was a duplicate house key that Sally and I, only days before the accident, had discussed giving her. “Thursday is fine. And now you’ve got your own key so that whenever I’m not here you can still come in and take care of business, okay?”

  She nodded and her eyes grew moist. Then she bit her lower lip several times, inhaled deeply and said, “Mr. Harding, as I was going around cleaning, there were … ah … there were lots of Sally’s things, here and there, you know. I didn’t know how to ask you what you wanted done with them, so I just kind of left everything where it was.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll do some picking up, although I’m afraid that even after everything of hers is put away, she will still be in every room.”

  Now there were tears running down Rose’s cheeks. “And I didn’t know what to do in the child’s room either, so I just made the bed, put some toys in the toy box and dusted.”

  “Thanks, Rose. See you next week.”

  I returned to my desk and sat, chin in the palms of both hands. What was I doing? Maintaining the grounds? For what? Dusting and vacuuming the house? Rick’s toys being picked up? Why? What difference did it make? Damn! Damn! I jerked open the lower-right-hand desk drawer and stared at the ugly loaded gun. Same old questions exploding in my head. What was there to live for? Who was there to live for? Who? On my desk was the aged brown baseball, its cover cut and scuffed, that Bill had stumbled over and handed me as we were leaving the baseball park. I picked it up and held it against my cheek. Oh, God, please help me!

  V

  On Saturday morning I had already walked down the driveway and was leaning on my mailbox, waiting, when Bill pulled up in his old Buick. He looked both surprised and pleased at seeing me but said nothing as we rode along, for at least five minutes. Then, still staring straight ahead, he shook his head several times and said, “I’m very proud of you, old buddy.”

  “Well, I think it would be wise if you withhold judgment for now. I’m not sure I know what I’m doing or whether I’ll be able to see this thing through. The odds are great, Bill, that I’m probably going to let you down and run away from this commitment, and sooner rather than later. You’ve got to understand and be ready if I can’t hack it.”

  Bill reached down and handed me a Masonite clipboard that had been next to
him on the car seat. “I typed up a list of all the player applicants last night so that you can make notes while you’re evaluating the various kids in the tryout. That red number before each name will be on a piece of heavy paper pinned to the back of each boy’s shirt, which should make it easier for the coaches and managers who are judging talent to identify the kids and jot down their opinions and ratings for each of them. We’re trying it this year for the first time. Should make the Monday-night player draft a lot easier and certainly speed it up.”

  “And what’s this other number, the one after each name?” I asked.

  “That’s the boy’s age. Just to refresh your memory, the magic date is August first. Kids must be nine before that date and not thirteen until after that date in order to play—ages nine to twelve, as it has always been. By sheer chance we happen to have no nine-year-old applicants this year, but there’s a good mix of tens, elevens, and twelves.”

  “Some of these names are underlined. What’s that all about?”

  Bill grinned. “Well, I figure the other three managers have a little jump on you since they’ve lived here for years and know most of the kids. Also, they all managed last year, so they’ve got a pretty good reading on the available talent. The names I underlined are the twelve kids I think are the most outstanding athletes. The three names with double underlines are the best three pitchers, at least as I remember their performances from last year. But this is your team,” he said, patting my knee, “and your flock of Angels will all have been selected by you.”

  “However, you will share your expert opinion with me, correct?”

  “If you ask for it,” he said, smiling.

  As soon as we stepped out of the car, in the Little League parking lot, I could hear them—the children—shouting, laughing, calling out to their fellow players, accompanied by an almost rhythmic thump of baseballs being caught in leather gloves. It was still early, but obviously most of the playing candidates were already on the field doing whatever they believed was necessary to attract some manager or coach’s attention.