Shoeless Joe

Three years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was a robin’s-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick,

“I have. He’s right here, sitting at my table.”

“Oh, really?” says Mark. I look sharply at Eddie. He becomes intent on watching the coffee dribble into the squat receptacle beneath the machine. “I guess he doesn’t have the nerve to tell you,” Mark goes on. “We’ve optioned your mortgage. At the end of sixty days, we own it. So unless you bring it up to date and keep it up to date, we have the legal right to foreclose. If you read your contract, you’ll find that the full amount of the mortgage becomes due if you fall even one day behind in your payments. We wouldn’t foreclose, of course, unless you left us with n

Building a baseball field is more work than you might imagine. I laid out a whole field, but it was there in spirit only. It was really only left field that concerned me. Home plate was made from pieces of cracked two-by-four embedded in the earth. The pitcher’s rubber rocked like a cradle when I stood on it. The bases were stray blocks of wood, unanchored. There was no backstop or grandstand, only one shaky bleacher beyond the left-field wall. There was a left-field wall, but only about fifty feet of it, twelve feet high, stained dark green and braced from the rear. And the left-field grass. My intuition told me that it was the grass that was important. It took me three seasons to hone that grass to its proper texture, to its proper color. I made trips to Minneapolis and one or two other cities where the stadiums still have natural-grass infields and outfields. I would arrive hours before a game and watch the groundskeepers groom the field like a prize animal, then stay after the game when in the cool of the night the same groundsmen appeared with hoses, hoes, and rakes, and patched the grasses like medics attending to wounded soldiers.

The vision of the baseball park lingered—swimming, swaying, seeming to be made of red steam, though perhaps it was only the sunset.

nsisted that Shoeless Joe was innocent, a victim of big business and crooked gamblers.

Was it really a voice I heard? Or was it perhaps something inside me making a statement that I did not hear with my ears but with my heart? Why should I want to follow this command? But as I ask, I already know the answer. I count the loves in my life: Annie, Karin, Iowa, Baseball. The great god Baseball

Ty Cobb picked Shoeless Joe as the best left fielder of all time.

“Oh, love, if it makes you happy you should do it.”

I don’t seem meant to farm, but I want to be close to this precious land, for Annie and me to be able to say, “This is ours.”

Annie chose me as her occupation.