Home News Stories Resurrecting the Single Wing Cornell at Auburn Scope Magazine Cornell ECP Links Contact

jerrygabriel.net Slump Elysian Fields Quarterly, Vol.18/No.1, January 2001 Brookwater's first error is impossible to forget. It came in the bottom of the seventh against Kentucky Fried Chicken-and they only had seven innings, these boys. The score was 3-4, and Brookwater's team-Rotary, they were called, after the international organization-was winning, but they were the visitors, so KFC had one last go at it, and they had baserunners on second and third and the top of their order at the plate. With the count at 2-2, the pitcher threw a fastball strike, a meaty pitch, and you could hear the loud crack as the ball came off the bat. He had gotten all there was to get of it, and it went straight up the middle, nearly taking out the pitcher, scudding hard overtop second base. Of course no one was surprised when the diving body of Sherman Brookwater disappeared into a cloud of dust behind second base and an instant later sprung upright with the ball transferring from glove to right hand. In nearly one motion, he looked back the base runner on third, and then was taking the step toward first to make the out. The boy who had hit the ball was not yet half way there. But then something happened. Brookwater released the ball too late, and it flew past the first basemen wide to the left-fifteen, maybe twenty feet wide. There was a very long moment of disbelief among those watching, a real quiet spreading over the place. And then it became a foot race. Rotary's first baseman, a kid easily twenty pounds overweight, turned to where the ball had gone and threw down his glove and started out after it; if Brookwater had run after it himself, he might have gotten there sooner. The base runner on third scored easily to tie the game, and the one on second came rounding third for home, his coach jumping up and down, swinging his arm in mad circles like some human version of a haywire timepiece. Through all of this, Brookwater stood where he had just seconds before thrown the errant toss. You could see it drain from him, whatever it was that had made him stand out. He watched as the first baseman finally reached the ball and turned to throw it home. He stood, impassive, holding his glove strangely at his side; it seemed not to contain a hand at all anymore, but some maimed limb. The throw to home was a good one and there was another cloud of dust, larger even than the one that had begun the play behind second base, but it did not even need to settle for Stewart Johnson, the behind-the-plate umpire, to make the call, for the ball had trickled out of the catcher's glove and it rolled right up against Stewart's foot. The boy was safe, and it was odd the way everyone immediately seemed to forget about that play and remember the other one. Brookwater was walking off the field by then. He went to the dugout where the second-string was sitting and presently the other fielders made their way in and sat as well, but all of them seemed to avoid getting too near Brookwater. He was not a big boy; nobody was ever afraid of Sherman Brookwater. It was more respect than fear that caused them to give him room to breathe. The coach said very little to the team. "We got General Electric on Tuesday," was really all he said, and the boys dispersed sullenly. Brookwater walked to the parking lot where his parents and his little brother were waiting in their truck, and then he climbed into the cab and his father drove them away. Soon the parking lot was nearly vacant, and as those cars emptied out onto Second Street, you couldn't mistake the feeling in the air. It seemed that no one felt quite right about what had happened, not even the boys on KFC, who had improved their record to 7-3 and moved into a tie for second place. I was the second base umpire that night, as I was most nights in those years. I remember that I stood next to the backstop afterwards and exchanged but a few words with Stewart Johnson, both of us, I think, a little dumbfounded by what had transpired. We didn't speak of it, though. We just looked at each other, our eyes big with surprise. We shook our heads. Stewart's wife pulled their El Camino into the lot. "See you tomorrow," he said finally. "Yep," I said. He walked over and he threw his chest protector in the bed and got inside and they pulled away. I leaned back against the mesh fence of the backstop then. The city park was nearly empty, all of those people going home to have dinner and watch television and talk about their days. I knew that at any moment I could go home myself-kiss my wife Helen, play with my daughter Jessica. I could take a cool shower and put on some shorts and maybe read for a while. There were plenty of things I could do or not do. I could go to sleep after midnight and wake late, because it was June, and school was out. But for a long time, I stood there, leaning against the backstop and looking out into the darkness coming on. I think I saw my life for a moment there without the blurring vision of someone living it, but from-not exactly outside it, but not completely in it, either. I saw, somehow, how it had unfolded, how I had ended up here and not there. I was still young, still close enough to the beginning to remember what some of the other paths might have been, but far enough down one of those paths to not be able to turn back, and it seemed strange to me for a moment that I was the man I was. It just seemed weird, being alive. And then I began to remember my own failures, my own blundered throws and catches, things I should have said but didn't, things I shouldn't have said but did-a full, if mostly innocuous chest of misadventures and shortcomings. In calling all this up, it occurred to me that I was just as much the man who had had fallen down those times as the one who'd gotten back up afterwards-that I was not just the figure masquerading through my life as me, but these other guys from along the way, too. Inexplicably, it was the beginning of Sherman Brookwater's slump that brought me to that. I think that I felt a terrible sense of dread for him that night. Being around children everyday as I am at the school, it's easy to forget the weight of it all, that immense desire to make the right choices, to separate yourself out, to become someone. His first error seemed emblematic of something much greater than it should have. I had a feeling already, that first night, that it would prove to be more than just an isolated event, that it would carry weight of its own. And as I watched each of those errors unfold over the following weeks, I understood that feeling no better, but saw that it was true. Out past centerfield was another field-the pony league field-and then beyond that, in descending order, the three things that had linked Falls with the rest of the world for 150 years-the highway, then the railroad tracks, and then the river. I hadn't ever thought of it quite like that, that if you wanted to get in or out of Falls, that's always been the way, right down the center of the valley, northwest toward the city. Cars were shuttling by on US 33 then-the only of the three avenues still in use-their lights coming on now against the fog creeping up the valley. I sat there a little longer, my mind drifting away from these things eventually, and when it was nearly dark, I walked to my truck and drove home. *** Some summer school flunkies saw Frank Brookwater down at the field with his two boys a lot that week. In the morning before work he'd apparently roust the boys out of bed and take them down there and he'd put Sherman out at second base, and his little brother Sheridan over at first. The sun would just be cresting the hills to the east of town and these summer-school boys-three of them, all part of the Hogben clan-they would be walking by the field and they'd see the Brookwaters out there practicing, and they'd sit down and have a dip of Skoal and watch. I saw these three Hogben boys one July day in the cafeteria-Wayne, Sutton, and Mike were their names, the first two brothers, the latter, their first cousin-and I sat with them. The cafeteria ran a small a la carte line in the summer months, for the students and teachers who had the misfortune of working, and for the painters and carpenters who were habitually at work somewhere on the grounds. I liked to go up there and get a ham and cheese sandwich and a coffee, maybe a Swiss Role, and talk to someone; I was generally by myself down in the shop, where I spent a lot of time in the summer because there was better equipment there than at my house. That summer, I was building a couple birdfeeders and a Shaker bed for my wife for Christmas. "Uh oh," Mike said as I sat my plate down. "Boys," I said. "Hey, Mr. Kern." "What's new?" I asked. "Nothing," Wayne said. And then his brother Sutton groaned. "Why you have to sit with us, man? The whole place is practically empty. We're not doing nothin wrong." The other two laughed. "Because," I said. "I want to know what's going on in your lives, how summer school is going. I'm not here to hassle you." He groaned again, but quickly went back to eating his hamburger, and the four of us made small talk for some time. These kids were trouble. Their parents were no good-not as citizens, not as parents, not as anything. The boys would most likely end up in some kind of trouble. At best, they would find work at the clay plant or for the sanitation department. At worst, they would frequent the Down Under Lounge and collect welfare and beat their wives, or something worse. I didn't ask them about Brookwater; they were talking about him among themselves. They were laughing about the idea of a dad-particularly their own-getting them out of bed to go practice in the morning. "You talking about Sherman Brookwater?" I asked. "I don't know," Sutton said. "Yeah, that's what the old man calls him. Sherman." "Sherman," Wayne said derisively. "He's got him practicing in the mornings, does he?" "I guess that's what you'd call it," Mike said. "He yells at him and makes him run laps and stuff." "And he hits big ole grounders at him," Wayne added. "Hard ones, like he's Reggie Jackson or someone." "Yesterday," Mike said. "He hit one so hard that it came up his arm and hit 'im in the face and give 'im an ugly ole black eye." "Yeah," Wayne added. "And just then, when that boy missed the ball, the old man goes over and leans against the fence like he's in pain, and then he says something like 'Go on an' git it'-like he's talking to someone on the other side of the fence. 'And do a lap.' Six-thirty in the morning, man. I'd like to see old Harlan Hogben say that to me." They all laughed uncontrollably. "Shoot," Sutton said finally. "And you can see his brother over there at first just lovin' it." They laughed again, and were still laughing when I got up and headed back toward the shop. *** Rotary played that Tuesday against General Electric and that was when Sherman Brookwater's slump began in earnest. He threw away three easy outs and duffed two more meekly-hit grounders. Afterwards he did not ride home with his family, but walked the mile and a half to his house. People saw him almost limping along Front Street, his head hanging low, his white uniform filthy; nobody knew if his dad had made him walk or if he had done it himself. I drove by him and offered him a ride, as I'm sure others had, but he never even looked up. Once the slump began, it was on for good, and it didn't take long for it to reach a point of completeness, a point of thorough and unequivocal failure. It was not possible really to fail worse, and by the time this became clear, everyone seemed dismayed, and seemed to hope that every time a ball flew off a bat that it would go to Sherman and that he would make the play and look this thing in the eye, and beat it. But he never did. He just seemed incapable of such a thing. During the afternoons of the slump that summer-this was late June and then all of July-I would see Sherman Brookwater at the library, because my wife worked there, and I would go there and read the paper in the hour before she got off, and then I would take her home. He was always in some new corner of the place, reading about Greek city-states or the northern lights or some other exotic topic. I would casually glance at the title of the book he was reading from across the room. He sometimes checked things out, but mostly he read them right there, and all day long. He read Hamlin Garland and Dickens and Isaac Asimov. Some days he would pull out the big Atlas and methodically go through all of the continents and countries and cities in the world, as if he were searching for one particular place-he worked with that sort of concentration, as if it were all just a search for one location. He was not known to be a good student or an especially strong reader. "He was in the middle of the class, maybe lower," a woman-had it been his fifth grade teacher?-once told a small group at a Rotary game. Many people spoke of this reading thing as if it were some sad manner in which he was dealing with his slump. It seemed natural enough to me. People saw him at the pool too-and on game days, which was widely known to be off-limits. But Sherman seemed to make a point of it. He would swim some laps-he was apparently a fair swimmer-and then get out and go rest up against the fence and talk to his friends, nearly as conspicuous as a lifeguard. "If you go to the pool on game day and so much as dip your foot into the water," Sherman's coach had said earlier that season, "you won't even pinch-run for my team." But there was Sherman, out in the open, doing a triple spring on the board (also illegal) and doing what the boys called "jays" so that the splash shot high into the air, as if from a whale's spout, drenching girls who were laying out or, if he hit a good one, drenching his friends on the other side of the fence. His coach knew; there's no way he couldn't have. But the only change in Sherman's position in the line-up was to be moved to shortstop for two games, a move that had no net effect on his fielding slump. By that point, everyone suspected that it would never end, and that it was now part of who he was. By the beginning of August, Sherman Brookwater was not really even playing much anymore. He would start the games, but his coach would substitute for him halfway through; it seemed only fair to give the second-string boys a chance. They couldn't, Sherman's coach reasonably argued, do any worse than Sherman Brookwater. After those games, you would see Sherman's dad walking away with Sherman, his arm over the boy's shoulder, tenderly guiding him toward the truck. His mother and brother would be walking with them, on the other side of Sherman, and Frank Brookwater would be speaking to Sherman. You wondered what a man could say to a boy who had failed like that, and it made me respect Frank Brookwater a whole lot the way he seemed to have come around. The last thing Sherman needed, after all, was his father berating him. As it was, it seemed like Sherman and his family had made peace with his failure. I don't believe, however, the same can be said about many of us who had been watching it happen. It was such an odd case, to see a boy with that sort of promise and natural ability lose it all as if by magic. For years, you would hear people talk about it. We shook our heads a great deal that summer. Finally, in early August, the season's last games-rain make-ups-were played. Rotary lost to the Shake Shoppe in their final game, 13-4, and ended the season with 8 wins and 12 losses. They had once been 8-1. They did not come in last place, because Central Oil had only won three games, but their failure seemed to transcend last place, to be something much worse than last. *** One day, years later, I came, I think, to understand the slump. The truth was-I believe-that Sherman Brookwater never had a slump. True, he made 28 errors-never, in fact, truly made a play after the one against KFC, not counting catching a few force outs at second. True, I saw every one of his errors happen and can verify for you that they did happen; I saw them with my better than twenty-twenty vision. But it was a supreme illusion. I believe that Sherman faked the slump, fabricated it, made it happen on his own volition. Why would a twelve year-old boy do that? I think I know. *** My daughter Jessica was a year younger than Sherman Brookwater and so through the years of Sherman's adolescence, I heard, from time to time, about his odd progress in life. I sat in the third row that very autumn in Falls High School's auditorium for County-wide History Day. I listened that afternoon to Sherman give a ten minute presentation on the German V2 Rockets and their use late in World War II, a presentation for which he was awarded a blue ribbon. I had never heard of any use of rockets in the war and thought for one strange moment that he might have made it all up and fooled everyone. The following Monday, though, I looked it up in the encyclopedia in our high school's library, and saw that such rockets had indeed existed, very much the way Sherman had characterized them. The spring following the summer of Sherman's slump, when sheets were passed around at school for baseball sign-up, Sherman did not, apparently, raise his hand for one. At the time, surely some of the other boys said something to him; it is impossible for me to know. To be fair, a lot of boys dropped out of baseball between sixth and seventh grade. Those who stayed had to jump up into the next league and face boys as old as sixteen. It was not entirely odd for a boy to gracefully bow out of the sport at that age, and though he was an exceptional example, people seemed to take it in stride, as an almost predictable thing: Sherman Brookwater had lost his confidence and he would never get it back, not in baseball at least. He was smart in a way to leave it behind, people said. Something like that could trail you around your whole life if you weren't careful. By the summer before he was a freshman, he was practically invisible-at least according to my daughter, who, as a teenager girl, might have blown things a little out of proportion. That summer would have been his last in the city recreational league. To my knowledge, he never played another game at the city park after Rotary's last game there three years before; he had that night dropped a pop fly, duffed a grounder, and tripped over second base on an attempted double play. He spent his freshman year as a Kiwanis exchange student, studying in Guadeloupe, and the year following, he was a student of mine for a semester. Among the two or three projects he made in that class, the best was a quite professional-looking metal ruler. During the time he was my student, we never spoke outside of class. The urge struck me more than once to ask him into my office, but I don't know what I might have said to him. If he remembered me, he never made any indication of it. In class, he would answer my questions as well as any of the other kids-questions about protective equipment and operating the lathe. Shop class is not a difficult business. Sherman Brookwater, a little to my surprise, did not seem a particularly sullen or insecure boy. I couldn't help but remember the kid who had become so accustomed to failure that he seemed to know it was about to happen; the two boys-the older and younger Shermans-seemed completely different people. He got an A in my class. I checked his records on the computer and discovered that he got As in most of his classes. He had clearly grown to be a bright young man. I remember later that year seeing him standing in the hallway near the auditorium during lunch, talking in fluent French with Mrs. Jackson, our languages teacher. It was intimidating in some strange way that he could do that, that he could just walk away from this place and learn to make sounds that we could not understand. I felt some inexplicable confusion about that-almost an anger. *** When Sherman was a senior, just months before he left Falls for a large university in Colorado, I had one more run-in with him. It was mid-spring, coming up on six years since the summer of his slump. I had been asked by Steve Walters, one of our gym teachers, if I could cover his eighth period class; his son had a last minute doctor's appointment. In exchange, he would cover my first period the following Monday, and I could sleep in for fifty more minutes. It was a fine trade, the kind of thing that went on regularly among the two of us, and among many other teachers as well. They were playing softball, he told me. All I had to do was observe; the boys did the same thing everyday, and they knew what to do. There were three games going on and I wandered among them as they played. It had rained earlier in the day, and it was a little muggy for April, but nice, too. Good baseball weather, really. It was toward the end of the period that it happened. I was watching from well behind centerfield when I recognized him, and I believe it was not his face that I recognized, but the way he paced around in between pitches, for I was too far off to see any of his features well. I casually shifted over toward the first base line of that game, next to the football field's visiting bleachers, and I leaned up against the structure and checked my watch. Time was short. The class was the last of the day-the last of the week-and my wife and I were having dinner with some friends that night, and I was thinking about that as I stood there. There were runners on first and third and the game's pace had picked up a little because the boys knew time was short, too, and, I gathered from their cheers, the team at bat was down by just a run or two. The next batter was a lefty, thin and wiry-looking, whose name I don't think I ever knew. He swung hard at the first pitch and pulled a line drive just foul down the first base line. The ball hit the ground twice and then bounced up in what we used to call a candy hop and landed squarely in my hands. Some of the boys applauded my stop as I threw the ball back to the pitcher, and I feigned modesty. The next pitch was a slow, high-arcing thing that took forever to reach the batter, but when it finally did, the boy took another strong cut, and tore into the ball, sending another shot toward first base, this time on the fair side of the line. It was something between a line-drive and a fly ball, this hit, and, I remember thinking, it seemed that it would turn into a very nice single, or possibly even a double if he were a fast boy. But then I saw the figure of Sherman Brookwater explode; he seemed to be doing something more than running, he moved so quickly. He was coming straight toward me, as the ball would soon be dropping very close to where I stood. All of this passed much quicker than the time it will take to tell it. I watched as Brookwater ran this ball down, somehow beating it to the spot. I could hear the exhalations of his breath and then, as he dove hard onto the damp playing field, I could hear the soft grunt he made when he landed. An instant later, he held the ball in his glove, his arm extended above his supine body. But the play was not over, and in the next instant, he sprung up and in an adult version of the wonder I had witnessed all those years before, and turned and threw a perfect strike-across his body, off balance, maybe thirty-five yards-to the third baseman, catching the baserunner who had not tagged up. It was a double play-I had seen him make many of those once upon a time-and the throw ended the inning. But there was a moment afterwards in which things moved much slower and in that time I heard boys shouting and the distant whistle of a girl's gym class and the sound of a ball hitting a bat in one of the other games. Also in that time, Sherman Brookwater turned and looked to me and told me the whole story with a single glance. In that brief glance, Sherman Brookwater gave me to understand the mystery I had turned over in my mind those years, and I immediately began calling up the images of Sherman making the errors he had made. No one was closer than I for most them. I had seen them and with what I felt was good judgment. But never did I imagine what became clear to me then. As I replayed them in my mind-one by one they came back, as if they had been my own-I watched his eyes, his hands, his head, and I saw the discrepancy between what I'd seen and what I'd thought I'd seen; it was a horrific realization. He had, I realized, made them on purpose. He had closed his eyes, turned his glove, tripped himself. It wasn't something I would ever be able to explain to another person. No one would believe it. I stood there and I think I mouthed the word Jesus, but not to anyone; Sherman had already turned his back on me, and was jogging off the field. I turned toward the row of white pine that separated the school grounds from Hancock Street. I put my hands on my head and just closed my eyes for a minute. "It's time to go in," a boy said next to me, holding up his arm for me to see his digital watch. "You need to blow the whistle." I looked to the boy and then reached to my neck and took hold of the string and pulled the whistle over my head and I gave it to him. He looked at me, confused. "You blow it," I said. "Would you?" He continued to stare, as if he weren't quite sure who or what I was. "Blow it, damnit," I said, not looking at him this time. Then he did and I heard its piercing screech and the ensuing low rumble of sixty-five kids running across the turf. It was as if it had all been for me, I thought. It felt like that-that Sherman Brookwater's elaborate vanishing act: the slump, but everything else too-had been solely for me. I squeezed my fists white. In the locker room, Brookwater was seated, pulling on his shoes. The din of noise was monstrous, lockers slamming and the weightroom stereo tuned into a crackly hard rock station and random cheers and laughs and showers running. Nobody paid any attention to me when I walked in. I approached him immediately. "You've got it all wrong," I told him. He didn't hear me, or pretended not to. "Sherman," I said. He looked up from where he was tying a shoe. "Huh?" "It's wrong," I repeated. Now he sat up, his shoes tied. "I'm sorry?" "You can't just fake something like that," I said. "You can't just kill a part of yourself." But I knew as I said it that I was dead wrong, that people did that everyday, that I had done it myself more than once. He squinted at me, as if I were very small and he were trying to see me. "I'm not sure what you're talking about, Mr. Kern," he said. "But I don't believe I've killed anything." He looked genuinely bewildered that I would be talking about killing things, and it seemed, somehow, that he had just wanted me to know-who knows why. Because he rightly suspected that it mattered to me. But he had nothing to gain by explaining it all now, six years after the fact, how he had sabotaged himself. Why. He had done it, and it had changed his future as he knew it would. And now, it seemed, it was possibly going to change mine, too. In some small way, this was going to uproot how I thought about my life, though I don't think Sherman really meant for that to happen. It just did. The bell rang then and boys went running in all directions, and the last of the showers was finally turned off. Sherman stood up to leave and grabbed three books from the top shelf of his locker. He paused there for just a moment, an act of courtesy. I wasn't looking at him anymore, though, just at the ground. I shook my head. "Have a good weekend, Sherman," I told him. "Forget about it." "All right," he said. "Have a good weekend, Mr. Kern." And then I watched him walk around the corner, and when he disappeared through the door, something made me follow him. When I got to the door that led outside, I saw that he had already descended the stairs along the stadium and was walking on the track toward the locked gate along Mulberry Street, the place where trucks could enter the field if they needed to. I walked along the top row of the stadium and then leaned against its back wall and watched as he walked around the track, that unmistakable way of moving that even adolescence hadn't robbed him of. When he got to the gate, he started to squeeze through the small opening where the chain locking the two bars together wasn't quite taut. He threw his books onto the concrete sidewalk on the other side, and then stuck his right foot through, and for a moment, he had his feet pointing in opposite directions, like the figures in Egyptian paintings. He turned his head to the side then, so that he could fit it through, and then he slowly moved it past the bars. Finally, he pulled his other leg through, and reached down and picked up his books, and began walking up Mulberry Street, and as he was just about to disappear from me forever, I wasn't even thinking about where he would be going. I was wondering how he had gotten through the gate. He had made it seem as if that thing hadn't been meant to stop anyone from coming in or going out.