All the Fields (2015)

Fond memories of Virginia and my last year in professional baseball with the Mets’ Triple-A club in Norfolk stay with me like a sweet dream. I remember the wild ponies on Assateague Island, bream and bluegill in the freshwater ponds and streams, flounder and sea trout in the tidal waters, and oyster and scallops in Chesapeake Bay. I remember how the sun flamed the horizon orange as it set over the Blue Ridge Mountains, and how the mist settled like cotton over the Shenandoah Valley at dawn. I remember walking the streets in the cities of Richmond and Williamsburg, the towns of Marion and Lynchburg, recalling the first heartbeat of a nation. I was a hot property at the time, one step away from the majors.

When I put my name on my first professional contract, my father was there in the locker room with me. So were my teammates, my college coach, Paul Tatum, and reporters from the press and TV.

“A dream come true,” my father said.

Growing up in a small town among fields of wheat, he’d had dreams of his own. Vietnam had interrupted those dreams, and a piece of shrapnel, which had lodged in his throwing arm, had ended them.

I didn’t know then how much my success meant to my father. Often he would come home from work exhausted and still find the energy to practice with me for hours at a time. Serious and demanding, he accepted nothing less than my best effort. I found it tough not to comply. How could I not give my all when he gave me everything he had?

For the gift of competitiveness, I am eternally grateful. But from him I also learned to seek praise instead of affection, always trying to please, putting undue pressure on myself. And though he never physically abused me, when he withheld that praise, used it as a weapon, it hurt me as much as any beating I could have suffered.

My father met my mother a dozen years after returning from Vietnam. They moved into a house in Oak Grove, a suburb of Minneapolis, one of the thousands of suburbs that mush- roomed throughout the country in the housing explosion of the fifties and sixties.

A year after my parents bought the house, my brother, Rick, was born. I arrived two years later. The delivery was long and difficult; my mother could not have another child, never have the daughter she always wanted, so ours was a household of boys, of scratches and scrapes, of Band-Aids and grass stains. Meals were timed to coincide with the ends of practices and games, the food often kept warm until seven or eight in the evening. I can’t ever remember a time when my mother complained, or a time when I wasn’t playing ball.

Blessed with a dark beauty and an uncanny eye for details, my mother was our umpire. An avid reader not only of books but also of people, she was able to see the curves, detect the subtle changes in the rhythm and flow of life. She mediated disputes, settled arguments, allowed our childhood to play itself out as if it were one long, endless summer game, each moment an inning, each inning another year to be savored and remembered.

She made certain we never went to school hungry or with torn or dirty clothes, and––though we never had much money—she always found enough for that new glove or shiny pair of spikes. I recall days when the aroma of apple pie filled the house; how she used to bake extra strips of dough and sprinkle cinnamon on them. At night she often opened the family scrap- book and told us stories about my grandfather, my namesake, Michael Collins, a pitcher so feared for his blazing fastball that even today his name is mentioned with reverence in town leagues throughout the state. From my mother I developed a love of stories and a dreamer’s spirit, a spirit that was easily wounded in the skirmishes of life.

Before we were old enough for organized leagues, my father hung an old tire from the oak tree in our backyard, and I would spend hours trying to throw balls through its center. Each evening in the summer, after dinner, he would take Rick and me to the field across the street, where we would throw and catch until dark.

It seemed natural that my brother, Rick, would become a catcher. Shorter and stockier than me, with my father’s blond hair and complexion, he had a catcher’s physique and temperament. Besides, I was left-handed and, in the beginning, too small to catch my big brother’s throws. Later, as I grew taller and stronger and could get some leverage on my fastball, one could hear the pop of baseball against leather in the quiet of the neighborhood at dusk as I hummed fastball after fastball into Rick’s mitt.
My brother was serious and thoughtful, slow to anger, willing to take the everyday bumps and bruises a catcher had to endure without so much as a whimper. Once, in Little League, when a foul tip left the bone protruding grotesquely from his index finger, he calmly walked over to the coach and told him someone would have to catch the next inning while he got his finger splinted. Even as he held his broken finger out to the coach and his teammates gagged, Rick blinked back the tears. He was more like Dad in that respect, keeping his feelings hidden, no matter how painful.

When I was twelve, my father was driving a semi from coast to coast, trying to keep his fledging trucking firm afloat. In the winter he would often be gone for weeks. It was on one of those rare occasions when he was home, the night after he had returned from a two-week trip, that I awoke to voices. It was two o’clock in the morning.
I got out of bed and wandered into the hallway, walking barefoot across the soft carpet to the iron railing at the head of the stairs, dressed in my pajamas, my eyes gradually adjusting to the light. I stood listening for a time, concentrating, hearing little of what was being said, noting only that the tone was serious. I wanted to get closer even if it meant that I might be seen.

Heart thumping, I descended the stairs that led down to the dining room, taking care to avoid the creak in the loose board on the third step from the bottom. From there I inched along the wall to my left until I came to the kitchen door, al- ways slightly ajar because it sat crooked on its hinges. I could see clearly through the crack between the doorjamb and door. The two of them were sitting at the kitchen table; my mother’s voice was soothing.

“It’s going to be okay, hon.”

“It’s no use. We just can’t save enough to get the business off the ground.”

“Give it a little more time,” she said. “I know it’s what you want.”

There was a momentary silence. Worried that they knew I was listening, I considered making my way quickly up the stairs to my room, but my feet felt too heavy to move.
Then my father said, “You want to know what I think sometimes, Rose? Sometimes when I’m driving along some country road in the middle of nowhere? I think about never coming back. I really think about it. I hate myself for it, but it’s true.”

I saw my mother get up and put her arms around his head, drawing him to her breast as she would a child. “We’re going to make it, Carl. You’ll see.” And then I heard something that I had never heard before, something that I never heard again. I heard my father cry.

In that instant, tears brimming in my own eyes, I ran into the kitchen and threw my arms around his neck. I told him how much I loved him; how I would always be good, always do my best, always do what he wanted, if he promised he would never go away.

I remember his look of utter astonishment and then his smile, which seemed to work its way through his tears. Embracing me in his thick arms, he said, “Don’t worry, son. I’m not going anywhere.”

My father kept his word.

I didn’t.

Perhaps if I hadn’t met Laura, things could have been different between us. I don’t know.