Box Socials

Box Socials

BY W. P. KINSELLA

Copyright

The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Copyright © W. P. Kinsella 1996

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

An early version of Chapter One was published as a chapbook by William Huffer Standard Editions of Vancouver under the title, Chapter One: from a Novel in Progress, 1989

The Epigraph is reprinted from The Silver DeSoto by permission of Council Oaks Books, copyright © 1987 by Patty Lou Floyd

W. P. Kinsella asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007497515

Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007497522

Version: 2014-07-31

For my daughter, Erin Irene.

“We cannot let go the need to bear witness.”

– Patty Lou Floyd

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

SECTION ONE: TRUCKBOX AL’S BIG BREAK

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

SECTION TWO: THE FULL SCHOLARSHIP ORPHANED GENIUS

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

SECTION THREE: THE LITTLE BOX SOCIAL

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

SECTION FOUR: BOB FELLER, HAL NEWHOUSER, AND JOE DIMAGGIO HIMSELF

Chapter Fifteen

Also by the W.P. Kinsella

About the Publisher

SECTION ONE TRUCKBOX AL’S BIG BREAK

Chapter One

This is the story of how Truckbox Al McClintock almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League, but instead ended up batting against Bob Feller, of Cleveland Indian fame, in Renfrew Park, down on the river flats, in Edmonton, Alberta, summer of 1945 or ’46, no one can remember which, though the date in question has brought on more than one disagreement, which turned first to a shoving match, then to an altercation, and finally a fist fight, though not a brouhaha, the general consensus in the Six Towns area being that it takes more than two people to staff a brouhaha, the fist fight though, usually resulting in bent cartilage of someone’s proboscis, and blood spots on a Sunday shirt.

I was young and pretty small at the time, not much taller than my dog, Benito Mussolini, who, when he stood looking sorrowful, if the light was right, appeared to have a long, bald head, though in reality he was just a plain old soup-hound of unknown but varied ancestry, with whiskers that stuck out like a cat’s and bad breath.

‘We’re hillbillies,’ my mama said, on more than one occasion, ‘only difference is we know we’re hillbillies, and we won’t always be that way, unlike some we know.’ Mama hailed from South Carolina, and though she’d grown up prosperous, with a daddy who was a mining engineer, had had at least a passing acquaintance with hillbillies, up until the time she met Daddy.

The unlike some we know at one time referred specifically to three families, the Venusberg Stevensons, the more-or-less-Doreen Beach Sigurdsons, and the Red Sigurdsons, who were also known as our Sigurdsons because they lived in the general area of Fark, which was also the town my family lived in the general area of. Fark was about nine miles as the crow flies from New Oslo, a little further than that from Sangudo, and exactly eleven miles from Doreen Beach, which wasn’t a resort or even on a lake, as many surprised visitors found out each summer. Fark wasn’t big enough to be a town, and it was, Mama said, a cruel punishment for anyone to have to live in the general area of a town called Fark, the naming of which I’ll get around to later.

My family, the O’Days (my father was John Martin Duffy O’Day, my mother Olivia), had been forced into unsuccessful farming by the Depression. One of my grandfathers was an engineer, not the steam-engine kind, but the coal-mining kind, and a great-grandfather had owned a winery in the old country, and my daddy, John Martin Duffy O’Day, built fine houses, only there weren’t any fine houses to build during the Depression, so he sold his property in the city of Edmonton, Alberta, and bought a farm sixty miles more or less west of Edmonton, Alberta, which in the mid-1930s might as well have been six thousand miles more or less west of Edmonton, Alberta, because folks around the Six Towns area in general and around Fark, in particular, traveled by horse and wagon, or horse and buggy, or just plain horse.

The summer of 1945 or ’46 Truckbox Al McClintock garnered a certain amount of attention, which without too much exaggeration could be construed as notoriety, when at a sportsday, while playing right field and batting cleanup for the New Oslo Blue Devils against an all-Indian team from the reserve at Lac Ste. Anne, the game being played on a newly mowed field on the banks of the Pembina River, Truckbox Al managed to come to bat five times, and five times he hit the ball about fifty yards beyond the centerfielder, which meant that the ball landed in the yellowish and murky water of the Pembina River, where it bobbed away downstream getting smaller and less white as it did so. In his fifth and final at-bat it is said that he hit the ball clean across the Pembina River. That mammoth blow caused the game to be called though it was only the fifth inning, because the Indian team was out of baseballs, and as home team they were obligated to supply them.

Outfielders who could hit five home runs in a game were in short supply, not to mention outfielders who could hit five consecutive baseballs into and across the Pembina River, so because of his prodigious feat that afternoon Truckbox Al was seduced into playing the remainder of the summer for the Sangudo Mustangs. What the Sangudo Mustangs used to seduce Truckbox Al was the fact that Bear Lundquist, the self-appointed coach and general manager of the Sangudo Mustangs, knew a man in Calgary, Alberta, a brother-in-law by marriage, once divorced, a man who hailed from Oklahoma and had played semi-pro baseball in his younger days; and that selfsame brother-in-law by marriage, once divorced, had an uncle in Pasadena, California, who, when he had last visited Calgary, Alberta, in the summer of 1937, said he was a speaking acquaintance of a scout for the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League.

What Bear Lundquist promised was that if Truckbox Al would play the rest of the summer for the Sangudo Mustangs, Bear Lundquist, who was at the sportsday and witnessed Truckbox Al hit five home runs, four into the Pembina River and one clean across it, off a skinny Indian pitcher named Eddie Grassfires, whose only saving grace was a passable pickoff move to first base, was that he would write to Calgary, Alberta, to his brother-in-law by marriage, once divorced, who would pass the information about Truckbox Al’s baseball prowess along to his uncle in Pasadena, California; who, if he wasn’t a liar, and the general consensus was that he was, would pass on the information of Truckbox Al’s baseball prowess to the scout for the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League with whom he was a speaking acquaintance.

Bear Lundquist’s Sangudo Mustangs were not in the tournament that sportsday because no matter how hard they tried they could only raise seven players, which included Bear Lundquist who was sixty-two years old and arthritic, playing catcher, and his wife, Mrs. Bear Lundquist, who wasn’t arthritic but moved like she was, playing first base. Bear Lundquist explained to Truckbox Al that mighty oaks from little acorns grow, and that once the scout for the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League heard about his hitting prowess, playing major league baseball for the genuine St. Louis Cardinals was only a matter of time.

Truckbox Al’s mother was a Gordonjensen, the bulldog-faced daughter of Banker Olaf Gordonjensen of New Oslo, about nine miles as the crow flies from Fark, a little further than that from Sangudo, and exactly eleven miles from Doreen Beach, which wasn’t a resort or even on a lake, as many surprised visitors found out each summer. When there had been a railroad, Doreen Beach had been named by an employee of the railroad, R. Ebeneezer Beach, for his daughter Doreen.

The family name, Gordonjensen, came about because of a misunderstanding with immigration, or at least an incompetent government official, who may or may not have been with immigration. When Gordon Jensen, newly arrived from Norway, was asked his name, he remained silent until someone behind him who understood more English than he did said in Norwegian, ‘Name?’

‘Oh, Gordon Jensen,’ was his reply.

The government official wrote, O. Gordonjensen.

‘What does the O stand for?’ asked the official.

The newly christened Gordonjensen and his more comprehending friend behind him discussed the matter. They knew from their experience in Norway that all government officials were fools.

‘O often stands for Olaf,’ they told the bureaucrat.

* * *

Olaf Gordonjensen established the Bank of New Oslo in 1900 and raised three bulldog-faced daughters, the youngest and most bulldog-like of whom, Gunhilda, he was marrying off on a spectacular fall day in 1929, when the groom, already dressed in the striped wedding trousers his future father-in-law had purchased for him, walked eleven miles cross-country through stubble fields, cow pastures, and blueberry muskegs, afraid to be seen on the main roads such as they were, to the Edmonton-Jasper Highway, where he used the last of his ready cash to buy a one-way ticket to Edmonton on the Western Trailways bus that stopped once a day at Bjornsen’s Corner.

The groom was never heard from again. Besides the striped trousers and frock coat, he carried away with him, carefully pinned in an inside coat pocket for safekeeping, the diamond-encrusted wedding ring, and a pearl necklace, his present to the bride, both items provided by his future father-in-law. The groom rode out the Depression in a room above a Chinese café on 101st Street in Edmonton, and when times began to pick up, he sold the ring and necklace and went to attend chiropractic college in Davenport, Iowa, where at the age of thirty-nine, he was just about to graduate at the head of his class, when his jilted sweetheart’s firstborn was about to face Bob Feller, of Cleveland Indian fame, in Renfrew Park, down on the river flats, in Edmonton, Alberta, summer of 1945 or ’46, no one can quite remember which.

It was a classic mixture of Norwegian and Irish stock that made Truckbox Al McClintock the baseball player he was.

‘Sort of like mixing straw and manure,’ my daddy said. ‘They seem an unlikely combination, but chink up the cracks in your house or barn with the mixture and it’ll withstand sixty below or a hundred above.’

The wedding took place in New Oslo, at the Christ on the Cross Scandinavian Lutheran Church, also founded by Banker Olaf Gordonjensen who figured his customers would save more money and pay their loan installments more promptly if they were soundly chastised every Sunday by a God-fearing, guilt-spewing pastor of his own choosing.

Banker Olaf Gordonjensen, who wasn’t really a banker, because the government wouldn’t allow just anyone to own a bank in Alberta, though he did anyway, because the closest bank was forty miles away in Stony Plain, and things in general were a lot less sophisticated in those days, personally paid the Reverend Ibsen’s first yearly stipend at the Christ on the Cross Scandinavian Lutheran Church. In return all he asked was that every one of Reverend Ibsen’s sermons deal in some way with the virtue of saving money, and that Reverend Ibsen point out with equal frequency and fervor that those who did not repay their debts promptly were doomed to eternal damnation.

Curly McClintock, Truckbox Al’s father, came from a long line of black Irish mechanics, self-taught mechanics, who would have looked down on and failed to heed the advice of anyone who had formal mechanical training. It was possible, my daddy speculated, that Curly McClintock wasn’t even black Irish, though no one could tell, for the McClintocks, male and female, had an inordinate affinity for grease and oil.

Young Curly, who was slow-moving and slow-thinking, grew up lying on his back under a dripping differential. He wore a green Allis-Chalmers Farm Equipment cap, backwards, because on weekends at baseball tournaments, sportsdays, and picnics he was catcher for the Fark Red Sox, Fark being the town in the Six Towns area that the McClintocks lived closest to. Curly McClintock just couldn’t see the wisdom of turning the cap around between sportsdays. That green Allis-Chalmers Farm Equipment cap, and Curly’s striped railroad overalls, if they’d still been around in 1974, could have solved the world oil shortage all by themselves.

Curly’s daddy, and Truckbox Al’s granddaddy, Black Darren McClintock (as opposed to his first cousin Red Darren McClintock who had gone off to fight in the First World War and been reported missing in action), was a sometime dealer in used automobiles, buggies, farm equipment and horses, an occupation that just naturally followed his inordinate affinity for grease and oil, an affinity that he had inherited, and passed to his son, and would pass to his grandson. Black Darren McClintock had sold the Reverend Ibsen a Model T Ford, at a clergyman’s discount, even though the Model T Ford was paid for by Banker Olaf Gordonjensen, and Black Darren McClintock had never heard of a clergyman’s discount until Banker Olaf Gordonjensen brought the subject up.

That Model T Ford which the Reverend Ibsen used to visit his parishioners in and around New Oslo, so as to enjoy an afternoon snack of Norwegian fruitcake and perhaps a piece or two of cold fried chicken, and, if it was offered, a glass of dandelion wine, while he impressed on them the biblical virtues of saving money and paying loan installments on time, was a car that simply refused to keep its oil pan on.

Because that Model T Ford refused to keep its oil pan on, young Curly McClintock was dispatched by his daddy, Black Darren McClintock, to New Oslo, on a brilliant October day in 1929, where he found himself in his usual and familiar position of lying on his back with oil dripping on his face. On this brilliant October day, Curly McClintock found himself lying on his back with oil dripping on his face in the driveway of Reverend Ibsen’s parsonage next to the Christ on the Cross Scandinavian Lutheran Church in New Oslo, Alberta, at a time when Banker Olaf Gordonjensen was marrying off his youngest and most bulldog-faced daughter, Gunhilda.

The youngest and most bulldog-faced daughter of the banker was being married off to the local schoolteacher, a Mr. Perry Wyandotte, all the way from Edmonton Normal School, who figured rightly that marrying the banker’s bulldog-faced daughter beat hell out of teaching forty-five hard-headed little Norwegians their ABCs for twenty dollars a month in a one-room schoolhouse, where before class each day he had to chop wood for the big, blue, pot-bellied stove that sat in the middle of the classroom.

Mr. Perry Wyandotte’s one vice was that he had brought with him from Edmonton a battery-powered radio from which he could, on clear nights, pick up KSL Salt Lake City, and other exotic radio stations, sometimes being able to hear Gene Austin croon ‘Ramona,’ or Jimmie Rodgers sing ‘Moonlight and Skies.’

It was while Mr. Perry Wyandotte was lying on his cot in the one-room teacherage, next to the one-room schoolhouse in New Oslo, the night before his wedding, that he heard on his radio that the stock market had crashed, and stockbrokers and bankers in various cities across the continent were leaping to their deaths just like they were lemmings driven by instinct, and the concrete below them was ocean water.

The news of the stock market crash hadn’t reached New Oslo yet. Banker Olaf Gordonjensen did have a telephone, one of only three in the Six Towns area, but local partridge hunters couldn’t resist the green glass insulators on the makeshift telephone poles, so the line was out of service fifty percent of the time all year ’round, and one hundred percent during hunting season, which late October was.

Three days after the wedding, Banker Olaf Gordonjensen found out he was, like everyone else in North America, more or less insolvent, and he came to understand why the young schoolteacher, Mr. Perry Wyandotte, had taken off cross-country rather than marry his bulldog-faced daughter.

There is a saying in and around New Oslo, actually it is a joke: ‘How do you stop a Norwegian wedding?’ is the question. ‘You can’t,’ is the answer. It loses a lot in translation. You’d have to be Norwegian to appreciate the nuances.

But on that brilliant October afternoon in 1929, when the bride, the youngest and most bulldog-faced daughter of Banker Olaf Gordonjensen, had been waiting at the Christ on the Cross Scandinavian Lutheran Church going on to four hours, and one of the Skalrud boys, Little Ole, who was probably but not certainly Flop Skalrud’s nephew, had just reported to Banker Gordonjensen that one of the Bjornsens (the guitar player in the Bjornsen Brothers Swinging Cowboy Musicmakers who played at barn dances, box socials, whist drives, sportsdays, and ethnic weddings) had seen Mr. Perry Wyandotte sneaking onto the eastbound Western Trailways bus that stopped once a day at Bjornsen’s Corner on the Edmonton-Jasper Highway.

It was about that time that Curly McClintock pulled himself out from under the Reverend Ibsen’s Model T Ford, a Model T Ford that refused to keep its oil pan on, and wiping the oil off his face and hands with his green Allis-Chalmers Farm Equipment cap, returned it to his head, backwards as always. Curly McClintock then dripped his way over to the steps of the Christ on the Cross Scandinavian Lutheran Church, where what was left of the wedding party, and the Reverend Ibsen, were enjoying the Indian summer sunshine.

‘She’s in A-1, tip-top shape, Reverend,’ Curly said, wiping the last drop of oil off his nose with his sleeve.

‘Thank you, young man,’ the Reverend Ibsen said.

‘Excuse me,’ said Gunhilda Gordonjensen, touching Curly’s sleeve, ‘but you wouldn’t be interested in getting married, would you?’

Curly wiped his face and forehead on his other sleeve, the one that the bulldog-faced banker’s daughter had just touched, while he eyed the people on the church step, especially the bulldog-faced Gordonjensen girl, as he tried to determine if they were making fun of him. He scuffed one of his oilstained boots on the brown October grass as he surveyed the solemn faces in front of him.

‘Who to?’ he said.

‘Me,’ replied Gunhilda Gordonjensen.

‘You the banker’s daughter?’

She nodded.

While Gunhilda Gordonjensen was proposing to Curly McClintock, the thoughts going through Curly’s mind concerned something his uncle, Red Andrew McClintock, manager and first base coach of the Fark Red Sox baseball team, often urged on his players, between innings or at their rare practices.

‘Want you boys to try as hard as a homely girl on her honeymoon,’ Red Andrew McClintock would say, as he slapped ground balls at the infield, or when he had the Fark Red Sox practicing rundowns between first and second base.

Curly McClintock, at twenty years of age, still wasn’t too sure what it was that a homely girl tried hard at on her honeymoon, but he knew when he looked at Banker Olaf Gordonjensen’s youngest and most bulldog-faced daughter, that he was staring at a homely girl. But dressed up in her cream-colored lace wedding dress, with the long sleeves that hid her muscles, her face screened by a little veil freckled with seed pearls, Gunhilda Gordonjensen looked less bulldoggish than she would ever look again, and, Curly recalled, Banker Gordonjensen owned an eight-room house with a cistern and indoor plumbing.

Only indoor plumbing Curly had ever seen was on the rare occasions when his father, Black Darren McClintock, allowed him to go along in the dump truck, on the twice-weekly jaunts to Edmonton for groceries, and then the only indoor plumbing he had encountered was in a tiny room at a truck stop on the edge of the city. A truck stop where the bowl and basin were so covered in grease and the smell was so strong Curly didn’t see a lot of improvement over the two-holer behind McClintock’s garage-house. The McClintock’s garage-house had at one time been the station house, when the railroad used to run by Fark, where the living room was now full of stripped-down motorcycles, and a couple of dozen generators sat around on the kitchen floor like patient cats waiting for supper.

Curly removed his oil-soaked Allis-Chalmers Farm Equipment cap, just long enough to turn it around and place it formally on his large, round head, crown forward, before he said, ‘By golly, let’s do it.’

Considering the circumstances of the marriage, Curly McClintock and Gunhilda Gordonjensen were said to have been as happy as any, and happier than most.

‘You can’t stop a Norwegian wedding,’ one of Gunhilda Gordonjensen’s aunts said, as Reverend Ibsen lined up Curly McClintock and Gunhilda Gordonjensen on the steps of the Christ on the Cross Scandinavian Lutheran Church.

Curly and Gunhilda McClintock (née Gordonjensen) borrowed Banker Gordonjensen’s open-topped touring car, and drove west on the Edmonton-Jasper Highway, stopping for the night at a town called Entwistle, at the Hide-A-Way Tourist Court, where they got a granary-sized tourist cabin all to themselves for two dollars, and where Curly sure enough discovered what it was a homely girl tried hard at on her honeymoon. Curly became quite fond of his discovery.

When Curly and Gunhilda got back from their honeymoon, having driven as far west on the Edmonton-Jasper Highway as Edson, where they stayed in a granary-sized cabin at the Bide-A-Wee Tourist Court for two dollars a night, they moved into Banker Gordonjensen’s eight-room house with a cistern and indoor plumbing, and learned that the banker, along with almost everybody else in North America, was more or less insolvent.

Alvin Olaf McClintock was born nine months after the night at the Hide-A-Way Tourist Court in Entwistle, Alberta, where Curly McClintock discovered what it was homely girls tried hard at on their honeymoon. And about two years later, as one of Curly’s brothers was watching Alvin Olaf toddle across the floor of the kitchen at Banker Gordonjensen’s eight-room house with a cistern and indoor plumbing, the baby wearing only a diaper and a smile, the brother said to Curly, ‘By golly, that baby’s built just like the box on Daddy’s dump truck.’