The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

In the months that followed, Matthew Clarke continued to operate his insurance business from the dusty-windowed storefront in Onamata, not soliciting business but gently reminding local people when their fire, auto, farm, or crop insurance was up for renewal. He accepted new business when it came to him.

‘My Joseph’s gettin’ married next month,’ a sturdy farmer might say, standing awkwardly in the office, which smelled of varnish and paper and held a large, rectangular, wax-yellow desk, a wooden filing cabinet, and two severe wooden chairs. ‘He’ll be around to see you about life insurance. That is, if you’ll be in Tuesday evening.’

‘If Matthew Clarke sends you a bill, you know it’s an honest one,’ people said. They also said, ‘Matthew Clarke could have made something of his life if he wasn’t so interested in those baseball teams of his.’ They also whispered, in the gentle, misty heat of Iowa summer, ‘Matthew Clarke had a wife but couldn’t keep her.’

Matthew was hard at work on a proposal to write his thesis on the history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, though occasionally, when he tried to confirm some detail by consulting various books on baseball history and was unable to do so, he had doubts. But he quickly put them aside. He didn’t need any confirmation from outside sources. The history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was carved on stone tablets in his memory. He couldn’t know such things if they were not true.

During that time he also made Darlin’ Maudie pregnant.

Try as he might, Matthew learned little of Maudie’s past.

‘Why do you keep asking?’ was the way she would answer his questions. Or else she would say, ‘Do you love me?’

‘Of course I love you,’ Matthew would reply.

‘Then what else matters?’ And she would stare across the oversized oak table in the dining room, her chin resting in the palm of her left hand, her fingers hooked on her lower lip, a smile, full of love, gently crinkling the skin around her eyes.

It was Matthew’s nature to ask questions. He felt as if Maudie’s past was a rock that needed to be battered into gravel.

It was years later, long after Maudie was gone for the last time, that Matthew realized how lonely she must have been. He had the business, his studies, his obsession with the mysterious baseball league. But he had few friends, and much of his life was lived in solitude. Maudie maintained the old home, which still smelled of his retired parents. But she had no friends. There were simply no friends for her to have. The young people lived on the farms; the houses in Onamata were occupied mainly by retired farmers and businessmen. There were fewer than ten children in Onamata. And the mothers of those children were tight-lipped Baptists with protruding teeth and hair pulled back until their eyes bulged. The women were the same color and texture as the dusty streets of the town. Maudie walked barefoot to the general store, wearing her celery-colored pantaloons. And she smoked in public.

About the only change Maudie made to the house was to open the heavy, lined drapes with which Matthew’s mother had covered the enormous bedroom window that looked out onto a lilac-and-honeysuckle-choked yard. Maudie insisted the curtains remain open day and night. She opened the window, too. She brought a garden hose indoors and sprayed years of dust off the screens. In doing so she let the trapped odors of camphor, floor wax, and moth balls escape.

In the rich mornings they lazed in bed, the room shimmering with sunlight; they made love slowly, Matthew taking a long time to get used to the light, to the trill of birds outside the window, the flash of a cardinal across the pane, a wren or finger-sized hummingbird staring in at them over the saucerlike edge of a hollyhock.

Maudie’s skin, the color of creamed tea, both aroused and fascinated Matthew. He teased her about being Indian, remarked on her high cheekbones, her flattish nose, her sensual lips, hoping for some response that would reveal her past. In the huge bed, fragrant with their lovemaking, Matthew would lick his way slowly across her belly, thrilling to the salty sweetness of her, sure he could feel the life growing inside her, though she was barely pregnant.

‘My name is Maude Huggins Clarke. I’m nineteen, and I used to travel with a carnival. That was all you knew when you asked me to marry you; that’s all you ever need to know,’ Maudie would say in reply to whatever questions or implied question Matthew posed.

‘Hereditary diseases,’ Matthew cried one morning. ‘We have to think about the baby. Did anyone in your family suffer from hereditary diseases? Your mother? Father? Brothers? Sisters?’

‘Is clap hereditary?’ Maudie laughed.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t have any idea who my father was. I don’t think anybody has any idea who my father was.’

‘And your mother?’

‘I didn’t have a mother.’

‘Everybody has a mother.’

‘I was one of those babies janitors find wrapped in newspaper in a garbage can.’

‘In what city?’

‘Jesus, Matthew, don’t you ever quit? My father was an Indian rodeo rider, my mother was a camp follower, a rodeo whore. Oklahoma City. How’s that?’

‘Is it true?’

‘Only if you want it to be.’

Matthew would laugh, wrap his arms around her, and roll her across the big bed. He believed she told him the truth when she said she didn’t know who her father was. One crack in the rock.

My father ignored the suggestions, and later the recommendations, of his advisers at the University of Iowa History Department. He finally decided his thesis would be called A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. His advisers were at first tactful, forgiving, tolerant; later they became businesslike, orderly, methodical, and demanding of proof.

‘It is highly unlikely that we will recognize your efforts unless you can provide us with some documentation as to the existence of the so-called league about which you propose to write,’ is a sentence from one of the many letters my father exchanged with members of the History Department.

My father, at that point totally unperturbed, replied that since a number of prominent Iowans, many associated with the University of Iowa, were among the founders of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, he would have no trouble providing the required documentation. He kept every piece of correspondence connected with his project. I also have his finished thesis, his book, all 288 pages of it, from which I will quote occasionally, though sparingly. When I do quote, it is first to show the mystifying problems my father was up against, and second to demonstrate the seeming genuineness of the information my father quoted as truth.

In fact, right now I am going to transcribe a letter my father wrote and the reply he received, as well as an excerpt from A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

My father, when he woke the first morning after being struck by lightning, with Darlin’ Maudie snuggled against him, knew unquestionably that the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was founded in the early months of 1902. The idea for the league came about during a casual conversation, in a bar in Iowa City, between Clarke Fisher Ansley, one of the founders of what eventually became the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Frank Luther Mott, an eminent Iowan who was a teacher, scholar, and baseball aficionado.

My father’s history of the Confederacy is divided into three sections – Origins, Emergence, and Growth and Consolidation – with each section having many subsections and even the subsections having subsections. The Origins section takes a full seventy pages of text. Very little of it requires repeating here. I can assure you the information is accurate in every detail.

Here is my father’s letter to Mr. Mott, who in 1943 was retired but very much alive.

Dear Mr. Mott:

My name is Matthew Clarke and I am doing graduate work in American history at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. My interest is in the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, of which you were cofounder.

I will not presume to ask the many questions I wish to ask in this introductory letter. However, I would be most grateful if you would consider granting me an interview, at which time I would be pleased to learn whatever you can tell me about the formation, duration, and history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

Yours very truly,

Matthew Clarke

Mr. Mott’s reply follows.

Dear Mr. Clarke:

I have your letter before me and, I must confess, am rather mystified by it. I am totally unfamiliar with the Iowa Baseball Confederacy and certainly had nothing to do with the organization of such a league. I am, however, a baseball fan of long duration, and had any such organization existed in Iowa, I am certain I would have known about it.

I was associated with amateur and professional baseball in a number of capacities during my years in Iowa City. You must certainly have the name of the league wrong. If you could be somewhat more specific I would be happy to answer your inquiries.

Best wishes,

Frank Luther Mott

So you see the problems my father faced. He possessed a brainful of information, bright and beautiful as diamonds swaddled in midnight-blue velvet, yet it was information no one else would validate. The letters I have reproduced are merely the tip of the iceberg. There were tens, dozens, and finally hundreds of letters to anyone and everyone who might have come in contact with anyone who organized, played in, or was even a spectator at a game during the seven seasons that the Confederacy operated.

I feel as if I might have written A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy myself, for my father has catalogued in it the exact information that is burned into my brain. The only difference is that I am one generation further removed from it. The number of people who might remember the Confederacy decreases almost daily. My own task becomes more and more difficult.

I am going to reproduce another letter – the final one my father wrote to Frank Luther Mott. There was an exchange of eleven letters between them, with my father’s letters becoming more detailed, more demanding, more desperate, while Mr. Mott’s letters became shorter, more curt, and finally almost condescending.

Dear Mr. Mott:

After all our correspondence I am still unable to understand why you do not remember the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. I realize it has been a long time since 1902; perhaps if I refresh your memory. It was the evening of January 16, 1902, when you and Mr. Ansley met at Donnelly’s Bar in Iowa City.

‘Some of these young fellows who play in the Sunday Leagues are awfully good,’ you said to Mr. Ansley.

‘We should get them all together and form a semiprofessional league,’ Mr. Ansley replied.

‘I’d be willing to do some of the work if you would,’ you said.

‘It sounds like a good idea,’ said Clarke Ansley. ‘There’s that team from out around Blue Cut, call themselves the Useless Nine; they haven’t lost a game for two seasons. I was up to Chicago in September and some of those boys could play for either the Cubs or the White Sox.’

‘I know a couple of other people who would be interested,’ you said. ‘Why don’t we arrange an organizational meeting for next Wednesday?’

There you are, Mr. Mott – that was the way the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was born. Surely that must jog your memory.

Waiting anxiously to hear from you,

Yours truly,

Matthew Clarke

What follows is Mr. Mott’s final letter to my father.

Dear Mr. Clarke:

Although as you say it has been a number of years since 1902 and I have indeed spent considerably more years than you on this planet, I assure you I am not senile, demented, forgetful, or a liar. I resent the implications of your last correspondence. Once and for all, I know nothing of an organization called the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. I had nothing to do with the conception of such a league. To my knowledge, and my knowledge is considerable, such a league never existed. And on the off chance that it did exist in some remote part of the state, I certainly had nothing whatever to do with it, and neither did my friend Clarke Fisher Ansley.

I will thank you not to write to me again.

Sincerely,

Frank Luther Mott

I quote from A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy:

The Iowa Baseball Confederacy consisted of six teams, representing, with the exception of Iowa City and Big Inning, rural districts rather than actual towns, although Frank Pierce did have a post office in a farmhouse, as did Husk. Blue Cut and Shoo Fly were loose geographic areas defined by the districts from which their baseball teams drew players. Shoo Fly was in the general region now known as Lone Tree, while Blue Cut was in and around the town of Anamosa.

The league standings, as of July 4, 1908 – the time at which, for reasons as yet undetermined, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy ceased to exist forever – were as follows:

Team Won Lost Pct. G.B. Big Inning 32 16 .667 - Blue Cut 27 21 .562 5 Shoo Fly 26 22 .541 6 Husk 22 26 .458 10 Frank Pierce 21 27 .436 11 Iowa City 16 32 .333 16

‘Something happened,’ my father would say, always making the same palms-up gesture of incomprehension. ‘Something happened on July 4, 1908, that brought history crashing down on the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Something happened that erased the league from human memory, changed the history of Iowa, of the U.S.A., maybe even the world. I’d give anything to know what it was. I don’t know if there was something in the air, or if a mysterious hand reached down out of the clouds, and patted tens of thousands of heads, wiping minds and memories until they were clear and shiny and blank as a wall newly covered in white enamel. Or maybe some phantom surgeon went into all those brains with long-handled magic scissors and snipped out all the memories of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy.’

My own knowledge also ends as of July 3, 1908. The day before a scheduled game between the Chicago Cubs and the Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars.

I have spent years of my life studying the Iowa City Daily Citizen and the Chicago Tribune, searching for some mention of the game or some mention that something unusual happened in the baseball world that summer. I know a great deal about the Chicago Cubs of 1908 and have written to their heirs and survivors – but I have drawn a blank.

2

My sister was born in 1944, and was, in some prophetic manner, named Enola Gay, a full year before the bomber droned over Hiroshima, its womb bursting with destruction. I was born a year after my sister and named Gideon John – Gideon, because my father, like the biblical Gideon, played the trumpet. He had a fascination for what he described as ‘soulful music.’ When he played, the instrument often seemed only a shadow of itself. The muted notes reflected his moods, burbling like water when he was happy, ticking like a clock when he felt reflective, wailing like an animal in pain when he was sad or frustrated, as he often was. Deep in the night I’d hear him in his study, or in the living room, the music soft and sad as angels. I’d shiver and cover my head with my pillow, for I’d know that his playing usually, in my early years, predicted my mother’s leaving, and later it meant his frustrations were building to unbearable proportions. On the occasions when my mother did leave us, he would climb to the second floor, pull down the old spring ladder that spent its life nestled against the hall ceiling, and climb to the widow’s walk on top of the house. There he would release all his anger and hurt and disappointment, and I would cry softly, as much for him as for myself, while he hurled the notes toward the blue-and-silver night sky.

I found out early on I had the same easy ability with the trumpet as my father. Neither of us ever took a lesson. When I was barely school age, after we had returned from a weekend of watching baseball in St. Louis, I picked up the horn and tooted ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ My version was as muted and sad as anything my father had ever played.

Instead of blood grandparents, I had John and Marylyle Baron. Only for the first five years of my life did I have a blood sister, but for all my life I’ve had Missy Baron. Missy, the eternal child. Like Raggedy Ann she has a candy heart with I LOVE YOU written on it. One of my first memories, perhaps my very first, is of Missy staring down into my crib, cooing to me in a voice of universal love. Missy, her straight red hair dangling like shoelaces across her bland, freckled face, her pudgy hands touching me as if I were made of gossamer. Missy is well over fifty now, an advanced age for one who suffers from Down’s syndrome, as it had come to be called.

The Barons, both over eighty, still live on their farm a mile out of town in the direction of the Onamata Catholic Church, which was built in anticipation of a new railroad and never relocated after the fickle iron highway chose another route.

‘We always tried to be a friend to that mama of yours,’ Mrs. Baron said to me just recently. ‘She was a strange lady, Gideon.’

In small towns, events that would be forgotten by all but intim- ate family members become community property, remain ripe for rehashing. My mother deserted us, taking my sister with her, when I was going on six.

‘Your papa was a fine man, a bright young man too, until he started carrying on about that baseball league of his. You know, Gideon, I trained as a nurse for three years, in the hospital in Iowa City, back when I was a girl. We were taught to look for symptoms, and I used to watch you with a professional eye when you were growing up, looking for signs of the same disease in you.’

She stops. She has talked herself into a corner. It is all right to mention my father’s obsession, but mine is never discussed seriously; certainly no criticism is ever offered. It is also all right to mention the strangeness of my mother, but Sunny is never mentioned, though she is my wife and, like my mother, a woman who comes and goes at will.

‘I caught the disease all at once. There were no symptoms.’

‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I always thought it was kind of like that polio that used to go around in the summers; it just snuck up and paralyzed your body. But what you got kind of affected your mind.’ She paused. ‘Well, now I have put my foot in it, haven’t I? But you really didn’t have personal knowledge of this baseball league until after your papa died?’

‘I knew only what he told me. I was just a kid, purposely uninterested in what my father was doing, kind of contemptuous, too, the way teenage boys are.’

‘And you were suddenly filled with it, just like religious fervor? But why keep at it? A smart young fellow like you should know when he’s beating a dead horse.’

‘I don’t think anyone knows when he’s beating a dead horse. But the reason I keep on trying to prove the existence of the Confederacy is that I’m right and everybody else is wrong!’ I laugh wistfully, trying to show that I do have some understanding of the futility of my quest.

‘Well, Gideon, I wish you luck. You still planning on having the town’s name changed?’

‘I don’t want to change the town name. I just want it acknow- ledged that Onamata is named for the wife of Drifting Away, the great Black Hawk warrior.’

‘I don’t suppose you have any proof that there ever was an Indian named Drifting Away?’

‘Not an iota. Except I know it’s the truth, and so did my father, and neither of us has ever been known to be a liar.’

It will take some monumental action on my part to have the Iowa Baseball Confederacy recognized and legitimized. I read of a man who climbed up a pole, vowing to sit on a platform twenty feet above the earth until the Cleveland Indians won the pennant. That was sometime in the mid-fifties. I assume he came down.

‘Well, I wish you luck, Gideon.’ And Marylyle Baron tightened up the strings of her speckled apron and hobbled up the steps of her farmhouse. I do odd jobs for the Barons. Out of love, not because I need the money. Today, I mow the big front yard; the sweetness of cut grass fills the air. I am bare to the waist and streaming sweat.

In the past year or so I have tried a new tack: I have begun to approach the subject of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy from an oblique angle. I liken it to driving a wedge in a rock.

Part of the information my father passed on to me concerned an Indian named Drifting Away, a Black Hawk warrior and chief. I know the facts I have about Drifting Away are true, but, as with the data about the Confederacy, there is not a shred of proof. But if I can get one person to acknowledge the existence of Drifting Away, if I can convince one person that the town was named for Onamata, Drifting Away’s wife, who was murdered by white settlers in the 1830s, I’ll have a real wedge in the rock.

From A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy:

Drifting Away remembers. He remembers the gentle, rolling Iowa landscape in days when buffalo still grazed idly, the only sounds the grumble of their own bones. The creak of the wheel was only a prophecy, the oxcart a vision, the crack of the whip and the crack of the rifle known only to those who made their eyes white as moonlight in order to stare down the tunnel of the future. Drifting Away remembers the haze of campfires hanging, smooth as a cloud, in the tops of dappled poplars …

Why baseball? Was it because of our obsession with the game that my father and I were gifted, if it can be called a gift, with encyclopedic knowledge of a baseball league?

I inherited my knowledge of the Confederacy and my interest in baseball, but what of my father? My grandfather never attended a baseball game in his life.

‘How did you come to love baseball?’ I asked my father repeatedly. And he told me the story of how his passion was roused by a visiting uncle, a vagabond of a man who parachuted into their lives every year or so. He would appear clutching a deck of cards and a complicated baseball game played on a board with dice and markers. He also arrived with an outfielder’s black glove and a baseball worn thin by time. He claimed the baseball was once autographed by Walter Johnson.