When We Were Wolves Read Free

Carp Whitehorse. “You gave them our dinner for nothing?”
    “Not for nothing,” Job said, shaking his stump at the third baseman. “Nothing is for nothing.”
    Our uniforms dried flapping in the wind on the long drive to Faith.

    The Indians blew into town from the east. I slowed the car and idled down Main Street to the ball field at the west end of town, near the sun-bleached Lutheran church. Folks on the square pointed and stared. A brass band warmed up with scales in a weathered gazebo.
    The outfield in Faith was dirt, cracked and hard, just like the infield. Barbed wire separated center from the scrabbled wheat field, where brown-and-yellow shoots of Russian wheat gasped for water and fought to stay upright. This wheat held hope. As Job threw me some lifeless pitches and the rest of the Indians played pepper and stretched, the bleachers slowly filled with baseball fans, the convicted, and the simply curious.
    “How’s the arm tonight?” I yelled to Job.
    “Which one?” Job said.
    There was at the time a white barnstorming team from a religious settlement up in Michigan called the House of David. They let their hair and beards grow long and God-like and kept Bibles with them in the dugout. We had met the Whiskers on the road before, at chautauquas and county fairs, and respected them because, yes, they preached humbly to the fans before the games, but after the first pitch their spirits were real. Their fervor for God turned into a fervor for baseball and winning. They cursed like Philistines in their blue-and-gray uniforms and threw at batters’ heads. A Whisker—pitcher named Benson—eventually made it to the Bigs. The games were as intense as firefights. It was like facing Jesus at every position.
    This game would be our first-ever night game. Crude portable lights were trucked in along with generators. The steel stanchionswere short and the lights yellow and not very bright, creating shadows behind everything. It made possible an incandescent noon at midnight. To folks in those parts, and even to us, a night baseball game was a miracle.
    Farmers and the CCC crews were all off from work and gathered in town at dinnertime to eat and talk about baseball and the possibility of weather. Horses and mules pulled wagonloads of children. A Methodist church had set up an old army tent and a choir practiced and sipped iced tea. Faith had the feel of the chautauqua.
    Drunk on a dram of humidity that some of the old-timers sensed, the crowd watched us take infield practice. Hope and desperation played on their faces—babies crying, mothers crying, fathers cursing and praying in the same breaths. They cheered our mistakes while grasshoppers danced in the dusky light that filtered through the dust. Ministers and deacons in dark suits and straw hats passed walnut collection plates.

    From the tin lean-to visitors’ dugout, we watched the Whiskers take infield. “I have felt weather in my arm all day,” Job said while fishing the June bugs from the water bucket with the drinking gourd. “Tonight there will be weather.” The air was heavy with humidity. Heat lightning flashed to the west. “We will be rewarded with God’s prosperity.”
    In the hazy twilight both teams racked up errors involving lack of sight. As it got darker we played blind to the balls that were hit over the lights, which were many. Line drives hid in the lights and the outfielders had to react to directions from their infielders. We communicated with whistles, growls, and shrieks only the Indians understood. Even Job’s breaking balls were hard to pick up in the shadows, and I had to track them by sound through the batter’s grunts of frustration.
    The Indians hit the ball hard and put runners on base all evening. Except for Job, who seemed to have lost a step in beating the throw to first. But we did score runs, even driving two long balls into the wheat, one with two aboard.
    The umpiring had been stacked against the Indians from the very