Buckskin, Bloomers, and Me Read online

  Didn’t look like harlots, iffen you was to ask me. Fact is, they looked more like a baseball team than us Mound City contingent. (Buckskin Compton told me to use the word contingent and how it’s spelt.)

  They wore dark blue uniforms, complete with belts, and those baggy pants that give them their name. Their stockings was blue, too, but with a white stripe just before the bloomers stopped right at their knees. Their hats was blue wool flannel with white trim—what we ballists call an eight-panel cap, since the white trim divides the blue wool into eight panels—with a small, rounded brim. They had collared shirts with pearl button fronts—not fancy bibs like us Mound City boys—and that reminded me that I needed to put on my own shirt but didn’t want to do it in front of a bunch of ladies, because I got manners. Most of them Bloomers wore under-sleeves on account it was sort of chilly if you hadn’t pedaled a bicycle ten miles.

  Them gals looked sorta pretty, except for two of them who was plug-ugly, but not as ugly as their manager. He had a big gut, and wore a flat-crowned, flat-brimmed straw hat with a big black band around the crown, and a white shirt with a narrow tie, plaid pants, and scuffed Wellingtons. He smoked a cigar while twisting the ends of his mustache, and he was spitting out words that you wasn’t supposed to say to ladies or anywhere in Kansas, unless you was in Dodge City before it got religion.

  Well, Mr. Durant wasn’t a whole lot better.

  “Look at ’em,” Mr. Durant told me, once he realized I wasn’t paying him much mind. After a whole lot of blasphemy, he spit on a cow pie—this still being a pasture—and said: “In my day you never even saw a woman playing one-eyed cat or wicket. It was bad enough when they started thinking they could play croquet or go out boating. Now they think they can do anything. Golf. Ride bicycles. It’s a disgrace. Shames our nation. Might even be the beginning of the end of the world. The ‘New Woman.’ Balderdash!” Only he used another word that wasn’t balderdash.

  I opened my mouth and started to ask him why he was playing them ladies if that’s the way he felt, but then I figured that wouldn’t be a smart thing to say iffen I wanted my buck fifty, which I did, especially since the Widow Amy DeFee didn’t know how much I was truly getting paid for this here game. Besides, it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of time to say something, because he kept right on with his blaspheming and spitting and complaining.

  “Turning baseball into a burlesque. How far will the government let our national pastime fall in disgrace?”

  The Mound City hurler, a lanky fireman for the Missouri Pacific, walked up and slapped Mr. Durant on the shoulder and said: “As far as you’ll let ’em for twenty percent of the gate, boss.”

  Mr. Durant spit. “Twenty-five percent, bucko.” He turned and bellowed where in the blazes—but it weren’t blazes that he said—was that Lutheran minister who had agreed to umpire the game. Then he looked at me and told me to hurry up and get my shirt on. That got my face flushing, but I figured, it being on the cool side for this time of year, I’d just pull it over my three-for-a-dollar shirt, no matter how warm I’d gotten pedaling ten miles.

  After that, the right fielder, who was smoking a corncob pipe, asked if I wanted to toss the ball with him, which I did, and things went on like that, me throwing the ball with a pipe-smoker and Mr. Durant cussing the Bloomers when he wasn’t taking a nip from his flask. So folks filled them grandstands, eating food and drinking lemonade till that bald-headed, bespectacled Lutheran finally showed up to umpire, and we prayed. Then we tossed the ball some more, or swung our bats, and got ready to play the National Bloomer Girls.

  When Mound City come to bat in the first inning, I led off, ’cause I run pretty fast, and that’s why I played second base mostly. I took my bat up to the plate, and nodded at the catcher, and said howdy to the Lutheran ump, and stepped up and give the pitcher the meanest glare I could in order to intimidate her, on account Mr. Durant told me to do that. Normally, I wouldn’t’ve, because even though my pa had his faults, he had always taught me to be kind to ladies, puppy dogs, and veterans of the War of the Rebellion, as long as they’d worn the blue. This in spite of the fact that his parents hadn’t gotten off the boat from Wales until 1867!

  The Bloomer hurler, though, didn’t look or act scared at all, and she sent a fastball that sounded like a cannon when it popped into the catcher’s big mitt. Then I could hear Mr. Durant hollering from his bench.

  “I remember the time when nobody … and I mean not one man … ever wore a mitt at all, especially not one the size of a pillow … anywhere on the gosh-darned field.” ’Course, he didn’t say gosh-darned.

  The catcher, well, she didn’t say nothing, just throwed the ball right back, hard, to the lady pitcher, whilst I was blinking, thinking to myself: I don’t think I saw that ball once it left that southpaw’s hand.

  So I looked back at the Lutheran, and he stared at me, and I asked him: “Was that a strike, Preacher?” Because for a Lutheran and an umpire, he wasn’t a real loud talker.

  Right then I felt the wind rush past my kneecap and saw dust pop in the catcher’s mitt, and that catcher tossed the ball up out of her mitt, snatched the ball with her right hand, and fired it back to that hard-throwing, left-handed Bloomer Girl.

  Well, I looked back at the pitcher, then down at the catcher, and then back at the umpire, and the Lutheran said: “Yes, lad, the lady’s first throw was across the plate right about at your belt buckle. Just the same as that one. And …”

  The grimace on his lips and the fear in his eyes told me that that sneaky Bloomer Girl was sending another baseball toward the plate, whilst my back was to her. I turned around and started to bring my bat up, but, almost too late, I saw that that ball wasn’t coming belt-high across the plate but right toward my noggin.

  That’s when I let out a dirty word while leaping backward, dropping my big bat, and falling on my hindquarters. Everybody in them fancy grandstand, and even those skinflints who was sitting on their horses on the other side of the canvas fence the Bloomers had set up in the pasture, laughed, hooted, and mocked me. Along the bench of the home team, my teammates sniggered, too.

  “That,” the Lutheran said, “was not a strike, and I fear I must call it a ball.”

  “What’s the matter?” said the catcher, whose voice was raspy. “Didn’t like that pitch?” She laughed as she rose, knees popping, threw the ball back, though softer this time.

  My ears started burning. Standing over me was the third basewoman, smiling as she stuck her glove under her armpit and reached down, extending her throwing hand to help me up.

  “He ain’t hurt, Dolly,” the catcher told her.

  Now, what with catchers wearing big masks by 1906 —Mr. Durant would go off about that, too, when he was in his cups, which he usually was, but maybe not as often as my late pa—I couldn’t see much about the catcher other than she had big hands for a girl and was dark-haired and flat-chested. Same as Dolly Madison—I didn’t know nothing about the Dolly Madison of our nation’s history till Buckskin Compton told me all about her—the third basewoman whose grip felt like my pa’s when he was swinging a sixteen-pound sledgehammer steadily rather than lifting a pint.

  I got a right good look at Dolly Madison, who had piercing blue eyes and full lips and blonde hair all curly and full. She was taller than me and had broad shoulders to boot.

  “That’s Lady Waddell’s way of introducing herself,” said the third basewoman in a friendly kind of way, and then introduced herself and tipped her curly blonde head over at the catcher. “And she’s Nellie McConnell.”

  I nodded at them both, but not that dastardly little witch of a pitcher, and let Nellie settle back behind the plate and Dolly trot back to third base as I dusted off my heinie and checked my bat to make sure it hadn’t been damaged. Once I was back in my stance, I set my jaw and tried not to listen to them folks in the grandstand who was yelling that I was a bum and ought to go back to Pleasanton
or someplace hotter and way below sea level.

  Lady Waddell threw a ball, but my eyesight told me that it was spinning away, and it spun right into the dirt a good foot off the plate. The catcher had to leap over and snag the ball, not that it would’ve done any harm as that made the count only two strikes and two balls, and there wasn’t nobody on base, because I was the first batter in this ball game.

  All right, I told myself as I gripped the bat’s handle firmly and ground my teeth as I saw the ball coming again. I let it travel some before I stepped into that pitch, swung the bat, felt the stinging in my hands, and watched that ball carry over the right fielder’s head, and that told me something, ’cause I never ever hardly get a ball to that side of the field, even against a southpaw. I took off running, and I kept right on running, till I went into a slide, and come up in the dust at third base with a triple that had them Mound City folks hollering and screaming and jumping up and down and saying that I was the best player that Mound City had ever seen since King Kelly. But I figured none of them had actually seen King Kelly play, as I’d never heard that he’d been to Mound City, and he’d been dead for around ten years.

  Dolly Madison grinned at me and threw the ball back to the pitcher and told me: “Not many ballists I know can hit that pitch off Lady Waddell. How long have you been playing baseball?”

  We chatted some, her being real friendly and me not knowing hardly a soul on my own team, which wasn’t my own team as I was just a traveling velocipedist who played for whoever was paying me. It struck me then that wouldn’t it be nice iffen I could play for just one team.

  Turned out to be a pretty good baseball contest. I would’ve been satisfied with just that triple, but I also singled and stole second base—actually I was out, but the umpire didn’t call it that way. The second basewoman swore a mite but let it go. When I come up to bat for the last time in the eighth inning, the catcher said that I knew I was out (which was true), that she knew I was out, that everyone in the grandstand and even them misers watching the game from beyond the outfield fence knew, that God knew, and that everybody knew I was out except for the blind Lutheran umpire.

  The Lutheran said meekly: “From my view and my humble opinion, he got under the tag, ma’am.”

  I walked on seven pitches but didn’t try stealing no bases or make it to third to chat some more with Dolly Madison, because I didn’t get a chance, as Al Iverson grounded weakly into a double play, and that ended our last at-bat, ’cause we didn’t need to bat in the ninth inning, on account that we was the home team after the coin flip. We won the game seven to four. Besides, the Bloomer girls had to catch the Missouri Pacific, so they wanted to get everything packed up, including the canvas fences and the bleachers, which I learnt they carried with them to all their contests.

  Well, I got my money from Mr. Durant, and after I’d shaken hands with my teammates and them Bloomer girls, I was out of the pasture and heading to my bicycle when that tobacco-chewing manager of them girls came up to me and holds out his hand and introduces hisself as Ed Norris.

  “Where you from?” he asked me after I told him my name. I pointed and started to say Pleasanton, but then I got suspicious and thought that maybe if he found out that I wasn’t from Mound City, he might protest that we was cheating him, and then the Lutheran might declare a forfeit, and Mr. Durant might ask for his money back that he had paid me. Instead, I just bobbed my head toward the northeast and said, “Over yonder a ways,” which wasn’t no lie. I sure hoped he didn’t want to invite hisself to supper, but I didn’t figure he would, on account that they was so jo-fired on catching that train.

  I got to thinking, as I glanced back toward the Mound City baseball field that was quickly returning to resembling the pasture it was, that this crew that worked with the Bloomer Girls was sure skilled in taking down them grandstand and canvas fences in no time at all.

  “You play good second base, run well, can hit,” Mr. Ed Norris said, which made me straighten up and feel pretty good till he went right on: “And you’re fair-skinned, aren’t shaving yet, and are soft-spoken.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just stood there with my mouth drawing flies.

  “How old are you?” he asked, quickly adding: “Not that it matters.”

  “Sixteen,” I said.

  He chewed on a pencil, looked this way and that, saying: “I suppose we’d have to get your parents’ permission.”

  I didn’t say nothing, ’cause I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I figured it out a moment later

  “Listen, Maude Lacy has been my regular second bagger, but …” He paused to spit tobacco juice and do a mite of soft cussing. “The thing is she up and got married. Married some fool from Hannibal, and nothing good has come out of Hannibal since Mark Twain left. Well, the rules are only unwed women can play for the National Bloomer Girls, and they’re already in a hurry to have a baby … Maude and that reprobate Ernest Earl Foster, I mean … so they’ve gone back to Missouri. I wish her well, but this Foster fellow can get lost in a cave like Injun Joe for all I care.”

  I didn’t know what the Sam Hill he was talking about till Buckskin Compton bought a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer wrote by that fellow Twain, whose name wasn’t Twain at all but Samuel Clemens, and then made me read it on the train. Buckskin read part of the book to me, on account that my slow reading or bad pronouncing or asking him what some word meant or how it was to be said aloud annoyed him at times.

  “Listen,” Mr. Ed Norris said to me, “how would you like to play second base for us?”

  I just snorted, because I wasn’t going to laugh at being played for a fool. I went right to work lashing my big bat underneath the handlebars to my bicycle, as that was the easiest way for me to carry it after I’d stuffed my glove into the pack I wore on my back that also carried my tool bag, my lunch pail, a can of lubricating oil, my Burlington cyclist cape, in case it happened to rain, and a Demon Lamp from the Sears, Roebuck & Co., Incorporated, in case it got dark before I could make it home, which sometimes it did and might that day if I kept letting this potbellied manager keep on with his flapdoodle.

  “I’m serious,” he told me. “I need a second baseman in a hurry. For the rest of our season. I hear you can pitch some, too.”

  Now the hairs started standing up on the back of my neck as I squatted there. I looked up at him above the handlebars to tell him: “Mister, I ain’t no girl.”

  “Neither am I.”

  That’s when I turned and saw the third basewoman, Dolly Madison, still in her Bloomer Girls uniform but taking off her—I mean his—wig.

  Well, I gawked, swallowed, coughed, and quickly turned back around. But by now all the Mound City folks had gone back to their homes, and even that omnibus was out of sight with its passel of folks headed back to Mapleton, so there wasn’t nobody around the pasture except the Bloomer Girls and all them workers getting everything packed up to take to the Missouri Pacific depot.

  “Bill Compton’s the name,” the third basewoman … base-

  man … said as he stepped up, holding out his hand. “Call me Buckskin.”

  She … he … needed a shave. I could see that now. But I took his hand.

  Buckskin turned back to Mr. Norris and said: “You got any Big Chunk?”

  “You know I only chew Sure Pop,” Ed Norris fired back.

  “One of these days, you’ll get wise,” said Bill “Buckskin” Compton, alias Dolly Madison. “But I suppose it’ll have to do.”

  Now that I was paying attention, when he held out his hand, I saw that it was not only too big to belong on a female of her … his … size, but that there were hairs on its knuckles.

  After Buckskin got a plug from Mr. Norris, he bit off a chaw and stuffed the rest of the tobacco in his trousers pocket. “I’ll pay you back in Fort Scott,” he told Mr. Norris before looking at me. When he had that tobacco soft
ened enough by his teeth, he asked: “You joining us?”

  Well, I had no inkling of going around dressed up like a woman and making a fool out of myself all across Kansas, and I took to studying them other Bloomer girls as they loaded their stuff into a wagon. I shook my head and must’ve had the face of some Lutheran who thought them Bloomer Girls was defrauding the good people of Kansas by pretending they was girls.

  “Most of them are girls,” Buckskin said.

  “But dames can’t pitch or catch worth a fip,” Mr. Norris said, though he didn’t use the word fip. “So, yeah, we bring in a few toppers.”

  “Toppers?” I asked.

  Buckskin held up his wig. “Ringers,” he explained, and I knew what a ringer was, me being a ringer on account teams from all over eastern Kansas paid me to come play for them.

  “Speaking of wigs,” Mr. Norris said, “you best put yours back on before Ruth sees you.”

  Buckskin rolled his eyes but did as he was told. I turned to see if I could find this Ruth. She played first base, and she had to be a girl, as she played that position wearing a catcher’s mitt, but she played it real good. Plus, she was right pretty. By golly, I sure was glad she wasn’t no man.

  But using toppers or ringers, well, that explained why Lady Waddell throwed so hard and had one nasty curveball, and was more likely a brother than a sister to Russ Waddell, the great southpaw who’d won something like twenty-five or more games for the Philadelphia Athletics last season.

  “And the catcher?” I asked, because it suddenly struck me just how stupid I was not to figure him out as a scalawag of a scoundrel and a he instead of a she.