Buckskin, Bloomers, and Me Read online

  “With your support, we can get Roodhouse out of office and bring peace and respectability back to Bourbon County. I’ve announced my candidacy on the Democratic ticket, but of course that is subject to the will and decision of the Democratic Convention.” He had a stack of papers clipped to a board in his left hand. “Might I have your support?”

  Buckskin slowly pulled his hand from underneath his coat, wiped it on his trousers leg, and said: “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m just passing through.”

  “Oh.” Mr. Commons looked crestfallen—that’s a word I picked up from one of them books Buckskin bought at Cottrell’s. And Mr. Commons stepped up to me and said: “And how about you, young man?”

  “Y’all got a sheriff named Roadhouse?” I said.

  “Rood-house,” he corrected, but kept right on grinning as he added, “but that might be something I can use in my campaign against that scoundrel.” He saw my baseball bat. “Are you twenty-­one?”

  “He’s with me,” Buckskin said. “We came to see the Bloomer Girls play your Athletics this afternoon.”

  “Oh.” The candidate looked back at Buckskin, shook his hand once more, and said: “Well, you shan’t find a better team than ours, sir. We have a reputation of playing like gentlemen. Why, a merchant in Pittsburg said that our team, because of the nature of our players, is the only one in the league that he would dare keep at his hotel. Our team is filled with gentlemen.”

  “Ours isn’t.” Buckskin nodded at the gent, whose face looked kind of numb, and told me we best grab some breakfast.

  As we walked away, the man who wanted to be sheriff recovered and said that we should try Carey’s Pastry Kitchen. Which we did, and when I was about to tell Buckskin that I didn’t have money to buy even coffee, I recollected that I still had the dollar and fifty cents that I’d been paid by Mr. Durant in Mound City.

  When we settled in front of the counter, Buckskin Compton wiped the sweat off his brow, took a deep breath, and, after he exhaled, nodded at the redheaded gal in front of us and asked for a big glass of water and some coffee and a doughnut, which he called a bear-sign, a word I’d heard some cowboys use. I ordered what Buckskin was having.

  “Nice bat,” he said, but it felt like he meant something else.

  I looked down at my bat, then up and around, and I saw that just about everybody else in the pastry shop was looking at it, too. So I leaned it against the counter so nobody might get the impression it was a weapon and go calling on Sheriff Roodhouse.

  It was a nice bat. One of the newer kinds, big and heavy, white ash, with four red stripes about where the rosin ended and a big fat red stripe between the small rounded knob—about the size of a good tomato—at the end of the handle, but that stripe wasn’t as shiny, on account of all the rosin and pine tar I’d rubbed there to keep the bat from slipping in my hands while I was batting. There was another red stripe, nowhere near as big as the one by the handle but maybe the size of two of the four down below, and one final red stripe, same size as the last one I mentioned, right at the top of the bat.

  “You swing it well,” Buckskin said. “You sure you really want to swing it dressed in bloomers?”

  We waited till the redhead served our orders and wandered to the far end of the counter to talk to a fat girl and her bespectacled brunette friend in a polka-dot dress.

  “Well … you do it,” I said.

  “I have my reasons.”

  “But I ain’t wearing no wig.”

  He bit into his doughnut, wiped the powder from his lips. “Yeah, that’s what you told Ed. When’s the last time you had your hair cut?”

  That had been right after Pa died, when the Widow Amy DeFee made me do it so I’d look “presentable” at the funeral.

  “Back in Mound City, it sounded like you wanted me to play …” It struck me how little time had passed. “Just yesterday.”

  “Don’t let this go to your head, kid, but you’re too good a ballist to be playing for a bunch of frauds.”

  “You ain’t bad yourself.”

  He smiled. “But I am a fraud.”

  We ate in silence, and Buckskin insisted on paying for my coffee and bear-sign, and said we might as well go over and see if Mr. Norris had sobered up.

  * * * * *

  He had. We found him at the baseball field, which wasn’t no pasture. The Bloomers’ crew was scurrying around, setting up the canvas fences, along with the grandstand. Mr. Norris was right happy to see me, and even happier to learn that I was an orphan, so he didn’t have to hear no gab from an angry mother, like he did when Ruth Eagan’s ma got to complaining.

  The mention of Ruth’s ma made Ed Norris snap his finger.

  “This is the most important thing, kid,” he told me. “Listen, on your own time, I don’t care what you do, or anything like that. Find a petticoat. Find an opium den. Whatever suits you. But any time you’re around Ruth Eagan, you’re a gal. Get it. You’re Lucy Totton. And he’s Dolly Madison. And Nelse is Nellie. And Russ is Lady Waddell. Don’t ask me to explain it. You’d have to get your brains wrapped around the way her shatterpated ma thinks. Even when you’re on the train, when Ruth’s around, the bloomers stay on, and so does the wig. ’Course, you don’t need a wig. But when’s the last time you washed that hair? Do that. Like now. Have you checked out, Buckskin? If not, get him back to the hotel. Get him cleaned up. Where’s your luggage? Never mind …” He stopped and half-turned to shout at the workers over in right-center field. “You idiot! That’s not an iron rod, it’s a two-by-four.” He started walking that way but paused to yell at Buckskin: “Get him dressed and ready! Get the dirt off his face! Redden his lips. And be back here ninety minutes before the game starts!”

  * * * * *

  Well, that’s how I started playing for the National Bloomer Girls. We lost, ten to eight, to the Fort Scott Athletics, but we had them down by one run in the seventh. We lost to Galesburg on Monday, four to two. Got rained out in Thayer.

  Then we were on the train, rocking and swaying, to some other city and some other game. And I was listening to Buckskin Compton and Nelse McConnell and Mr. Norris—mostly Mr. Norris talking and Buckskin and Nelse listening—saying that he never should have played that game in Fort Scott.

  “That scoundrel of a reporter. He’s a muckraker.” He held up a copy of the Tribune and Monitor and began reading: “ ‘Three of the men were in men’s suits.’ That’s a shameless falsehood. You were all in bloomers and wigs. ‘The first baseman, shortstop, pitcher, and right fielder were men.’ Another lie. The battery were men. They always are. But who could mistake Ruth Eagan for a boy? No man’d ever take a catcher’s mitt to play first base. It oughtn’t even be allowed for dames.”

  I’d never mistake Ruth for a fellow. To me she was real pretty, which I might’ve already mentioned.

  “If I recall,” Buckskin said, “that Fort Scott newspaper said we played before a thousand people.”

  “So what?” Mr. Norris belted out.

  “Twenty-five cents a head … that’s two hundred and fifty dollars, which leaves you one hundred and eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents. That doesn’t include programs sold, which all goes to the National Bloomer Girls, and the split in concessions. Or our appearance fee.”

  “You done all that ciphering in your head?” McConnell asked in pure amazement.

  Buckskin grinned. “It doesn’t take into account the bets you placed, either, Ed.”

  “It also doesn’t take into account what I pay you,” Mr. Norris said. “Or those idiots to put up and take down the grandstand and fences. And I don’t place bets. I sure wouldn’t bet on this team of dunderheads.”

  “I didn’t say you bet on us,” Buckskin said, but Mr. Norris didn’t hear. His mouth was running like a thoroughbred.

  “This train isn’t free. This women’s team will drive me to the poorhouse yet.”

  “
You pay us a decent wage,” Buckskin said. “You pay the girls something else.” Only it wasn’t something else Buckskin said. “And we’ve drawn bigger crowds than we did at Fort Scott.”

  “Yeah,” McConnell said. “The newspaper kid I talked to said folks have never supported baseball in that town.”

  “You talked to a newspaperman?” Mr. Norris belted out. “I told you never to talk to a newspaperman. I talk to the press. Did you tell that reporter that some players weren’t ladies?”

  “A kid,” McConnell explained. “A boy selling papers. Not a reporter. Unless they let nine-year-olds write for them.”

  Mr. Norris gulped down what was left in his flask. “A story like that’ll ruin us.”

  “It’s one paper, boss,” McConnell told the manager.

  “That’s what you think,” Mr. Norris came back at him. “Ever heard of a stagecoach? A train … like the one we’re riding … or the invention of the telegraph? It’s starting to seem that every town we play in has picked up that pack of lies printed in that Fort Scott paper.”

  “Not just lies, boss,” Buckskin said. “We are men.”

  “Balderdash.” Again, that ain’t exactly the word Mr. Norris spoke.

  Now that he mentioned it, it struck me how right Mr. Norris was. You see, I’d been reading them newspapers, too, as best I could, or at least looking over them to see if there were any reports about a runaway from Pleasanton—nothing— or, even better, the arrest or shooting down of two murdering scoundrels in Pleasanton, meaning the Widow Amy DeFee and Judge Brett.

  No luck. No stories like that. Just a bunch of boring stuff, and some baseball scores and write-ups, and, yes, sirree, a paragraph or two about the Bloomer Girls being men and girls that had been first printed in that Fort Scott newspaper.

  Then, as Mr. Norris was rampaging against the press, I realized that that sorry reporter hadn’t said the second baseman was a man, and I’d been playing second base.

  I was about to say something about that, but that train kept right on rocking, and the next thing I knew, Buckskin was poking my shoulder to wake me, saying that we was at wherever we was to play another game.

  Chapter Five

  Evening News

  Ada, Indian Territory • July 20, 1906

  The Bloomer Girls do not expect to draw crowds entirely on account of the novelty of being lady baseball players, but really put up a very creditable game. They travel in a private palace car and carry a canvas fence 14 feet high and 1,200 feet long for enclosing the grounds, a canopy covered grandstand with a capacity of 2,000, and everything necessary to give a first class exhibition. They have toured every state, also Canada, and have everywhere received good notices from the press, not only for their good baseball playing but also for their ladylike behavior.

  It was a right nice train. We had Pullman sleepers for our team. Didn’t share them with no folks on the regular run. Had our own smoking room, even though I never saw no need in rolling dead grass into a piece of paper, then lighting one end and then sucking on that burning paper.

  I was learning the rules, like them written down on a paper we all had to sign:

  No kicking, quarreling, or demonstrative criticisms while traveling on train, stagecoach, omnibus or any public or private conveyance, or at depots or hotels. Offending party is subject to pay a fine of twenty cents for each offense.

  No flirting, mashing, or making the acquaintance of any gentleman on trains, steamboats, or any public or private conveyance, or at depots, hotels, restaurants, or any public place. Offending party is subject to pay a fine of between twenty-five cents and three dollars, depending on the severity of the offense.

  No receiving of any notes from any gentleman with mashing on his mind. Offending party is subject to a fine of twenty-five cents.

  No entering, either during daylight or nighttime, any saloon, barroom, gambling den, grog shop, winery, or any establishment where intoxicating beverages are sold. Offending party is subject to a fine of no less than fifty cents and no more than two dollars.

  No digressing from the proper places for ladies, which are in their rooms at their hotels or in the ladies parlor, and no running through or occupying a hotel office or a gentleman’s sitting or waiting room. Offending party is subject to a fine of no less than twenty-five cents and no more than fifty cents.

  Them rules, Buckskin told me, didn’t apply to us, on account we wasn’t ladies.

  The thing you got to remember is that I’d spent most of my baseball career traveling from one field to another on my Hawthorne. Now I was riding on a train, as was my bike, though I was mostly sleeping, on account it’s right hard to stay awake with a coach swaying this way and that, and the iron wheels making that noise that sounded to most folks like clickety-clack but to me sounded like go-to-sleep-go-to-sleep.

  That’s what I’d done. We had played some team in some town. After about a week of baseball games practically every day, and sometimes two a day, games and towns and catches and hits and errors, not to mention wins and losses, sort of run together. We’d played two games, and that cool spell that had been hovering over Kansas had gone somewhere else, and Kansas had reverted back to its hot, windy ways, and that’s why I was so plumb tuckered that when I settled into a chair in our parlor car, I was sleeping like a dead man. When I felt someone nudge me, I yawned and muttered something, slowly opened my eyes, and …

  There she was, sitting right across from me.

  “We didn’t mean to wake you,” Ruth Eagan said.

  I blinked and saw Mrs. Eagan standing right over me, that perpetual scowl saying that I’d better not get no notions, as she knew that I wasn’t no girl.

  “It’s …” I stopped, dragged my shoes off the bench, and tried not to sound like a sixteen-year- old boy, though Buckskin, who weren’t a real deep talker hisself, said I didn’t have to worry about my voice till it finally got around to changing, and even after that occurrence, I wasn’t never going to sing in no mezzo-soprano voice or be another Edyth Walker, which I still ain’t rightly figured out what that means or what Bloomer team Edyth Walker plays for.

  “It’s all right.” I was still donned in my bloomers. My baseball bat and glove lay on the hard seat next to me.

  “Mother’s getting some tea and cookies,” Ruth Eagan said. “Would you like some?”

  “Well, sure.” See, I wasn’t thinking clear, but the look Mrs. Eagan give me told me she weren’t right happy about nothing, and then Ruth was sliding into the seat across from me and saying something to her ma, whose eyes bore through me like she was the Widow Amy DeFee come for killing.

  Finally, after leaving me with one more scowl, Mrs. Eagan moved down the rocking aisle toward that bar at the front of the parlor car where the National Bloomer Girls organization had all sorts of drinks—not intoxicating spirits, mind you—and cakes and cookies and nuts. Every now and then, there’d be sandwiches or soups, but not on this particular run.

  Ruth grinned, pulled up her skirts, and moved from the seat across from me to right next to me. I had to slide over some and put my baseball bat on the seat where Ruth had been sitting.

  “This way I can keep my eye on Mother.” She got this look of pure contentment, like my face must’ve gotten any time I figured out a way to do something spiteful to the Widow Amy DeFee. She raised her right hand and gave a little wave to her ma.

  “Wonderful,” Ruth whispered.

  “What?” I pretended to be staring out the window watching the Kansas scenery go roaring by at twenty miles an hour.

  “The man has to heat up water for our tea.”

  Ruth had gotten out of her Bloomer Girls uniform and was dressed in a skirt of navy blue and a blouse that was a lighter blue with little print of different colored roses, and a belt pulled real tight around her waist that seemed to accentuate—Ruth used that word some time later, probably the first ti
me accentuate was ever uttered aloud in Topeka—her … ummm, well … the ruffles around the top of her blouse, and those sleeves that was puffed up something extraordinaire from her shoulders to her elbows. She was busy opening her big bag and talking at the same time, every few seconds glancing up and smiling at her ma, but I figured she was just checking on the exact location of Mrs. Eagan.

  “You like to read, don’t you, Lucy?”

  Didn’t have no time to answer, on account she was saying: “I know you do. I see you all the time going through newspapers. Mother never lets me read newspapers. Says they’re nothing for a proper lady to read. In fact, she doesn’t think a lady should be reading at all … not even the Bible. That’s for the pastor to read to us and tell us what it means. So I have to read anything I can, and wait …” She checked on her mother before pulling out a fair-sized book. She lifted it ever so discretely so that I could see the cover, which was brown with red letters, all caps, and some design in the center that took me a while to figure out, but then, as my reading went, so did figuring out the title.

  “Have you read this?” Ruth asked, again not waiting for an answer. “Of course you have. Everyone has. But here’s what I keep reading over and over and over again. Here.” She thrust the book at me.

  My eyes landed on the full-page drawing next to the page which had nothing but words. It was a right fair drawing of some cowboys in a darkened room playing cards, and there was some writing underneath it that caught my attention, just as Ruth was quoting, from memory: “ ‘Therefore Trampas spoke. Your bet, you son-of-a-*****.”

  She said the whole word. But when I read it, I seen that Trampas didn’t. The last part of that there bad word on page twenty-nine was just a long dash.

  Giggling, she took the book back and shoved it into her purse. “Oh, how I wish the Bloomer Girls could play a baseball game in Wyoming.”

  At least she give me time enough to read the title. “Because of The Virginian?” I asked.

  Ruth waved her hand. “Oh, heavens no. I like the idea of Owen Wister’s hero, though I found Trampas more exciting, and Steve …” She stopped to do some tsk-tsking. “Such a tragic figure. And the West. It’s grand. It’s adventurous. Exciting. Cowboys are so dashing and fun and lively. I can’t wait till we play in Dodge City. Yet still.” Her head tilted back. “But it’s Wyoming. Wyoming.” She said it like some folks say the ocean, or the Rocky Mountains, or bacon. “We have the vote in Wyoming. Always have.”