Buckskin, Bloomers, and Me Read online

  “We do?” I said.

  “Yes. And soon we women won’t just be voting or holding office in Wyoming, but across these United States. We’ll be playing baseball, too. The men will no longer dominate.” Her head shook. “Wister’s Molly is such a weakling. She reminds me of my older sister. But Wister isn’t a woman, so he doesn’t know what we feel. In fact, I’m not overwhelmed by his gift of prose, but …” She leaned forward, lowered her voice, and quoted the line again, whole and complete!

  “With whom are you bunking?” she asked me after a pause. “Mother hasn’t told me.”

  “Ummm. Buck … I mean … ummm …”

  “It doesn’t matter. When we move north in four days, we’ll have to change trains to board the Santa Fe. So, when that happens, they’ll send us to a Harvey House for supper. We’ve made arrangements to discuss important matters. Suffrage. Putting women everywhere. Susan B. Anthony might be dead now, but we are united behind her cause.” Her voice changed. “You played very well today,” she told me.

  “Oh. Thank you. And you … ummm …” Must’ve still been more asleep, and now completely confused about suffrage and Owen Wister, and the sound of Ruth Eagan’s voice when she said son-of-a-*****.

  “I did a fine job of selling programs.” Now Ruth sounded sarcastic, but her mother was back, holding a tray that held cups of piping hot tea and cookies and tiny bites of cake.

  I tried to stand up, remembering to be a gentleman whenever possible, and stopped halfway up because I wasn’t sure it was proper for a girl to help a mean-eyed woman. But Mrs. Eagan’s glare sent me settling back down into my seat. Ruth got up and took the tray, and then she got into a discussion with her ma, who, turns out, didn’t think it was proper for ladies to be selling programs at baseball fields. That went on for quite a while, till I shut them both up by asking a question.

  “But a woman can play baseball?”

  Right then I knew that Mrs. Eagan despised my guts as much as did the Widow Amy DeFee.

  “Touché. Wonderful, Lucy. A marvelous comeback,” Ruth said, and lifted her cup and clinked it against mine. “Let me tell you about Mother,” Ruth said. “There are some things a woman should do, many things a woman shan’t do, but Mother’s sister, my Aunt Jessica, attended Vassar and played baseball there. Aunt Jessica says that I have talent, that I can play as well as many male players, and when Father found out what the National Bloomer Girls are willing to pay …”

  “Enough.” Mrs. Eagan sounded just like the Widow Amy DeFee, and I spilt some of my tea.

  “You swing the bat good,” I told Ruth.

  “Not as well as you do,” she said.

  I shrugged and told her: “You play good.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Eagan said.

  I looked at her and waited. I knew that when someone says well they generally go on to say something they find right important, but she just looked at me like I was an idiot.

  Sighing, she said: “You play well. Not … you play good.”

  Ruth laughed, and then she leaned over to me and whispered, and her eyes shined with hope and a longing to hear something that she wanted to hear so bad. What she whispered was: “Do you think I can play baseball as well as any man?”

  “Ruth Eagan,” her ma reprimanded.

  I was getting sleepy again because the train was really rocking, and now I had a belly full of cookies, puny slices of cake, and some tea, and I wasn’t thinking real straight. But Ruth being so close, and me smelling that fresh soap at her throat and thinking that maybe what she wanted to hear was the truth, I decided to tell her.

  “Not when you’re playing first base wearing a catcher’s mitt.”

  I watched the look on Ruth’s face change as she slammed back into her chair. Then I looked over at Ruth’s ma and saw her beaming and happy, like she’d been drinking some Oh-Be-Joyful and not hot tea. I felt like I’d gotten kicked in my belly, and I knew that must’ve been how Ruth felt, on account that I’d dashed all her dreams. I wanted to say how sorry I was, because tears welled in her eyes. I sure wished Buckskin was sitting next to me, because he could be right savvy, and he could’ve figured out what would change everything that had suddenly turned out so awful wrong.

  Didn’t happen though.

  What happened was Ruth shot up suddenly, left her cup in the tray that was sitting next to Mrs. Eagan, and she didn’t look at me at all, just said curtly to her mother: “Let’s go.” She started for the door toward the Pullman where we ballists sleep.

  Mrs. Eagan daintily put her cup on that tray and rose like a real lady, giving me a look that didn’t need no words.

  All alone, I felt like a louse.

  Which, Buckskin later told me, was how I should’ve felt.

  Chapter Six

  Toronto Republican

  Toronto, Kansas

  May 17, 1906

  The National Bloomer Girls, in jumpers and baggy knee pants, are to play ball here next Friday. It will be remembered that there was a “Bloomer Girl” crowd here last year, but the fans kicked, because some of the “girls” were masculine gender and wore long golden locks, while some of the players didn’t even pretend to ally themselves with the fair sex. It is hoped the National Bloomer Management will at least bring a bona fide aggregation to town whether they can play the national game or not.

  There ain’t really nothing worser than getting shoved awake out of a miserable sleep when your bones ache, and you got a crick in your neck, and then you up and let out a scream, on account your first thoughts is that the Widow Amy DeFee has found you.

  “Gosh darn it, kid,” a voice throttled way down in some dark tunnel, “what the heck’s got into you?”

  Yeah, you’d be right if you’re guessing that Buckskin Compton didn’t actually say gosh darn or heck.

  The only good thing that I could notice was that it wasn’t Judge Brett or the widow standing by my seat, but Buckskin Compton. It was also good I hadn’t messed my bloomers.

  “Oh.” I looked out the window and saw nothing but lanterns glowing and the shadows of figures heading down the depot’s platform and vanishing in the dark, ’cause, as I learnt ten minutes later, it was three-thirty in the morning. “Where are we?”

  “Toronto,” Buckskin said.

  “Canada?” Joy entered my heart, by grab, knowing that the Widow Amy DeFee and her murdering judge wasn’t never going to find me up here.

  Buckskin muttered a few more salty words. Reckon he wasn’t too happy to be awake at that hour, neither. “Toronto, Kansas.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come on, kid,” Buckskin said. “We’re going to the hotel for a few hours.”

  Blinking and yawning, I slowly come close to being awake. Buckskin had set a couple of bags on the seat across the aisle, but he kept holding this long, slender one that I’d seen him carry to every game we ever played. And now when I thought more about it, I’d seen him carrying that bag just about everywhere he went, even to the privy a time or two. Now professional ballists feel a mother’s love toward their baseball bats, and that thought made me make sure no thief had made off with mine, which remained on the slatted rack above my seat. After rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I focused on Buckskin.

  And his dress, apron, and wig.

  “Got your grip?” Buckskin asked.

  “Ummm.” I pointed over my head at the sack that rested against my ash bat.

  “That’s what I thought,” Buckskin said. “Get it, and let’s go.”

  * * * * *

  Buckskin didn’t even let me close my eyes once we got up to the room we shared with Nelson “Nellie” McConnell and Russ “Lady” Waddell, neither being really pleased with Buckskin ordering a tub and hot water be brought up to the room after we registered downstairs. It was still the wee hours of the morning.

  “Gee willikins.” Yes, Russ Waddell actually us
ed that word. “Can’t a bath wait?” He did add some adjectives—or is them adverbs?—in front of wait, though.

  McConnell muttered something, too, but for some reason his cussing reminded me of some night song my ma—my real ma, not my other ma, that hydrophoby dog called the Widow Amy DeFee—used to sing to me so I would go to sleep. Three, four cusses was all it took before McConnell began snoring in one of the two beds.

  Waddell fetched a bottle from his grip while this big fellow with flaxen hair poured buckets of hot water into the tub that had been rolled in and set between the two beds on account that was about the only place you could fit a tub in a room maybe a little bit bigger than that four-seater behind that Missouri Pacific depot that was marked ‘Ladies Only,’ and that we had visited before coming into the hotel. We had had to wait the most awfullest long time, on account the Bloomer Girls were with us, along with some other ladies who were either getting off in Toronto or didn’t want to use the facilities in the coaches no more. Anyway, ’cause we were still dressed in our uniforms or, like Waddell and Buckskin, in dresses and wigs, we couldn’t go into the men’s two-seater where there weren’t hardly nobody waiting at all.

  “Will that do, sir?” the flaxen-haired kid asked in a funny accent that Buckskin later told me was Norwegian.

  “We’ll see,” Buckskin said, as he tipped the boy and closed the door behind him. Looking at me, he pointed at the steaming tub, and ordered—bossing like Ed Norris done most of the time —“Get in.”

  My mean look didn’t scare him none.

  “You stink,” Waddell said as he pulled off his dress.

  Weren’t nothing wrong with my nose. Or my eyes, neither, cause a quick glance around that room revealed that there wasn’t no screen so a body could have privacy. Wasn’t nothing but a dresser, a chamber pot, and a mirror. The mirror was cracked, and the chamber pot wasn’t exactly spotless. I got undressed.

  The hot, soapy water felt good, but the feeling left once I spied Buckskin opening my sack.

  “You stop that,” I told him. “That’s my stuff.”

  He dropped my leather glove and ball onto the bed, but my stockings got pitched into the tub, whilst Waddell, holding the small bottle in his left hand, used his right to dunk my uniform underwater, too. Everything, excepting my shoes. Then Waddell submerged his left hand in the water, shook it off some, and dried it on McConnell’s Bloomer Girls’ shirt.

  My plans were to step out of the portable tub and have a go at fisticuffs, but Buckskin shook his finger, then pointed at the floor. “You ruin that rug, the hotel manager will charge Norris for damages, and Norris’ll take it out of your pay.”

  So I sank back into the tub, but not ’cause I didn’t want to lose a penny of the money I was supposed to be getting paid. Besides, that hot, soapy water did feel good.

  “Blue Buckles,” Buckskin said as he threw my overalls into the darkening water. “And whatever this once was.”

  “That’s one of my three-for-a-dollar shirts,” I said, feeling sort of embarrassed.

  “The other two must have been the forty-five-cent ones, ’cause this one ain’t worth more than a dime,” Waddell commented, corking his bottle and throwing it to Buckskin, who took the cork out with his teeth and splashed some of them ardent spirits on the hand he’d used to throw my duds into the tub. After drying his hand on McConnell’s Bloomer Girls’ shirt, he plucked the cork from his teeth and took himself a swallow of liquor.

  “A prince’s wardrobe,” Buckskin said after McConnell finished muttering some cusses between snores and grunts, like a fat hog might make, and rolled over. Buckskin handed the bottle back to Waddell and called me a “runaway.”

  “I don’t think he’s an army deserter,” Waddell said after taking a sip from the bottle.

  Forgetting all about my clothes that was getting washed, or being called a runaway, a thought got me nervous, and I shouted out: “Toronto!”

  “Huh?” they said.

  “Where do we go next?” I asked, having realized that after all the baseball games I’d been playing, I wasn’t no more than a hundred miles from where the Widow Amy DeFee and Judge Brett were living.

  “Emporia, I think,” Waddell said after a long staring session with Buckskin.

  That was better, I thought. More north, more west from Pleasanton.

  “And after that?” I asked.

  “You’ll be sorry when you see me in Toledo,” McConnell mumbled in his sleep, coherent and clear, like he was wide awake and not drunk, neither of which he was.

  “Chanute,” Buckskin said.

  Which was worser. Even closer to Pleasanton than Toronto. When you play baseball as a ringer for teams across the state, you come to know a little bit about geography.

  My stomach started rumbling, which caused me to fart—which I do when I get nervous—and that made the water bubble. That got Waddell to laugh, but Buckskin just stared harder at me and scratched his head, meaning, of course, his real hair, not the wig he put on to fool the Bloomer Girls, the crowds, but not too many reporters.

  “We aren’t going to play a game in …” I stopped, looked at my two teammates, and quickly knew I’d better not mention Pleasanton, scairt that might get them to learning the truth and they’d tell Mr. Norris that I wasn’t an orphan but a runaway, even though I happened to be both. But iffen we wound up in Pleasanton, I’d be deader than the Boston Beaneaters already was in the National League.

  So I said: “Kansas City.” Which was stupid and not what I meant to say, which was Yates City, which was also in Woodson County. Besides, Yates City didn’t have no baseball team I’d ever played for or against. I really didn’t know nothing about that town, which might have been why I said Kansas City by mistake, but it didn’t matter what I said, ’cause Buckskin kept right on staring at me.

  “You are a runaway!” Buckskin shouted, which got him to cussing, which got Ed Norris, in the room next to ours, pounding against the wall and telling us to get some sleep, ’cause we got a game to play at two in the afternoon.

  Waddell kept trying to sink his head deeper into his pillow, but his pillow was like a brick, which added to his irritableness, so he snapped at Buckskin: “What difference does it make if he’s a runaway? He plays good ball for a kid his age.”

  “He joined us in Fort Scott,” Buckskin said, keeping his voice down, ’cause just before he said that, Mr. Norris had banged on the wall again and said that if we didn’t shut up and go to bed, he was going to start implementing fines for disobeying the going-to-sleep rule. I didn’t recollect reading about no going-to-sleep rule, but I guess we could’ve been fined for kicking, quarreling, or causing a commotion when we were supposed to be sleeping.

  “He brings nothing but a bicycle, gear, and the clothes on his back,” Buckskin muttered to himself. Which made me pray that the fellows that traveled with us and did all the constructing of our baseball stands and fences remembered to take good care of my Hawthorne, which they’d been real good at so far. Still it was starting to look to me like I’d have to be leaving the National Bloomer Girls before the sun rose, and pedaling as fast and as far away from the Widow Amy DeFee and Judge Brett as I could.

  “Maybe he’s poor,” Waddell said, like I wasn’t right there. “Have you seen most of the rubes who come to our games, Buckskin?”

  “I don’t want the law to come down on us ’cause we’re traveling with a runaway,” Buckskin said.

  “The law won’t,” Waddell said. “ ’Cause if Nelse finds out, he’ll turn him in for the reward. And if Nelse doesn’t, Norris sure will.”

  “I’m not a runaway.” Yes, I was, but there wasn’t nothing illegal about running away from a couple of murderers. “Both of my parents are dead,” I told them. That was, sadly, truthful.

  “I wanted to run away and join the circus,” McConnell said as he rolled over. “Still do, sometimes.” We looked at h
im, but he started snoring again.

  Waddell laughed.

  But me and Buckskin didn’t.

  “Give the kid a break,” Waddell said. “We’re all running away from something.”

  Buckskin sat down on his bed and held out his hand to Waddell, wanting what was left of the whiskey. Waddell obliged. Buckskin drained the bottle, and then he laid his head down on his rock-hard pillow and didn’t say nothing no more.

  Chapter Seven

  Emporia Gazette

  Emporia, Kansas • June 24, 1906

  Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, the Normal girls play baseball on the Normal athletic field, behind closed gates. With field glasses you can get a good view of the surrounding country from Perley’s hill, or on the east side of the field, for the fence is down.

  Before I got paid a lot more than four or six bits to play baseball, it typically took two, three weeks before I forgot how good I had done—extra-base hits, super catches, things like that. But errors, strikeouts, and bonehead plays I had made would stick in my craw much longer. But you got to understand that way back then, I’d have a game once, twice a week, unless we got a couple of doubleheaders. Now that I was traveling by train and playing practically every day, albeit in bloomers, well, the point I’m making is that I honestly ain’t got nary a clue how we played in Toronto, how I did, what the rival team was like, or what the town was like. Nothing at all. It’s like the only thing that happened in Toronto occurred at that rawhide hotel between four and five-thirty that morning. Can’t recollect lots of other games, or towns, neither.