Having taken care of half my living and 3/4 my transportation costs, I told Champion to book me on. I felt relieved. That night the dreams stopped.
I found the note in my box at the Gibson:
Samuel,
We miss you. Will you visit tonight?
Caitlin
My heart nearly catapulted from my chest. I let out a yell that lifted the feet of lobby dwellers from the gleaming parquet floor.
I arrived with a 150-piece Noah’s Ark set fashioned in Bavaria that I’d found in Over the Rhine. We covered the floor with intricately carved animals and birds. Timmy fell asleep with the lions in his hand.
“This is for you,” I said, handing Cait a small box.
She smiled. While I played with Timmy she’d watched quietly. She wore her green dress, the one that made her eyes even more jewellike and at once concealed and suggested the contours of her body. I could scarcely look at her. Or keep from it. She was too beautiful.
“Samuel,” she breathed, holding the heart-shaped silver locket by its chain. It gleamed in the lamplight.
“Like it?”
She cradled it in her hand and gazed at it. “When I was a girl,” she said, “I hoped . . .”
She didn’t finish. “I missed you, Cait.”
“I couldn’t follow the Circle leaders’ talk,” she said, smiling, “even when they spoke of the most serious military matters.”
“Why was that?”
“Thinking of you.”
I moved toward her. “Are you marching off to war?”
“Not just now, for a certainty.”
I took her in my arms, pressed her to me as our mouths met. She held me so tightly that I could feel the trembling of her body.
“I do want you,” I breathed into her hair.
She kissed me again, then leaned back and looked into my eyes. She fastened the chain around her neck and lifted my hand to cover hers holding the locket. Around its edges I felt the soft swell of her breasts. “Can you be patient, Samuel?” she said softly. “I care for you, very much.”
Although attention was focused on the trip, the local baseball scene was not entirely quiet. A letter appeared in the Gazette arguing that the game was fast becoming, like boxing and horse racing, “a sport for gamblers and blacklegs to make money on.” It should not be played for pay, but solely “for the exciting and health-giving exercise it affords,” and employers should give their “best young men” time off to form amateur teams.
It was a popular argument. The country as a whole seemed obsessed with the subject of youth’s corruptibility. The Stockings weren’t impressed. “They’d grab for the cash fast enough if it came their way,” Waterman said bluntly of critics. “But who’d pay to see raggedy-ass muffins?”
The Pittsburgh Olympics came in to try their luck against us. Since Johnny now spent all his time training, with the fair about to open, I turned the score book over to Oak Taylor and busied myself feeding the multitudes. When the last of the hot dogs and hamburgers sold, I was more wrung out than after one of Harry’s workouts.
The game was a blowout. The Stockings took a 10-0 lead in the first and never slackened. In the face of Brainard’s two-hitter, George’s eight hits and six steals, and Andy’s two homers, Pittsburgh fell, 54-2, in only two hours. A most efficient drubbing.
That night Johnny and I packed our supplies and equipment. The Stockings would not play here again for at least a month, until after California.
Departure was five days away.
Next morning I brought Cait and Timmy to the Hamilton & Dayton depot, where Johnny waited with his sparkling three-hundred-dollar Demarest with its gleaming steel rails, ivory handlebars, silver-plated wheels, and hard rubber tires.
“Take me for a ride!” Timmy pleaded, eyes riveted on the mechanical wonder.
“I dunno, Tim,” said Johnny.
“For a certainty not!” Cait said.
“Tell you what,” I said to Johnny. “You save your legs. I’ll give him a spin around the platform.”
“You can ride?” said Timmy wonderingly, as if it were a wild bull.“I’m an expert.”
“Sam, I don’t think . . .” Johnny began nervously.
“Real slow and easy.” I straddled the bike and lifted Timmy onto the handlebars. “No problem.” We set off over the planks of the platform.
“Samuel!”
“Jeez, Sam!”
I wobbled a bit, giving Timmy several unintended thrills. Then I got the feel of it and we roiled smoothly. At the far end I set him on my shoulders for the return trip.
“Wheeeeee!” He clutched my hair, his knees pressing the sides of my neck, his elation fusing into me, making me young again.
“Look, Ma!” I said, lifting my hands from the bars as we coasted back.
“Samuel!”
“Where’d you learn?” Johnny said as we dismounted.
I waved at the bike and started to say it was something you knew as a kid and never forgot—then remembered that few people had mastered the new two-wheelers. “Guess I must be a natural,” I said.
“Wow, Sam!” said Timmy.
“Just jump on and ride my Demarest!” Johnny said incredulously.
“Ain’t Sam a dinger?” Timmy demanded, sounding for all the world like Andy.
“Samuel’s fond of his surprises,” Cait said, hugging him and looking at me over his shoulder. “For a certainty.”
I saw the locket hanging at her throat.
When the train arrived we lifted the velocipede aboard. Johnny was already edgy.
“You’ll make a fine showing,” Cait told him as we pulled out of the city.
“Fine ain’t enough,” said Johnny.
Cait smiled uncertainly, not sure if he was serious. To her it was a marginal pastime. To him it was a new identity, the launching of his future.
Carthage lay ten miles north. We arrived at noon and shuttled by coach to the fairgrounds. Clouds of dust rose from the road. We passed beneath a banner.
FIFTEENTH ANNUAL FAIR
HAMILTON COUNTY AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY
At the
