Tyrus: An American Legend - Hardcover

Chapter One
 
THE FAMILY GUN
 
Nobody felt harder pain. The boy was dead certain. Who else, not nineteen days gone, lost a father the way he did? Taking two blasts from 4 a shotgun, dead on, at just paces? Do people know what a shotgun can do at that distance? Do they have a clear picture of the nightmare? And who had to watch his own mother being taken in, then, and charged with this kind of killing? Or had to read in his hometown paper words that spun rumors like those spun by the Royston Record about the Cobbs? Unstoppable little whispers, racing off like lightning all across the state of Georgia, about a wife and a lover. About a husband who'd been warned in secret to "watch his house." For when the husband wasn't there, what? Why didn't the paper just go ahead and say it! That his wife's lover would be right there for him, taking his place in his own bed. Why didn't the Record say that right out loud! It went ahead and floated off third-hand things about a pistol that was supposed to have been seen in his dead father's coat pocket but that was now, supposedly, missing. Pure rumor. When you don't stop at that, why not just make yourself happy. And damn say that Senator Cobb had set up his wife so he could catch her in the act of adultery and then murder her, or her lover, or both of them in his bed--but that instead it was his wife who surprised him, two times, with the family shotgun, as he stood on the roof outside their bedroom window. His wife with her lover by her side.
The boy knew every word from the Record exactly. And these--that "Mrs. Cobb's claim that she thought it was a burglar in her window is doubted by many"--these he'd repeated to himself in raging anger more times than he could count in the two weeks now since her arrest. "By many." He wished it were by all, Joe Cunningham, his best friend, included, so he could write off every last one of 'em until the end of time. Friends. Call them former friends. What do they all want, anyhow? They want a tragedy--their little bit of small-town Shakespeare. You can't get a good story out of a mere accident.
But where in hell did he find himself now? Ironies he'd had enough of in the preceding two days to last him for the next thousand years. For, hour after hour, Augusta to Atlanta, Atlanta to Cincinnati, Cincinnati to Toledo, and Toledo on toward Detroit (just some few miles still to go), he'd been reading the book he held now closed on his lap. His father's book. William Herschel Cobb, Turning Points of His Life, Commencing With His Coming into His Profession. It was the running story of his life that his father had kept up for over twenty years, marking what he called those turning points, beginning with the beginning of his teaching career in "The Narrows" of Banks County, Georgia, where his first son was born. And now that son, with this book on his lap (his finger held for near forty minutes to a page he couldn't get past, one he knew was close to where the writing stopped), was coming into his own profession. And the ironies in every one of his father's words of hope and expectation, for Georgia education, for the South's rising from the dead, for his son Tyrus, almost made the boy laugh out loud, or break down crying. Only he wouldn't let these Yankees riding now with him, crowding him, on the Michigan Central's late-night Toledo-Detroit, get the chance to think of him as crazy. He was dead certain someone would use that to deny him the opportunity of his life.
And let him spit at the damned, cheap neatness of irony, it made it hurt so much more that right now was supposed to be the happiest moment of his life. His father had done everything to talk him out of becoming a ballplayer, to get him to go to university and make himself ready for one of the learned professions. But, as his mama knew, there was no talking him out of it. He was born to be a ballplayer. And when you've heard your calling--when you know that difference between how dead and small you are when you're doing what somebody else wants for you and how alive when you're going your own way--well, then, there's no stopping you. And now he was just a handful of hours from putting on a major-league uniform, though he was still only eighteen. How many had made it so far, so fast? You could count 'em now maybe on a single hand.
But no good--such sweet, dream things. With all the other sad and godforsaken horrible things that had happened these last days, Jesus Lord help him, please, Jesus, he was feeling not just shattered in his heart but confused far down in his mind--to the point of something strange. Like the way he felt now--as if he were on two trains at the same time. The first--the one now speeding him to the end of his father's book, the last two words of which story he knew were a sick-ominous, darkly scrawled BURN THIS (and he knew this because among the hundred guilty temptations to be curious that he'd felt in the last twenty days, going ahead and looking at those last words was one more he couldn't resist). And the second--the train that was actually now carrying him to Detroit, driving him on and on through territory more and more foreign the farther north it went (for he'd never in his life before been north of Chattanooga). But this second train he couldn't really feel. Couldn't, hours on end now, sense the real motion of it much at all, even though for a ballplayer there is no time in his whole life like the time of his call-up to the major leagues. It was as if this train to Detroit, impossible but true, ran only alongside the one he was really on. And, Christ, how could it be that he couldn't even much sense the dream of his life coming true? Right this instant, though, he thought that the reason he couldn't much notice the motion of the Toledo-Detroit was that it ran exactly parallel to the train of his reading his father's book, and at exactly the same speed--in that way trains have of seeming not to be moving when they are moving right with us. And somehow, which was strange too, he suspected that the moment he arrived at the Tigers' Bennett Park would be the moment that he came to the end of his father's story, and that the two arrivals would be at the same place. Don't ask him what that place would be.
It tore him, too, though, made his heart feel still more sadness, to think back on how he had killed train-time and distance when he was playing in the South Atlantic League, before the accident. Just Charlie, that's all it would be, just his beautiful girl, Charlie, Charlotte Lombard--he could think of Charlie for hours, and hours, and hours, nonstop. And he wouldn't know that he was on a real train, then, either. Easily he could spend two hours on a word he might say to her and how she might laugh or smile when he said it. That soft turn of her lips, so wonderful. Or all the way from Augusta to Chattanooga, just on the kind of day it would be, and where they would be, when he asked her to marry him. Or on how gentle he would be the first time he made love to her. On that he could spend a day. And on the kisses they'd begun to share now, not clumsy like that stupid first one, but cool as the clean taste of her soft lips and then warm with their passion, and tenderness. Hours and hours on that unbelievable feeling. And on how beautiful she looked on her chestnut, Highlander, when they rode together at The Oaks, her family's home outside Augusta. And could the girl ride! It had made his eyes tear up with warm pride to watch her.
He had confessed to Charlie now that he loved her, and she had told him that she loved him. And she would move heaven and earth, she said, when they parted three days ago, to get the schedule of her and her mother's upcoming junket to New York matched to the schedule of the New York games between the Highlanders and the Detroit Tigers....