Ebenezerville

By V. J. Black

Winner of the William Faulkner Literary Competition for Best Novel, 2018.

Professor JB “Stuffy” Hugabee, on sabbatical leave from Charleston, has returned to the small upstate South Carolina town of his birth to conduct research for a book on Mill League baseball. Taking up residence in the dilapidated house where he w

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hungry Hill Books
• Release date: Nov 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733085618

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First Edition published by Hungry Hill Books 2019

Copyright © VJ Black 2019

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-7330856-0-1 (TPB)

ISBN: 978-1-7330856-1-8 (EB)

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are

the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

entirely coincidental.

Typeset in Baskerville

Cover by Berge Design

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019912464

Ordering Information Contact:

Hungry Hill Books LLC

www.hungryhillbooks.com

The Pitch

I stand in the lobby of a monument to the written word. The triangular light on the wall emits a sudden, soft glow, and a soothing electronic ping summons me to the elevator. The doors open with an unexpected rattle almost halfway…there is a slight pause, and they continue to separate smoothly, finally disappearing behind polished granite walls.

I am in Manhattan to visit my publisher, a garrulous man named Fordyle, with whom I have corresponded by e-mail but have never met. His company has accepted two of my previous manuscripts—obscure academic volumes, cheaply bound, weighted down with footnotes—through an arrangement with the university where I teach. Both are now out of print, but I continue to photocopy the original books for my largely unimpressed students. I suspect Fordyle will want the meeting to go quickly, since at the outset of our agreement he e-mailed his preference never to actually meet any of his authors in person, the better to dissect their work without prejudice. But I had insisted (even above the protestations of my own academic dean) and had made myself a pest. If I were willing to come all the way from Charleston for five minutes of his time, Fordyle had growled, he supposed he could suspend his policy, just this once.

The doors close softly, and the ascent begins. The elevator car quickly reaches cruising speed and wobbles slightly as it slows to meet my selected floor. A deep rumbling precedes the surprisingly fluid opening of the doors.

I step into the corridor and march toward Fordyle’s posh rooms. I have imagined a chaotic maelstrom of creativity—keyboards clicking away, harried scribes milling around sipping lattes, agents energetically soliciting scripts—but the office is quiet, even sedate. It hardly seems the kind of place where stories are launched into the breathing world. But all of this is about to change.

I place my wrapped manuscript on the high counter and hand the receptionist my card. My formality seems to confuse her, and her announcement to Fordyle over the intercom lilts into a question: There’s a Professor Hugabee here to see you? The voice that answers is surprisingly pleasant in tone, but I shouldn’t be surprised, since I have never actually heard the man speak. One cannot really be known from one’s e-mails.

I sit for quite some time, contemplating how I will make use of the five minutes Fordyle will allow me. I had returned to my birthplace at the outset of this shiny new millennium to chronicle the pleasures of a former time, when life was no more complicated than a boy’s game and was just as satisfying—to inspect with a historian’s eye the shreds of my past that lay buried in the warm sod of Ebenezerville, seeking to anchor myself to some secure foundation that never really existed. What I found there shook me to the core. It will take more than five minutes to explain.

Fordyle appears at last. He is small of build, almost delicate, balding in all the wrong spots. His shirt is stiffly starched. Well, J.B., we finally meet, he says in his musical voice. He looks down his nose (literally) at my bundle of manuscript. So, another anecdotal early-days-of-baseball book, eh? He is trying his best to be smooth, but he is not. The sarcasm in his tone is intentional.

Actually, it’s more of a memoir, I answer, standing. I am a good four inches taller, though not particularly tall.

I see. One of those grandiose baseball-as-a-metaphor-for-life books, is that it?

I cannot smile with him. Not exactly, I answer. While researching for the book, I stumbled upon a murder.

His eyeballs shudder, as if he is experiencing a mild seizure, and his body goes rigid. I have thrown him a curve; his advantage over me is lost. He chews on his lip and eyes me suspiciously. Are you serious?

Indeed, sir.

He ushers me down a long corridor. True crime is hot right now, he is saying. Through the open office doors, I catch glimpses of the skyline; it is terrifyingly beautiful, but the drones at their desks pay no mind, for they are conditioned to the view. Fordyle is chatting incessantly, awakened by the prospect of financial gain at the expense of another’s tragedy. But you have to have an angle to make it interesting, he is saying. The people in their offices begin to look up as we pass, their ears pricked by his loud ramblings. They strain to catch a phrase, a word, anything to quicken the pulse. I hear some of them whisper the word—murder—and I wonder why they are so vitally interested in death.

Perhaps, I conclude sadly, scanning their pallid faces, it is because, in a metaphorical sense, at least, they are so familiar with it.

Fordyle is tossing up names of notable bestselling authors he plans to coerce into blurbing my book, without pausing to hear me say that I have no interest in shameless promotion. The best stories—and the deepest truths—are the ones we discover for ourselves. Now, tell me your story, he says, breathless, as we settle into our respective chairs.

I smile. The five minutes is already up.

Whether we wake at morning in the city, or lie at night in darkness in the country towns, or walk the streets of furious noon in all the dusty, homely, and enduring lights of present time, the universe around us is the same. Evil lives forever—so does good. Man alone has knowledge of these two, and he is such a little thing.

This is man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destinies of nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.

Thomas Wolfe

You Can’t Go Home Again

The First

The roads that take you most of the way from Charleston to Ebenezerville belong to the federal government, and they are for the most part clean, fast, and nondescript. You can stop at a rest area and stick your hand through the cage that secures the vending machines to buy a Coke, or walk your dog on the prescribed path, or peruse a display of brochures which promise so much more beyond the wide ribbon of painted concrete cut through the heart of the Palmetto State. Over the course of three hours you can discern a subtle change if you are sensitive to it: the long, flat stretch of lowcountry highway rising into the sandhills, where the haze and sun compete to obscure and illumine the elevated distant skyline of the capital city for a moment, replaced by the rolling pastures of the piedmont, its tall trees gloriously adorned in kudzu, their ancient roots firmly embedded in red clay. But modern motorists rarely notice; they are vacationers from far away, or college students loaded down with a month of laundry, or snowbirds journeying home in their Cadillacs from a seasonal hibernation in Palm Beach, all preoccupied with dodging trucks, finding the cheapest gas, and making good time.

Such were my thoughts as I veered off the interstate just north of Columbia to take a country road the rest of the way, the one routinely traversed in my boyhood, when it was the only available route. On this bright day, in the Spring of the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred ninety-nine, not much seems to have changed. Driving my recently purchased, pre-owned, low-mileage lime green Beetle past collapsed wooden structures overcome by the unstoppable vine and abandoned filling stations with rusted metal signs of long-forgotten brands, I lamented the passing of time and tradition, and reached for memories that were mostly wistful dreams. Even so, I breathed in the majesty of God’s unspoiled creation and saw that it was good, for John Bartholomew Hugabee, a.k.a. Stuffy, Associate Professor of History on sabbatical leave from Charleston, was finally coming home.

As Route 21 curled lazily before me, dipping this way and that, indifferent to the overgrowth and accumulated junk along its weedy shoulders, I regretted its relegation to obscurity in favor of the almighty interstate highway, that icon of modern travel that elevates the getting there above the going there forevermore. I bit my lower lip and concentrated hard, trying to recall the road in all its glory, when as a toddler my mother and I drove north along this very route. I remembered nothing, of course, but visualized it nevertheless in powerfully imaginative detail. My heart raced, despite the frigid draft of the air vents; I was almost there.

The Spoleto Festival would be well underway back home in Charleston, and as the distance grew between here and there, I thought about Mother and her husband of over three decades, Wardell Marchandregarde, Esq., the noted South-of-Broad attorney, sitting in the cool of some hushed auditorium, far from the common folk, such as I hoped to meet on my journey home. For to say that Charleston is my hometown is actually technically incorrect, since I was only raised there, not born there, which to Charlestonians is an important distinction. In fact, I was now traveling to the town of my birth, where a Winthrop College freshman named Ella Grace Poteat once fell in love with my father, or at least I had always assumed it was love, since Mother had described their courtship as so hot we gave off sparks, and one of those sparks turned out to be me. The prospect of marriage, unfortunately, was unacceptable to the Poteats, who upon learning of the affair immediately made arrangements to return their daughter to the Holy City, though she would frequently (and often secretly) travel back to watch her beloved Hoyt Little Train Hugabee play baseball. Star mill league player and pitching phenom that he was, Ella Grace was always treated to the most gracious hospitality by his kinfolk, despite being in the family way, and when on one of these trips little John Bartholomew decided to come early, it was the Hugabees who brought me into the world, right there in the humble manse in Ebenezerville that served as their ancestral home.

In 1963, Little Train left his job at the mill and walked on to the fledgling Pittsburgh Pirate farm team, the Rock Hill Wrens of the Western Carolinas Association. Though she was by this time seriously dating the gallant Marchandregarde, a Citadel grad away at NYU Law School, on cool Spring mornings Ella Grace packed me into a car filled with fellow College of Charleston coeds and drove north for weekend ballgames. In 1964, when I was three, Little Train was enjoying a spectacular season for the Rock Hill team, which had changed its affiliation to the red-hot St. Louis Cardinals. With an earned run average of 0.00 in 59 innings pitched, the big club took notice and snatched the diminutive 5’6" fireballer right up to the major leagues. Ella Grace, oozing forth magnificent splurges of her extraordinary Southern charms, persuaded my soon-to-be stepfather (Marchandregarde) to find tickets to the World Series that year in New York, and we attended game three in Yankee Stadium. The arrogant and self-absorbed law student never realized, of course, that he had only rekindled a fire that had never really been extinguished, since Ella Grace had always explained me by saying that she had fallen prey to the advances of a former high school chum, the two of them having stumbled into the darkened dunes of Sullivan’s Island beach in a drunken reverie, on a sultry evening over Spring Break. It would have never occurred to Marchandregarde that his intended could have ever become enamored with a chaw chewing, gas pumping, butt scratching scrapper like Hoyt Hugabee—even if he was a rising star in the big show.

I retracted the window and hung the crook of my elbow outside in the warm air. It was Memorial Day weekend, and flags (both U.S. and Confederate) were hanging here and there from the poles and porches of the country homes of rural York County. I felt strangely like Odysseus returning home after a long and successful adventure, and I wondered if anyone here remembered my father. That World Series game in 1964 had been the highwater mark of his short life, when he entered in the ninth inning with the score tied to fan both Maris and Pepitone on six pitches, only to serve up a hanging curve to the hobbled but still indomitable Mickey Mantle, who launched it high and far into the left field seats. Though the Cards went on to win the series, Hoyt Hugabee could never forgive himself for that seventh and final pitch; upon returning home he retreated into an off-season abyss of lawbreaking and dissolution, ending when, in an alcoholic stupor, the man who honed his rocket arm by throwing rocks as a boy into the windows of locomotives tried unsuccessfully to drive across the tracks in front of a speeding train, and found no forgiveness there, either.

Baseball had always hovered in the background of my consciousness, an inexorable force from the day I learned as an eight-year-old child that fastballs were in my genes. I was, however, a spectacular failure at playing the game, and the rueful Marchandregarde was no help, given that he himself eschewed all sports that involved team play, particularly baseball (which he despised, once he was told by Ella Grace, in a tearful, wine-induced panegyric upon hearing of the train wreck, of the true patronage of her young J.B.). So, after ten years of dropping popups, fumbling easy grounders with my tender hands, and tripping over my own feet while trotting to first after a base on balls (the only way I could ever get there), I resigned myself to strictly academic pursuits, at which I have always excelled. But the grand old pastime was never very far from my mind.

So it was that as I entered Rock Hill and passed Cherry Park, a sports complex with five pristine diamonds clustered around a tower, one of the South’s most storied amateur softball destinations, I was filled with wonder. I had arrived at my personal Mecca, where my father’s meteoric rise and fall had occurred, where eighty years before, Hap Rathskeller perfected his legendary skills on the long-forgotten grassy fields of Ebenezerville, a mere hundred miles from where Joe Jackson once torched the base paths in stocking feet. I, Professor John Bartholomew Hugabee of Charleston, had come to set down the unabridged history of a simpler time, to anchor myself to a place and a people, and to capture life as it once was and should always be, artfully woven within the story of the greatest game of all.

I hurriedly referenced my hand-scrawled notes for directions and drove my garishly green bug out of town toward the bump in the road where the dilapidated family home was waiting, the very spot from which I had drawn my first breath. As I made my way through the gradually changing landscape from city to country, I thought I heard the slow, mournful, rumble of a distant train.

The road that takes you from Rock Hill to Ebenezerville is maintained by the state and offers few roadside attractions. Unlike Route 21, it never thrived with commerce, and rarely hosted traffic from beyond the county boundaries. The town itself sprouted at the very place where the edges of large, land-grant farms converged, along a quarter mile of rail, just a few miles away from the grand summer homes of Charleston’s elite families in the bustling county seat of York. My green Beetle floated high and low over the highway, cruising through the unspoiled spaces like a Day-Glo cloud, until the white spire of the Three Taverns Presbyterian Church came into view beyond the trees. As the road veered slightly northwest, the ancient oaks lined up on either side of the entrance, and for a moment it seemed like I could drive right through this leafy corridor and up the front steps: a silly vision glistened and dissolved before my eyes—the doors opening, ushers in dark suits smiling in welcome, the candlelit sanctuary filled with townsfolk welcoming me home. I blinked, and the road was curving again; the old church was now on my right with its venerable graveyard sweeping across the field beside it, trimmed with a low stone wall. The crooked headstones, weather-beaten and chipped from the years, gave off a dull brilliance, like rows of bad teeth. Beyond them in the distance were newer, more stalwart markers, a sign that though the population of Ebenezerville had dwindled with time, the community retained a sure hold on its sons and daughters, who, regardless of how far they might roam, promised to return for one final homecoming.

The little car shook violently as it hit the tracks. Having been lulled to near slumber by daydreams and bright sun and the lonely road, I had fixed my eyes on the graveyard and was not looking ahead. Instinctively I clutched the wheel tightly and scrunched my shoulders together as the Beetle bounced along, finally straightening out once the rails were cleared, though I was almost certain that the front end had been thrown out of alignment. I drove slowly, the car’s nose now pointing at a slight angle, and I overcompensated by yanking at the wheel repeatedly to stay within the single lane. I progressed in this halting fashion for about five hundred feet, when all at once my heart constricted in my chest and I stopped the car, short of breath. It was not just a delayed physical reaction to the shock of the collision, but an emotional one as well. I looked back over my shoulder at the tracks. The road had settled down into a swale where the Beetle now sat, and from the low vantage point the tracks seemed to loom above the pavement, exalted on a bed of railroad ties and gravel, ominous and foreboding as a castle wall. Was it here that my own young father, delirious in his despair and sweating moonshine, came to his violent end? A warm breeze wafted in through the open window and chilled my damp skin as I stared down at the dark metal. The sweltering heat seemed to melt it into a puddle across the road, but it was only a mirage. I blinked again, perhaps expecting the ghost of Little Train Hugabee to appear from among the tombs in the distant graveyard, like Shoeless Joe himself in the fanciful and gripping novel of the same name.

There were no drivers inconvenienced by my abrupt pause. It occurred to me that I had not seen another vehicle for the last several miles. There was the sound of rustling leaves high in the trees, and the call of several birds. It was late in the day, when the setting sun casts long shadows, and the clouds were bright white, moving swiftly against a deep blue sky, then slowing to hang heavily in space. I turned again to face forward, seeing the ribbon of road bend sharply to converge with the tracks down the line, and a cluster of buildings beside it. There were no voices rising from the settlement, no movement discernable from this distance. The birds fluttered off, and yet the wind puffed in faintly audible bursts through vale and timber. The chill returned, and I feared going forward almost as much as turning back to look at the way I had come. I sensed a portentous moment was at hand, as if the Keeper of the vast expanse of Heaven above me had stopped time to allow me to reconsider what I was about to do.

I reminded myself that I was a man of no little scholarship, a man who drank deeply and often from the well of human experience and folly, who habitually ridiculed the superstitions of earlier, less informed peoples in my stirring lectures. Everything, I insisted, could be explained if all the facts were known, as all will be explained someday, when all is made known. The striving after truth is the chief end of man, and only the smallest of minds are satisfied by the simple rationalizations such as afforded by religion or myth. When confronted by doubt, look closer, I would say; do not give up the search for the answer to that which cannot yet be grasped, for it will be but a trifling matter to some future historian, looking back. But sitting there on that road, I could think nothing—only feel—and my body tensed with what can only be described as an energizing, yet mortifying dread.

I approached the cluster of buildings cautiously, rolling the car along at a mere twenty miles per hour, as if still hoping for an excuse to abandon the whole endeavor. What was I so jumpy about? This was, after all, my father’s ancestral home, where generations of Hugabees before me spent their entire lives. Was there any question that I would be welcomed, the long, lost son of one of the town’s tragic heroes? Why had I avoided coming here for so long? I attributed my queasy apprehension to the unsettled mass of boiled peanuts in the early digestive stage, purchased at a roadside stand and absently consumed over the past thirty miles, and nothing more. The eerie stillness of the place notwithstanding, I entered Ebenezerville with a firm resolve, if not glad anticipation.

A strict scheduler, I had assigned my exploration of the hamlet for the next morning, since the remainder of the afternoon and evening would be needed to establish residence in the house. There were perhaps three hours of daylight left, and because there was purported to be no electrical service to the Hugabee homestead, I resisted the tantalizing lure of the town and again consulted the map that Mother had drawn. Somewhere close there should be a road just past the church which veered north and swung by the fabled ballfield toward the backside of the town limits…ah, that must be it just now—a stone marker amateurishly carved with the word RATH and the crude symbol of a diamond below it announced the turn.

I bounced along the dirt for about two hundred yards, trusting only in my map and the wisdom of German automotive engineering, until the spire of the church, which had never left my line of vision, seemed to launch itself above the horizon until the whole building was once again in view, its gravestones popping forth in an uneven line as if the last trumpet call had sounded. It was apparent that I was emerging from a deep hollow, of which the swale beside the train tracks had only formed the edge, and I was now coasting along the crest of a wide ridge that curled behind the church. Suddenly there, directly in front of me, rested the hallowed ground of Rathskeller Field. I wanted to stop, perhaps to genuflect and photograph, or simply bathe in the majestic timelessness of the scene, but the unexpected sight of a lone figure in the outfield shattered the moment, and I sped away, strangely embarrassed. Out of the corner of my eye I took in what I could: the lithe form of a young woman in white shorts and socks pulled up to the knee; a dark shirt, untucked, emblazoned with the number three; a dingy bag, crumpled on the ground; a long step, a shockingly quick release, a ball in flight across the infield, bouncing once and landing hard on home plate, skidding to the backstop, colliding with a cluster of perhaps two dozen other balls before rolling to a stop. I cursed the loud rumble of the engine as I passed, not seeing but knowing that she had paused to fix her stare upon me, and I retreated with the somber guilt of one who had intruded on something truly sacred.

The road veered back to the west into the sun, momentarily blinding me, and I squinted into the rearview mirror, where the shrinking lone figure could still be seen firing softballs toward the diamond. Behind her was the low stone fence common to both ballfield and cemetery, the tombstones on the far side assembled like so many spectators standing in rapt attention or respect.

Watching this display filled me with conflicting emotions, for I perhaps unjustifiably felt entitled to a solitary walk across the well-trodden grass, where, humbled and awed by the magnificent exploits of my young father, I would stand upon the mound and borrow from the memory of his splendid feats as if they had been mine. And yet, there was a quiet dignity possessed by the outfielder, whose very demeanor suggested that this timeworn turf belonged to her alone. I frowned and shook my head, tightening my grip on the wheel, frustrated at the lost opportunity. It reminded me of my visit to Stonehenge, where I scrambled over the dewy earth at daybreak in order to place my hand upon the towering ancient dolmen stones and connect somehow with the awesome ingenuity of the Celts, only to find the area cordoned off to discourage vandals (Americans, no doubt, who had taken to carving their names in the rock), and I was not permitted to get nearer than thirty feet. Such was the curse of educated people like myself who understand the depth of meaning associated with ancient places, who must tolerate the irreverent trampling of hallowed ground by the ignorant masses. Still, there was something almost majestic in the girl’s motion, something artistic in the trajectory of the ball as it flew, that undermined my arrogance.

I came at length to a stretch of paved road and turned right per Mother’s directions. Here there were tall oaks and a smattering of pines bordering split rail fences where cows stood in clusters, and modest homes with free standing garages and barns could be seen off in the distance. The area quickly became densely wooded, and shadows fell like billowing cloaks across my way. The houses were now nearer to the road, and I slowed down in anticipation of finding the landmark on my map. As the timberline opened briefly onto a meadow, I saw it plainly: a fire tower, rusted and leaning, established some fifty yards away on a wide mound, with the rolling fields beyond. Suddenly the sky darkened as I reentered thick woods; potholes appeared in the road, and a wiry undergrowth encroached upon the shoulder. I found the narrow dirt path only with difficulty, and branches slapped my windshield as I carefully directed the car off the now broken pavement. It was clear that I was venturing where few before me had recently traveled, and my pulse quickened with an excitement I recognized as grim trepidation. I forged ahead, ducking reactively inside the cocoon of my Beetle as the long fingers of the trees scratched the paint like chalk on a blackboard, until the hulking wreck of the Hugabee homestead appeared. I turned off the engine and sat transfixed by the sight of it, a ghost ship anchored in a harbor of primeval forest, uninviting but enthralling, the place where I was born.

The house in which I was raised was well over two hundred years old and had survived not only the wars and natural disasters common to all historic Charleston residences, but also the indignities of a series of occupants ending with my mother, who demolished and reconstructed its interior room by room throughout my childhood in an attempt to restore it to a grandeur it probably never enjoyed. It was therefore not uncommon for me to awake to the clatter of hammers or the buzz of a saw, and the coming and going of workmen as I watched cartoons or ate my grits was simply an accepted part of my morning ritual. Though the outside of the three-story house retained its original look, there was continual upheaval on the inside, as Mother rearranged walls and relocated staircases—without approval from the Historical Society, of course—because, I supposed, she had nothing better to do. When she was not renovating she was redecorating, and a steady stream of designers came forth with their fabrics and catalogs, like caravans of desert merchants journeying from far and foreign lands to display their treasures to the queen. So, my home was never what you might call comfortable, and even when a room was completed, it was maintained as a kind of exhibit, and I was not permitted to venture in until Mother decided to change it again. The alternating finished rooms being off limits, I made my dwelling amid the sawdust and stripped wallpaper, with the tradesmen my constant companions, their ladders and workbenches my furnishings.

But none of that prepared me for this.

The Hugabee house had settled on a brick foundation which itself had gaping holes in several places, and the