No Stone Left Unturned

The Legend of Cyclone Young

by Kenneth Ramsley

Sitting atop the garage floor beneath a pile of long forgotten items, I’ve exposed an ancient carpenter’s toolbox – handmade with unpainted wood dried with age and dust-covered with neglect echoing from a time when we collected more than we would sell.

“After today – no more ‘garage sales’ or ‘yard sales’ or ‘rummage sales,’” I hear myself saying aloud – expecting Edna to scowl at such heresy.

From late spring into early July the regular selling season fades to ‘Scavenger Time’ – as I call it, with vultures wandering a loop through town hunting up the few remaining tables set across faded lawns and gravel dirt driveways – scavengers drawn to posters flapping in the breeze of regular road traffic passing too fast to notice words like ‘Items Priced to Sell’ – ‘All Offers Entertained.’

Today, with my ‘Going out of Business’ signs and just a few hours left in the yard-selling season I watch the last of the vultures racing from their overstuffed pickups. With brief inspections, most dart away only slightly dissatisfied. Perhaps if not this yard, then maybe the next will offer that one special item everyone else managed to miss.

I’ve been in this business 50 years, and I know how the old hopes never die – how the scavengers are never disappointed – how instead they’ll drift on down the line from one garage sale to the next like addicts pumping quarters into one-arm bandits.

We once drove that same sort of loop through the towns and villages of central Ohio – me with Edna and a truck full of hope. Sometimes we got lucky. Most days we found the usual junk. The better items we carted home and kept for a rainy day. The tattered remains we left with the dump master who runs a salvage operation on the side. Of course, what Edna and I considered ‘worthwhile items’ versus ‘hopeless junk’ was always open to considerable debate, and over the years we piled up more than our fair share of questionable items.

To pay off the last of the medical bills, this past winter I sold some of the better items on consignment. And like I said already – the rest I’ve been selling to the passing vultures – until today – when I found the garage floor for the first time in years and the last of the hopeless items and worthwhile junk.

“Finí – out of business, done for good!” – I hear myself saying… though for a second I consider the old loop again …maybe driving down into central Ohio one last time “for old time’s sake” …maybe even starting a whole new life on the road collecting a new pile of genuine antiques and tattered remains.

Of course, without Edna, it wouldn’t be the same.

An autumn chill hangs in the air well past quitting time on any normal day. Empty tables have fallen into darkness. I awake under the stars wrapped in a blanket slumped into a chair I’ll never sell. In the starlight I see the old wooden toolbox, now ‘free for the taking’ with the selling season over and no one left to take it.

I sure did try to get rid of that old box, but no one seemed interested. Just before dinnertime I was offering just ten cents to a guy with too much coffee in his veins. In the approaching twilight I watched as he inspected worn down tools and assorted worthless items mumbling the whole time about ‘decorating’ his restaurant – before he finally pranced off into the approaching night.

Still my chair, still under the near-autumn starlight I imagine how it might feel to drop this toolbox with the dump master –the whole thing with its useless contents set beside his doorstep. At first I feel relief. That would be the end of it. Fini! Done! Good Riddance! No doubt he’d use it for something useful like kindling. He never lets anything go to waste. But I can’t do it – not this time – not to something surviving this long – not even after seeing a dozen old toolboxes at every yard sale east of the Mississippi. It may not matter to the passing vultures and everyone else that today is my last day in the antiquing business. But it matters to me!

Over the years I’ve thrown away too many treasured items with meaning to somebody long gone – photo albums with stoic faces reflecting a different age – personal journals echoing a hundred stories nobody will ever know. It’s the hardest part of the job, and I’m not about to end my antiquing career at the dump master’s doorstep. So tonight, before I’m calling it quits for good, I’m back in the garage fetching out every tool from that box and scrap of metal and splintered wood for one last look.

Down inside I find the usual trimming planes, cold chisels, and claw-hammers. After all my talk about ‘treasures’ there isn’t much to save, and I’m about to call the job done when I pull on some loose floor boards. Well now, if I haven’t found a false bottom and below this a small canvass basket …not a basket, really. Yet sitting so far down in the shadows – that’s how I recognize it at first.

In better light I see the basket for what it is – an old-style baseball cap lying upside-down holding a pair of well-worn game balls stained green with grass and brown with dirt – the work of many men – leaving dents in the hat like they’ve been sitting there a long time. Then below the hat I discover a small stack of yellowed paper—near as I can tell hand-written more than a century ago by some kid from central Ohio.            It seems the boy’s name is Zachariah – and what he’s written is the main reason I’m avoiding the dump master’s door, or any notion of selling to the highest bidder for that matter. It’ll kill me to give it away – going against all the dreams and reasons anyone ever gets into this business. But from what I’m reading in Zachariah’s journal the player’s cap and baseballs belong on public display, not stored away in some private collector’s air-tight vault.

It took only one phone call and already a fellow I know is driving all night over from New York State – calling me every hour from the interstate, telling me on the phone ‘not to move an inch’ till he gets here.

After fifty years of scavenging, I told him that when somebody finds the baseball equivalent of the Holy Grail sitting right on his garage floor – piled under there the whole time – there’s no reason to be anywhere else tonight. So until my friend pulls in from Cooperstown I suppose you’d like to hear what the kid has to say, and see why someone might want to drive all night to see for himself.

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My schoolin’ teacher’s collectin’ words from all over Tuscarawas County for a ‘Centennial’ capsule goin’ in the ground midnight after the Fourth – to be dug open a hundred years out – on about July, 1976 – if folks remember to dig by then. Why she wants me writin’ instead’a Pa don’t make sense. But she says I got the knack for it. So here it is – startin’ a week before they dig the hole I gotta to bury somethin’ in.

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High up the riverbank, me, Gus, and Jimmy found one today. Most disappear for good. But after driftin’ in the river a spell, some float to the bend where tangled brushes and shallow waters snags what’s loose. By mid-summers when the river’s runnin’ low – if there be any foul balls to find – most’ll be right here past the tall grass and woods where the river runs low behind the farm.

Saturday past, on the first pitch to Port Washington, one of those game balls got hit past the road bridge over trees into the river. We never seen it come down and got to lookin’ – but by the middle of the third, Pa’s team was gettin’ whupped so bad it didn’t hurt none to be playin’ with the practice ball, and we gave up lookin’ – figurin’ it to be floated a fair ways downriver by then.

Trout fishin’ the next day we’re scoutin’ for that ball up to where the river runs deep under the railroad bridge and back. And there it be on the riverbank too high up to get there all by itself.

“That must be the one” – I says – ‘cause it don’t take long before they’re all waterlogged and pretty soon down into the mud gettin’ two-faced brown on top and black on the bottom. How this one got up the riverbank instead’a into the mud don’t make sense. There ain’t been floods and base balls don’t go crawlin’ last I seen.

“Could’a been a turtle…” says Gus, who lives on the farm across the road.

“Ain’t no turtle – somebody throwed it up that bank,” I say – lookin’ all ‘round for how this could be when Jimmy spies a red tail with a squirmin’ rabbit bein’ chased by crows on the wing cawin’ up a racket – divin’ and pokin’ and nippin’ high over the river oaks.

“Maybe hawks steals game balls for the yarn inside,” says Jimbo, “and drops some gettin’ back to the nest fightin’ crows the whole way in.”

“Could be gators in the water,” I say “– pullin’ out not knowin’ a game ball’s ridin’ up high between their eyeballs.”

“…or Martians,” says Gus, seein’ where all this is goin’.

On our farm, me and Jimmy don’t work much as some. Pa says there’ll be lots’a work ahead, and right now our job’s about book schoolin,’ trout fishin’ and base runnin’.

“You got the best Pa in the world,” says Gus – whose Pa most days has him workin’ summer chores past lunchtime. Till then, me and Jimbo play double-pepper, seein’ how many we can bunt between us before hittin’ the ground for an out. Forty ain’t bad, but we did ninety-nine once, and would’a made a hundred ‘cept that Ma said something about “pies ready to eat.”

Today Gus is over late sayin’ how family folk is already pullin’ in from everywhere. On the fair side – every night till the Fourth, Gus’s Pa is fixin’ to build a bonfire up their farm—it bein’ the big one this year – a hundred years since we was thinkin’ we might have us a country – so we’re doin’ more celebratin’ and hooplahin’ than years past. On the poor side it’ll mean a scrub brush bath before we get turned to mummies in clothes itchin’ and hair-grease a’drippin’.

With the preacher sayin’ more than usual I reckon tomorrow we’ll be squirmin’ extra-long in Sunday church like rabbits carried by hawks – and in the afternoon I’m expectin’ pies to make up for it. Monday’s the third of July – an extra holiday for house-cleanin’, chicken pluckin’ and readyin’ up for the Centennial Day parade. Past the parade Tuesday we’ll watch a town ball game with just local townsfolk playin’ like they used to before villages got to playin’ against each other. And on Wednesday, everybody gets back to farmworkin’.

With all the hubbub and commotion, me and Jimmy is hopin’ Gus has his cousins down from Gilmore Ridge. That’ll make six – which don’t happen much. Town ball takes two teams of nine. For farm ball, six is altogether plenty. Most times we make do with just three – and jus’ one can pretend all alone takin’ balls off the barn roof for flies and bouncin’em against the walls for grounders.

Sometimes I ain’t sure which is best – a bunch of us in the field or jus’ one pretendin’ all alone. Pa says it’s ‘cause base ball happens on the inside of folks and it don’t matter much how many is playin’ ‘cause what’s real and what’s pretend is all about the same.

After supper Pa gets to sayin’ how the ballplayers expects to charge five cents a head to watch the game on the Fourth. All spring townfolks is been settin’ new fencin’ alongside Hansen’s pasture to keep the cows out on game days, and Uncle Quint is fixin’ to cast a proper iron dish for home base. So that’s costin’ a pretty nickel and the ballplayers don’t see no harm in askin’ townsfolk for some of those nickels back on Centennial Day – if folks don’t mind.

Says Pa – “Some players is talkin’ up the notion of a professional ballplayin’ club and how we’re gonna need a field made right for it someday soon.” But as far as Pa can see, “it’s just big-talkin’ to raise those nickels for fence posts and iron plates, and the only professionals ever likely workin’ those fields anytime soon is Hansen’s cows tradin’ outfield grass for milk money.”

Grown folk play most Saturday afternoons when it ain’t rainin’. Young folk like me and Jimmy sometimes sneak in beforehand, but the field’s rightly big and they don’t like us movin’ the bases in, so mostly we leave Hansen’s field to the cows and town-versus-town games – and play our own games in whatever hayfield got cut that month.

It don’t matter on the farm how we got no chalk lines, white-painted iron plates, umpires, or nine on a side. Most days me, Jimmy, and Gus make do with a pitcher, batter, and a short fielder. If we hit one fair, we high-tail and run, and if one goes foul, we stay put. We set out grain sacks for bases, and sideways behind home base we lay an old work table to stop unfair pitches. The bats we get from Uncle Quint when he’s got the scrap and time for lathe work, and the balls come from the river like I been sayin’.

With just three of us we got extra rules—balls hit between first and second base bein’ unfair – easy balls on the fly makin’ outs even if they ain’t caught. And if we stop a grounder for real, the runner is out so long as we get the ball back to the pitcher before the runner makes it to first. When needs be – we set ghost runners and they high-tail dependin’ on what might’a happened. And after one of us makes three outs – we trade places. Most times we don’t count runners crossin’ home ‘cause there’s no way of sayin’ anything we pretend really happened that way – and mostly the rules of the game is just a fancy way to give us each a fair turn with the bat. When it gets too hot we pile everything under the table and head for the river – trout fishin’ or jumpin’ off the railroad bridge or just lyin’ in the shade like cows before the rain. But even settin’ with a fishin’ pole or divin’ into ten-foot water we keep playin’ the game in our heads – ‘cause like what Pa says – most times it don’t matter what happens for real and what’s for pretend.

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Sample End

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