"Bailey-Legacy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bailey Dale)

DALE BAILEY

THE RESURRECTION MAN'S LEGACY

I did not know the phrase "resurrection man" eighteen years ago. I was a boy
then; such men were yet uncommon.

I know it now -- we all know it -- and yet the phrase retains for me a haunting
quality, simultaneously wondrous and frightening. I met him only once, my
resurrection man, on the cusp of a hazy August morning, but he haunts me still
in subtle and unspoken ways: when I look in the mirror and see my face, like my
father's face; or when I take the diamond, my uniform shining beneath the ranks
of floodlights, and hear the infield chatter, like music if you love the game.

And I do. I do.

It was among the things he bequeathed to me, that love, though he could not have
known it. We do not understand the consequences of the actions we take, the
meaning of the legacies we leave. We cannot.

They are ghosts of sorts, actions in a vacuum where all action has passed,
inheritances from the inscrutable dead. Legacies.

They can be gifts and they can be curses. Sometimes they can be both.

My father returned to the States in April of 1948, following the bloody,
methodical invasion of Japan, and he married my mother the week he landed. She
died in childbirth eleven months later, and I sometimes wonder if he ever
forgave me. One other significant event occurred in '49: Casey Stengel, a
ne'er-do-well journeyman manager, led the Yankees to the first of an
unprecedented five straight victories in the World Series.

Twelve years later, in 1961, my father died too. That was the year Roger Maris
came to bat in the fourth inning of the season's final game and drove his
sixty-first home run into the fight-field seats at Yankee Stadium, breaking Babe
Ruth's record for single-season homers. In Baltimore, we still say that the new
record is meaningless, that Maris played in a season six games longer than that
of our home-grown hero; but even then, in our hearts, we knew it wasn't true.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

Two days after my father's death, the monorail whisked me from Baltimore to St.
Louis. I had never been away from home. The journey was a nightmare journey. The
landscape blurred beyond the shining curve of the window, whether through speed
or tears, I could not tell.

My great aunt Rachel Powers met me at the station. Previously, I had known her
only from a photograph pasted in the family album. A young woman then, she