Mrs. Talbot and a Field
by Kent Jacobson
Life comes with indelible loss: lost innocence, lost
loved ones, broken bonds, broken hearts, faulty choices . . .
Bob Hohler
I remember a woman crossing her lawn, the doctor’s wife, Mrs. Talbot, a slim woman in a dark faded shirtwaist, striding with this-is-my-world certainty, chin out, spine straight. She’d shot from her weathered-shingle second home on Winnapaug salt pond: the sharp smell, the squawking gulls, the jays, the blackbirds, low-hanging limbs heavy with apples. I was 12.
We played baseball in the summer twilight on Mrs. Talbot’s field with its chicken-wired backstop and dirt bases, the sloping left field and the too deep right. Nobody ever hit a home run to right. Nobody. One kid was the son of a double-amputee chicken farmer, and another, the son of his foreman. A third was a string bean with a future in basketball; his dad sold insurance. Another’s cousin would play in the baseball All-Star game, his father a state trooper. My nearest neighbors and buddies, the Crandalls and the Smiths, came from families where mom and dad worked the factory lines. And me, I was the kid who lived on the lone hill, Mom at the University, Dad head of the state forest service. We boys were a mixed collection, just enough of us, we always said, “for a decent game.”
We scrapped and recited. “Who forgot the first baseman’s glove?” “Get the damn ball over the plate. Arm needs a tune-up.” “Where’s the good bat?” “You didn’t tag ‘im, you didn’t tag ‘im.” “Overthrow first and you go find it in the high grass.” We were that kind of family. Each night we bickered for the good of the game. Ball fired to the plate, crack of a bat against beat-up ball, “In the air, in the air, Go back, go back,” runner streaks, “Second, he’s at second,” ball in Mike Smith’s glove in left and a bad throw to third, ball wide, runner scores, “Missed a base, he missed a base.” The game was like a song shout with Chuck Berry and the Yankees’ World War II marine outfielder Hank Bauer, revered for grit and a face “like a clenched fist.”
But then there was Mrs. Talbot. She had an underground, fresh-water spring that poured cold into the marsh, steps from her shingled home. In the August heat, t-shirts sopped, jeans stuck to our thighs, we threw our gloves down to hold our spot and howled across her lawn like we owned the place, the salt smell sharper, and gulped at her spring, the water clean, the water clear . . . and whooped our way back past the lilac and summersweet, the rhododendron and hydrangea, back over her green wide lush lawn to our field.
Mrs. Talbot complained. She said we were too many. There was noise. We wore a path. No water, she said, no more use of the spring.
What’d she say?
We weren’t certain the verdict was final. It couldn’t be. Adults said piles of things, much of which we tried to ignore.
I headed for the spring. That’s when Mrs. T appeared, that stride. I froze.
Adults talked to kids when we needed a correction and I sensed mine was coming now.
She spoke in a whisper without a hint of hesitation. “It’s alright if you come here for water. I won’t allow anyone else.”
Wha . . .?
The boys could see us. I should have gone back to the field right then, told them, Forget it. Verdict’s final. She’s serious. No water.
Mrs. Talbot retreated to the house. I stood there. I watched her go. I turned for the spring.
Why? Why did I do that? Why wasn’t I wiser?
Mrs. T, I thought, is looking after me. She’s singled me out. One boy’s okay. I’m not the army of the 11 of us. I’m quiet, though how does she know?
And sure, my older sister was smart and Mrs. Talbot’s sister, my new English teacher for the college-bound, gave A’s to my soaked-in-books sister. That counted for something. Mrs. Talbot and my family were nearest neighbors (even if we didn’t speak), us up on the hill, 25 rooms, a stone porch and fountain, Japanese maples and an ocean view. On nights and weekends Dad and Mom had transformed a three-story derelict mansion into a summer inn (Winnapaug House) to pay for sis and my college.
I was different from the other boys, Mrs. Talbot’s permission said. I was special. I could be trusted. They couldn’t. I was flattered.
I swallowed the message whole.
I must have told the boys, though I can’t remember. I don’t want to remember. No water except for me. Did I appear smug and pleased?
No one protested, not openly.
Their dads may have said: Live with it. He isn’t like us. He’s like Mrs. Talbot. Though some boys had to balk: Why him? What’s wrong with me? He’s just a kid like us.
All the boys would slip from my life and never see me as older men except that time on a New Haven train when Randy and Kenny Crandall passed and didn’t speak. We didn’t forget, none of us could forget, because we’d had a glimpse early of the way the world would likely work.
You can betray your friends and simultaneously betray who you are and who you have been, and spend much of your life from that point on finding your way back, all the way back… to one isolated abandoned field off the main road.
Kent Jacobson has taught in prisons and a foundering inner-city for 30 years. His writing appears (or will soon appear) in The Dewdrop, Hobart, Talking Writing, Backchannels, Punctuate, Lucky Jefferson, BULL, and elsewhere. He lives in Massachusetts, two hours from Mrs. Talbot’s field.