Molina Read online

  Hundreds of people streamed through the tent all morning. I recognized many of their faces. Pai’s former players. Coworkers. Neighbors. Politicians. Shopkeepers. Children from Pai’s teams. But there were so many I didn’t know. Men and women I had never seen broke down in tears, telling Yadier, Cheo, and me what a great man Pai was. Some couldn’t bring themselves to enter the tent. They didn’t want to see him that way.

  Deliverymen kept arriving with more flowers. When there was no more space around the casket, we lined them along the tent’s walls.

  When I stepped outside to use the restroom early in the afternoon, I couldn’t believe the number of people. The street was packed in both directions as far as I could see. Kyshly, who had just woken up, emerged from Mai’s house as I was heading back to the tent.

  “Dad!”

  “Yes, mama?”

  “All these people know guelo?”

  “And more, mama.”

  But I was stunned, too. I knew he was known, but I didn’t know how much. I knew he was loved, but I had no idea how deeply.

  I stayed by the casket all day. Jamie stayed with me. We hadn’t slept since the plane Saturday night. We had barely eaten. I told Jamie to go to Yadier’s to get some rest. She wouldn’t.

  At nightfall, the music began out on the street. I could hear the thumping beat and rattle of the pleneras, the maracas, the guirros. I heard men’s voices rise in singsong bomba verses, the lead singer delivering a four-line rhyme about Pai—about baseball, family, his integrity, sense of humor, Coors Light. The crowd answered with the chorus—Hey, guy, get your woman out and start dancing bomba with us! One verse after another. Hour after hour. When one singer left, another joined, an unbroken stream of music rolling through the streets of Kuilan through the night.

  Yadier joined the throngs outside. This was how he took care of people. He made them feel welcome, the way Mai and Pai always did. Cheo joined in, too, at times, but I couldn’t. I felt as if I’d be abandoning Pai, yet again, if I left his side.

  Through the afternoon and evening, baseball players showed up—José Rosado, Pedro Feliciano, Juan Gonzalez, Carmelo Martinez, José Valentin, José Hernandez, and many of Pai’s former Puerto Rican teammates and Hall of Famers.

  The eight-year-old boy from next door was one of Pai’s players. “He was like my second father,” he told me.

  One after another, men and boys I’d never met told my brothers and me that Pai had been like a father to them, too. He kept them in school, off drugs, out of jail, off the troubled streets. One boy couldn’t stop crying. “Now what will I do?” he asked.

  I thought about the crops that once covered the field where Pai coached us and so many other boys. It occurred to me that instead of growing sugarcane and grapefruit trees on that land, Pai had been growing young men.

  “He was born for that,” Jacinto Camacho said to me during our second long night at Pai’s casket. “He was born and died for that. He died teaching. He died with the kids.”

  At some point, Vitin arrived with our local newspaper, El Nuevo Día. Pai’s death was the top story. Vitin and I took turns reading it to Pai.

  A late-season hurricane was developing off the coast. As Tuesday morning broke, wind whipped the tent. Intermittent bursts of rain pelted the roof. We would be burying Pai in the afternoon. My time with him was running out. I pulled my chair close to the casket.

  “I’m going to hit twenty home runs,” I told him.

  I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I thought hitting twenty home runs would be proof that his belief in me was so deep, so utterly complete, that it could work miracles. Maybe I thought it would be proof of how much I loved him.

  Around noon, after a priest from Yadier’s church led us in prayer and hymns, Cheo and Yadier used the microphone from Pai’s beloved karaoke machine—which had been positioned next to the casket—to thank everyone for coming. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  “If my dad were here, he would be very happy,” Yadier said. “He would want everybody to be happy. For my part, I want to say thank you to everybody. To Bengie, Cheo, Mai. To my dad, I want to say, ‘Mi viejo, I love you so much.’ ”

  A light rain fell as we carried Pai’s closed casket out of the tent and onto the baseball field. The baselines and batter’s boxes had been carefully chalked. The infield dirt had been raked and smoothed. In front of home plate, in large chalk letters, were the words: Nunca te olvidaremos. (We will never forget you.) Kuilan.

  Jamie told me she had watched the man chalk the letters four or five times until they were good enough for Pai.

  A thousand people filled the stands and crowded into the dugouts and outfield. The longtime mayor of Dorado, Carlitos Lopez, who had played Double A with Pai, stood with a microphone behind home plate.

  “One of the best people in Puerto Rico, Benjamín Molina Santana!” he said as Pai’s pallbearers—me, my brothers, Lusito, Junior Diaz, Vitin, and several others—carried the casket to home plate. The crowd roared. The mayor called Pai “a hero of the people, a pillar of Kuilan in the barrio of Espinosa, the best community role model.”

  He handed the mic to Cheo. “My mother and brothers and I are very happy for all those who saw Pai as their father, too,” he said. “We didn’t know Pai had so many children!”

  We carried the casket to first base, then second and third. The mayor delivered a play-by-play of the action, as if Pai were rounding the bases. I picked up first base, Cheo second, and Yadier third. The mayor’s voice grew louder and more excited as we carried Pai toward home. His last trip around the diamond. A thousand people leapt to their feet.

  Pai’s standing ovation.

  “The most important base,” the mayor said, “the one that brings Benjamín back to home, goes to a lady so supportive of her family and her husband. The home plate goes to Gladys Matta!”

  The crowd went wild.

  As we stood at home plate, I scooped up a handful of infield dirt and rubbed it on the lid of the casket.

  In the rain, with a police escort, we walked behind Pai’s silver hearse through the streets of Kuilan. On every block, people emerged from their houses, clapping and crying as we passed. Some held signs: “We will never forget you!” and “Rest in Peace, Benjamín” and “Thank you, Benjamín!”

  Both lanes of La Número Dos had been closed to traffic to make way for Pai’s funeral procession to the cemetery. Commuters stood by their cars in the rain, waving or holding their hats over their hearts.

  The sky had turned black when we reached Cementerio de Monterrey. Mourners under striped golf umbrellas stretched across the lawn. People watched from balconies and rooftops on a ridge above us. We carried the casket into a small tent at the entrance to a row of crypts. We prayed, and each of us placed a single rose on top of the casket. Junior Diaz tried to speak but cried, and someone else took over. Mai thanked everyone for coming.

  “I hope you know how much Benjamín loved every one of you,” she said.

  We carried Pai along a wall of vaults, each one marked by a square plaque. Toward the back, three up from the bottom, was an open square. I felt Jamie’s hand on the back of my neck. I didn’t know how long it had been there, but I knew it was the only thing holding me up.

  We lifted the casket and slid it in. Pai’s sisters began to wail. I heard distant shouts: “We love you, Benjamín! You’ll never be forgotten!” Cemetery workers bolted the cover of the crypt and affixed a square of marble engraved with Pai’s name, dates of birth and death, and “Beloved Husband and Father.”

  His entire life reduced, like a box score, to a few words and numbers.

  For five or ten minutes nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Then we left. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t let myself think of him alone in that dark, cramped space. I kept moving forward.

  At eight o’clock for the next nine nights a priest arrived at Mai’s house to pray the novena. More than a hundred people showed up every night to join in, filling the patio and carport and overflo
wing into the street to pray the rosary and speed Pai’s soul into heaven. Everyone stayed for soup and snacks, coffee and soda. Later the beer came out and we made more toasts and told more stories.

  The talk every night at Mai’s always turned to Pai’s skills on the baseball field.

  “Can you imagine if he hadn’t missed those two years?” Pai’s cousin Licinio said.

  “What two years?” I asked.

  “In Massachusetts.”

  “Massachusetts?”

  Pai was sixteen years old and in love with Mai. He wanted to marry her but didn’t earn enough playing Double A baseball to build a nest egg. He applied at all the factories, but unemployment then was in double digits. Sixteen-year-olds weren’t getting hired.

  Licinio had left home several years earlier and was working in Lowell, Massachusetts. He told Pai he could get a job with him at the Jo-Ann Fabric factory as a fabric cutter. So Pai moved to Lowell, saying good-bye to his girlfriend and his brokenhearted grandmother. The cousins shared a cheap, cramped room above a store on Main Street.

  “He was there for two years?” I asked. “When he was sixteen?”

  Everybody knew sixteen was the prime age to attract the attention of pro baseball scouts. American teams liked to sign the Latin players when they were young so they could shape the raw talent themselves through the minor-league system. Pai had to have known this. He went to Massachusetts anyway.

  “Maybe he thought he’d get more attention from scouts in America?” I asked.

  Licinio said he didn’t play baseball at all when he was in Massachusetts. “Chino thought only about making money for Gladys.”

  When Pai returned to Puerto Rico at age eighteen, he was immediately recruited by the Double A team in Utuado. He reestablished himself as a top player, earning seventy-five dollars a game. And he found a job at the Westinghouse factory. He and Mai resumed their courtship. Pai won the batting championship that year. He was better than he had ever been. The best in the league. Scouts came around. Everyone was certain he would be signed by a Major League club.

  “He could have made it. No question,” one of Pai’s old teammates said.

  We were on the front patio by the carport. A streetlamp across the street spilled a mist of light onto Pai’s field.

  “Of course! Look at Felix Millan!”

  Millan was from Yabucoa, an hour outside San Juan. He gripped the bat halfway up the shaft the way Pai did. And he not only played in the Major Leagues as a second baseman for the Mets in the 1960s and ’70s, he was an All-Star.

  “But Chino never went to the tryout.”

  “Wait, what tryout?” I asked. I couldn’t believe Pai never talked about any of this.

  It was in the winter of 1973, they said. The tryout—at least according to everyone’s best recollection—was with the Milwaukee Brewers. Everybody seemed to have a bit of the story.

  “The guy had been watching Chino and wanted to sign him. I’m sure the money wasn’t much at that time. Chino was small.”

  The scout gave Pai a time and place for the tryout. Other players had been invited as well. It was a big deal, especially because by this time Pai was twenty-two. On the appointed day, all the hopeful young men ran the bases, showed off their arms, and clobbered pitches to the outfield as the scout scribbled in his notebook.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “Benjamín didn’t show up,” Vitin said. “He was at a bar with his friends from the factory.”

  “What? Are you serious?” I said.

  “He didn’t go. Everyone said he was better than any of them.”

  This was crazy. He loved baseball more than anything. He had worked his whole life for that moment, his one big chance. It made no sense.

  “Was he hurt?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine what could have kept him away. “Was he scared?”

  “Your father? Scared?” Vitin said, incredulous. “No!”

  “What, then?”

  Vitin leaned toward me in his lawn chair, his elbows on his knees, his big hand wrapped around his plastic cup of grapefruit and vodka. His face was hard, as if I had said something wrong.

  “Your mother had just found out she was pregnant,” he said. “He wouldn’t leave her.”

  My eyes darted from one man to the next. They showed no sign of surprise. Did everyone know this? How could I not know? I sat in silence, stunned, trying to make sense of it. My father had let his dream walk right by him. He saw it, stepped aside, and let it pass. He spent the rest of his life at a factory, not once complaining.

  I felt sick to my stomach. It was easier to think Pai had failed than to think he threw away his dream for us.

  “I can’t imagine that level of sacrifice,” I said. “I wish he hadn’t done it.”

  “Chino was the happiest man I knew,” Vitin said.

  “But he never got to do what he really wanted.”

  Vitin slapped his thigh, jostling his drink. “That man did exactly what he wanted,” he said. “Don’t you feel sorry for him.”

  “But he could have had such a different life,” I said. I thought about all the times I had wished Pai could have felt the thrill of forty thousand fans cheering for him, the way his three sons had felt it.

  “You have it all wrong, Bengie,” Vitin said, rising from his chair. He seemed agitated. I watched as he poured another drink at a small table in the carport. The other men shifted in their chairs, sipping their cocktails and beer, watching a car slow down at our driveway, then continue on. The tent had come down. We could see Pai’s field in the glow of the streetlamp: the outlines of the fences and backstop, the walls of the dugout.

  Vitin sank into the lawn chair and slapped a mosquito on his bare arm. I waited for him to pick up where he had left off. But he said nothing, and soon the conversation turned to other topics. What did Vitin mean I had it all wrong?

  WHEN A REPORTER called in November to get my comments on Tim Lincecum winning the Cy Young Award, it took me a moment to register what he was he talking about. The baseball season seemed like a million years ago.

  Timmy was the second Cy Young winner I had caught in four seasons (the Angels’ Bartolo Colon was the other). I texted Tim to congratulate him, and he texted back that he couldn’t have won it without me. Typical Timmy. Generous, humble, and gracious. He said he was looking forward to seeing me at spring training in a couple of months.

  But I knew I couldn’t play baseball. Baseball died when Pai did. Baseball and Pai were a single thing. How could one continue without the other? Baseball was his passion, his great joy, his life’s work. The game had no meaning for me if he wasn’t around to share in it.

  And I couldn’t move past my guilt. I should have spent more time with Pai. I found myself blaming baseball. If I didn’t play baseball, I could have stayed in Puerto Rico and helped him coach his Little Leaguers and played dominoes at Junior Diaz’s. That’s what Pai had done. Stayed with his family instead of going off to play baseball. I was out of my mind with grief.

  I seemed to worry all day. I worried about Mai and about Pai’s brothers and sisters. I worried about Pai’s players. I worried about the cousins who had seen Pai as a second father. I worried about Cheo and Yadier. I called and checked in constantly, asking what they needed, what I could do. It was like a fifty-pound weight in my heart. More than once, Jamie had to talk me out of moving to Puerto Rico. If it weren’t for her, I’d have quit baseball right then and camped in front of Pai’s grave, punishing myself for all our years apart.

  “Take your time,” Jamie kept telling me about playing baseball. “Don’t make any decisions.”

  A month later, in December, Jamie found out she was pregnant. I wrapped my arms around her and, in the midst of my grief, felt a wave of gratitude for her and my girls and this new baby.

  Of course I would go back to baseball. It was my job as caretaker of my family. It’s what a man does. As long as I had my family, I knew I would be okay. Watching the girls grow and guiding them the
way Pai guided me—what better way to spend my days? What more was there?

  Then it dawned on me.

  I suddenly understood what Vitin had meant. I had it all wrong about Pai sacrificing his dream for us.

  I almost laughed, the way you do when you see how a magic trick is done; the answer had been in plain sight all along, if only you knew where to look. I thought about how Pai was the one who always watched over his sisters and their kids. How he stayed with Mai when she was pregnant with me. How he spent every afternoon after work on the baseball field with his three sons. How he never bragged about his Major League sons. How he stayed at the factory instead of letting us support him. How he kept coaching long after his own sons had left home.

  Playing in the Major Leagues was not Pai’s dream.

  His dream was to be a good father and husband and raise good sons.

  I thought about my first memory, when Pai hit that home run. I remembered how his face lit up when he saw me at home plate. Now I understood that his joy wasn’t just about hitting the home run but about sharing the moment with me. That’s what baseball had always been about for him. Family.

  He never craved conventional success. He measured his worth in his own way, not by any outside standard. He didn’t need to play in Yankee Stadium to feel he had accomplished something. To him, baseball was baseball. Baseball on the field across the street was as true and beautiful as baseball in Yankee Stadium. Baseball delivered to this quiet and introverted man a means of connecting to his sons and to other people’s sons. It was his way of becoming a father to every kid in the barrio, creating for himself an extended family of sons that had nothing to do with blood.

  Through baseball, he taught all of us how to be men.

  That was his life’s work.

  I remembered back to an afternoon soon after Pai’s funeral when I visited with my great-aunt Clara Virgen. She lived on the same property as Titi Graciella and my other aunts. In the course of talking about Pai, I asked why their family, the Molinas and Santanas, rarely attended church. Clara Virgen was in her eighties then and seemed halfway swallowed up by the couch in her tiny cement-floor living room. Several grandchildren and great-nieces and -nephews had followed me into the house and sat cross-legged at her feet.