Hodge Reckons the Doings of the Pinstripe Guild

I went again to watch the great contests, as is my charge, and by my troth I have seen a stranger day than any I have known since the miller's ox et the churchwarden's hat. They call the guild the Yankees, and they wear hose striped like a beadle's ledger, and I am told this is fearsome to their foes, though it looked to me only tidy.

I must set down first the matter of the meat-tubes, for it occupied me the better part of an hour and I will not be shamed for it. There is a man who stands behind a little wheeled stall, no bigger than a hurdle-gate, and upon it he keeps a trough of hot water in which float what I can only call sausages, though no hog I have ever dressed gave up meat so pink nor so long. He sells these tubes wrapped in soft bread to any who come, and takes from them small stamped discs of no metal I recognize, and never once does he ask what parish they hail from nor whether they have paid their tithe. I watched him work longer than I watched the game entire, for his labor was plain and honest and I understood every part of it, which is more than I can say for aught else that day.

Now to the contest, such as I grasped it. It was told to me this was baseball, which I take to be a cousin of stool-ball as we played it at Michaelmas, save that here the bat is round as a maul-handle and the ball flies with a wickedness no parish game ever showed. The guild's captain is a man they call Judge, which struck me as a fine and proper name for a man who stands over other men and metes out judgment, and indeed I am told the masters of this guild have lately altered his whole course of labor — when he shall stand, when he shall rest, in what order his duties fall to him — the way a reeve might shift a plowman from the far field to the near one when the rain is coming. This they announced with great solemnity, as though it were a matter for the shire court, and mayhap in their world it is.

At the same hour, or near it, another man of the guild was raised up from wheresoever he had been kept — I understood this to be a kind of knighting, a calling-forth, for they said he was "activated," which put me in mind of nothing so much as the parish bull being let out to the pasture in spring, roused from his winter shed to do the work God and the herd required of him. There was much cheer at this activating, and I confess I cheered too, not knowing the man nor his deeds, but cheering being catching in a crowd the way a yawn is catching in a hayfield.

But then, in that same breath near enough, they cast another man out — a young one, I am told, who had once been reckoned among the very finest of all the squires drafted to any guild in the land, a "top prospect," which I take to mean a lad the augurs had marked for greatness the way a good midwife marks a lamb born feet-first as one to watch. Him they set upon "waivers," and named it "DFA," which no man explained to me and which I have therefore taken, in my own poor learning, for a kind of excommunication — a laying of him outside the guild's gate, there to stand until some other lord of some other guild should take pity and claim him, or until the frost should have him. I do not know his crime. I do not think a serf ought to know a squire's crime; it is not my place, and besides the crowd around me did not seem to know it either, and only shook their heads and said his numbers had not held, which I took for the reading of some private almanac closed to the likes of me.

I will say this plain: it troubled me more than the game did, that a man could be raised up and another cast down in the same hour, under the same striped banner, by the same unseen hand, and the crowd cheer one and sigh at the other and call both of them, in the end, business. We had a word for that too, in my village, when the lord's reeve moved men on and off the demesne as the harvest required. We did not call it business. We called it March, and we bore it, because bearing it was the whole of what we could do.

Above the field there hung the great glowing tapestry I have written of before, worked all over in numbers by hands I cannot see, and upon it from time to time would flash the captain's own likeness, vast as a cathedral window, so that ten thousand souls might look upon his face at once — a marvel I do not think even the Pope commands, and I say that with no disrespect meant to His Holiness, only wonder at the age I have fallen into. The man in black stood behind the batting-squire with his little cage of iron mesh before his face, and every so often he would fling up an arm and cry a word I could not catch, and the crowd would roar or groan accordingly, and I understood him to be some manner of hedge-priest, adjudicating sins invisible to the common eye, which put me somewhat in mind of Father Osric and his penances, save that Father Osric never once made ten thousand men cry out as one.

There was also, low along the wall, a beast of sorts, painted all in blue and white and shaped like nothing God ever put breath into, that danced upon two legs and clapped its stubby paws and tousled the hair of small children, who shrieked with a joy that seemed to me entirely sincere and entirely without cause, the beast doing no discernible labor, tending no herd, pulling no plow, only dancing, which I confess I begrudged it somewhat, having never in my life been permitted to dance while there was still work in the field.

I will own that I lost the thread of the contest itself more than once — whether the striped guild prevailed I could not rightly tell you, for my eye kept sliding to the meat-tube man, and to the great tapestry, and to the dancing beast, and to wondering after the cast-out squire, wherever in the cold he had got to by nightfall — but I set down what I saw as I saw it, true and unadorned, as is my charge, and let wiser heads than mine sort the wheat of it from the chaff.

The captain's hours are changed. A man was called up like a bull to pasture. A young squire was put outside the gate. The meat-tubes sold well. God keep them all, every one, for I understand none of it, and the light is going, and I am away to my field, which at least I understand.

— Hodge o' the Field, who tilled once and tills again come morning