“One Play’ originally appeared in Willow Springs.
Jason Rice: Being a Red Sox fan, although not die-hard, I immediately sensed something strange coming from this story about the fictional life of the legendary Bill Buckner. The goat of the 1986 World Series against the Mets, who let the ball go through his legs stopping him from recording the final out in what would have been the first World Series Win for the Boston Red Sox in many years. The legend of this game is something that is passed from one baseball fan to another, sometimes with great pain, other times with a laugh and slap on the back. Mr. Currie clearly isn’t a person I’d want to talk to about this historic sporting moment, as it might still be an open wound.
Growing up in New England I remember the horror show that became the every waking moment part of life the day after Game 6 of that World Series. The fans were bitterly disappointed, crushed, and when I went to school that morning it seemed like a day long wake. Mr. Currie takes this moment and bends it into fiction, having his narrator tell the reader what it is like to be the son of a much hated baseball player. There is a palpable odor that rises from this work that seems to blister and crack when you finish reading how the Father (really Bill Buckner) can’t seem to get it together the next season and turns to alcohol for medication. The son narrates this story which follows Dad through the year after and his own wobbly career with baseball, his ups and downs, and his own inability to allow his own son to take up the game. Somehow Currie manages a magic act by toggling back and forth between the narrator’s father’s downward spiral and his own rise as an up and coming star in the game . The narrator watches his father receive torrents of hate from fans, and in turn takes that anger out on a team that has meaning to him, only to undo his athletic achievements at the end of the story.
Names of the players give just a hint of what really happened, and Currie writes about a violent game of catch between father and son, one that will strike a cord with any man who’s played a game of catch with his father, or watched a father toil at the dinner table. The anger in these pages and the disappointment seem to be powerfully conveyed in short bursts of dialogue and descriptions that are nothing short of breathtaking. I read this story while I eat breakfast this morning and it still resonates with me hours later. Father and son stories are traditionally written by the son, and this is no different. Except Currie manages to dovetail the narrators own experience as a parent with those of his father like a pro.
Read story here: http://willowsprings.ewu.edu/archives/currie.pdf
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