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To the Wilderness and Back Again
Perfect Silence
by Jeff Hutton
Breakaway Books, Paperback, 2002.
Hardcover, 2000. 320 pages.
Reviewed by Michael Wilt
“Baseball opens your eyes,” Roger Angell has written. It is a statement with which Joseph Tyler, the protagonist of Perfect Silence, would no doubt agree. But Joseph would take it further, for it is baseball that opens all his senses and solidifies his understanding of who he is and where he belongs. It is baseball that gives him a safe place in a world in which he has survived Civil War battles and the loss of innocence, friends, and family. “This was where he should be, for whatever reason. On the base ball field he felt almost complete -- almost right.”
Jeff Hutton’s thoroughly satisfying debut novel opens at the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. Joseph Tyler, the son of a Virginia farmer, is a Confederate soldier who has been left for dead, but survives the battle. With the woods in flame, Joseph hears the cries of another soldier and -- even though the voice belongs to the enemy, in the uniform of the North -- Joseph pulls him away from the fire. The Yankee soldier dies despite Joseph’s effort, but Joseph finds in the man’s pocket a letter to Sarah Kingsley, a young woman in New York state. The words of this letter will ultimately help Joseph find the strength to reconcile the inhumanity -- the ungodliness -- of the war with the presence of God he has encountered in the Virginia mountains and friendship and even on the field of play.
After the opening battle scene, Hutton takes us back to a younger Joseph, who discovers the new game of “base ball” and his own natural talent as both a thrower (pitcher) and a striker (hitter). We witness the life and death of Joseph’s mother and his father’s withdrawal -- after his wife’s death -- into the labor of farming and clearing fields and building stone walls. Eventually we return to the battlefield and the series of events -- imprisonment, escape, becoming a ballplayer -- that leads to Joseph’s delivery of the dead Union soldier’s letter to its intended recipient.
In Hutton’s narrative, such events are always charged with meaning, as are Joseph’s considerable skills as a soldier, farmer, and ballplayer. Joseph’s baseball skill, for example, is the medicine that keeps him going after the war. In writing about the game, Hutton has done his homework and evokes the sense of discovery that must have accompanied baseball in its infancy. Joseph is among baseball’s early innovators, placing emphasis on pitches that fool the hitter, rather than simply allow the batter to put the ball in play. But Joseph’s love for the game is for the game at its purest, as play, and early attempts to commercialize it leave him cold: “Joseph felt the tan leather ball in his hand -- felt the stitching on the flesh of his fingers -- listened to the barking and then the howling of the awakened dog and felt he could do this -- play ball -- forever.”
We come to appreciate Joseph most, though, as a young man who thinks and feels deeply about his place in the world.
I used to wear the mountains like a cloak, Sarah. I used to pull them across my shoulders as I worked the field, like they was wrapped around me and I swear they gave me strength. It was like God hisself put the weight of his hand on my shoulder as I worked. I remember my mother sayin that if you couldn’t find God in this valley then you sure won’t find him inside any church building.
Hutton employs a vibrant palette in his writing. Images of light frequently indicate the needs of Joseph’s spirit. “He saw the stronger sun wash the pink flowers of a dogwood at the bend ahead -- the outstretched branch holding shining pearls in its palm, offered up to the boundless sky -- away from the deep woods; and he let his mind relax and his thoughts wander.” But Joseph is also rooted in the densely wooded place in which he was raised, where stone walls mark boundaries in much the same way that base paths and fences bound the playing field: “The walls frame a man’s life, his father had said as they lifted stones together from the raw field in the early winter.”
When Joseph finally meets Sarah Kingsley, the sweetheart of the dead soldier, he must confront the disordered strands of his young life and begin to untangle them. This is his great struggle -- to become reconciled with his father, his vocation, his many losses, and his God, who became absent to him in the midst of war and has remained absent except in memory. The words of love and hope, expressed by a now-dead soldier in the most horrible circumstances, provide the key that unlocks the door to Joseph’s ability to live in peace.
There is no shortage of baseball novels in the literary landscape, but the best are never really just about sport. To the shelf containing the best of these -- Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The Celebrant, and others -- Jeff Hutton’s Perfect Silence can be safely added. Hutton, whose eye is as sharp as that of a .360 hitter in a September pennant race, has written a memorable book that should be more savored than read.
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