“What happened at Miss Giselle’s funeral?”
“Memorial service. The usual. Blather, tears, you know. Remember Charlie Snow’s. Only difference? Afterwards, Mister JayMac took his lady’s ashes home in an urn.”
“Oh.” I changed the subject. “Where’s Henry? He never came to see me, but I look in these here box scores for the Phillies”-I snapped the sports page with my knuckles-“and his name amt here. Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“He didn’t go up to the Phillies?”
“Maybe he’s sitting on the bench. Not finding his name in a box score only means he didn’t play in that game.”
I tacked about. “Why doesn’t Hoey come visit me? He owes me that much, the jerk.”
“Cripes, Boles, you’re a pigheaded case. Hoey didn’t-doesn’t-like you. Plus he’s ashamed.”
“I bet.”
“Anyway, he’s not the sort to come creeping in here, hat in hand, to ask forgiveness. Which you already knew.”
On Saturday, I got hold of a newspaper. It had a story clipped from the front page. I asked the nurse on assignment to my room why. She said a staff doctor with a cousin in the Ninth Air Force, headquartered in England, had clipped it for a scrapbook he planned to give his cousin on his return from overseas. Nobody else had a paper to loan either-the hospital tried to keep its premises litter free and to recycle paper products immediately. I believed the hussy. She lied like a front-office flack, and in those days I didn’t know enough to see through the prevaricators the way I do now.
Two days later, about five in the afternoon, another nurse came by and looked in. “Nigger boy out here says he wants to see you. You want to see him?”
Euclid, I thought. “Yessum. Let me see him.”
Euclid came in, eyes cast down, head respectfully hang-dog. He looked dirtier than usual, sweatier-as ragamuffinish in his clothes as anybody could look and still get in the door. The nurse-I could tell-figured she’d just done her unpaid good deed of the day.
“What’s going on, Euclid?”
“Hey, Danbo. Braugh yoo ledder.”
“Where?” I saw no letter. Euclid had his hands clasped in front of him like a recaptured escapee wearing cuffs.
“Heah.” Euclid pulled a manilla packet from under his stained muslin shirt and nearly poked me in the eye with it. I took it from him. He glanced away-at the ceiling, into a corner, at the foot of my bed.
“Who’s it from?” I studied the handwriting on the front of the packet: Daniel Boles. And just that quick, I knew who’d written the letter. “Henry,” I said.
“Yessa. Mister Jumbo say gib it yoo. So I’s done it. Now I gots to go. Bye.”
Euclid hustled out of the room. I opened the packet and spread out the pages inside it in my lap.
57
I write to you with considerable difficulty, Daniel, for I must labour both to express myself in an apposite idiom and to justify actions which might otherwise seem grotesque, if not monstrous. What I have done, however, I own as products, albeit misshapen and disfigured ones, of my finer sentiments-kindness, regard, love-rather than of mere destructive egotism. In allowing outrage to deform my nobler affections in one case, I grievously erred. But in the other I sought only to reaffirm justice and the existing social order, not to instigate ruin and spiritual desolation.
In the wake of your departure via ambulance to the county hospital, Daniel, I repaired on foot to McKissic House and took a shower. From Musselwhite I learned that your injuries would debar you from accompanying me to Philadelphia; would, indeed, prevent you from playing baseball at any professional level again. This news induced in me a bleak lethargy-the blues, Darius would baptise my psychological complaint-and likewise a vehement choler akin to the fury I had so often known as Victor Frankenstein’s foresworn handiwork.
For two hours, my lassitude held my wrath in check; then, thinking on your love of our sport and your cruel abstraction from it, I recalled that just as Michelangelo had said, “It is only well with me when I have a chisel in my hand,” you had once averred that you felt most alive when wearing a fielder’s glove or gripping a bat.
This recollection goaded me from bed. I believe I may have howled. I forsook the still, hot rooms of McKissic House. I quitted the equivocal revelry of my teammates (men somewhat more enkindled by our victory than abashed by your ill fortune) and directed myself through the twilight to Cotton Creek Street and the clapboard dwelling of Linda Jane Hoey and her four children. It had occurred to me that Ligonier Hoey, unlike other Gendarmes, had a local home to which to retire. There his wife and helpmeet would welcome him, commiserate over his season-ending loss, and absolve him with laughter and kisses of any complicity in your becripplement. This conjectural domestic scene, so tender and so unjust, heaped faggots on my rage.
As I strode, dogs of all types-spaniels, blueticks, rodent-faced mongrels-left their porches to defend their shabby fiefdoms and harry my passage. Heedless, I strode on, preparing myself for a head-to-head affray with the miscreant I had once counted teammate and friend. When a hound of umber eye summoned the brass to bite my heel, I twisted it up from the walk by its hackles, and flung it simpering into a pack of like-minded dogs trailing me along a holly row. The cur landed amidst its kindred, scattering them in girning panic. At length it scrambled lamely away into the shrubbery. I continued, impervious to the cruelty of my act and the mayhemic dimensions of my humour.
In the spacious confines of Alligator Park, I slowed my step, intuitively detecting a hint of what could lie in wait not only for my prey but also for me. I spoke one word aloud: “Atonement.” The silhouetted planks of some teeter-totters, primitive machines for the fabrication of joy, calmed me with their offset diagonals. I must bank the coals of my anger, I reasoned, and confront Hoey as one sane and well-intentioned being to another. When I knocked on his door, his youngest son-your fortuitous namesake, Daniel-opened it and gazed up at me as if from a trench.
“Jumbo’s here!” he shouted. “The biggest man in the world! The mostest homers in a season!”
Linda Jane Hoey appeared behind young Daniel, wearing a look of commingled charity and exasperation, as if a black-sheep uncle had intruded on a private celebration. I was not beloved of Mrs Hoey; my size and mien discomfited her. At every home game, she had held herself and her children frostily aloof, fearing perhaps that, if vexed, I would treat of her offspring as I had just treated of that vile dog. Before I could ask for her spouse, exasperation decided Mrs Hoey’s rejoinder to my unsolicited appearance.
“Buck’s family needs him tonight, Mr Clerval, and he needs us. What do you want?”