"Who do you think Casey is today?" asks Skeetoby.
"Galen Flynn, I hear," offers the occult Schultz, man who has turned, so Costen has heard, to the folklore of game theory, and plays himself some device with dice.
"Flynn!" snorts Flint, whose line in this league is the longest of them all, indeed to the first of the vicars. "That damn toady!"
"Easy, easy!" cautions Raspberry Schultz, nodding with squinted eyes toward Paul Trench, son of the establishment, now receiving Hardy-Damon's warm-up pitches. "Even the eyes have spies!"
But fiery Squire McFlint in a temper is no easy man to hush. "A bunch of idiots, that's what we got running this league! Nobody understands Casey anymore! Nobody understands history!" Paunch, asquat, uniformed as Royce Ingram, mighty arm of divine retribution, is faceless behind his mask.
"Anyway," proffers the conciliatory Parson Ramsey, "maybe it isn't Flynn."
"Of course, it isn't," Cuss-Tuck McWilson informs them.
"No?" asks Witberry Yultz. "Then who do you think that…?"
"Why," quoth this hero who shall walk today from home to home to the inevitable satisfaction of all parties under the sun, "that it is Jock Casey himself!"
"Ho ho!" cheers Skeetoby Ramparts. "I might have guessed!"
"But how…?" asks the witless Jerkberry.
"You're crazy," grumps Drusquire McWormy, lover of the Casey dead, but not alive.
"Crazy? Well, yes, I am," Cusstuck confesses nobly. "Else how account for my stuffing body and bunghole into this museum piece of a rag bag?" He flexes a leg to rip a stitch and spring a general laughter. "But as for Casey, what do we know?"
"Aw, let's find a bar, for God's sake!" butts the good Gringo impatiently in.
"That no man ever lived a life like his," responds Squire Flint, the humorless one.
"First, we know that—"
"Thirst is first!" gripes Gringo Greene. But as Cuss McCamish knows full well, it is all bravado; the first sack will be tupped many times over by the sober Pioneer cleats of Goodman James today.
"He thirsts for the True Church," wry Raspberry smiles.
"And what of your fans, Gringo?" asks Skeeter Parsons.
"Mother can smother in her own vat of fat," Gringo grumbles.
"A dogmatist," Cuss McCamish complains, and all nod, pitying. "Now, as for Casey, the first thing we know is that he was still pitching long after Damonsday the First."
"Everybody knows that," is Squire's reposte. "They've just squeezed the two deaths into one ceremony in order to—"
"But if this is a falsehood, dear comrades, where is truth? We know who buzzarded about the immortal remains of our friend Hardy here — or I mean, Damon — know when and where he was immortally interred, even know the music performed at his immortal obsequies, but of Casey what can we say? That Hardy's own glorious ancestor knocked Jock on the block and fixed his clock? A mere fairy tale, adorned with the morbid imaginations of a century of sentimental artisans!" His efforts to draw in Hardy Ingram avail him not. Hardy Ingram he is no more. "We don't even know if his corpus delicti was scraped off the rubber, or if it just sank into the premises! As the great historian U. R. Obseen has informed us:
Said Long Lew to Fanny
Whilst inspecting her cranny:
'Why! someone inside I have found?'
Said Fanny to Lew:
'Dear, don't you know who?
It's the Man Who Sleeps there in the Mound!'"
"You're sick, McCamish!" is the reward the noble historian reaps from the furious Flint, though elsewhere he fares better.
"So I say it is he, in the flesh of the bone and the bone of all flesh, the Man in the Mound, Jock the Mad Killer Casey, come back this day once yearly to victimize us all, we of the green hinderparts and the wives and daughters of honest men!"
"Casey died to prove his freedom!" Squire Flint blurts out. "And ours! And all we do—"
"Well, a great man, Casey, but not the greatest."
"Who was the greatest, Cuss?" asks the grinning Skeeter.
"Why old Pappy Rooney, of course."
"Rooney! What did he do?"
"Lived to the age of a hundred and forty-three and, so they say, could get it up to the very end!"
'To the very end of what?" asks the Green Gringo.
"That's stupid!" Drew McSquire snaps.
"Stupid? I should say not! In fact, may we all, my friends, meet such a reasonable demise!"
"Death is never reasonable," argues Squire the great denier, "even for an old fool at one hundred and forty-three."
'Take it easy on Squire," laughs Skeeter. "He's writing a book on Jock Casey."
"So I've heard," says he whose very seams split with a loathing of giants. "It's The Man Who Stood Alone, isn't it?"
"That's right," says Squire grimly.
"If Squire writes it, then I shall bring out my long-awaited biography of Long Lew Lydell!"
Raspberry Schultz laughs and claps. "Wonderful! What are you going to call it, Cuss?"
"The Man Who Stood on his Bone!" Full-bellied laughter at last, which he gathers in, then adds:
"Said Fanny to the spectre
As soon as he'd decked her:
'Why, sir! you're positively pneumatic!
Unlike my old feller,
You tickle the cellar
Without making a mess in the attic!'"
But no rewards this time, for it's Dame Society herself who responds, a terrible roar dredged up from the very gut of the beast, a horrendous witless bellowing, that sucks up all their scrotums, and makes them catch their breath. Skeeter Parsons checks his timepiece: "It's time," he says. Trench and Ingram depart, under a cascade of cheers. But yes! It is really they! See how they go! Two still-young heroes of the golden past: miraculous transformation! And soon even he, Costen McCamish, will shrink instinctively to Tuck Wilson, step over the crushed skull and blinded eyes of that one who, in spite of all, must be loved, and walk the magic bases while the whore weeps. No cheers for him. Only survival.
Paul Trench, at the grim edge, too wise to step back and too frightened to leap, walks miserably toward the diamond beside Hardy Ingram, wanting to speak of it, his gloom, and why, but not knowing where to begin. Paul is a plain-spoken man, and his despair is too complex for plain speech. Though none would ever guess it, the thunder of the crowd only makes it worse. He is afraid. Not only of what he must do. But of everything.
Beyond each game, he sees another, and yet another, in endless and hopeless succession. He hits a ground ball to third, is thrown out. Or he beats the throw. What difference, in the terror of eternity, does it make? He stares at the sky, beyond which is more sky, overwhelming in its enormity. He, Paul Trench, is utterly absorbed in it, entirely disappears, is Paul Trench no longer, is nothing at alclass="underline" so why does he even walk up there? Why does he swing? Why does he run? Why does he suffer when out and rejoice when safe? Why is it better to win than to lose? Each day: the dread. And when, after being distracted by the excitement of a game, he returns at night to the dread, it is worse than ever, compounded with shame and regret. He wants to quit — but what does he mean, "quit"? The game? Life? Could you separate them?
High in the stands, enjoying the rewards of mere longevity, sit the twelve Elders, his grandfather among them. In the government's official box, beside the Chancellor himself, sits his father. Though he knows they watch him, he doesn't look their way, afraid his own doubts will betray him. It began with them, after all. Discovering their fallibility, he encountered the pathos of all life, then reasoned that the Age of Glory was perhaps no different than this, his own inglorious times.