I held Phoebe’s hand briefly before she slipped away, over to the door. “Miss LaRaina, leave me those cigarettes, okay? You can get some more.”

Miss LaRaina walked over and laid her pack on my stomach.

“When’s the funeral?” I asked her. When she just stared at me, like she’d forgotten an earlier part of our talk, I added, “Miss Giselle’s?”

“Oh. Tomorrow, at Alligator Park. A memorial service. No burial. The body’s being cremated.”

“I can’t go,” I said. “I’d like to, but I-” I dropped my cigarette butt in the water glass on my bedside table and watched it fizzle and saturate. Miss Giselle dead. Henry not accounted for. My career an injury-blasted memory. The weight of all this wreckage squeezed tears from me. “Okay. Yall go on. Leave me be.” I fumbled another cigarette out and got Phoebe to light it-to keep her from planting another wet sympathy buss over my eye. She and Miss LaRaina went to the door.

“Matches!” I called after them. “Please.”

Phoebe tossed them onto the bed, not really within easy reach, and then I was alone again.

During September, every day until my release on the twenty-seventh, Phoebe kept her word and came to see me, usually in the afternoon after school. With the end of the CVL season, though, visits from other Hellbenders dwindled to one or two a week, for most of my teammates left Highbridge for their own hometowns or farms, or rode away to take winter-long defense jobs in shipyards, munitions factories, and bomber plants. Nutter, Hay, Sloan, Sudikoff, and Fanning stayed, with jobs at Foremost Forge or Highbridge Box & Crate-but only Nutter ever actually dropped by, usually with newspapers, his motor-mouthed five-year-old Carl, and a fresh-to me, anyway-anecdote about his days with the St. Louis Browns.

Mister JayMac visited me on Sunday afternoons at three o’clock and stayed fifteen minutes, tops. He never mentioned Miss Giselle, Darius, or Henry, but concentrated on asking how I seemed to be healing up and second-guessing Allied command decisions in Italy and the Solomons. By telephone, of course, he’d told Mama Laurel of my injuries, and of their severity, without trying to soft-pedal the truth or to weasel out of the club’s financial obligations-even though my contract didn’t say a word about insuring me for game-acquired or aggravated hurts. He’d’ve paid Mama Laurel’s way to Highbridge, but Mama told him tearfully in one call that coming to see me might make her lose her job. Colonel Elshtain had helped Deck Glider get its military conversion contract, but he didn’t seem to have any leftover pull with the management at the Tenkiller factory, and Mama couldn’t put her job up for grabs by asking for an emergency leave of absence.

“Then don’t come, Mrs Boles,” Mister JayMac told me he’d told Mama. “I’ll take care of Danny jes like he was my own.”

Imagine my gratitude.

Anyway, Mama and I also talked occasionally. I told her to stay on the job and to pray for me. Ordinarily, we talked on Sundays, after Mister JayMac’s humdrum visits, when he sat in a chair near the door, a black arm band on one sleeve and a look of heavy confusion on his booze-swollen face. Sometimes we’d talk, Mama and I, while Mister JayMac, who’d had the phone brought in, sat nearby in his rumpled widower’s weeds and his deep-purple heartache.

“Yessurn, they’re treating me just fine,” I’d say. “Yessum, he is.” What else could I say-though it did pretty much tally with the truth-with Mister JayMac sharing my room?

Nobody brought me a copy of the Highbridge Herald until the Friday of my first week in the hospital. And when Nutter came in with it, he brought me only the sports page, which had a few major-league box scores and a whole section about a GI track meet at Camp Penticuff. I’d already read my Saturday Evening Posts from cover to cover.

“Where’s the rest of this rag? Nobody here’ll give me a copy and you come in with a piddlin snippet.”

“Didn’t think you’d care about anything but the sports,” Nutter said. “After ball season, nothing worth preserving in type happens in this burg.”

“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.