Through the porch screen, I could see a long row of kitchen windows. Through those windows, the yarny-looking gray head of a colored woman bobbed back and forth behind a counter. The woman’s face had caved-in cheeks, bulgy lips and eyes, and a beaklike nose. Her hair had braided rat tails coming down behind her head and over her shoulders to the front, a more squawlike than a mammylike do. From the bus, her head seemed to lack a body; it rolled here and there in the kitchen’s steam and clatter.

“Kizzy,” Darius said. “She either feed you or use you in a pie. Whynt you see which it gon be today?”

Just then, though, I saw Mister JayMac strolling through a big victory garden toward the old servant quarters behind the main house: a neat little bungalow. It had hydrangea bushes with smoky blue flowers big as cabbages, and a red-tile roof that made it look more Spanish than Suthren.

“Office back there,” Darius told me. “Office and bedroom. Him and Miss Giselle got to have they privacy.” I watched Mister JayMac amble, thinking Darius might say more, but he added only, “Git out, Danl. Go on. Git.”

I stood up. I’d reached my “home.” Never mind I had no notion what to do now or even how to make my feet move.

“Holy Jesus,” Darius said. He came down the aisle, grabbed my arm, and dragged me off the bus and up the decaying steps into the kitchen. “This young man hongry and speechless,” he said. “Feed him, Kizzy, but don’t spec no thanks.” He slammed on out of the kitchen through a swinging door more like you’d see in a restaurant than in an old Victorian home.

Euclid came through another door from the dining room and the parlor beyond, where Hellbender ballplayers, from kids like me to grizzled codgers like Creighton Nutter, were listening to the news and debating the capture of Attu in the Aleutians.

“Stupid,” somebody said. “Shoulda let the Japs have it. Two-bit icy rock aint worth one GI’s life, much less five hunnerd’s.”

“You betcha,” a second player said. “Troops up there’d be more use here to home kicking striking miners’ butts.”

“You don’t know squat, Fanning,” somebody else said. “My dad mined coal. If not for baseball, the mines’d have me too.”

And so on. I remember the argument because my dream of Umnak and the tidal wave of Marsden plates clattering down still sprocketed through my head. I could close my eyes and relive the nightmare in milky black-and-white.

Euclid gave me his Plastic Man comic book. He climbed up on a stool next to the wood stove and asked for something to eat. Kizzy poured him a fruit jar of buttermilk and gave him a plate of tomato slices with a crumbly chunk of cornbread.

“Danbo too, Awnt Kiz,” he said.

“Whynt you eat in the dining room wi the other mens?” Kizzy asked me. “Got a full spread out there.”

I shook my head. They’d ask me questions, just like that farm boy Ankers at McKissic Field had done, and the silence I gave them back would irk or tickle them in troublesome ways.

Kizzy (if she was Euclid ’s aunt, she had to be Darius’s too) had hands like long ash-colored mackerels. She sliced me a chunk of cornbread and sloshed me a glass of buttermilk even bigger than Euclid ’s fruit jar. I wolfed the cornbread and the buttermilk standing at a dough-rolling counter in the middle of the kitchen, sweating in the heat pouring off the wood stove. The kitchen’s wallpaper-calico-gowned ladies and top-hatted men on old-timey bicycles-peeled in strips, steamed away by heat and the fumes from boiling kettles of greens or tea.

“Meetin in parlor, six-thuddy,” Euclid said. He put a dollop of strawberry jam on his cornbread and wedged the whole chunk into his mouth. “Yo hea?”

Kizzy gave me all I could eat, including a bowl of greens with some pepper sauce and a piece of cold chicken, and shoved me into the backyard with my comic book and a baseball-sized green apple.

“Iw caw you fo supper,” she said.

I sat in the rusty metal seat of the junked tractor reading Plastic Man and shooing away noseeums. From the parlor, I could hear dance music on the radio, jokey arguments over a hearts game, a soap opera, more war news. I dozed, tuckered from my train ride. I woke and thumbed back through Euclid ’s comic. I dozed again. Next time I woke, I got down from the tractor and explored the house’s spread-out grounds. I stood clear of the bungalow out back, out of respect for Mister JayMac and Miss Giselle’s privacy, and maybe the simple fear he’d shotgun me if I bothered them. Eventually, I dozed off again.

“Danbo,” Euclid said. “Suppa.”

I didn’t want to, but I ate with the other players boarding in McKissic House. Counting me, sixteen fellas crowded the long table. Lon Musselwhite, the team’s six-foot-four left fielder and the biggest man in the dining room, had the seat of honor next to the kitchen. (Musselwhite was team captain.) The chair at the table’s foot, more a throne than a piece of furniture, stayed empty, even though Kizzy had set it a place. I guessed it was for Mister JayMac, who’d show up when he felt like it. Reese Curriden, the third baseman, and Q. U. Parris, a pitcher nicknamed Quip, served us, toting bowls of vegetables and plates of meat in from the kitchen so Kizzy wouldn’t drop dead trying to do everything alone.

“Don’t fret,” Reese Curriden told us newcomers. “This is just a get-acquainted deal. Yall’ll get your shot next week.”

“KP,” Quip Parris said. He was short, blond as wheat, and triggered like a clock spring. Soon enough, I learned he saw himself as the linchpin of the pitching staff. He hailed from Raleigh, North Carolina. His initials stood for Quintus Uriah, which explains why everybody called him Quip.

With nearly all the food on the table, Musselwhite rapped his spoon against his tea glass and said, “Yall please bow.” Everyone bowed. Kizzy came back in with three banana cream pies on a rack of lacquered dowels. She sighed loudly. “Sweet and holy Jesus,” Musselwhite said, “thy blessings on the lady that prepared these victuals, the victuals themselves, and all who aim to eat em. Give us strength-also victories over our CVL enemies, as Thou dost give our fighting forces victories over the Nips and Krauts. Amen.”

“Amen,” said everybody at table.

“Pass them ol field peas,” Musselwhite said.

Bowls began shuttling around. Kizzy finally got to squeeze her rack of meringue-topped pies onto the table.

“Okay, fellas,” Musselwhite said, “innerduce yourselves.” He served himself field peas, tomatoes, fried squash, okra, butter beans, green beans, and mashed potatoes. He grabbed off several biscuits and forked up a breaded pork chop, a slice of ham, a batter-fried chicken breast. I followed suit.

Players introduced themselves. In addition to Reese Curriden and Quip Parris, we heard from Clarence “Trapdoor” Evans, Burt Fanning, Lamar Knowles, Charlie Jorgensen, Sweet Gus Pettus, Vito Mariani, Jerry Wayne Sosebee, Rick Roper, and Percy “Double” Dunnagin. Us newcomers to Highbridge included Philip Ankers, the farm boy who’d called me ugly; Jefferson Dobbs, alias Skinny; and Junior Heggie, shy and decent and maybe a tad smarter than the other two rookies.

Lon Musselwhite pointed his butter knife at me. “Okay, champ, who’re you?”

On one of her glide-throughs from the kitchen, Kizzy said, “He don’t talk, but you can caw him Danny Bowes.”

Boles, I wanted to correct her; not Bowes.

“Why the hell don’t he talk?” Musselwhite said.

“Maybe he’s taken a vow of silence,” Vito Mariani said.

“You figure him for another damned Papist?” Musselwhite said. “Uh-uh. He’s got Primitive Pentecostal writ all over him.”

“Darius told me he’s a born-again shortstop,” Quip Parris said, “with serious plans to excommunicate Hoey.”

“Hallelujah,” Lamar Knowles, the second baseman, said; he said it quietlike, but everybody heard him.