After hook-sliding around the Seminole shortstop’s tag and asking for time, I got up to find the toe spikes on my shoe torn from the sole and a gaping rip in the side panel. The other shoe looked almost as bad. I could never run on those dislodged spikes. Two steps would sprain my ankle or twist a knee. I showed the base umpire, Jake Schact. Mister JayMac came out to assess the damage, and the Seminole crowd booed as he crossed the infield in his street clothes and again when Hoey trotted over from the first-base coaching box to make it a three-party powwow.

“Don’t put on a stall,” Schact told Mister JayMac.

“Who’s stalling? We’re out of shoes.”

“ ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without’ ”-a wartime motto that Schact quoted. “And hurry it up.”

Unless you had an illegal hoard, there was no sure or cheap way to replace rationed items, and Uncle Sam rationed shoes, even baseball shoes. We might’ve had an extra pair in my size in Highbridge, but in Marble Springs the spare-pair cupboard stood Mother Hubbard bare. Mister JayMac looked hard at my shoes and then just that hard at Hoey’s.

“What size do you wear, Mr Boles?”

“N-n-nines.”

“And you, Mr Hoey?”

“Criminy,” Hoey said. “Jesus.”

“What size?”

“Nines.” (The kind of confession you get from a fella when you put him in a room with a blackjack crew.)

“Give him yours, Mr Hoey.”

“Here?”

“Here and now.”

Hoey sat on one half of the bag removing his spikes. I sat on the other half unstringing mine.

“Should I give him my jock too?”

“Please, Mr Hoey. Don’t provoke a display of female ardor beyond your capacity to quench.”

The Seminole crowd whooped like picture-show Indians, ready for the game to resume. Hoey, though, had to walk back to the coaching box in his stirrup socks and clay-stained saintaries. Between innings, he put on a pair of street shoes. It took me a week to find my own replacements, though, and for that week, Hoey wore a pair of boot-blacked slippers. From a distance, they looked like the real things and kept fans from ragging him, but this episode, on top of everything else, guaranteed I’d stay at the top of Hoey’s shit list forever.

Thank God Phoebe cared for me. Thank God I had Henry for a protector.

42

My Second Life (continued)

… I heard shouts, laughter, and a mechanical sort of hooting. Together, these noises enticed me from the woods, where I had made a shelter of evergreen boughs, and onto the verge of an open fold. Here I saw a great many men standing about in like-tailored coveralls and startling red blouses, the blouses identical but for the different numerals in white on their backs. One player, running towards me to retrieve a spherical object struck over his head, showed across the front of his crimson blouse the word POINSETT. He and his comrades, each with this same designation on their chests, had embarked upon a sporting contest against some green-clad men wearing across their shirts the epithet BRAGGADOCIO.

From considerably greater distances, I had seen, and given a prudent berth, games of this raucous sort before. The Caucasian natives of the continental hinterlands-by now I had made my way to northeastern Arkansas-called their pastime “base ball,” but it had affinities to ball-and-stick children’s games that I had encountered everywhere from Switzerland to eastern Siberia. The rural version of this sport fascinated me, less for its regulated intricacies than for its ability to assemble and amuse many diverse persons.

In any event, I emerged from the woods.

On the outskirts of Poinsett, Arkansas, a hundred or more spectators had gathered about the ill-marked field (known locally as the Strawberry Diggings) on foot, in mule- or ox-drawn wagons, in surreys, and even in self-propelled “Model T’s.” The drivers of these last vehicles, sometimes called automobiles and sometimes Fords, would pull their movable windshields down to preserve the glass from balls bludgeoned foul by the teams’ various batsmen.

Whenever those watching approved a development in the game, the spectators on foot or in wagons would whistle, cheer, applaud, and stamp their feet. Those in Model T’s would sound the signalling devices in their conveyances to produce a festive cacophony. Perhaps this continual hubbub should have warned me off; instead, it drew me, as a lamp does a moth.

The ball being pursued by the unsuspecting Poinsett outfielder rolled to my feet. I stooped to pick it up and greatly agitated the man. His eyes, under the narrow bill of a striped cap, grew wide, then hard. I tossed the ball to him. He caught it in a thin glove from which the tips of his naked fingers protruded like pale sausages. The cheers and honking from the devotees swelled in volume and in anxiousness. “Thanks,” said the man. Turning, he threw the ball in a low arc to a teammate at one congested corner of the “diamond.” This disciplined heave and its skillful reception by a teammate excited the local enthusiasts to even louder approbation. I moved back into the shelter of the woods-to watch the remainder of the contest from this vantage, without detection by the spectators or further intrusion of myself into the game.

Afterwards, the man to whom I had tossed the ball ventured alone to the edge of the evergreen stand. “Sir,” he said, “if still here, please shew yourself.” I did, but my fulfillment of his request evoked his silent wariness. He had above-average height and strength, but I stood three hands taller and cast him in darkling shadow. “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “I intend neither you nor your friends any harm.” These words clearly ameliorated his mood. He slipped from out my shadow and appraised me with a look of most welcome sympathy.

“That out you he’ped me git,” he said in his rude dialect, “was shore a big un. Jes’ then, Mister, the game teetered more t’ards them than us, but Flexner’s tag at third settled them Braggadocio’s boys’ hash and skinned us through the tight. So thanks again. ’Thout yore he’p, I’d’a lost two weeks’ wages at Griscom’s dentistry office to Bruno Shaler.”

“It was my pleasure,” said I, and the timbre of my voice occasioned him another instant of unease. He quickly recovered and questioned me on my knowledge of base ball and my best self-assessment of my plying skills. I owned that my knowledge derived solely from observation; further, any talent I might possess was that of an awkward tyro.

“If you could hit jes’ a quarter lick yore size, you could take the Poinsett Redbirds to a state championship,” he said. “How’dyou like a weekday job at Griscom’s? Let me th’ow you a few and see what befaws, aw right?”

The name of this outfielder and dentistry-office factotum was Jimmy Brawley. Jimmy proceeded to test my abilities and to lesson me in the rudiments of the pastime and sport to which he devoted most of his Saturday and Sunday afternoons. When he experimentally pitched to me, at first lobbing the ball, then hurling it with an uncouth ferocity, I excited his admiration by launching seven of these latter pitches almost to the trees. My bat was a modified wagon tongue that Jimmy had held back for me from the equipment of his departed companions. He also had a leather-wrapped india-rubber ball that he delivered from a slat laid down as the pitcher’s mark. Finally, I propelled the ball into the very treetops of the woods wherein I had sheltered, and neither Jimmy nor I could recover it.

My impromptu tryout ended on that account, but Jimmy wrung from me through importunate flattery a commitment to appear in the Diggings for a weekday-evening practice.

“Tomorrow,” said he.

“Perhaps. I hardly trust my base-ball instincts, nor yet, Mr Brawley, my-”