“Jimmy,” he told me. “None of that’ere mister rig-a-roo. Makes me sound I’m awready a laid-out stiff.”

“Nor, Jimmy, do I trust my ability to secure favour equal to your own among your colleagues and supporters. It has ever been thus with me. I offend by my appearance. I go down to dust an outcast because my body incites not only revulsion but also a wholly unwarranted fear.”

“If you pound ’er to the treetops wunst or twicet a game, Sonny Man, you could look like a shaved-butt coyote and nobody roundabouts Poinsett’d give a stale tea cake.”

For nearly a week, I remained unperceived in the pine stand. At night, however, I betook myself to the diamond on the Strawberry Diggings with a burlap sack of pine cones and a stout bough with which to launch them. For hours I practiced. The flanged configuration of the surface of the cones, along with their relative lack of density, prevented me from propelling them far beyond the fan of the infield, but the persistence with which I drilled instilled in me, over time, great confidence. I decided to accept Jimmy’s challenge.

When I first shewed myself to the Poinsett Redbirds on a practice afternoon, Jimmy introduced me to the players and to their manager, Almont Rattigan. Against even the team’s best hurler, I batted surprisingly well, but fielded so ineffectually that Rattigan despaired of ever employing me, because of the liability I would pose on defense. The less kind or more ignorant Redbird players referred to me as Flatfoot, Lame Ox, Dropper, and Stoopnot. Mr Rattigan advised me to quit base ball for coal mining, but Poinsett had no mines.

Jimmy sought virtually alone to retrieve me from incompetence afield and disfavor among his teammates. With old leather-wrapped balls, then with a crate of mail-order Spaldeens, he tried my limited skills and augmented them through repetition until only my lameness debarred me from excellence as a fielder. This handicap-the consequence, I knew, of my own efforts to humanise my monstrous physique-I overcame through application, diligence, and a style of chicanery in my self-positioning that the other Redbird fielders later strove to emulate themselves. When I could find no one with whom to practise, Jimmy advised, I should take myself to the vacant lot behind Criscom’s dentistry office and catapult a Spaldeen at its foundation for as long as I could catch the rebounds. So much did I improve, through devotion to this regimen, that within a week Rattigan had fitted me with an outsized uniform and deployed me in vital town-team contests against Lepanto and Frye’s Mill…

From before the Great War to the acme of the American Depression, I changed my residence at least once a year. I eschewed a permanent home and also the inevitability of my neighbours’ snoopery for a transient life and the qualified privacy that mobility affords. I played town-team ball in Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Alabama, Texas, and Florida’s panhandle. I chose towns far enough apart from one another to prevent old acquaintances or teammates from a prior affiliation from chancing upon me. At intervals, I curtailed my participation for a year, two years, perhaps even three, though I honed my skills even during these sabbaticals. Some towns, when I played, gave me a monthly stipend-$30 was the most munificent-and a sinecure such as sidewalk sweeping or crate handling that did not monopolise my evenings or weekends. I purposely shunned human entanglements, such as that I had enjoyed with Kariak in Oongpfk, and behaved myself both on and off the field with as much sobriety and honour as I could, given the transient nature of my allegiances and my wish to hold myself emotionally aloof from my teammates, as well as from the communities that supported us.

Why did I live? In the middle 1930s, with bread lines commonplace and unemployment an evil contagion even in the remotest hamlets, I no longer regarded my absorption into human society as a productive citizen as my foremost aim. Playing ball, I realised, had become an end in itself, not a means of such absorption. What now infused meaning into my days, whether in Donigal, Missouri, or in Hurricane, Alabama, derived less from tiresome social intercourse than from the galvanising physical sensations of hitting a ball hard and far, and of throwing it with exactitude. Once I had wanted a spiritual sharer, but now, drunk with the restored robustness of my borrowed body, I wanted only faceless teammates and unending occasions to exercise my intellectual and animal fatuities playing baseball…

In the summer of 1940, I had a janitorial sinecure with a school in Hurricane, up the Tensaw River from Mobile Bay, and the guarantee of at least two town-team games a weekend. The part-owner of a minor-league club in Mobile itself, having heard of my batting prowess, sought me out. Despite the evident distress that my appearance caused him, he bestowed many flowery compliments and offered money, women, and alcohol as inducements to leave the Hurricane Hurricanes in favour of the Mobile Tarpons. Because I had no use for these offers and hated his protestations of high esteem, I declined. He departed from me both confounded by my gentlemanly refusals of his overtures and angry with me for seeing through his dissimulations.

Soon thereafter, Mr Jordan McKissic of the Highbridge Hellbenders of the Chatahoochee Valley League came to watch me play. A teammate told me of his presence in the stands and informed me heatedly that only an “addlepate” would decline a second invitation to a higher level of play. He seemed sensible of the townwide conviction that although I had graciously shown my loyalty to the Hurricane nine, I had also manifested irrefutable proof of my foolish lack of self-regard. Should I reject another attractive offer, he supposed, every other member of our club would inherit the taint of my simplicty, and the name Hurricaner would soon stand synonymous with ninny, simpleton, or dolt. I ignored this counsel and performed as I always performed; that is to say, with intensity, diligence, and positivity. Indeed, I led the Hurricane Hurricanes to victory.

Afterwards, Mr McKissic and I conferred. He did not recoil from me. His smile had no falsity, his words no ulteriority. His offer of a regular emolument, along with room and board, veiled no improper inducements or counterweights. His proposal tempted me, but the glare of playing in a larger city, with a major-league affiliate, subverted even the happy impression that Mr, McKissic’s sincere demeanour and speech had forged. Neither riches nor glory held any irresistible allure for me; I could fulfill my inbred need for athletic self-expression in an unfenced meadow as well as in a lighted stadium.

“I disagree,” said Mr McKissic. “You’ll never realise your full capacities as an athlete until you play against men as good as, or perhaps even better than, you. A home run against Joe Blow of the Fairhope Shrimpers proves a good deal less than does a home run against Sundog Billy Wallace of the Gendarmes. By the same token, a home run against Billy pales next to one off Rapid Robert Feller of the Cleveland Indians.”

This line of argument found a sympathetic resonance in me. “Then, sir,” I said, “I should try to play for a nine that periodically meets Mr Feller’s club.”

“But the only way to reach such a nine, Mr Clerval, is through a training league such as the CVL.”

To what summit of expertise could I aspire? Glory, though some may dispute this assertion, did not beckon me. Rather, curiosity about the range of my talents filled my thoughts, calling me to some practical resolution of the question. In this way, Mr McKissic nearly secured my defection to the Hellbenders. Mulling a host of maddening factors, I said nothing, inadvertently prejudicing him to conclude that I would respond negatively.