“Tell me what you want, Mr Clerval,” said he. “If it isn’t against my principles or terribly outlandish, I just might give it to you.”

I catalogued and sorted through my wants. It scarcely took a minute, but this minute protracted Mr McKissic’s anxiety to the utmost extent of its elasticity.

“For pity’s sake, Mr Clerval, say something!”

“Occasional use of your automobile and instruction in its operation,” said I.

“My automobile? And lessons in how to drive it?”

“Just so,” I said. “Those are my conditions.”

“All right. Done.”

But I finished that season with the Hurricanes, as I had earlier pledged to do, and soon forgot the compensatory pledges of the Hellbenders’ owner.

The following summer, though I greatly wanted to play, I determined that my small fame in the Mobile Bay area had so far overthrown my anonymity that I must resign for a time from public view to reestablish it. I did so, passing the time through closeted reading and contemplation.

In early July, I relocated to eastern Alabama. There I apprenticed to a laconic and seldom occupied blacksmith who understood that the automobile had long since rung the death-knell of his profession. In any event, he led me to proficiency in horseshoe making and harness repair while I educated him in the esoteric niceties of scrimshaw painting and the making of fishing nets from the sinew strands of whitetail deer. On December 7th, the Japanese executed a disabling strike on the Pacific fleet of the United States, and my mentor, against my ardent counsel, quit Skipperoille to enlist in the Army at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For three and a half months, I oversaw the daily trade of my departed teacher’s blacksmith enterprise. My income supported me in austere comfort. With it, I rented an upstairs room in a shabby antebellum home belonging to an eccentric widow. Miss Rosalind, as the townspeople knew her, smoked Cuban cheroots, raised hairless chihuahua dogs, and wore jumpsuits adorned with sequins. She viewed me as excellent company, not as a grotesque curiosity. Indeed, she so heavily freighted my leisure, of which I had a severe plenty, with such meandering local genealogies and such mazy accounts of her dogs’ ills and achievements that upon occasion I would have preferred to be shot. Moreover, the fumes from her cheroots pervaded my clothing, begot in me migraines of excruciating tenacity, and called forth my tears. (This liquid Miss Rosalind always misconstrued as a sign of my tender heart.) Often, then, I felt indentured less to my smithery than to my landlady.

In April, Mr Jordan McKissic and his wife, Miss Giselle, stopped in a handsome automobile outside the dingy garage in which I laboured. A player of his, a young man recently taken into the Navy, hailed from Skipperville, and the player’s mother’s epistolary accounts of the giant who had moved to town to assume the blacksmithery of Millard Goodsell had come to Mr McKissic’s attention via the low route of boardinghouse gossip. After a visit to his wife’s cousin in Brundide, he had driven to Skipperoille seeking to learn the truth of this gossip and the exact identity of the blacksmith’s apprentice.

“Ah, Mr Clerval, it’s you,” said he. “I renew my offer of almost two years ago. Don’t immediately say no. With a war on, baseball at the training level needs an infusion of fresh talent-or the return of competent old talent-merely to survive.”

He continued in this vein, appealing to my love of the sport, and stressing what he regarded as my unsatisfactory present circumstances, to finagle my consent. At length his words merely clanged, for the lack of useful blacksmith work and the dubious benediction of Miss Rosalind’s society had predisposed me to accept his offer. He may not have noted this pliability in me, however, for I stood in the crepuscular gloom of my garage like a yoked ox, a harness over my shoulders and a bellows in tine hand, a figure of almost Satanic apostasy and discouragement.

Then, Miss Giselle made a self-effacing appearance in the doorway, a spectre of sunshine and organdy. She much resembled Elizabeth Lavenza Frankenstein, the bride of my creator, as Elizabeth might have come to look had I not slain her for my own revengeful purposes in the freshness of her young womanhood. Miss Giselle’s eyes had not yet adjusted to the dinginess of the garage; she had no cause to fall back in dismay at the sight of an ogre of my bulk and hideousness; but, as her pupils contracted, it seemed that she adjusted without strain or upset not only to the twilight in my unkempt shop but also to the parodic human creature trapped in its gloom.

“Jordan, I see you’ve found him,” said she. “Will it be much longer? The sun’s ferociously hot.”

“I’ll be along shortly,” said Mr McKissic with a curtness I had never heard from him before. “Go back to the car.” He somewhat relented. “Or stand under that sycamore.” He nodded towards it. “Mr Clerval and I have an item or two more to discuss.”

“Mr Clerval,” said the woman, although her husband had offered no formal introduction.

“Ma’am,” said I, inclining my head.

She withdrew, leaving me stunned with reminiscences; and Mr McKissic returned to his needless suasions, for, by now, I had determined to give Miss Rosalind notice and to migrate to Highbridge. Mr McKissic nonetheless reiterated his various incentives, including the many chances I would have to try myself against redoubtable competitors.

“Thank you,” said I.

“Anything else, Mr Clerval?” asked Mr McKissic.

“The occasional use of an auto,” said I. “And driving lessons.”

“Yes. I’d forgotten. But never fear, you’ve got it. Report to spring training as soon as you can.”

“Yes, sir.”

And so began the latest chapter in the long chronology of my second life, a tale whose theme remains occluded to its hero and whose end is not yet told…

43

On Tuesday, July 27, the ball field at Camp Penticuff basked red and dusty in the sun. We rode out to it in the Bomber, dressed out in our flannels, more anxious than we’d admit about taking on these Negro barnstormers in front of a hopped-up crowd of colored GIs. We’d just come off a five-game road trip (three wins, two losses), and the Mockingbirds and the Gendarmes would play us three games each at home towards the end of the week. I had the impression, jouncing past the stripped-down barracks and the parched parade grounds, that Muscles, Hoey, Dunnagin, and some of the other Hellbender vets felt we’d bitten off a chaw big enough to choke us.

The stands out here already teemed with khaki-clad black soldiers. They sat or stood in the main grandstand behind the backstop or on portable metal bleachers a maintenance unit had set up beforehand. The sun blazed, slapping the whole sports and training complex like a huge catfish bladder on an unseen stick. The very air seemed to stretch out and pop under the blows. The Bomber pulled up, after the Splendid Dominicans’d already arrived, to some ear-splitting whistles.

“Bout damn time!” yelled somebody sun-sore and antsy.

We parked behind a fleet of ten- or twelve-year-old Buick touring cars, dented and furred with rust; and the Splendid Dominicans ran out onto the field. Until we’d showed, they’d apparently spent their time mingling with the troops: boosting morale. Learning that about em lowered ours. It implied the Dominicans (“These guys’re Dominicans like I’m a Hawaiian,” said Turkey Sloan) hadn’t felt obliged to warm up in advance of our arrival. Two seconds after hitting the field, though, they had a ball whipping around the horn like men born in spikes and caps. I watched them from the Bomber while, outside the fence around the park, Mister JayMac and Darius shook hands with Mr Cozy Bissonette and Major Dexter.