Anyway, the crouched shadow in that chapel of pecan-bough whorls beckoned to us again.

“It’s Darius,” I told Henry in pure amaze.

We crept away from the other departing mourners through a break in the pecan grove. Darius, wary as a fox, had gone even deeper into it, at last turning himself at bay alongside the scabby bole of tree not much thicker through the trunk than he was through the chest. Beside that pecan, he raised a hand to halt us.

“Yall sit right there,” he said. “Pretend to rest.” He meant on a moss-grown bench. Henry and I sat down on it.

“Where’ve you b-been?” asked.

Darius, maybe ten feet away, laid his cheek against the scabbed bark of the pecan. He hugged it like a person. “I’ve done signed on with Mister Cozy and the Splendid Dominicans,” he said. “We play in Lake City tomorrow. Next summer I could be wi the Memphis Red Sox or the KayCee Monarchs. Playing, Mister Henry-not jes driving a bus. Playing.”

“Mister JayMac will find you,” Henry said.

“Why? Why’d he want to do that? Sides, I’m gon change my name and play a lot more spots than jes pitcher.”

“What about Euclid?” Henry said.

The question gave Darius pause. Me too. I hadn’t even thought of Euclid, Darius’s supposed little brother, and his’d been the first Hellbender face I’d seen upon arriving in town. Home games, Euclid acted as our bat boy, the only Negro kid in that position in the league. He didn’t go on the road with us (not counting his stowaway trip to Cottonton) because Mister JayMac had no control over his treatment in other cities. Euclid had a regular presence around McKissic Field, though, and split his time between Darius’s apartment and a trim little house near the farmer’s market where his mother-Darius’s mother, the onetime brown-sugar fancy woman of Mister JayMac-lived.

But Euclid had no McKissic blood in his veins. His mama, Detta Rae Satterfield, had conceived him with an official of the Railway Porters’ Union from Atlanta, a man as long gone from Detta Rae as Darius’s daddy and not a whit more missed. Just in her forties at Euclid’s making, she’d planned the child as the apple of her early dotage-but the manchild’s inbred rambunctiousness wearied her, and she’d begged both Darius and Mister JayMac to take him off, to act as stopgap providers and sponsors. They’d more or less agreed, with the understanding Darius would do the biggest part of the guardian work.

“Euclid’s got his mama,” Darius said. “Got Mister JayMac and a house full of white big brothers.”

“Have you told him you’re leaving?”

“Lord, Mister Henry, I haven’t had the chance. He’s gon be awright, though, if he jes git told I’m out there pitchin and hitting. You see him, Mister Henry, tell him that. Let him know I aint gone off to dodge him, I’m doing it to grab my life back from the ol McKissic yoke.”

“I’ll tell him,” Henry said. “Now, though, that yoke will rest even more heavily on him.”

“He’s awready got a yoke-his black hide-he won’t shuck off this side of dying,” Darius said.

A brown thrasher rattled about in the underbrush five or six feet from Darius, fluffing out the flecked white vest of its chest and tossing twigs and pine straw around.

“I’m deeply sorry bout Mr Snow,” Darius said. “He wasn’t no showboat. He had this easy stillness that spoke straight through everbody else’s jive and moonshine. That’s why I come today. To say good-bye-to Mr Snow and likewise to yall, if I could manage it.”

“You m-managed,” I said.

“Some stuff awready packed in a bag on my closet shef,” Darius said. “Mister Henry, could you fetch it out here after yall’s game tonight and set it on that bench? You could, I’d pick it up round midnight.”

“Is your apartment locked?”

“Nosir. Aint never been.”

“Then I’ll do it,” Henry said. “But what impels you to venture forth from McKissic House now?”

Darius seemed surprised. “Why, Mister Cozy ast me, he’s giving me a chanst at something I awways wanted a chanst at.”

“But you could’ve taken flight long ago.”

The interlocked wheels of the pecan leaves above Darius winched his gaze upwards. He searched all that lacy green for an answer. Then he squatted and trailed his fingers in the pine-straw mulch lapping his shoes. The sheer worn-outness of his hunker got to me.

“Better late than no time,” he finally said, peering at us up from under. “But why now? Good question, Mister Henry. I think it’s cause my life’s done crept into its brittlest part, like unto them innings when the whole thing could go either way-depending on jes when the crucial bonecrack happen, and to whom. I awmost waited past the snappin point. Mebbe I did. But if I beat it now, mebbe I’ll git past my brittle innings and play on through to a stretch that’ll heal me, that won’t jes shake me down to splinters and shards.” Then he sounded angry and near tearful at once: “Don’t give me no grief for coming so tardy to a notice of how damn feeble and rickety I’d got. Jes don’t. I’m moving now, aint I? I’m laying grease in my joints, oiling up for tomorry?”

Henry said, “So it would appear.”

“Then don’t yall chide me for what I cain’t nowise fix.”

“Darius, we don’t,” I said.

“And fetch me that suitcase, hear? They’s cash money in it, some clothes, a packet of eelskins.” Eelskins?

“Have no fear,” Henry said. “The deed is accomplished.”

“One other thing,” Darius said. “You still holding them fifty dollars what got bet on our game out to Penticuff, Mister Henry?”

“I believe I am,” Henry said, surprised.

“Well, I won that bet. I heard it said so over them PA speakers round the field. Anyhow, I could use the money.”

Henry took his wallet from inside his jacket.

“Don’t open it,” Darius said. “I could use it, but seeing how that game ended, hexed by them damn bats and dimmed by Mr Snow’s dying, I cain’t take it. Give it to Mr Snow’s missus. Say it’s a token from a admirer.”

“Very well,” Henry said. “I will.”

“God bless yall. And bye.”

Darius saluted and backed off. He rattled the underbrush-the blackberry vines, the pine straw, the tiny white violets-less noisily than the pesky brown thrasher still goofing around in there.

47

Laying Charlie Snow to rest did something kindlesome for us Hellbenders. We won that evening’s game against Quitman. We won it big, about as big as they’d beaten us the night before. Win one for the Gipper-except Mister JayMac never trotted out a phony-baloney Knute Rockne ploy like that; he simply said our whole season would fall in ruins if we gave away any more games to outright inferiors, namely, Quitman, Lanett, Marble Springs, and Cottonton.

After the game, back at McKissic House, Henry sent me over to Darius’s apartment to get Darius’s suitcase. He figured he’d have a harder time than me sneaking down two flights of stairs and over the crushed seashells in the Brown Bomber’s garage to pull off our mission. This wasn’t a con on his part, just smart planning, but I still resented having to do myself what Henry’d promised Darius in the cemetery. So I snuck with a foolish what-the-hell orneriness.

I clomped up the stairs in the garage and twisted the knob on the door at the top of the landing. The Bomber slept below me like a hibernating metal bear. The apartment door creaked ajar, and I pushed my way inside. I couldn’t turn on a lamp for fear someone in McKissic House would notice, and I hadn’t had the wit to bring along a flashlight. I ran smack into a wicker rocker, cursed like crazy, and wound up with a small welt on my knee. I felt my way from the chair to a tomato-crate table and from there to another door.

I’d come to a bathroom, with a commode and a bowl-sized sink with naked pipes. I waved my hand until it brushed a string, which I pulled. A light bulb popped on, lifting sink, toilet, and water-stained walls into the glare of old porcelain and scabby green paint.