“This was an idyllic time for me, Daniel. In the early phases of my recovery, I had access to a storehouse of nuts, tubers, and dried fruits that I had laid by before abridging my height. I lay on my back in the cave, near a long-abandoned mill, and wrote poetry in my head or tried to solve self-posed geometric or mathematical enigmas. I resisted the urge to sing. Because I had foresightfully equipped my cave with rope ladders and wooden travel rods, I could hand-over-hand from one spot to another without putting any but a therapeutic stress on my lower extremities. This same system took on added import in the rehabilitation process, and it was not long before I again mastered the rudiments of walking.
“My self-surgery left me awkward afoot, but less alarmingly a giant when I crashed about upright. During the latter part of my healing, again ambulatory, I tested myself outdoors. I gathered mockernuts; inhaled the aroma of hand-crushed hickory leaves; and saw mergansers, crimson-headed canvas-backs, and delicate wood ducks scull the September skies. Life apart from man seemed an unutterable gift. Ahead, however, lay autumn’s drear gales and the winter’s enfortressing cold, a time that I bleakly awaited.
“Indeed, I often thought of insinuating myself into a human community as accepting as Kariak’s people had been. I trimmed my hair. I mixed many natural unguents, to repair the twisted lumpiness and hideous variegation of my complexion. I measured my progress in a shaving-mirror shard that I had found. In it, I saw that my lotions and poultices had turned my patchy skin an even pinkish gray. I could pass, I believed, for a lame, ugly Caucasian. No fastidious American woman would want me for a mate, but so long as I could chastely associate with talented men and women of goodwill, I could endure this lack of intimacy with a sympathetic female.
“Over the years, Daniel, I’ve endured, accommodating myself to a strenuous celibacy. It has proved less difficult than I feared. The years leach one-even a creature doomed, as I am, to a contingent immortality-of desire. A further mitigating factor is my sterility. I neither gainsay nor scorn the allure of erotic pleasure, but, for me, coitus sans any procreative potential loses some of its relevance, and so also its allure, and likewise its power to tempt. No longer do I blaze like a furnace. I don’t need women to fuel me. Thus, my capacities for a higher passion channel into three sustaining reservoirs: atonement, human companionship, and baseball.”
Baseball I got. Companionship I had a glimmering of. But atonement swept past like water in a spillway. Henry stood up. His sutured calves drew my gaze as surely as a starlet’s gams would’ve.
“I’ve revealed these signs of my self-mutilation, Daniel, to impress upon you the length to which loneliness and a need to belong once drove me. I do not regret having performed my surgery, but I do regret the evidence of it. The scars don’t pain me in a physical sense, but the mere sight of them lays a bruise on my heart. I entreat you then to look away.
“Look away.”
I looked away. Henry gathered up his overalls and scooped himself back into them. I didn’t see him do this-I heard the rustle of denim and the muffled clicks of brass snaps.
37
On Sunday morning, when the Brown Bomber pulled into the parking lot at McKissic Field, the stadium and its barbecue pits had the look of a birthday bash in a military zone. Lots of Highbridgers had paraded off to church, but many hadn’t. We Hellbenders, Mister JayMac’s public piety aside, fell into the second group. We’d substituted a talk by Colonel Elshtain and some prayers on our bus ride for attendance at an honest-to-God worship service. Anyway, at the field, we saw folks standing in queue for the barbecue (which wouldn’t be served until one), vendors peddling all kinds of gewgaws, and several soldiers in battle dress standing guard along a cordoned lane through the lot to the place where Darius always parked.
As soon as we’d stopped, Mister JayMac spoke to us from the front: “President Roosevelt has spent the last two days at the Little White House in Warm Springs. Given the demands of the war, this’s been a hard time for him to get out of Washington -except for shipboard conferences with the rulers of our allies or his battle commanders. For reasons I don’t think require an explanation”-Mister JayMac wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief-“the President only rarely visits Georgia at the height of summer. He came for one day in August five years ago; usually, however, he confines his expeditions down here to the spring or fall. His presence this Fourth of July weekend bespeaks his strength as a man and his integrity as a patriot. It honors every soul born or resident in the South.”
“Holy cow!” Trapdoor Evans blurted. “That goddamn polio’s not going to be at our games today, is he?”
Colonel Elshtain stood. “He’ll be here for at least one of your games and maybe both. I’d suggest a more respectful form of address than ‘that goddamn polio’-should you have occasion, gentlemen, to meet him.”
“How about ‘Your Highness’?” Buck Hoey said.
“Criminy,” Muscles said. “We have to win. If we lose, we’ll shame ourselves in front of the President of the United States.”
“Losing won’t shame you,” Colonel Elshtain said. “Cracks like ‘that goddamn polio’ and ‘How about “Your Highness”?’ will far more effectively do that. Whether you personally find the man now in office an ornament to or a blot upon that position, it nonetheless remains that…”
And blahblah, blahblahblah.
A couple of seats up from me, Turkey Sloan raised his hand.
“What is it, Mr Sloan?” Mister JayMac said.
Sloan stood up. “Not too long ago, sir, I wrote a tribute to the Leader of the Free World, his administration, and the first family. To settle Colonel Elshtain’s doubts about Hellbender loyalty, I’d like your permission for me, Mr Hoey, Mr Evans, and Mr Sosebee to recite it for him.”
“How long’s this gonna take?” Mister JayMac said.
“Not even a minute,” Sloan said. “Sir, you know I always write tight.”
“You do everything tight,” Hoey said.
“If you’re going to do this, Mr Sloan, proceed,” Mister JayMac said. “It’s too hot to dawdle till Halloween in this four-wheeled inferno.”
Sloan made a humming sound, like a music teacher blowing on a pitch pipe. His pals stood up, at smirky attention. “ ‘The Battle Hymn of the Repugnant’ by Nyland Sloan, as performed by the author and his Disgusting Associates.” In the farce that followed, Sloan recited the first two lines of each stanza of his “tribute,” while Hoey, Evans, and Sosebee joined on every third-line chorus:
“Tip your fez
To the Prez?
Shout, ‘Glory Hallelujah!’
“Whose New Deal’ll
Make you squeal?
Why, Frankie Rooz-ah-velt-ah’s!
“Cordell Hull
Is a cull
Who’ll downright coldly screw yah!