“I didn’t choose to say it that way,” Henry said. “Lay down a bunt. Everybody says that.”
“You’re always
choosing,
” Dr. Rachels answered, a hint of snap in her voice. “But who is Mike Schwartz? Why do you need to lay down your life for him?”
“I don’t.”
She clapped her hands together. “Pre
cisely!
So why did you? Are you some kind of pussy?”
Henry had spent a good deal of the summer pondering that question, until it came to seem more philosophically dense than
The Art of Fielding,
or Aurelius’s
Meditations,
or anything on Owen’s many shelves. He’d had plenty of time for pondering, first in the hospital in South Carolina, and then as he shoved snaking lines of silver carts across the Piggly Wiggly parking lot in Lankton, which he’d done just yesterday and was scheduled to do tomorrow.
Now he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a wad of paper, handed the wad to Schwartz. “I guess you’ve heard about this,” he said.
Schwartz unfolded the contract and flipped through the pages. There it was in black and white: $100,000.00. He handed it back. “You’d better get this in the mail,” he said. “August is almost over.”
“I don’t want to mail it,” Henry said. “I want to come back.”
“So come back. You’re a student here.”
“I want to play ball.”
Schwartz found something of interest under his left thumbnail, studied it intently.
“Starblind’s in the minors,” Henry said. “Owen’s headed to Japan. Rick’s the only senior, and Rick’s a goof. You need somebody to run the team. A captain.”
Schwartz kept fiddling with his thumbnail. He wasn’t going to make it easy.
“You’re a paid employee now,” Henry went on. “It’s against the rules for you to lead off-season workouts. Who’s going to be on the guys every day from now until practice starts? Who’s going to make them puke?”
Schwartz raised his gaze, fixed it on Henry. “So Coach Cox and I name you captain, and everything’s fine for a while, and then you start having problems. What then?”
Henry tried to answer, but Schwartz cut him off. “If you mail that contract, you can think about yourself, your game, twenty-four-seven. If you’re here, different story.”
“I know.”
“Whatever happens with your wing, whatever happens with your head, it doesn’t matter. Whatever’s best for the team is best for you.”
Schwartz looked Henry in the eye, cranked up The Stare.
“And there’s no guarantee you’ll get your job back. We won a national championship with Izzy at shortstop. It’s his spot as far as I’m concerned.”
Henry had been nodding along with everything Schwartz said. Now his eyes dropped to the asphalt. This was the ultimate sacrifice, or indignity, or something—to not think of himself as the shortstop.
“If we need you at second, you’ll play second. If we need you in right field, you’ll play right field. Agreed?”
To consent to this, to submit once again to Schwartz’s conditions and discipline, was maybe not what Dr. Rachels had in mind. But Henry knew that Schwartz was right.
Fog lazed at the water’s edge, waiting for the sun to burn it away. He nodded. “Agreed.”
Schwartz unlocked the VAC, slipped inside, and emerged moments later, carrying a bat, a five-gallon bucket, and his fielder’s glove. He tossed Henry the glove, and they crossed the khaki practice fields, Contango lumbering gamely alongside. On the Large Quad, small and busy in the distance, the juniors and seniors of the Welcoming Committee were setting up rows of folding chairs, in preparation for President Valerie Molina’s first convocation address.
Schwartz tied Contango’s leash to the fence. Henry yanked up first base, which was anchored to the ground by a metal post, and tossed it aside. He jammed the wooden handle of the square-headed spade into the posthole. It fit snugly, and the spade head sat at sternum height, just where Rick’s outstretched glove would be.
He walked out to shortstop, slid Schwartz’s glove onto his hand. Not since he was nine had he worn a glove other than Zero. It felt clumsy and huge, and Schwartz, who only ever used his catcher’s mitt, had never really broken it in. Henry mustered whatever saliva was left in his mouth after a night of whiskey and beer and no water, spat into the pocket, and rubbed in the spit with his fist.
It had been a summer of record heat, and last night’s rain had done little to soften the infield dirt. He pawed at it with the toe of a sneaker, bounced on the balls of his feet, jangled his achy limbs.
Schwartz held up a ball. “Ready?”
Henry nodded. A lone seagull coasted by overhead. Schwartz took a lazy cut, and the ball bounded toward Henry, a routine two-hopper. Part of him could tell how slow the ball was moving, and yet it reached him so quickly he could barely respond. He flung Schwartz’s glove in front of it, and the ball smacked the heel of the pocket with a painful thud. He grabbed the ball and spun it to find the seams, his fingers cramped and stiff from shoveling. He side-stepped toward the shovel head. His arm felt heavy and unfamiliar, like he’d borrowed it from a corpse.
Come on,
he thought.
One time.
The throw sailed well wide of the shovel head, bounced to rest in the longish grass at the base of the fence. Schwartz stooped to grab another ball.
Another slow grounder, two steps to his left. Henry’s legs felt heavy, he was wearing jeans, he’d been up all night. He stuck out Schwartz’s glove and snagged the ball awkwardly. His throw flew high and right.
The next ball caromed off a pebble and struck him in the meat of his shoulder, or where the meat of his shoulder used to be. He picked it up and whipped it sidearm, missing badly. The balls kept coming. The morning was already thick and stifling, and after a dozen grounders he was exhausted, pouring sweat, his head throbbing with scotch and sleeplessness, but his arm was getting looser, and the throws drew nearer to the shovel head.
Schwartz stooped and rose and swung, stooped and rose and swung. He didn’t have to count, because the bucket always had fifty balls in it, but he counted anyway. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. As rusty as the Skrimmer looked, his sneakers sliding on the dirt, Schwartz’s too-big glove slipping off his hand, his throws missing high and low and left and right, he still possessed a grace, a sureness of purpose, that was unlike anything Schwartz had ever seen, on a baseball field or anywhere.
Before long four dozen balls lay scattered at the base of the fence, a harvest of dirty white fruit. Schwartz paused between swings and held up the ball: Last one.
Henry nodded. Sweat dripped off the tip of his nose.
Come on,
he thought.
One time.
The ball screamed off the bat, a low shot toward the hole. He darted to his right, angling backward as fast as his shaky legs could go. At the edge of the outfield grass he dove. With Zero he would have missed it, but Schwartz’s glove had an extra inch of leather. He snow-coned the near half of the ball, somehow held on as his stomach smacked the ground. He skidded toward the foul line on grass still slick with dew. He scrambled to his feet, planted his back heel, felt a blister rip.
Come on.
Mist or sweat fogged his eyes so he couldn’t really see the shovel head, just a kind of looming not-large grayness there in the middle distance. His fingers found the seams. He spun his hips and whipped his arm, feeling nothing, less than nothing, no sense of foreboding or anticipation, no liveliness, no weight, no itch or sentience in his fingertips, no fear, no hope.
The ball bore through the morning mist on what seemed like a true path. The closer it got the more Henry expected it to veer off course, but halfway there it looked good, and three quarters of the way it looked better.
One time.
The shovel head rang like a struck bell, continued to quiver after the sound was gone. Contango howled as if trying to match the pitch. The ball dropped straight to the infield dust. The feeling that ripped through Henry was better than that magic IV he’d been served in the Comstock hospital, better than anything he’d felt on a baseball field before. A half second later the feeling was gone. He’d made one perfect throw. Now what?
Schwartz bent down gingerly, reached into the bucket. “Just kidding,” he said. “I’ve got one more.”
Henry nodded, dropped into his crouch. The ball came off the bat.
The story of Ralph Waldo and Ellen Emerson is adapted from the excellent
Emerson
:
The Mind on Fire,
by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
Thank you to Keith Gessen, Matthew Thomas, Rebecca Curtis, Allison Lorentzen, Chris Parris-Lamb, Michael Pietsch, Andrew Ellner, Stephen Boykewich, Brian Malone, Timothy “Viper” Lang, the Hucks, the Blausteins, Kevin Krim, Brad Andalman, Emily Morris, Jean McMahon, and everyone at
n+1
.
Contents
Chad Harbach grew up in Wisconsin and was educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He is a cofounder and coeditor of
n+1.
Copyright © 2011 by Chad Harbach
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.