Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [76]
Two hours into our walk, we stopped at the side of the road where we found a sack of discarded tobacco. I taught Jake how to clip it and separate the seeds. An old, heavyset woman came running from her home, little more than a shack with a tin roof. She looked any age with her brush of coarse iron gray hair pulled into a bun, her snaggletoothed smile, battered muslin shift smudged with grease, and a face so seamed she could have hidden rainwater in its folds.
We understood enough of each other’s language to communicate. Her four-year-old grandson had seen us walking up the road from the living room window and wanted to meet the tall gringo. But when we entered her home, we did not see him anywhere. I thought the boy had left until Jake noticed a frightened pair of large, brown eyes peering out from behind a chair.
After much coaxing he emerged from his hiding place and stood next to his grandmother without saying a word. A shy, fragile little boy, all boney angles and naked except for a pair of ratty briefs that looked a size too large. We sat in a sparsely furnished room without carpeting of any kind, just the dirt floor that was such a common sight in rural Cuba. That floor fascinated me. I expected it to be dusty, but the constant humidity caked down the soil and just walking over it kept the floor packed tight. Our hostess could not afford indoor plumbing.
The woman brought us out back to see her garbage disposal: a pen of pigs feasting on that evening’s leftovers. She apologized for having nothing left to offer us. Then something caught her eye. Midway up a wizened tree in the rear of her yard hung a ripe guava, the last piece of fruit on these branches. She grabbed a broomstick and brought it down with a few strong pokes. Then she folded the guava into my hand to thank us for our visit.
When you play major league baseball, people frequently give you things, sometimes of substantial material value. But no gift I have ever received could be more precious than this piece of fruit passed to me with love by a stranger who owned so very little.
We hugged each other goodbye long and hard. Before Jake and I got much further down the road, our team bus pulled over to pick us up. I sat huddled in the back, too moved to speak to anyone. No one could guarantee we would ever play baseball in Cuba again once this tour ended. But as I bit into the pink, sugar-laden flesh of that guava and its syrupy juice ran into the salty tears trickling down my chin, my heart told me I would return to Vinales.
16
THE PREACHER BLOWS A SAVE IN LANDISBURG
August 2001. Rural Pennsyl-vania is a place that invites you to get lost. Local maps offer no warning of this. They fail to indicate how the landscape is composed of a series of valleys, each one an exact replica of the other. As soon as you cross over the first ridge after Harrisburg, you are traveling through the Appalachians. Here, the old trails tend to run northeast to southwest, so you had better be headed that way as well.
You can drive for some distance without seeing a single house or person. Stop near the edge of a forest and you might hear the rustle of creatures foraging in the distance. Actual sightings, though, are rare. The deer and other woodland animals in this region prefer staying hidden. Nothing moves. Even the tree leaves and branches refuse to let the wind sway them. You are driving through a still life.
Suddenly, you pull up to a large, bustling farm at the center of a junction. Men bellow against the roar of tractors and the diesel fuel fouls the air. Don’t let this glimpse of civilization and commerce mislead you. You won’t find a single landmark to pinpoint your location.
What will you find instead? More roads. Roads without