Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [84]
My vehemence on the subject backed off Jeremiah a half step but no more. He decided on another tack. “All right, Bill,” he said, “perhaps a lesson in humility isn’t what you need. But I know you feel sorry for yourself. Do you understand how we are all responsible for what happens to us, the good as well as the bad? We reap what we sow. Do you remember reading about the twelve plagues that God visited on Israel after the people turned their backs on him?”
Uh-oh. He had just allowed me my opening. I said, “Look, God didn’t visit anything on anybody. All that happened was that the Nile simply overflowed, just like it usually did that time of year.”
“But,” Jeremiah countered, “the waters turned to blood and a great pestilence descended on the land.” His voice was shaking now. “Thousands died in excruciating pain.”
“No,” I calmly replied, “the rising Nile merely colored crimson after the swirling currents mixed together the red sand, silt, and dead fish. And that pestilence? After the floodwaters washed through the town, they left piles of dead frogs, which attracted armies of flies and mosquitoes. That illness they spread wasn’t any plague; it was just an early form of West Nile disease. Nothing divine to it, just the natural order of existence at work.”
Jeremiah remained undeterred. Back and forth we debated, bashing each other toe-to-toe, substituting rhetoric for right crosses. He jabbed me with every spiritual point he could muster, quoting chapter and verse from both testaments, and I counterpunched with biological and metaphysical data. Jeremiah talked about the seven-day creation; I lectured him on the evidence paleontologists had unearthed to prove that life had evolved in a quagmire over 4.5 billion years.
To his credit, Jeremiah hung in much longer than anyone else who had ever tried to save me. But after two hours of head-butting discourse, he conceded, at least for this afternoon. Jeremiah mournfully shook his head, placed his hands on my shoulders, and whispered, “You are going to have to go through an awful reckoning before you find yourself back in the arms of God. Can’t you believe that Jesus Christ is the only answer?”
“Only if you are responding to someone who just reminded you that George Bush is actually our president, and even then it must be followed by an exclamation point.”
That did it. Jeremiah packed his gear, threw it in his car, and drove off. We waited awhile, but he never did come back. I do have that effect on people. My stubborn irreverence had so ruffled Jeremiah, he had forgotten we were fishing on his own property.
17
VERMONT TALES
My girlfriend, Diana, and I live in a half-way house in Craftsbury, Vermont. It sits halfway between the bars in Montreal and the bars in Boston. Constructed the place myself—well, myself and about twenty close friends under the guidance of master builder Lyle Raymond, but it feels all mine. Like a child I helped create. I even relate to my home as if it were human. When the plumbing breaks down or the heat fails to come on, I talk to it, and what I whisper in its eaves is, “I’m going to sell you, you son of a bitch.”
The house does not mind. It knows I never mean it.
I worked on nearly every inch of this building. A contractor named Billy Bolton took me on as an apprentice and taught me everything I needed to know, from working with Sheetrock to cutting wooden frames. Only the foundation escaped my touch. It takes experts to pour concrete. I hired the Bradleys, a father-son team—two tobacco-chewing, cigarette-smoking deer hunters who worked the job with the carriage of Marine grunts. Toughest people I’ve ever known. These men could stalk out of slippery mud holes carrying ninety pounds of plywood on each shoulder and never come