The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [208]
She wrapped Owen in a long hug, they whispered to each other, and she padded off toward the dining hall, flip-flops slapping the packed sand.
The clouds were dispersing, and the sun had poked above the lake. Owen was leaving for San Jose, en route to Tokyo, in a matter of moments. Henry desperately wanted to say something fitting, to thank Owen for being such a good friend and roommate, to tell him how much he was going to miss him, but now his own eyes were full and he couldn’t even squeeze out a Take care or a See ya around. Owen gripped his shoulder consolingly. “Henry,” he said. “You are skilled. I exhort you.”
And then it was just Henry and Schwartz, standing there in their gritty T-shirts. The dirt on Schwartz’s face, and the mean-looking five a.m. shadow beneath it, reminded Henry of their first meeting back in Peoria. Schwartz’s widow’s peak had deepened since, and his shoulders and chest had thickened and settled into a kind of premature middle age. But his eyes still held that pure maple-syrup color, that light that drew people to him like moths.
“What time’s practice?” Henry asked.
“Not till seven.” Schwartz checked his watch. “If we hurry we can fill in that hole.”
They made their way to the cemetery and shoveled the dirt back into what had been Affenlight’s grave. Once the sod had been relaid, the surface looked a little uneven, as if a mild earthquake had struck, but it seemed unlikely anyone would notice or care. They shouldered their shovels and headed back to campus.
“Where’s your new place?” Henry asked.
“Grant Street. Block and a half from the old one.”
They walked in silence for a while. Though it was still quite early, Henry saw one and then another Ryder truck pass by in the distance. It was freshperson moving-in day.
“The new football players aren’t bad,” Schwartz said as they stopped in the VAC parking lot. “I might make a few of them puke today.”
During Henry’s time in the hospital in South Carolina, he’d met every day with his psychiatrist, Dr. Rachels. She’d taken a liking to him, or at least an interest in him, and had come in on the weekends to continue their sessions. Sometimes they talked for two hours or more. To Dr. Rachels, the ethically dubious things Henry had done—sleeping with Pella, quitting the team—were justifiable and even borderline heroic, because they asserted his independence from Schwartz, whom Dr. Rachels considered an oppressive, tyrannical, oedipal figure in Henry’s life, an assessment confirmed for her once and for all when Henry told the story of his and Schwartz’s first meeting in Peoria, and the name that Schwartz had called him.
“Pussy,” Dr. Rachels said, tapping her pencil against the arm of her chair with barely restrained glee. “Before you’d even met.”
Whereas the thing he’d done that might sound pretty brave—putting his head in the path of a whistling fastball, for the sake of the team—could even be considered cowardly.
“What comes to mind when I say the word sacrifice?” Dr. Rachels asked.
“Bunting.”
“Decorative bunting? Easter bunting?”
“Bunting,” Henry said, holding an imaginary bat horizontally across his chest. Dr. Rachels didn’t have a couch, as he might have imagined; he sat in a stiff wooden chair. “Laying down a bunt.”
“This is a baseball term? Use it in a sentence.”
“Instead of bunting, I swung away.”
“I found it interesting,” said Dr. Rachels, “that you chose to say Laying down a bunt the way a person might say Laying down my life. You’re familiar with this passage from the Gospel of John? Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
“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. “Precisely! 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