The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [210]
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.
Acknowledgments
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,