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The argument had gone on long enough that even the ball seemed to have lost interest.
It sat in the grass between them, its once-white leather gone the color of dishwater, red stitches frayed and fuzzy in places where years of hands had worried at them. The mitt beside it was darker still, softened almost to cloth at the pocket, with one finger patched in a different shade of leather that hadn’t quite agreed to age with the rest. The bat had a strip of old tape wound near the handle where the wood had begun to split and then, by some family’s refusal to waste a thing that could still be used, had been made serviceable again.
The four children stood around these treasures as if they had been presented with the keys to some grand athletic kingdom and no map for entering it.
Dottie Haines had the ball in both hands and the sort of determined frown that suggested she intended to solve the matter by glaring at it until it confessed its purpose. Ruth Bell kept hold of the mitt under one arm, her shoulders drawn up with the practical irritation of a girl who wanted to be underway already. Little Billy Mercer, who was only a few months younger than Jennifer but had all the restless urgency of a much younger boy, kept picking up the bat, setting it down, then picking it up again as if the answer might arrive through touch. Jennifer stood with them, hands folded behind her back, listening.
That was what she usually did first. Listen.
The park in Geneva was green in the soft, slightly uneven way of places that had been used hard by many seasons and many shoes. The grass was cropped in some places and tufted in others. A path of dirt, stamped flat by prams and work boots and bicycles, cut across one end toward the benches. Beyond the trees the day had the bright, silvery cast of lake weather, though the sun was warm enough on their shoulders. Somewhere farther off, another child was calling for a dog. A buggy wheel crackled over gravel. A woman laughed. It was an ordinary afternoon, and because of that it felt precious.
The children’s coats, piled in a little mound nearby, were all of them slightly too old in one way or another. Billy’s had shiny elbows. Dottie’s had had its hem let down and the old fold still ghosted the wool. Jennifer’s cardigan, buttoned neatly despite the mildness of the day, had one button that didn’t quite match the others, though only Jennifer ever seemed to notice.
“We know you hit it,” Billy said at last, gesturing with the bat in a broad, dissatisfied sweep. “That part’s plain.”
“Well then who throws it?”
“Somebody.”
“That’s not a rule, Billy.”
“It ought to be.”
Ruth gave the mitt a little shake against her hip. “And why’s there only one of these if everybody’s supposed to catch?”
“Maybe not everybody catches.”
“That seems foolish.”
Billy bristled. “It’s not foolish.”
“It is if the ball comes at your face.”
Jennifer’s mouth twitched, but she still said nothing. She had been turning the problem over quietly in her mind for several minutes now, assembling it from scraps of things she had heard other children mention, fragments from newspaper comics, a sentence Brandon had once said in passing, half a memory of boys in a field beyond town. But that still did not amount to certainty, and Jennifer disliked saying things before they had properly formed.
Dottie looked from the mitt to the bat to the ball and then over Jennifer’s shoulder, past the patchy grass and the path and the little stand of trees near the rail, to the bench where Brandon Fischer sat in his coat and hat, one ankle resting on the opposite knee. He had brought Jennifer out that afternoon because the weather had held, and because he liked the park in spring, and because neither of them had needed to say aloud that these small outings mattered.
He was reading the paper, though not so completely that he was missing the children. Brandon never seemed to miss much. Now and then he lifted his head, not intrusively, only enough to keep the world in view over the top of the page. Jennifer had long since learned that his attention could rest lightly on a thing and still be absolute.
Dottie brightened at once. “Ask Mr. Fischer.”
Billy followed her line of sight. “He’d know.”
Ruth adjusted the mitt under her arm. “He’s old enough to know.”
Jennifer looked at Brandon too, then down, already feeling the little bubble of amusement before it had fully risen. She knew, with that private confidence children sometimes have about the grown people who belong to them, that Brandon might or might not know the rules of baseball, but either way he would answer as if he had been quietly waiting to be consulted all along.
The four of them crossed the grass. Billy hurried half a step ahead with the bat. Dottie had the ball. Ruth carried the mitt. Jennifer walked among them, small and composed, her braid lying cool against the back of her neck.
Brandon lowered the paper before they had quite reached him. The corners of his eyes folded with recognition, and then with deeper amusement as he took in the procession: one child with the ball, one with the bat, one with the mitt, and Jennifer in their midst like the solemn little secretary to a very serious delegation.
“Well now,” he said, drawing the paper into his lap. “You all look like management.”
Billy, impatient but trying his best to be respectful, held up the bat. “Mr. Fischer, how do you play baseball?”
Brandon looked at the equipment first. That was his way. He gave each object its due consideration, not only what it was but what it had been through. His fingers reached out for the mitt and pressed the pocket gently. He glanced at the taped handle of the bat, the worn ball in Dottie’s hands, then at the four upturned faces.
He leaned back a little and thought.
“The last time I was at a baseball game,” he said at length, dry as old paper, “was Roosevelt’s first term.”
The remark landed among the children like a ball thrown too high. Billy blinked. Dottie frowned in a way that meant she suspected she ought to understand but did not. Ruth only shifted the mitt from one arm to the other, plainly prepared to wait out whatever grown-up strangeness this was.
Jennifer let out a bright little giggle before she could help it.
Brandon’s eyes slid to her at once. Not enough to make a show of the shared understanding, only enough for her to catch the tiny spark there. Jennifer pressed her lips together, but the smile still pulled at them.
Billy looked from one to the other. “So do you know or don’t you?”
“I know enough to get you started,” Brandon said, folding the paper and setting it beside him on the bench. “That’ll do for a fine afternoon.”
He rose with the unhurried care of an older man who refused to be hurried merely because the young were bursting at the seams. The children stepped back to make room. Jennifer watched him with calm expectation. He took the bat from Billy, weighed it once in his hand, then used it to point out onto the grass.
“You don’t need a proper diamond if you haven’t got one. Not for a park game. Choose where home is. There.” He indicated a flattened patch near the edge of the path. “Then first base, second, third. Use stones if you can find ’em, or caps, or just agree where they are and don’t be cheats about it.”
At that he gave Billy a look that was mild but specific. Billy straightened instinctively.
Brandon handed the bat back and walked a few paces, indicating the bases with the toe of his shoe. Dottie and Ruth hurried to gather markers, Dottie finding a nice pale stone, Ruth a crooked twig and then a better one because the first would not do. Billy used the toe of his own shoe to scuff a rough home plate into the dirt. Jennifer, still quiet, bent and placed her cardigan carefully off to the side before returning, because if there were to be running she meant to do it properly.
Brandon explained pitcher and batter, fielders and turns. He showed Billy how to hold the bat without strangling it, and how not to stand so square unless he wanted the ball in his ribs. He had Dottie try an underhand toss first, then an overhand one, both of which veered wild in opposite directions and made all four children scatter laughing. He demonstrated how the mitt ought to face the ball, though the mitt was so soft and tired it seemed as likely to sigh as to catch. Ruth practiced with grave concentration, jaw set. Jennifer listened to every word as if she were storing them in labeled drawers.
“And if somebody hits,” Brandon said, dusting off his palms, “they run. If the ball gets to the base before they do, they’re out. If it doesn’t, they’re safe. If nobody can rightly tell because you’re all too busy yelling, then I suggest you use your consciences and not your imaginations.”
He stepped back and studied the arrangement they had made: four makeshift bases in a public park, a patched mitt, a taped bat, a ball whose best years were behind it and whose working years plainly were not.
“That’s baseball enough,” he said.
The children looked at one another with the shared electrified relief of a knot finally cut through. Dottie clutched the ball. Billy hugged the bat to his chest. Ruth settled the mitt more firmly on her hand. Jennifer stood very still for one small second, that particular stillness before motion, her eyes bright and intent.
Then they flew apart to their positions.
The first innings, if they could be called innings, were disorderly in the happiest possible way. Dottie pitched with ferocious sincerity and no consistency at all. Billy swung as if he meant to punish the air. Ruth guarded first base with the mitt held up before her like a sheriff’s badge. Jennifer, after taking her turn at bat and sending the ball skittering a triumphant few yards along the grass, ran with her braid loosening and her shoes kicking up little bursts of dust, her face transformed by the simple pleasure of purpose.
Brandon sat back down on the bench and watched.
He did not interfere after that. He let them overrun the bases and invent half a dozen tiny local amendments to the rules in the course of twenty minutes. He let Billy crow when he connected cleanly and let Dottie insist on another pitch when she knew perfectly well the last had gone astray. He let Ruth miss a catch, recover, and then behave as if the recovery had been the plan all along. He watched Jennifer most of all without seeming to, watched the quickness with which she understood the game once it had been placed in order for her, the way she threw herself into it then with the quiet thoroughness she brought to everything.
Soon the park was full of the music of them.
The crack of the bat on the old ball. The thud of shoes on uneven ground. The flap of someone’s coat left too close to a baseline. Jennifer’s clear laugh among the others. Dottie’s delighted shriek when a catch held. Billy’s exultant hollering as he tore for second base. Ruth’s triumphant yelp with the mitt raised overhead like a trophy wrestled from fate itself.
Brandon sat with the folded newspaper beside him and his hat brim casting a little shade over his eyes, smiling to himself as the children ran and shouted and chased the game into being, Jennifer among them now not listening, not waiting, but playing.