The baseball diamond was at the far end of the elementary school grounds, with a wide expanse of what was intended to be a grass field between it and the school, but the field had been bulldozed level and seeded only recently so the grass was sparse and the field was at least as brown as it was green. The turf around the baseball diamond was thicker and better cared for. Behind the home plate there was a chain link fence with a tall backstop. On the other side of the fence, a little to right of the home plate just on the edge of the surrounding woods was a tall pole supporting the school’s civil defense siren. It was early in the afternoon and the warm sun on the pole cast a narrow shadow through the chain link fence across home plate.
It was near the beginning of the school year and the kids from sixth and seventh grade were let out of their classroom for the afternoon. I no longer remember what occasioned that temporary liberation, but once outdoors the boys quickly took off for the baseball diamond. The girls along with all the teachers stayed behind on the blacktop near the school where they played jump rope and other games.
The seventh grade boys had been arguing about the World Series at lunch. Bobby and Tom were particularly vocal. They were the school’s self-appointed baseball captains and were presumably knowledgeable about the sport. Anyway they were sure of themselves and most of the kids deferred to them without question.
Walking out to the field my friend Creed and I ended up well behind the others. Creed was feeling hard done by and his moping slowed us down. Creed often complained about his mother. He was aggrieved because she had made him come out shopping with her the afternoon before forcing him to miss “Spin and Marty” He must have mentioned “Spin and Marty” four or five times that day, starting at morning recess. I had met both of Creed’s parents and I thought his mother was alright but I’d be pretty nervous if I’d been left alone with his father. He was scary. I didn’t tell Creed that but I did tell him what happened on the “Spin and Marty” episode he missed. It didn’t seem to make him feel any better. By the time we got to the baseball diamond the obligatory choosing up sides ceremony was about half over.
The ceremony consisted of Bobby and Tom facing each other with the bat straight up and down between them, knob on top. They took turns grasping the bat, alternately placing one hand above the other, starting about half way down the bat and working up. The team whose captain grasped the bat at the knob leaving no space for the other’s fist, got to bat first. The ceremony seemed complicated and arbitrary to me. I didn’t understand why they didn’t just flip a coin and be done with it. I guess people had been choosing sides that way for a long, long time, perhaps before there were coins to flip.
Once the ritual was over, the captains, who were self-equipped as well as self-appointed, lined up the boys and took turns choosing team mates and distributing the baseball gloves they brought from home to those whom they thought could use them best (there were never enough for everyone).
Creed, who was better at baseball than me, got pulled onto Tom’s team early. His team would bat first. I ended up on the other team with Bobby. Because it was early in the year there were a number of sixth graders who were unknown quantities as far as baseball was concerned. Consequently team selection took a long time and I lost interest before it was over. I was distractedly staring up at the civil defense siren when Bobby tapped me on the shoulder, looked me over and sent me to right field, without a glove. The game commenced.
Right field was an expanse of grassy emptiness. I took my position and stood attentively facing the diamond. I was alert at first but it didn’t last; things moved slowly and I got lethargic. Every time a batter would connect there was a sharp report and I would glance up to see what was coming my way, but nothing ever was. Right field was notorious for its sleepy uneventfulness. After every false alarm my attention wandered. Like the other outfield guys I got tired of being on my feet and sat on my knees. Once there was pop fly that seemed like it would end up near me but instead came down where it was an easy catch for Toby the first baseman. It made me worry that I wasn’t paying enough attention. I resolved to be more alert, but my resolve didn’t last long. I was soon back on my knees and whatever might be happening in the infield may as well have been happening some place far away.
After a while Tom’s team got called out for the third time and we took their place at bat. It was nice to get out of right field, but the respite was short. Bobby wasn’t having a lucky day; the team he had selected struck out fast, much faster than Tom’s. I never got anywhere near the front of the lineup. I went back to right field, bored, but resigned.
The heat from the sun and inaction made me drowsy. I surveyed the field and noticed the grass in front of me was dry and crinkly, drier than I had thought it would be. It was also more ragged than it had seemed. Looking closely I saw distinct tufts of grass separated by meandering channels of brownish black soil. There were smallish clods of dirt, pebbles and rocks scattered about, often buried or half buried in the soil. I could see places where random weeds, some with sharp thorns, pushed up in and around the grass. Off to my right I saw a tiny volcano-like hill of what looked like sand. There was a constant traffic of black ants moving over the little hill and beyond. The ants were considerably more active and purposeful than I was and as I looked them over I began to notice a low hum of sound that seemed to emanate from the entire field. It was hard to tell where it was coming from, but then I caught sight of a grasshopper that ended its last jump directly in front of me. The grasshopper clung to a tall blade of grass and stayed there in plain view for some time. I could see its legs moving and discovered that the low hum I had been hearing was in fact the grasshopper, stridulating. More accurately I was hearing all the grasshoppers in the field stridulating together. The sound was easy to miss until one noticed it but once one did it was pervasive and seemed louder than it really was.
Time passed wearily as I listened to the grasshoppers and examined the surrounding plant and insect life while the ball game went on in the distance. I pulled my left leg up and began to fiddle with my sneakers. The sneakers had a round label glued to the canvas. I gradually worked the label loose, pulling at it little by little, till it peeled off entirely, leaving a raw canvas circle on the side of the shoe. I jammed the label into my jeans pocket and rubbed some dirt on the circle to make it less obvious. I shifted from knee to knee. I was uncomfortable so I sat down with my legs stretched out in front of me.
I shook my head. There was nothing to do but return to the kingdom of grass and insects. I closed by eyes, nodded out, then jerked myself back awake. I looked around the field but saw nothing I wasn’t already tired of looking at. The shadow of the civil defense siren pole had moved with the sun and now it fell across first base. Toby danced in and out of the shadow as he moved to field grounders and intimidate uncertain runners. While I was watching he caught a line drive that was about to go out of bounds. That gave our team the first out of the inning. The next batter walked. I lost interest.
I kicked the heels of my sneakers into the ground and dislodged a slew of small stones. Looking at the debris I saw a stone that had been broken in half. It was greyish and smooth except where it had been cut. The rough edge revealed a milky quartz crystal. I polished the stone against my jeans. Now I could see the crystal clearly. I turned it over in my hands. As I was peering at it a deer fly buzzed into my face and I clumsily lost hold of the stone. It flew out of my fingers, tumbling end over end, and disappeared behind a clump of grass about three feet away.
I got up and tried to see where the stone had gone. I leaned down and ran my palms over the grass trying to find it. Finally I noticed something gray and round near the edge of the grass. I got closer and found the stone. Next to the stone I’d picked up and polished was another that looked identical. The two stones were both broken down the middle and the milky quartz was easy to make out on both.
I picked up the stones. They were warm from the sun. I tried to fit them together and found that they matched perfectly. I put them in my left palm and pressed the two stones together with my fingers. Now I could see what the stone had looked like before it had been broken. As I weighed the stone in my palm it seemed to grow hotter. At the same time I heard a new hum. It was pitched lower than the grasshoppers’ hum and was much fainter and easy to miss, but insistent. There was a faint odor of ammonia in the air.
I began to feel uncomfortable in an unfamiliar way. It was as if my whole body had turned to paper. I felt as if I was about to burst into flame and blow away on the next little breeze that crossed the outfield. I sat down quickly. I started to sweat. I closed my eyes and my fists clenched together involuntarily. The sweat made my face and head feel like soggy newspaper. I dropped my head between my knees and smelled the earth. I pressed my forehead against the grass which parted and spread like the glass falling out of a broken mirror. I crouched there for some time. It was hard to breathe. I opened my fists and let the stones tumble off into the grass somewhere. I was panting, but gradually my body cooled and the insistent hum faded. I tilted my head to the side and breathed deeply. I got back up on my knees.
I was back to listlessly surveying the grass when I heard the sharp crack of the bat. I looked up in time to see Dick, a sixth grader who lived near me and whose sister was in my class, running toward first base. The ball seemed to be going very high and far over left field. I was surprised because Dick wasn’t a guy who would often hit the ball at all, much less hit a home run.
Then I heard shouting from around home plate. Something was definitely wrong. The tone of the shouting wasn’t like an ordinary baseball game. Most of the infield players and runners drifted toward home to see what was going on. Bobby was pitching and he started yelling at them to go back. He looked annoyed. But the boys didn’t listen and kept moving toward home plate. Then I heard a kid crying.
By the time I was close enough to see what was what, Dick was over near the backstop with Tom and some of the other kids. I saw a kid I didn’t recognize lying with his legs and arms sprawled and someone’s shirt covering his head. There was blood on the shirt. The bat was four or five feet away from the body and there were specks of blood on it.
Someone ran to tell the teachers what had happened. I expect they were already alarmed by the sounds coming from the baseball diamond. While waiting for the adults the kids lost whatever sense of safety they had. Some were crying. Some wandered about looking dazed. Most stood close together repeatedly telling each other their versions of the accident with a kind of desperate vehemence. A couple of kids just got up and walked home without telling anyone where they were going. I found Creed not too far from the body. He was staring at it with a bitter expression and it was hard for me to get his attention at first. Finally Creed and I set off toward the school. We waited in the cafeteria with others while the authorities arranged to get us home.
The story turned out to be pretty simple. My neighbor Dick was at bat and missed the first pitch. With the second pitch he was luckier. He connected and the ball took off at a beautiful high angle. Dick immediately registered the direction of the ball and took off running as fast as he could toward first base, tossing the bat behind him as he took off. The kid I didn’t know was a sixth grader named Philip. No one else knew him either; he was new student. He had been sitting to the left of the catcher, near the backstop, but just before the second pitch he got up and started walking behind home plate toward the first base side of the diamond. The bat hit him as he passed, catching him across the side of his skull, killing him.
Dick didn’t come back to school. The adults told us he transferred to another school. I didn’t see him around his family’s house either. They still lived in the same place, but he wasn’t there any more. His sister continued to come to school, but I never heard her say anything about Dick or the accident. She wasn’t the kind of person one could prod for information. There must have been a service for Philip but no one I knew took part. He really was a stranger to us.
Kids talked about the accident but it quickly became an unpopular topic and before long no one mentioned it anymore, at least at school. I discovered that Creed blamed Philip for costing him his time at bat (Creed was up to bat next after Dick). The kids laughed at that which made Creed mad. One of the other kids thought Dick must have hit Philip intentionally. But most of the kids just wanted to forget the whole thing, as did the school. Our teacher, Miss Downs, never said a word about the accident; neither did Mr. Day, the principal.
Baseball was quietly dropped in favor of what the kids and adults called soccer. It was actually more like a loosely dumbed down version of rugby than soccer, with the kids more interested in violent collisions and muddied clothes than skill with one’s feet or teamwork. It seemed natural to twelve-year olds and it saved the school from uncomfortable reminders. So the school pretended there had been no accident. But the pretending didn’t make the kids feel safe or trusting. In fact for the seventh graders school became more stressful and confusing by the day.
A month or so after the accident, on a Saturday late in October, I did one of my habitual day-long walks. Creed would often join me on these walks, but not this time. I wasn’t very disappointed because lately Creed wasn’t fun be around. He was touchy and quick to stomp off in the middle of things. I started after breakfast near the power line right-of-way between my house and the newest housing development and worked my way south across Telegraph Road and Pike Branch through a disused corner of Ft. Belvoir. The Army had allowed the area to grow up into a dense jungle of second growth, very low and muddy, with lots of wildlife and little ponds and streams to explore and virtually no adults or kids to run into. I wandered around there for hours and finally started home, following a path that brought me out behind the school.
It was mid-afternoon when I emerged from the woods near the baseball diamond. I was surprised to see Bobby, Tom, Toby and others from my class playing baseball there. They were playing seriously and it was easy to see that they were engrossed in the game. They didn’t notice my approach so I leaned against the siren pole and watched them. I was well aware that on TV kids were often depicted as playing baseball for fun but I had always assumed that was like lots of things one saw on TV but never in real life.
Of course kids I knew always played with bat and balls and called it baseball, but that was play, spontaneous and improvisational, not organized sport, like at school. I had assumed that only grown ups actually played baseball like that by choice. But Bobby and the others were playing happily and certainly voluntarily. I had never imagined such a thing. I was impressed. While the school was pretending that baseball didn’t exist, the kids had stolen the game and now they were enjoying it for themselves. It made me somehow hopeful.
That Winter there weren’t a lot of reasons to be hopeful. My class got accustomed to feeling edgy and unhappy. School wasn’t going well; Miss Downs, our panicky teacher, was behaving erratically and the kids didn’t understand what was wrong. Kids who used to be docile became argumentative. Kids who were quiet became sullen. Creed turned mean. I could never work out why but he was always angry. No matter what was going on it always ended with Creed making threats. One day in January he got into a fist fight with a kid from another class and was sent home.
The rest of us got by the best we could. The school quietly reintroduced baseball that Spring. It was done without public comment. By then the accident was officially forgotten. If someone did remember, they knew to keep their memories to themselves .
"Nation's Pastime" is an excerpt from a larger work titled "Telegraph Road." It is set in Northern Virginia in the late 1950s. "Nation's Pastime" is a little longer than 2500 words. I hope that won't be a problem.