Read Online Elegy on Kinderklavier by Arna Bontemps Hemenway - Free Book Online

explosive, and we took the tail end of a doubleheader against the Good Harvest Baptists for our very first win of the season.
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    Hilton’s tape is particularly hard to watch, because he keeps looking up at the boys after each punch like he’s sorry, like he doesn’t understand, and he cries and cries.
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    At some point I sat with Samuel in the airless little town library on a Saturday afternoon so he could use the free Internet. He was showing me videos of IEDs going off in Baghdad, pictures of Kalashnikovs. He pulled up a long list of names, and pointed to one.
    â€œThis is the one they’re fighting in Fallujah,” he said, pointing to a line that read: The Badr Brigade.
    â€œWhat does that mean?” I said. “The badr brigade? What’s a badr?”
    Samuel leaned back.
    â€œIn Arabic it means ‘full moon,’ apparently,” Samuel said. He laughed. “We’re like knockoffs,” he said. “We’re like the half-moon brigade. We’re the half-moon martyrs’ brigade,” he said again, distantly.
    Later that day, or maybe the next Saturday, Marly put down her fork at dinner and leaned forward, steepling her hands, her elbows on the table.
    â€œWhere have you ever even been?” she said to me. “Have you ever thought about that?”
    At some point, by some miracle, we won enough games to get the last spot in the regional playoffs.
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    The game was on a Sunday, and church that morning was packed with double the usual crowd; the families and fans of the Athens’ First Baptist Blasters looking slightly uncomfortable in our Church of the Holy Sepulcher (of the One True Congregation of the Saviorand Nazarene). Brother Reeter was supposed to give the special blessing at the end of services that day, in honor of the game, but he was missing the whole morning. Instead, Elder Peters had to get up and extemporize with some well-meaning verses. He seemed cheered by it, his voice rising as he went on about being the “shepherds of all that flies in the field” and avoiding “the errors that let our objects pass by our hands in distraction.”
    Brother Reeter didn’t show at warm-ups either, though we didn’t talk about it. None of us were talking much by then.
    There are times in Kansas at the end of the summer when the land offers itself like an upturned palm, when the green and the air seem somehow elevated, overwhelming, and the late afternoon of that playoff game was like that. Both makeshift stands were full, and people had brought out lots of lawn chairs and large glass jugs of lemonade that they shared as they fanned themselves. They must have cheered at times during those first four innings, but mostly I just remember the quiet, heavy and flat, that seemed to have come over everything.
    Samuel was pitching solidly, the ball cracking into Hilton’s glove, sometimes the Athens’ Bible batters visibly flinching at the sound. Seven innings in and he was throwing a perfect game: no hits, no walks, almost all strikes too.
    Samuel didn’t want to drift into the place he was used to going. He tried to focus on the particular details of each batter before he threw, tried to keep his mind there—he was tired of the desert, of ghosting behind the insurgents as they moved according, even in his head, to some mysterious design.
    By the bottom of the seventh inning it was still tied, and all the uninitiated in the stands had by this time had it explained to them what a no-hitter was, what a perfect game meant in its spectacular rarity.
    There were two outs and Samuel had run up a full count on the batter he was facing when he saw him. He threw a fastball and thekid in the batter’s box meekly presented his bat and by sheer luck the ball nicked the barrel and glanced off high, popping up straight down the third-base line.
    I don’t know why Samuel didn’t look. He just stayed facing forward, while