Read Online This Magnificent Desolation by Cara Shores, Thomas O'Malley - Free Book Online Page B

for it. He turns to his left and is waiting with the ball in his glove when Billy comes, tottering and wheezing, to a stop before him.
    Goddamn shit! Billy says, and Father Toibin hollers for him to watch his mouth. The children look toward the outfield, where Julie is standing with her oversize leather glove on her hip.
    This is the stupidest game I’ve ever played! she hollers. Is it over yet?
    They change sides and Duncan steps up to the plate, scrapes thedirt with his bat, and stares out at Billy. Billy is wild with his pitches and most of the kids are afraid of getting hit by him, even though Father Toibin has warned him to slow it down and take it easy, and they stand way outside the box when they come to bat; Duncan has already struck out twice against him, chasing balls spinning crazily downward into the dirt. This time, though, he wills himself to get as close as he can to the plate and to have patience. He whispers to himself: If it’s low, let it go.
    Billy throws the baseball from an exaggerated windup and Duncan watches its dirt-sullied cover and its red stitches as it revolves slowly through the air, growing larger and larger like something the astronauts might see from their windows as they hurtled through space in their orbit about the moon. Duncan brings his arms forward, uncorks his weight from his back leg and through his twisting hips like Ted Williams. He sees the ball strike the bat, feels the pleasing tremor in his hands, and then it is gone, past the infield and rising high, high above Julie’s head. Julie throws her glove up into the air as it passes but the baseball is still climbing into the sky and she turns to follow the other children’s gaze, watching as the baseball rises higher and higher until it is merely a white pinprick in the sky, visible only because of the gray cloud beyond it. At the point at which the height of its arc seems imminent and its trajectory will curve and the baseball will fall back to earth, it continues, shooting upward into those low churning clouds and then rising beyond their ability to see, and is gone.
    The children stand, mouths agape, looking up at the sky. A breeze pushes at their shirts and jeans. A spattering of warm raindrops spatter their upturned faces and then there is heat as sunlight flickers in bright splinters from the clouds churning toward the east. The wind sounds in Duncan’s ears like waves upon a beach. When he moves his neck, the muscles and tendons creak and crack. Within the clouds strange trembling, violent thrustings, seem to occur—gray shapes flitting back and forth, the vague suggestion of limbs, armsand legs and wings, hands, and of faces pressing and pushing and contorting against the body of the clouds themselves, as if they were merely diaphanous thin-skinned bellies.
    As the clouds move, they pass between shadow and light. Disgusted, Billy spits into the dirt and steps off the mound. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his Russian wool cap, tugs it roughly down over his wrinkled head. Julie’s black hair flows back from her neck and whips about her thin neck. When she looks at Duncan, questioningly, hair finds its way across her eyes and into her open mouth. Duncan shrugs and turns, grinning, as the children from his team clap and pat him on the back.
    Together the children pick up baseball mitts and bats, pull sweatshirts over sweat-dampened T-shirts, and, talking among themselves, allow Father Toibin to march them in staggered columns back to the Home. A young novitiate with olive skin and the dark shadow of stubble on his cheeks and jaw accompanies Duncan, Billy, and Julie down the hill. We must have lost the ball in the sun, he says. Hell of a hit, Duncan.
    Duncan knows that they didn’t lose the ball in the sun, but he smiles anyway and says thank you. From their height on the hill he looks at the fields falling away so steeply below them to the Home that they—all of them—might