COMING HOME
by Anthony J Fuchs
SmashWords
Edition
Copyright
2011 Anthony J Fuchs
Cover photo by Anthony J Fuchs
All rights reserved
The game doesn't even matter anymore on this muggy Sunday in August.
I stand beside the chainlink fence along the first-base line of Field 4 at the Camlann Fields Baseball Park. Dusk has turned to night over the line of trees beyond the outfield fence, but the floodlights shine over our little pick-up match. Eighteen of us started playing at ten o'clock this morning, expecting little more than a spirited bit of sportsmanship. Bud Selig announced the cancellation of the remainder of the Major League Baseball season nine days ago. That meant no postseason. No World Series. And that was unacceptable. We needed our baseball fix.
So we took matters into our own hands. I recruited friends and family, and the lot of us settled on the third Sunday of the month for a one-game playoff that we called the first annual Prophecy Creek World Series. We came together at Camlann Fields, and split ourselves into the Natural League and the Amateur League. My grandfather threw out the first pitch at 10:19. But instead of an afternoon of friendly competition, we got an eleven-hour grudge-match, and no one wants to quit at this late hour. Tonight isn't about fun or even pride anymore. If it ever was.
As the last heat of the day fades to a memory, I'm running on high-octane spite.
Because my team gave up an unearned run in the top of the 42nd inning to hand over a 26-25 lead. Jared Baranski grounds weakly to second, where my stepbrother fields the slow-roller and flips it easily to first. I spit into the grass. Jared is barely out of the batter's box by the time the play is complete. He strays out of the basepath at a weary trot to head back into the dugout.
I wear a worn-out maroon ballcap with a white Phillies emblem on the front and a Dave Hollins autograph under the bill. A pair of heavy baseball pants. A white t-shirt with my last name and the digits 19 scrawled across the back in marker. A pair of cleats my grandfather bought me two summers ago so I could try out for the Keller Vale Middle School team.
I am fourteen and immortal as I hoist a 39-inch length of wood. I am the only batter to use lumber. Everyone else has wielded aluminum, a sacrilegious offense in my teenage mind. The word Andarta is burned into the grain of the handle, and I feel the letters beneath my palms. It was a name I chose on Halloween morning almost three years ago. Not because I knew what the name meant, but because that was what the woman in my dream had told me to name it.
Three days after my eleventh birthday, three years ago, my grandfather took me to the park at the center of Prophecy Creek. At the center of that park, an ash tree stands 3,514 inches tall. It has many names, but on that day, my grandfather calls it the Speaker Tree.
He led me through the gate in the wrought-iron fence that borders the Tree. We walked into the shade beneath its outermost branches almost a hundred feet from the where the trunk breaks through the ground. When we reached the base of the Speaker Tree, I craned my neck all the way back, looking straight up into the tangled warren of branches that blotted out the sky.
My grandfather had taken me there, as his grandfather had taken him there on his eleventh birthday almost half-a-century before. This was my real birthday present, he told me: to pick out a branch from the Speaker Tree. To give that branch to Algernon Sloan, a childhood friend of my grandfather's, who worked at the Prophecy Creek Union Library. To let Mr. Sloan carve that branch into a baseball bat. Because in a workshop in the basement of the Library stands an ancient lathe that had come to this continent aboard the transatlantic ship Serenity in 1719.