Mordecai Brown by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Mordecai Brown

Page 153

Brown woke with the familiar stiffness in his hand and ankle, the old injuries that had once made him great and now made him slow. He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, listening to the faint rattle of a streetcar outside. His wife had already left a pot of coffee on the stove. He poured a cup, wrapped his crooked fingers around it, and let the warmth seep in.

He wasn’t scheduled to pitch that day; nobody was scheduled for anything with certainty anymore, but he headed to the park anyway. Habit was a kind of ballast.

The clubhouse was nearly empty. Two players were reading the newspaper, scanning the casualty lists with the same dread they used to reserve for batting averages. Another man coughed into a handkerchief and insisted it was just the dust. Brown nodded to them, hung his coat on the same nail he’d used all season, and walked out to the field.

The groundskeeper was raking the infield, though no one had told him to. “Figure someone ought to keep her ready,” he said. Brown agreed. The diamond looked smaller than it used to, or maybe he’d simply grown older around it.

He played catch with a rookie who’d been too young for the draft and too stubborn to quit baseball. The kid kept glancing at Brown’s hand, trying to understand how those twisted fingers