Mordecai Brown by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Mordecai Brown

Page 156

They stood in the yard, tossing the ball back and forth as the sky darkened. The boy tried, failed, tried again. Brown corrected his grip, bending the knuckles of his second and third fingers, adjusted his wrist, encouraged him without fuss.

When the boy finally got the ball to dip; just a little, —he lit up. Brown felt something warm in his chest, something steadier than the world around him.

“Keep at it,” he said. “Game’ll need you when all this is over.”

The boy nodded solemnly, as if accepting a charge.

Brown watched him run home, then sat back down on the porch. The night was cool, the street quiet, the future uncertain. But for that moment, he felt anchored; by the game, by the kid, by the simple act of passing something on.

It wasn’t a triumphant day. It wasn’t even a memorable one by the standards of his old life.

But it was a day he could carry.

In 1919 Brown went back to Terre Haute, (high ground) Indiana, where his pro career had commenced in 1901, to manage and occasionally pitch for his former semi-pro team, now called the