Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

I don’t know why Samuel didn’t look. He just stayed facing forward, while everyone in the crowd rose to their feet as one, craning to see if the ball would stay fair and ruin his perfect performance or drop safely into foul territory. Once he realized what was going on Reeter must’ve waited, hanging back, not wanting to show himself, not wanting to ruin at least this small thing for Samuel. But Reeter couldn’t help it when that ball went up and the game was in the balance, and he took a small step to lean out around the corner of the stands he’d been standing behind and the dark green of his Casualty Affairs uniform gave him away.

His hands were clasped in an official-looking manner in front of him. The black of his military beret and his carefully polished shoes seemed very dark against the trees and the grass. As the ball fell safely foul and everyone relaxed, regaining their seats, most of the crowd looked at Samuel to see his reaction, his perfect game saved. Brother Reeter did too, by reflex, his body already moving back to where he’d been hidden. But he saw that Samuel was looking at him, saw that Samuel had seen him, and I watched a small cloud of frustration pass over Reeter’s face before it went blank and he looked down and away and I knew that he had the manila envelope, and that he was waiting there for Samuel, for Samuel’s mother, to be done.

Samuel Lincoln only paused a moment. Then he threw a blistering fastball that the batter fanned at hopelessly and the inning was over. While we were at bat in the eighth, the people in the stands must’ve realized that Brother Reeter was there and seen his uniform, because a kind of quiet swept over them. We kept on playing but nobody cheered. Around me in the stands, nobody said anything.

Samuel threw and threw, his breath hard and flat. He didn’t wait for Hilton’s signals: it was all straight fastballs anyway. Around him the sky drew itself up for dusk, the air going watery and bluish, shadows gathering themselves in the corn and under the trees. Tiny birds played in the grass of the outfield, occasionally rising in a shifting, hovering form, as if to a soundless call. In the distance, behind the stands, the waters of Galilee Lake winked in the long sun.

The eighth inning passed, and the ninth, and the tenth. Brother Reeter had solemnly stepped out into full view after I’d seen him, and he stood now, watching silently. There was some discussion among the Athens coaches after the tenth inning, as if they didn’t want to let the game go any further, like it was cruel now, but Samuel was already back on the mound, not even waiting for the batters, slamming the ball to Hilton again and again. When the first batter stepped up, it barely broke his rhythm.

In the top of the eleventh, Hilton floated a long fly ball over the corn for a home run. In the bottom Samuel struck out the three batters he faced in a row. The game was over and people began to get up from their seats, but Samuel hadn’t stopped throwing. Hilton obediently stayed in place. Everyone was quiet. He just kept throwing. After about ten pitches, the batter who would’ve been next stepped up to the plate. Then the next. As each one struck out the next stepped up, the whole Athens team cycling quietly through again and again. After a while the majority of the crowd got up and petered away, averting their eyes as they went. A while later the rest of our team trotted slowly in from the field, then sat down on the bench to watch. They were followed by the umpire, who wordlessly stripped his gear. Samuel didn’t look at anyone.

The Athens batters kept going, their coaches standing silently, their arms crossed. I don’t know how long this went on. Samuel was doing something else by then, the pitching steps raveled into a suite of movement, a semaphore for nothing.

Finally one of their bigger batters swung hard and made contact. Everyone who was left watched as the ball sailed high and straight. It seemed to stay in the air for a long time before finally disappearing into the corn. Samuel turned around and breathed in the near dark. His teammates were all standing still, looking at him. Hilton had taken off his catcher’s mask and now stood, glancing back and forth between Samuel and the bench. Brother Reeter was the only one left in the stands, and he stood. Samuel let his glove drop to the mound, and went to face him. We forfeited the next game, and just like that, summer was over.

•

They did not ask me to tape Samuel’s turn in the shed. By then there were so many hands, so many punches to take. What I do know is that he had to go to the ER afterward, and that he sputtered blood all over the nurse’s uniform trying to explain that he’d started the fight, that it was his fault, really.

•

We didn’t find out that Douglas Reeter had been lying until late September, when my father and what was left of the unit came back. I told him at dinner all the stories Brother Reeter had told the team. I didn’t even ask if they were true, but my father just got this long look in his face and stared over at the window for a while and said, “Honey, Douglas Reeter sat at a desk in Kuwait the entire time before coming back here. It was a reward for his typing skills. We didn’t even see him.”

It seems impossible that none of us had asked our fathers, in all those emails or calls, about Brother Reeter’s stories, but I only remember the boys leaning across those rows of bleachers, looking off up into the sky or trees or grass, listening and listening. There was a news story once the men of our town that could come back did come back. We were briefly the town with the highest casualty rate of all the places in America that had sent men to the war. It only lasted a few months, though.

•

In the fall cold at midnight, the group of dark bodies standing back in the fallow field that fronted my house had a specter of frozen breath hovering over it. There was Samuel’s face at my window. I followed him out without speaking.

Three of the boys were carrying their father’s shotguns. Samuel already had his farm license, and we sat in the back of his truck, Douglas Reeter lying face down, hooded, gagged, hands bound behind his back with plastic zip-ties, between us.

In the shack, on the tape, his eyes are wild when the boys pull off the hood, when he sees the gun. They don’t hit him. For some reason, this tape is the hardest of all of them to watch. He looks, his eyes so wide, at the shotgun that Samuel holds up to his face, but it’s not that. There is the sharp, ammoniac scent of urine. Then, the part I can never get over: you see his shoulders soften, his eyes go dull — like he’s accepting it. He closes his eyes. Samuel Lincoln pulls the trigger and there is only a click. Someone undoes Reeter’s hands, and the boys file out, leave him there. They do not beat him. They do not really even touch him.

The tape follows the boys out, catches their faces where they stand together out in the cold, exhilarated. There is the faint sound of Reeter weeping, back in the shack.

And I remember them there well, I remember their faces, lit by the glow of the cigarette they pass around on the tape. Truman, who will accidentally kill his girlfriend driving around after prom, when he will take a hill on a gravel road too fast and the car will flip and roll, crushing her to death but sparing him perfectly, without even a scratch. P.J., Gary, and Ralph, who will move away after graduating, getting as far as Oklahoma City, St. Louis, and Omaha, respectively; all three mechanics, if you can believe it. Hilton Hedis, who will become an overweight student football manager for the University of Kansas, before getting fired after being arrested for breaking three bones in his girlfriend’s face after a drunken fight, and finally end up with the job at the grain elevator in Cloud County. In the end only I will stay in New Jerusalem. Only I will be left around to remember.