Elegy on Kinderklavier by Arna Bontemps Hemenway Read Free Book Online

security patrol, or being the Son of God, or having a dumb hick carpenter whom everybody hated for a coach.
    â€œI DON’T KNOW,” Hilton blared, looking to Brother Reeter and then back at us, his eyebrows working, which meant he was thinking. “JESUS WAS A CARPENTER AND HE COULD DO SOME OTHER STUFF PRETTY GOOD TOO.”
    Where was I during all this? I was on the top plank of the newly carpentered set of wooden bleachers, which none of the boys kicking dirt around home plate had yet caught on Doug the Reaper was crafting a mate for. I don’t think it’s true that my father wanted a boy. He was a kind, wilting, educated man who was taken to long moods of quiet melancholy and wistfulness. I had a better chance moving him to expression with an idea about a book I was reading than by making my throws pop into his glove in the warm evenings when he came home from work. If he minded much that I’d come out a girl, he never did let me see it, though it’s true that he taught me a mean sinking fastball. He used to play catch with my mother, before she died when I was eight, before she’d even had me, when they were just young married kids. I still have a picture of them as they stood lined up in the yard, my father crouched, squinting at something behind the camera, my mother scowling, the ball held trickily behind her back, ready to go into a windup. And it only occurred to me a couple years ago, once I had a house of my own, that it might’ve been her pitch that he taught me, that fastball with the slight downward movement. But anyway.
    I was really mostly allowed as a de facto member of the ball team because my father was the commanding officer of our town’s Army company and, when his reserve unit wasn’t being called up to go towar, he worked as the floor manager in the pet food plant two towns over, which still employs most of the people around here. Everyone in New Jerusalem liked him because they thought he was fair. I was allowed more or less free range by the Elders, and the people in the town. The boys on the diamond (which is also to say, the boys in all my classes, the boys who were my friends) let me along with them in most things because both my legs were bound up in painful, complicated orthopedic braces and because when my dad was at home he was the boss of half of their fathers, until the reserves got called up to go to Iraq, and he became the boss of all of them.
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    What do I remember?
    The sun burning high and hazy in the sky above the green sea of the corn past the outfield, but not yet high enough to burn the color out of everything. It was maybe two weeks before the summer ball season started. The boys were one by one coming in from the field at the end of their morning practice, gathering on the other set of wooden bleachers. I had my braces off and was lying across the highest plank of my own bleachers. Two planks lower, Marly was lying with a forearm draped over her eyes, her cotton shorts and T-shirt scrunched up in a way that had caused a good number of fielding errors already.
    I’ve been holding off on Marly, saving her for as long as possible, but Marly never was one to be held off, even in memory, and I can no longer neglect her presence, her glorious body: thin, tan, her rounded chest, her impossibly blond hair. She was twenty-two I think, seven years older than me, and I counted her as my friend. Her and Doug the Reaper rented the little falling-down house on the rearof my father’s land, and she spent a lot of time that year in our house, especially when my aunt, who was supposed to be my caretaker, was gone to Stillwater to see her friends. Marly was quiet and beautiful wafting around the rooms of our house. People said she’d run around on Doug during the first seven months of our fathers’ deployment, before Doug came back to do his three-fold job in town, and it seems possible, just because she was always so supremely bored, but