The road out of the lowlands did not rise gently; it twisted upward into the Blue Ridge Mountains along a narrow two-lane asphalt cut that smelled of wet pine needles, cold granite, and woodsmoke.
Arthur Vance drove the heavy black sedan with two fingers on the wheel, his silver hair catching the dull gray glare of the overcast sky. In the passenger seat, Wesley sat upright, his boots resting flat on the rubber floor mat. Beside his hip, wrapped in an old flannel shirt, lay the reinforced Rawlings glove, quiet and stiff. For three hours, neither of them had spoken more than ten words.
"You ever seen real hills before, son?" Arthur asked as the car crested a sharp switchback.
Through the passenger window, the endless gray-green carpet of the Appalachian forest tumbled down into the mist. Below them, the river that ran through the Bottoms looked like a silver thread dropped carelessly across a patchwork quilt.
"No, sir," Wesley said softly. "Only the highway overpass and the levee behind the railyard."
"Air’s thin up here," Arthur said, downshifting as the car turned off the pavement onto a rutted gravel road marked only by a weathered timber sign that read Camp 4 – Private. "Down in the basin, you're throwing through soup. Air’s heavy with river moisture, exhaust, sulfur from the chemical vats. That gives your four-seamer life because the laces have something thick to bite into. Up on the mountain, the air is dry and light. A baseball doesn't catch the wind the same way. If your mechanics aren't anchored in your spine, your ball floats like a dead leaf."
The car crunched to a halt in a broad clearing carved out of the hemlock trees. In the center stood a long, single-story cabin built from rough-hewn pine logs, its tin roof coated in gray lichen. Behind it was not a manicured diamond with painted foul lines, but an old sawmill yard. Stacks of weathered white-oak ties formed an irregular backstop sixty paces away, surrounded by heaps of dark sawdust and the constant, cold trickle of a mountain creek.
Standing on the porch of the cabin, wearing heavy denim overalls and holding a pair of heavy iron horse rasps, was an elderly man whose frame was as crooked and knotted as an apple bough. His left arm hung completely dead at his side, withered inside a pinned-up sleeve.
"That's Silas Vance," Arthur muttered, cutting the ignition. "My older brother. Hit three hundred and fourteen for the Memphis Chicks back in fifty-nine before an artillery shell in the Mekong took his elbow."
Wesley climbed out of the car. The cold air hit his lungs like ice water, sharp and clean, making him cough once—a dry, startled bark.
Silas descended the porch steps slowly, his boots thumping on the gravel. He didn't look at Arthur. He walked directly up to Wesley, his pale, rheumy blue eyes squinting beneath thick gray eyebrows as he stopped six inches from the boy. Without asking, Silas reached out his good right hand and clamped his fingers around Wesley’s right shoulder socket.
The grip was iron. Silas dug his thumb into the groove behind the boy’s clavicle, feeling the insertion of the subscapularis muscle and the long head of the bicep tendon.
"Loose," Silas rasped, his voice sounding like two dry grindstones turning against each other. "Loose as an unstrung fiddle. Just like the old man."
"Elijah’s boy," Arthur said, coming around the hood.
"I can see whose boy he is," Silas snapped, letting go of Wesley’s shoulder. "Got the same wide bridge on the nose, same long fingers. Elijah could hold three regulation softballs in one palm and still deal an inside curve." Silas turned his gaze down to Wesley’s shoes. "Arthur, you bring him up here to pitch or to catch a draft in his chest? Get him some wool socks from the trunk before his ankles freeze."
Within twenty minutes, Wesley was standing on a patch of packed sawdust in the center of the clearing.
The setup was brutal in its simplicity. Sixty feet away, against the wall of stacked railroad ties, Silas had nailed an old tractor tire to the wood. The hollow center of the tire—a circle barely fifteen inches across—was the only target.
"No catcher," Silas said, leaning against a sawhorse with a bucket of damp, scuffed balls at his feet. "You miss the hole, you walk sixty feet and pick the ball out of the mud yourself. You hit the rubber rim, the ball flies fifty yards back into the hemlocks, and you go hunt it before the sun drops behind the ridge. You put it through the center, it hits that sawdust pile behind the tire and rolls back to your feet like a trained dog. You understand the math, boy?"
Wesley took the mended glove from under his arm. "Yes, sir."
"Then don't waste my daylight," Silas said. "Give me fifteen."
Wesley took his mark. The ground beneath his feet was soft, shifting beneath his tread unlike the hard-packed clay of the Bottoms. When he raised his leg, his balance wobbled an eighth of an inch, the thin mountain air offering no resistance against his chest.
He drove forward. His arm whipped through.
THWACK-BOING.
The ball clipped the thick steel-belted tread on the top rim of the tire. The rubber acted like a catapult, launching the sphere eighty feet straight up into the dense pine canopy, where it ricocheted off a cedar limb and vanished into the blackberry briars sixty yards down the slope.
Wesley didn't wait for Silas to speak. He lowered his head, turned on his heel, and began walking toward the briars.
"Pick your feet up, boy!" Silas shouted from the sawhorse. "The sun don't wait on pride, and Charlotte don't give second chances to boys who can't find their own misses!"
For the next four hours, the mountain clearing echoed with the sound of leather hitting rubber, sawdust, and stone. Wesley fetched nine balls from the thorny brush, his forearms scratched red, his breath tearing at his throat in the cold air. But by the eleventh ball, something inside his core shifted.
He stopped trying to use the thick mountain air to carry his ball. He lowered his center of gravity, sinking his hips three inches deeper into his stride, anchoring his rear foot into the sawdust like a hemlock taproot. He stopped looking at the black rubber rim of the tire. He looked through the empty space in the center, visualizing the dark, rotting pine ties five feet behind it.
SWISH-THUD.
The twelfth ball flew clean through the tire's opening, striking the sawdust pile with a heavy, muffled crunch, rolling straight back down the trough to stop six inches from Wesley’s front toe.
SWISH-THUD.
The thirteenth.
SWISH-THUD.
The fourteenth.
Silas Vance stood motionless against the sawhorse, the iron rasps hanging quiet in his good hand. Beside him, Arthur took a slow sip from a steel thermos of black coffee, a faint, ghost-like smile carving its way through the wrinkles around his eyes.
"He ain't throwing to the tire, Artie," Silas whispered, his voice stripped bare of its earlier rasp. "He’s throwing through it. Just like Elijah did behind the warehouse in sixty-two."
"I told you," Arthur murmured.
"You told me half," Silas replied, turning to look at his younger brother. "You didn't tell me the boy had Elijah's eyes. Harrison’s gonna wet himself when he sees this kid walk through the tunnel."