The Ghost in the Leather: The Pitch That History Forgot

CHAPTER 18: THE LONG WAY HOME

The Buick’s transmission slipped in second gear as they climbed the long, sun-baked incline out of the Mad River valley, but Arthur Vance did not force the lever. He drove with his wrists resting on the lower quadrant of the wheel, his broad shoulders rounded beneath the damp wool of his chore coat, listening to the mechanical heartbeat of an engine that had outlived its warranty by a hundred thousand miles.

They did not take the interstate.

They turned south onto State Route 72, a forgotten spine of cracked gray concrete that wound through the low, green hills of Greene and Clinton counties, past shuttered canning factories, rusted grain elevators, and fields of knee-high corn that had begun to curl at the tips under the relentless July drought.

The green seabag sat between Marcus’s feet on the passenger floorboards. The old black Rawlings Heart of the Hide glove was tucked inside it, wrapped in the damp wool of an old shop rag soaked in wintergreen and mineral oil.

Marcus leaned his head against the window glass. His right arm was tucked into the pocket of his oversized t-shirt, swaddled in an old towel Vance had taken from the motel bathroom. Every ten miles, Vance reached down, picked up a plastic bag filled with melting crushed ice from a gas-station cooler, and pressed it against the boy’s inflamed forearm.

The boy did not wince. He did not speak. His eyes remained fixed on the passing telephone poles—countless wooden crosses standing along the ditch line, each one carrying the black wires that carried voices, numbers, and transactions across the Republic.

"The Braves called Snyder’s phone before we hit Xenia," Vance said after an hour of silence. The wiper blades were still, the sky having cleared into a hard, metallic brass that gave no promise of evening relief. "They offered seventy-five thousand straight to your mother’s name. No training clause. Just an open option until your sixteenth birthday."

"What did Snyder say?" Marcus asked without turning his head.

"He told them the line was bad," Vance replied. A faint, dry shadow of a grin touched the corners of the old scout’s cracked lips. "He told them there was an iron ridge between Fairborn and the river, and the signal couldn't get through the rock."

The car rattled over a wooden-decked bridge crossing a dry tributary of Paint Creek.

"You knew, didn't you?" Marcus asked suddenly.

Vance slowed the car, easing the Buick around a sharp S-turn where an abandoned limestone kiln stood half-swallowed by sumac and wild grapevines. "Knew what?"

"That the arm wouldn't hold."

Vance’s hands tightened on the wheel. The swelling in his left palm had begun to harden into a knot of deep, fibrous scar tissue that would never completely flatten out again. He looked at his own reflection in the rearview mirror—the sagging jowls, the bloodshot eyes, the gray stubble that had grown in thick and wild over the past twenty-four hours.

"I knew forty years ago," Vance whispered. "When our father had the blacksmith shop in Minford. We had a team of Belgian draft horses—huge, beautiful brutes with legs like oak stumps. The off-side horse, Prince, was the strongest animal in the township. He could pull a two-bottom plow through clay so thick the iron groaned. But he had a flaw in his hock. A tiny, hairline calcium ridge on the bone."

The old scout cleared his throat, spitting a dark fleck of tobacco into an empty coffee cup between the seats.

"My father worked that horse every day," Vance continued. "He told everyone Prince was worth five hundred dollars in gold. But he never let Prince run. He never let him hit a trot on the hard road. Because he knew that the very thing that made the horse pull like an engine was the thing that would shatter the bone if he ever opened him up."

Marcus looked down at the towel around his arm. The melted ice water had begun to seep through the terrycloth, cold and dripping through his gray track pants onto the rubber floor mat.

"Elijah wasn't a draft horse," Marcus said.

"No," Vance said, his voice dropping into a register of solemn, unbearable grief. "Elijah was the fire in the dry grass. He wanted to burn everything down just to see if the ground was still there when the smoke cleared. And he didn't care if he burned himself to ash in the process."

They crossed into Scioto County as the sun began to drop behind the ridges of the Shawnee State Forest.

The air changed immediately. The dry, limestone-tinged heat of the northern plains gave way to the thick, humid, river-bottom atmosphere that smelled of coal smoke, damp alluvial silt, and the pungent, chemical musk of the coke plant across the water in Kentucky. It was the smell of Marcus’s entire life—the air that had filled his lungs in the alleyways, in the railyard, and under the dripping tin roof of the roundhouse shed.

Vance did not turn toward the dry cleaner’s apartment on Eighth Street.

He drove past the city limits, past the rusted iron bridges of the Norfolk Southern line, and turned down the overgrown cinder track that led toward the river landing. The car bounced through deep ruts, the sumac branches scraping against the Buick’s faded green paint with the sound of fingernails on slate, until the road ended at the edge of the water.

Here, where the Scioto River met the brown, churning current of the Ohio, the bank was a broad, flat shelf of gray shale and smooth, water-worn river stones.

A hundred yards down the shore stood the remnants of the old ferry slip—four massive, vertical pilings of black oak, driven deep into the riverbed seventy years ago and left to rot after the steel suspension bridge was built in nineteen-thirty-nine.

Vance turned off the engine.

The silence that followed was immense, filled only by the lap of the brown current against the gravel and the distant, rhythmic thumping of a diesel towboat pushing twelve barges of coal upriver toward Wheeling.

Vance opened his door. "Bring the bag," he said.

Marcus stepped out into the evening heat. His legs were stiff, his shoulder throbbing with a deep, sickening ache that made him nauseous, but he gripped the canvas strap with his good left hand and followed the old scout down the shale slope to the water’s edge.

Vance stopped at the water line. He reached into his coat, pulled out the split-seam baseball, and held it out to the boy.

"The scouts will be here by Wednesday," Vance said. "Dave Klemko won't quit. He’ll go to the county court in Portsmouth. He’ll find an ambitious judge who wants box seats behind home plate in Cincinnati. They’ll file for a custodial guardian ad litem under the abandoned-talent provisions of the state sports code. They’ll have a legal deputy on your mother’s porch before the end of the week."

Marcus looked at the baseball.

He looked at the dark brown smear of Arthur Vance’s blood, and the fresh, bright red flecks of his own blood that had dried together on the gray horsehide, merging into a single, dark crust over the four-year-old stitching.

"What do they want, Arthur?" Marcus asked quietly.

Arthur Vance looked out across the brown, wide sweep of the Ohio River, where the lights of the Kentucky shore were beginning to blink to life in the purple twilight.

"They want to see if the ghost can be bought, Marcus," Vance said. "That’s all they ever wanted."

Marcus took the ball.

He did not look at his swollen right wrist. He did not look at the black Heart of the Hide glove in the bag. He stepped down to the very edge of the shale, where the brown river water lapped against the toes of his taped sneakers, and raised his left arm—the arm that had never thrown a dead drop, the arm that had never known the agony of the dead knuckle or the terror of an unspun seam.

With a smooth, easy, natural swing—the swing of an ordinary thirteen-year-old boy throwing an ordinary stone into the water on a summer evening—Marcus threw the ball.

It rose against the purple dusk, turning over and over on its axis with a tight, perfect, beautiful four-seam spin. It didn't drop. It didn't dive. It rode the warm river breeze, arcing higher and higher into the summer air, until it fell with a faint, clean plip into the deep, churning current of the channel, three hundred feet from the shore.

The brown water closed over the leather. The river took it, rolling it down into the dark mud of the bottom, carrying it past the barges, past the coal terminals, past the state line, on its long, silent journey to the sea.

Marcus let his left arm drop to his side.

He reached up to his right wrist with his thumb and forefinger, feeling the pale, bare skin where the three knots had lived. The skin was smooth now, cool in the evening draft that was beginning to blow off the water.

"Let's go home, Mr. Vance," the boy said softly. "My mother’s got the stove on."