Read The Game of Love and Death Online
Authors: Martha Brockenbrough
The Game of Love and Death
To Adam: Love has forged no finer heart than yours.
Contents
T
HE
figure in the fine gray suit materialized in the nursery and stood over the sleeping infant, inhaling the sweet, milky night air. He could have taken any form, really: a sparrow, a snowy owl, even a common housefly. Although he often traveled the world on wings, for this work he always preferred a human guise.
Standing beneath a leaded glass window, the visitor, who was known as Love, removed a small, pearl-headed pin from his tie and pricked his finger. A bead of blood rose and caught the reflection of the slice of moon that hung low in the late winter sky. He bent over the cradle and slid his bleeding fingertip into the child’s mouth. The baby, a boy, tried to suckle, his forehead wrinkling, his small hands curling into fists.
“Shh,” the figure whispered. “Shh.” This player. He could not think of one he’d loved more.
After a time, Love slipped his finger out of the boy’s mouth, satisfied that the blood had given the boy a steady heart. He replaced his pin and regarded the child. He removed a book from his pocket, scribbled a few lines, and tucked it away again. When he could stay no longer, he uttered two words, as softly as a prayer: “Have courage.”
The next night, in a small green house across town, his opponent made her choice. In this house, there was no leaded glass in the windows. No gracious nursery, no wrought-iron crib. The child was a girl. A girl who slept in an apple crate — happily so, for she did not yet know of anything else.
In the house’s other bedroom, the child’s grandmother slept lightly, listening from some ever-alert corner of her mind for the sounds that would indicate the child’s parents had returned home: the creak of a door, the whisper of voices, the careful pad of tiptoeing feet.
The old woman would wait forever to hear those sounds again.
Wearing a pair of soft leather gloves, Love’s opponent, known as Death, reached for the child, who woke and blinked sleepily at the unfamiliar face overhead. To Death’s relief, the baby did not cry. Instead, she looked at her with wonder. Death held a candle near so the child might have a better view. The baby blinked twice, smiled, and reached for the flame.
Pleased, Death set the candle down, held the baby close to her chest, and walked to the uncovered window, which revealed a whitened world glowing beneath a silver flannel sky. She and the baby watched the snow fall together. At last, the child fell asleep in her arms.
Death concentrated on her essential task, relieved when she at last felt the telltale pressure behind her eyes. After much effort, a single black tear gathered in her lashes. Death removed her glove with her teeth. It made hardly any noise as it hit the floor. With her index finger, Death lifted the tear.
She held her fingertip over the baby’s clean, warm forehead. Slowly, carefully, she wrote directly on the child’s flesh a word that would be invisible. But this word would have power over the child, and later the woman she would become. It would teach her, shape her. Its letters, seven of them, gleamed in the candlelight.
Someday.
She whispered this into the baby’s ear:
Someday, everyone you love will die. Everything you love will crumble to ruin. This is the price of life. This is the price of love. It is the only ending for every true story.
The letters sank into the infant’s dusky skin and vanished as if they’d never been there at all.
Death put the baby down, removed her other glove, and left the pair of them on the floor, where they would be discovered by the baby’s grandmother and mistaken for something else. The gloves would be the only things she would give the girl, though there was much she had taken already, and more she would take in the years to come.
For the next seventeen years, Love and Death watched their players. Watched and waited for the Game to begin.
B
ENEATH
a heavy cushion of clouds, Henry Bishop stood in the soft dirt of the infield. The space beyond and between the first two bases was a fine place for thinking. It smelled like cut grass, and the Douglas firs that wrapped around the outfield sealed out the noise of the rest of the world. Henry swallowed, crouched, and socked his glove as the pitcher let loose with a fastball. The batter swung and connected —
pok!
The ball leapt off the bat and streaked through the infield. Henry jumped and reached, but the ball took its own surprising course past the tip of his mitt.
When his feet touched the ground again, Henry had an epiphany about the rhythm of baseball, and why it meant a damn to him.
It was connection. Without the answering swing of the batter, the work of the pitcher meant nothing. Likewise, the fielder’s throw found its meaning in the baseman’s glove or in the grass. The connection completed the rhythm. Two opposing forces crashed together with their individual desires, creating something unpredictable between them. Triumph. Disaster. Heartbreak. Joy. Baseball was a love story, really. Just a different love than the kind he’d always sought.
His feet touched the grass as the team’s center fielder, Ethan Thorne, bare-handed the drive on the run, his long and loose limbs so sure of every movement. Ethan fired it at Henry in time for him to tag the runner dashing back toward second. Henry loved being part of this complicated life-form made from the hands and feet of his schoolmates.
“Nice save,” called the coach, who wore a cap, sweater-vest, and necktie that almost cleared the distance from his belly to his waist. “But use your glove, Mr. Thorne. That hotdogging is going to leave you with a busted knuckle.”
“Yes, sir,” Ethan said. “I thought I’d return the ball faster that way.”
The coach snorted and shook his head. He looked up at the sky, grimaced, and scrutinized his athletes. The practice continued a few minutes more, until something in the air shifted. Henry felt it as it happened, this sudden burst of pressure. The rain turned from a light mist to a regular shower, darkening the players’ shoulders. Puddles, sizzling with falling water, filled the low spots on the diamond.
Holding a clipboard over his head in a fruitless attempt to keep the rain at bay, the coach blew his whistle. “Hit the showers! Everyone but Bishop.”
Henry jogged over and looked down at his coach.
“Usual drill. Bring in the equipment and clean the mud off the bats and balls. Make sure you get them good and dry or we’ll have to replace them, and that’s just not in the budget.” He glanced at Henry’s sagging socks.
“Yes, sir,” Henry said, half expecting the heat on his face to turn the rain to steam.
A sparrow lighted on the grass nearby and tugged at a worm that had been lured by the pounding drops. The bird cocked its head at Henry, appearing to study him intently. Henry pulled up his socks.
“Once you get this cleaned up, you can go,” Coach said. “I’m heading in. It’s a mess out here.”
Henry nodded and bent to pick up the closest ball. He winged it into a bucket and did the same with the next and the next, never missing a throw, even as he moved farther and farther away from it, creating a steady
thup, thup, thup
of baseballs as they piled up. Rhythm. Connection. They went where he did, like shadows, like ghosts.
Henry whistled as he worked, the theme from a Russian ballet he’d played in the school orchestra. He lifted his cap to wipe water from his forehead and moved on to the bats, gathering them into bouquets that he swung as he walked. He rinsed them, dried them, and lowered them into a wheeled cart, which he pushed toward the storage shed with one hand as he carried the ball bucket in his other, his face angled away from the rippling curtain of falling water.
The beauty of the all-boys preparatory academy invariably filled him with awe. It was a symphony of red brick and white paint nestled in an evergreen forest. Even on a rainy day, it was a splendid thing to behold. He was glad for the scholarship that secured his spot on its edge, and hoped for another to carry him forward through the University of Washington in the fall.
When Henry arrived in the locker room, Ethan was still there, wrapped in a white towel, although everyone else had gone home.
“I should’ve given you a hand,” he said, rubbing a smaller towel against his dripping hair. “I can be a real heel.”
“My job,” Henry said. “Not yours.”
“Well, if that doesn’t stink,” Ethan said. “You’re soaked clean through. And your shoes … I don’t know why you just don’t take my old pair. They’re in much better shape —”
“It’s fine, Ethan. Really.” Henry set his cap on the bench, pulled his wet shirt off over his head, and let it fall with a slap to the concrete floor. “Don’t worry.”
By the time Henry finished his shower, Ethan was dressed, looking neat and confident in his school uniform, his hair parted sharply. He turned toward the fogged-up mirror, cleared a circle with his fist, and adjusted his already smartly knotted tie.
“Malt sound good?” He looked at Henry’s misty reflection. “Guthrie’s is always crawling with girls this time of day.”
“Nah,” Henry said, ruffling his hair to peaks with his towel.
“You’re certain?” But even as he asked the question, Ethan looked relieved. His expression was strange. But Ethan could be complicated, especially about how they spent their free time together. Henry had learned not to ask. He moved the fingers on his left hand, practicing the melody of a new piece he was working on. He itched to have his double bass in his arms for real. The feeling and ritual always soothed him.
“Say, you don’t have other plans, do you?” Ethan asked, a vaguely hurt look in his eyes. Ethan always hated it when Henry made other plans, as if he didn’t want Henry to choose any other best friend. Not that he ever would.
But Henry didn’t want to admit he intended to spend the evening in the carriage house, practicing. Ethan would give him an earful. “Oh, say, I’d meant to ask about your English thesis.”
“Henry, that’s not due for more than two weeks and this is Friday. The weekend, for chrissakes.” Ethan slung his satchel over his shoulder.
“Doesn’t have to be tonight,” Henry said. “I thought you might like to get started.”
Ethan tugged the hair on the top of his head, ruining his perfect part. “No, no. I know what I want to say in it. There’s no rush. But this isn’t going to get in the way of your own schoolwork, is it? Because I can probably —”
“It’s no trouble,” Henry said. He balled up his towel and tossed it into the bin. “I like doing it. Stop worrying.”
Ethan grinned. He drummed his fingernails against the doorframe, a quick rattle of sound, and then pushed on the door. Outside, the rain had stopped, but the world around Henry still felt as though it was about to crack open. He hurried after his friend. The world could fall into pieces if it wanted. Ethan — and everyone else — could count on Henry to hold up his part.