The Richmond Saga, 2.1
Near Wakefield, Virginia
September 8th, 1861
In the morning light of a dew-laden clearing, barefoot boys with baggy suspenders and sun-stained cheeks emerged from the wood like acolytes to play the game of base ball.
They hooted and whistled with the cardinals, darting at the crack of the worn-down ball, yarn bursting from its faded leather, and each boy held the prize of the field—an ancient, faded walnut bat, like it was a relic from Jerusalem.
The farm boys of Wakefield were losing to the Waverly team seventeen runs to nothing when the Kirby brothers arrived.
Preston Theodore Kirby, twelve years old and built like a lone loblolly tree, chided his young and identically-built brother, spitting in his own palm and wiping the evidence of strawberries from Thomas Kirby’s face.
“If ma finds we’ve been in the preserves,” he scolded with a patronly tone while Thomas frowned and watched the game, “it will be the last time we sneak out this way.”
Thomas spat, reeling from his elder brother’s grasp with a devious grin. A train whistle groaned in the distance, toward the small town—but the boys paid it no mind.
“Alright then, hotshot Preston Kirby!” called the tallest of the boys, a husky, tanned child with a long face and dark eyebrows. He pointed from the pitcher’s circle—marked by twine—at Preston. “You done lickin’ at your brother, or what? Get the stick!”
With a short glare, Preston squared his six-year-old brother by the shoulders. “Now, Tommy, I want you to watch what I do. These boys from Waverly think everyone south of them’s a hillbilly because they’ve got a billiard hall. Do you remember what Daddy told us about folks who think we’re dirt?”
Thomas nodded earnestly.
“What makes us better than the dirt, Tommy?”
With his attention drifting to the many young eyes now waiting for Preston to approach, Thomas muttered his response.
“We watch and learn.”
“We watch and learn, Tommy. That’s right. Kirbys always watch and learn. Now watch me lick this white-shirt dandy from Waverly.”
He thumped his younger brother on the head, and his Wakefield teammates clapped and hollered as he picked the old bat up off the ground and spit into the wet grass. The tall, hawk-nosed pitcher grinned, pushing a copse of shaggy hair from his wide brow and tossing the ball up and down in his hands.
“You ain’t never seen pitches like these, Kirby.”
“Wait and see, Waverly boy.”
The Waverly team jeered, joshing from their line in the grass, and the fielders called and leaned forward. They had all heard of the boy from Wakefield—the lean, quiet farm kid who lived with the Widow Kirby and her younger son near Nic’s Farm.
Beyond the boys, a handful of curious young girls had come to watch the match in the mystical space of the old clearcut off the Line Road. They made crowns from weeds in the grass, whispering to one another and poking at ribs as Preston came to the old flour sack that marked home plate.
The tall pitcher licked his lips, leaning forward, and his catcher muttered a death wish from behind Preston. He ignored it, taking a few practice swings as a stillness settled about the field.
The pitcher leaned back, arcing his wide and powerful frame. The pitch was delivered like a cannonshot, sprung from the pitcher’s arm, and Kirby watched it sail into the catcher’s glove.
“That’s one!”
The Waverly boys cheered at the strike call. The umpire was an older boy—a teenager, who had collected pennies and marbles before the game–and his treasury now included a half-consumed mason jar of Miss Kirby’s strawberry preserves.
The dark-browed pitcher revealed a row of bright teeth, leering. Thomas Kirby tensed, sitting in the grass and leaning forward. Preston nodded and shifted his weight, lifting the bat from his shoulder.
A few of the local girls clapped politely. It was fast—very fast, and it seemed to almost rise up when it came to the flour sack. Preston calculated that this illusion was why every boy before him had struck out on three pitches. He squared himself again toward the pitcher.
The second pitch was the same as the first—the same as they had all been. Faster, likely, than Preston had ever seen. It seemed to slam into the catcher’s gloss-worn leather mit (the only glove present on the field, and shared between teams) like a train engine. Preston’s comrades groaned. A few more girls clapped at the pitcher and cupped their hands to conceal excited whispers.
Looking calmly to the beaming boy, Preston spit in the grass again, loosening his shoulders. He stole a glance to the young girl sitting on the edge of the group, gowned in a simple white dress, watching him intently with her hat resting in her lap. He looked back toward his adversary.
“Come on, Theo!” Thomas hooted, glaring a the pitcher with his nose upturned.
“Time’s up, hotshot,” the pitcher taunted with a triumphant smile. He leaned back again.
The sound of Preston’s walnut bat making contact with the leather ball filled the entire clearcut. The girls gasped from their grassy grandstand, but Thomas was the first one on his feet.
Outfielders gawked heavenward in disbelief as the ball sailed over their mops, vanishing with the crash of brambles into the distant wood line. The pitcher, too shocked to be furious, looked from the treeline to Preston’s bat in disbelief, as if some enchantment now lay over it. The girl in the white dress—who had caught Preston’s attention before the hit, rose to her feet and cheered, much to the horror of her companions. Her cheers were soon drowned out by that of the Wakefield boys as Preston tossed the bat aside and trotted along the basepath, never once looking to the pitcher’s gaze that followed him.
Now down seventeen to one, the boys of Wakefield rushed Preston in a tide of jubilance as he tapped his foot on the flour sack, the teenaged umpire grinning with a congratulatory nod. No one from Waverly—no one from anywhere–had ever hit a home run off the legendary Connie Kilgore. For the rest of Connie’s short life, he called Preston Kirby “Hotshot.” It was no longer an insult.
The young girl—Annabelle Wheeler, was first embrace Preston, and his cheeks flushed. She pecked him on the cheek with a wide grin. All the world spun in a sea of wet grass and tall pines. Boys exchanged impish grins at the scene while the girls of the clearcut looked on in indignant disbelief.
Next, yellow-curled Thomas leapt into his brother’s arms, lifted with joy, his hands extended to the September sky. Preston laughed, hoisting his brother high in a moment he would try, in much later years, with all his intellect, to reproduce.
“Watch and learn, Tommy!”
It was then, in that juvenile moment of glory, that the man in uniform appeared.
