Waiting for Teddy Williams by Howard Frank Mosher

Author:Howard Frank Mosher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

23

ONE SATURDAY Teddy took Ethan up Allen Mountain to the woods above E.A. and Gypsy’s special place and showed him a stand of white ash trees, tall and straight and good for making baseball bats. He told the boy that ashes favored sunny, south-facing clearings, out of the wind. Wind stressed their grain. He said that white ash liked a loamy soil, not a clay base. And that a good sawyer could get twenty bats out of one tree.

“How is it,” E.A. said to his father as they sat on a log under a yellow birch and looked down the mountainside, “you come to know so much about ash trees?”

“Oh,” Teddy said, “when I was staying with my great-uncle, old Peyton Williams, up in Lord Hollow, he cut ash trees for the bat factory down to the Common.”

This was the first time Teddy had ever mentioned his family to E.A.

“Teddy? How come you never talk about your people?”

“My people?”

“You know. Your folks.”

Teddy shrugged. “I never really knew my people, Ethan. My ma, she passed on when I was little. I don’t hardly recollect her at all.”

“Then what happened? After your ma died?”

“Well, I got shifted around from one shirttail relation and foster home to the next. Finally I landed up with old man Williams.”

“Was he good to you?”

Teddy broke off a yellow birch twig and sucked on the wintergreen-flavored inner bark. “He weren’t nothing to me one way or the other. He weren’t mean when he was sober, and I learned pretty quick to steer clear of him when he was on a binge. I reckon I was a handful myself, Ethan.”

“What happened to your great-uncle?”

“He was old when I first went to stay with him, and a year or so after I got sent to jail, he up and died.”

Ethan hesitated. Then he said, “What about your pa?”

“What about him?”

“You said your ma passed on when you were little. What became of your pa?”

Teddy stood up. “He dropped out of the picture before I was born. I never knowed who he was.” He flipped the yellow birch twig at a nearby ash. “There, Ethan. That’s a better than average baseball-bat tree.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Same’s you know how to throw a baseball. Let’s go get your pitching in.”

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