River Teeth by David James Duncan

Author:David James Duncan [Duncan, David James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-440-33651-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

It took four years to solve the riddle on the ball. It was autumn when it happened—the same autumn during which I’d grown a little older than my big brother would ever be. As often happens with koan solutions, I wasn’t even thinking about the ball when it came. As is also the case with koans, I can’t possibly paint in words the impact of the response, the instantaneous healing that took place or the ensuing sense of lightness and release. But I’ll say what I can.

The solution came during a fit of restlessness brought on by a warm Indian summer evening. I’d just finished watching the Miracle Mets blitz the Orioles in the World Series and was standing alone in the living room, just staring out at the yard and fading sunlight, feeling a little stale and fidgety, when I realized that these were just the sort of fidgets I’d never had to suffer when John was alive—because we’d always work our way through them with a long game of catch. With that thought, and at that moment, I simply saw my brother catch, then throw a baseball. It occurred in neither an indoors nor an outdoors. It lasted a couple of seconds, no more. But I saw him so clearly, and he then vanished so completely, that my eyes blurred, my throat and chest ached, and I didn’t need to see Mantle’s baseball to realize exactly what I’d wanted from it all along:

From the moment I’d first laid eyes on it, all I’d wanted was to take that immaculate ball out to our corridor on an evening just like this one, to take my place near the apples in the north and to find my brother waiting beneath the immense firs to the south. All I’d wanted was to pluck that too-perfect ball off its pedestal and proceed, without speaking, to play catch so long and hard that the grass stains and nicks and the sweat of our palms would finally obliterate every last trace of Mantle’s blue ink, till all he would have sent us was a grass-green, earth-brown, beat-up old baseball. Beat-up old balls were all we’d ever had anyhow. They were all we’d ever needed. The dirtier they were, the more frayed the skin and stitching, the louder they’d hissed and the better they’d curved. And remembering this—recovering in an instant the knowledge of how little we’d needed in order to be happy—my grief for my brother became palpable, took on shape and weight, color and texture, even an odor: the measure of my loss was precisely the difference between one of the beat-up, earth-colored, grass-scented balls that had given us such happiness, and this antiseptic-smelling, sad-making icon ball on its bandage-box pedestal. And as I felt this—as I stood there palpating my grief, shifting it round like a throwing stone in my hand—I suddenly fell through a floor inside myself, landing in a deeper, brighter chamber just in time to feel something or someone

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