Elijah

By David Harrison

Elijah came like all the others.
Black,
leery,
skeptical.
Ready to bolt
at my first
white-faced mistake.

Through summers spent on dusty fields,
chasing balls across the withered grass,
he became one of my many
fatherless companions.

He was there whenever he could be.
The first to arrive.
The last to leave.
Even when there was no game,
no practice,
he would come.

To rake the field,
to pull up weeds,
clinging,
like all of us,
to that tenuous
ghetto diamond
we’d reclaimed.

* * * * *

Too often, though,
Elijah couldn’t be there.
I would return home that night,
sweaty and exhausted,
to find his guilty voice
on my answering machine.

“Coach,” he’d say,
always ‘coach,’
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.
I had to watch my sister.”

* * * * *

I never could teach him
to field or throw.
Elijah couldn’t see.
He refused to wear
his glasses on the field,
knowing
that if they broke,
there would be no money
for a new replacement.

Somehow, though,
he learned how to hit.
All I had to do
from my perch
out by third base
was show him
the cocked-elbow stance
and remind him,
“Elijah…
Watch the ball!”

Squinting,
the ball would appear to him
at the last second.
What was once just a blur
was suddenly right there,
spinning
and alive.
His lean muscular body
would uncoil,
and attack that ball with confidence.

A line drive hummed
into centerfield.

* * * * *

Elijah stuck with us
through all those sorry years,
when we lost by scores
of forty-nothin’,
and twenty-four to three.

Until,
finally,
we started to win.

Our van
full of ragged men
and boys from the ghetto
unpiled night after night
onto the polished fields
of the suburbs.

Barbs, jealousy, laughter, anger.
Theirs
and ours.

None of it could stop us.

We clung to victory after victory,
arriving
one win away
from a trip
to the state playoffs.

Us?
In the playoffs?
Us?
With our charity bats
and donated gloves?
Us?
This ragtag gang
of black boys
who had not lived
and breathed baseball
from the time they could walk?
Us?
In the playoffs?

We were one game away.

* * * * *

Elijah was at that game.
I made sure of it.
Speaking to his mother.
Picking him up
early
at his house.

He stood by me the whole game,
leaving only when
it was his turn to hit.

Elijah came to bat
in the top of the ninth.
Down by two.
Two men on.
Two men out.

A hit we live.
An out we die.

I stared at Elijah from the coach’s box.

He looked at me from the batter’s box.

All tension fell away
when our eyes met.
We both smiled,
and I pumped my fist
in wordless encouragement.

For the first time,
I did not show him the stance.
I did not remind him
to watch the ball.

At fourteen,
after three years together,
his moment had arrived.

The first pitch tore a path
towards the outfield.
The shortstop leaped…

Base hit.
Tie ball game.

* * * * *

Elijah stood at my side
and watched from the dugout
as we lost the game
in the bottom of the ninth.

An error by our star player,
a ball rolling to the backstop,
and it was all over.

* * * * *

That was years ago.
I don’t coach baseball anymore,
but I see Elijah
in the city
every now and then.

On a street corner.

Two lines over at the grocery store.

Always with his sister.
Always smiling or laughing.
Always at some impenetrable distance.

I can’t reach him now.
Probably shouldn’t.

But as I walk away,
I smile,
knowing
that maybe
some long-ago
unstriving part of me
has helped Elijah
become a man.

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