putting out the last little candles, one by one,” Ethan said, and even he looked surprised as the words came out of his mouth.
AN UNEXPECTED RESULT of Ethan Feld’s determination to become a catcher was the discovery, by Jennifer T. Rideout, of a native gift for pitching. The two friends met, on the morning after the loss to the Reds, at the ball field behind Clam Island Middle School, which was closer to either of their houses than Jock MacDougal Field. Ethan brought his father’s old mitt and, in the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, Peavine’s book on catching. Jennifer T. brought an infielder’s glove that she had turned up someplace, and the baseball that Ringfinger Brown had given her. When Jennifer T. rocked back and let it fly, it came whistling and fizzing towards Ethan’s mitt as if it were powered by steam.
“Ouch!” cried Ethan, the first time the ancient baseball slapped against the heel of his mitt, sending a crackle all the way up his arm to his shoulder. It hurt so much that he did not at first notice that he had held on to the ball. “Hey. You can throw.”
“Huh,” said Jennifer T., looking at her left hand with new interest.
“That was a fastball.”
“Was it?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
She nodded. “Cool.” She waved her glove at him and he half rose, and arced the ball back to her. His throw was a little high but close enough. She caught it, fingered the ball, then concealed it once more inside her glove.
“So, catcher,” she said. “Call the pitch.”
“Can you throw the slider?”
“I’d like to see if I can,” said Jennifer T. “I know how to put my fingers. I saw it on Tom Seaver’s Total Baseball Video.” She checked an imaginary runner on first, then turned back to Ethan. He put two fingers down, extending them in an inverted V towards the ground. He was calling for the slider. Jennifer T. nodded, her black ponytail flickering behind her. Her wide, dark eyes were unblinking, and she narrowed them in concentration. She reared back again, her right leg lifting and flexing in a high jabbing kick, then stepped down onto her right foot, bringing her whole body forwards and lifting her back leg until it stuck straight out behind her and hung there, wavering. Ethan saw the snap of her hand on the hinge of her wrist. Her fingers blossomed outward and the ball flew towards him in a long, straight line. At the very last second it broke abruptly downward, and he just barely got his glove down and under it in time. By the time you got your bat, if you had been the batter, to the spot at which you hoped your bat would meet it, the ball would have long since dropped away.
“Nasty,” Ethan said. He had a sudden protective feeling towards Jennifer T., an urge to encourage and reassure her. This was not because she was a girl, or his friend, or the child of a scattered and troubled family with a father who was in jail yet again, but because he was a catcher, and she was his pitcher, and it was his job to ease her along. “The bottom fell right out of it.”
“You caught it real nice,” said Jennifer T. “And you had your eyes open all the way.”
Ethan felt a flush of warmth fill his chest, but it was short lived, for in the next instant there was a sharp snapping in the blackberry brambles that made the edge of near right field such a terrifying place to find yourself during a game of kickball or softball. Cutbelly appeared, stumbling onto the field. He limped towards Ethan and Jennifer T., dragging a leg behind him. His coat was matted and filthy, and his sharp little face bled from three different cuts around the cheeks and throat. On his snout and on the tips of his ears there lay a dusting of what looked to Ethan like frost. The glint of mockery was all but extinguished from his eyes.
“Ho, piglets,” he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “I’m very thirsty. Thirsty. Thirsty and cold.” He shivered, and hugged himself, then brushed the powdery ice from his ears. “I scampered here much too quickly.”
Ethan dug a half-empty squeeze bottle out of his knapsack and passed it to the werefox. Then he took off his sweatshirt and draped it over Cutbelly’s furry shoulders. Jennifer T. had not moved from the pitcher’s mound. Her glove dangled by her side. Her mouth hung open. Cutbelly tipped back the squeeze bottle and drained it in a single draught. He wiped his mouth on the back of his bloodied arm.
“Thank you,” he said. “And now, perhaps it may be for the last time, I’m to ask you to hurry along with me. You’re needed.”
“What can I do?” Ethan said. “I can’t fight. I can’t play baseball. I can’t do squat.”
Cutbelly sagged, and sank to the dirt of the infield. He buried his face in his hands. “I know it,” he said, rubbing at his long snout. “I told them as much my own self. But we have something less than a choice. It may be too late already as it is.” He held out a tiny paw to Ethan, who pulled him to his feet. “We must cross over, now. The other piglet, too, it’s unfortunate she saw me, but there’s no helping it now.”
For the first time since Cutbelly’s appearance, Ethan remembered Jennifer T. She was still standing on the pitcher’s mound, a little behind the rubber now, as if to keep something between her and Cutbelly. Her mouth was twisted into a strange half-smile but her eyes were wide and empty. Ethan saw that she was afraid.
“It’s OK,” Ethan said, using his newfound catcher’s voice. “He’s a friend of mine. I tried to tell you yesterday, but—”
“Little people,” Jennifer T. said, in a thick voice.
“—but you didn’t believe me.”
“She believed you,” Cutbelly said. “Come on, girl. See what you’ll see.”
THEY LEAPED ACROSS to the Summerlands through deeper shadows than Ethan remembered, the frost of the crossing streaking their hair and dusting the brims of their caps. The darkness was only partial but thick and deep. It reminded him of the false night that had fallen on Colorado Springs during a solar eclipse, one winter day back when he was in the first grade. Cutbelly hurried along as quickly as he could on his wounded leg, looking all around him as they went, his bright orange eyes darting from left to right. From time to time he would stop, and motion for the children to do the same with a curt gesture, and stand motionless, his long ears quavering, studying the air for a sound they alone could detect. Though Ethan was filled with questions, Cutbelly refused to listen to them, or to reply. He would not say how he had been injured, or what was happening in the Birchwood.
“Two thirds of all the shadows you are seeing around you are not real shadows at all,” was all he would say, in a low whisper. “Try to keep that in mind, piglets.”
They looked around; the shadows twisted like smoke, billowed like curtains, dangled like Spanish moss from the limbs of birch trees; then they looked again and all was still. Jennifer T. bumped up against Ethan and they walked that way for a while, shoulder to shoulder, holding each other up as they lumbered after the werefox through the silent woods. Great slow wheels of crows turned in the grey skies overhead. Rain was falling all around. And then they stepped out of the trees, into the clearing where Ethan had met Cinquefoil and the other Clam Island ferishers, to find that the final lines of the first paragraph of the last chapter in the history of the world had already been written.
“Too late!” Cutbelly cried. “Too late!”
The clearing was filled with grey smoke and hissing jets of steam. The turf was trodden and torn. And the Birchwood itself was gone; all the trees had been cut down and apparently hauled away. All that was left of the great mass of tall white trees were splintered stumps and tall piles of stripped branches. The beautiful little ballpark, made from the bones of a giant, lay in ruins, the towers torn down and scattered, the stands collapsed in on themselves. In the midst of the field that had once surrounded the ballpark, churned up in a muddy tumult of earth, lay an overturned vehicle of some kind, a twisted hulk of black iron with heavy leather treads,