Wrapped in Rain(50)

She nodded and looked like she couldn't quite understand where he was going with this.

"Miss Ella, I didn't have gold, so I built this for you." He pointed to his right, and there, farther down the pine-straw path, stood a cross sunk into the earth and standing about twelve feet tall and seven feet wide. Built out of fat lighter, hand-sanded, and polished to a bright finish, the post and crossbeam were ten inches square and showed no seams. It was as if the tree had grown that way and Mutt had just polished it. Miss Ella couldn't believe it. She rushed forward and clasped her hands together, and big tears welled up. She placed her hands against the wood, afraid to touch it, and then looked up. For several minutes she just stood there touching the wood as if a body really hung there. When the tears dripped off her chin, she hit her knees and leaned in. For several minutes, she clutched it, marveled, and whispered to herself.



"Matthew," she said, holding his hands with both of hers, "thank you. I have always thought this is what it would look like. You have created the one in my head. It's the nicest thing anyone has ever given me." Mutt nodded and turned to leave. "Matthew?"

He turned, and she stood up and reached into her apron.

"I had this made for you. I've just been waiting for the right time." She held out her hand and placed a polished piece of flat granite, black as onyx, about the size of a polished river stone, into his. On the front she had had carved one word in deep block letters: "Matthew." He rolled it around in his hand and traced his fingernails through each letter. "Mutt." She placed her palm against his cheek. "For when the voices lie to you. To remember." He nodded, wrapped his fingers around the rock, and slid it into his pocket. After that, she spent a lot of time at the foot of that cross.

From there, Mutt's story is a bit of a mystery, because I didn't see him very much. I was playing baseball every waking minute, and my brother disappeared. We would discover later that he spent a lot of his time riding trains. Hoboing. From what I could gather, I think he rode from New York to Miami to Seattle and back without ever buying a ticket. I suppose it was his way of seeing the world without being seen. And the more I've thought about it, the clackety-clack rhythm of the tracks and the change in scenery soothed his mind.



I'm not sure how I turned out so different. I've thought about it a lot. The assumption there is that I'm somehow fundamentally different from Mutt. I'm not so sure.

When I turned four, Miss Ella gave me a baseball and bat for my birthday. I had never seen a bat, so I didn't know what it was. "What's this?" So she showed me. And I picked it up pretty quickly. From then on, every morning, noon, and evening, "Miss Ella, will you throw to me?" "Miss Ella, can we hit?" "Miss Ella, can we ... ?" Surprisingly, she did. A lot. "Child, if it will get you out of this house so you'll quit tracking in mud and dirt, I'll throw all day."

With only one baseball, and Miss Ella needing to work, Mutt and I improvised. We picked up chert rocks and hit them out over the quarry. It wasn't the best thing for a wooden bat, but it kept us out of the house and we could hit all day and never run out of balls. Pretty soon Mutt started side tossing, and I learned to push and pull the ball at will. Like making the choice to hit it to right or left field. By the seventh grade, I was cracking the rocks. Eighth grade and I could crumble them into little pieces. In ninth grade, I pulverized my first chert rock. I still remember the cloud of dust that washed over me and the smile on Mutt's face. "I hope you don't want that one back," he said. "If you do, we're going to need more than just superglue."

Because we wanted to hit day and night, Mutt mounted spotlights inside the barn, and we set up home plate in the middle and the pitching mound up against the back wall. It didn't take me long to start poking holes in the boards at the back of the barn. After the first month, it looked like a jagged piece of Swiss cheese. Rex got really mad when he first saw it. He reached up, tore down a piece of the cypress, bent me over a feed trough, and blistered my backside. I didn't care; it was worth it. I just kept right on hitting.



The summer between my ninth-and tenth-grade years, Southern Liming heard about Waverly Hall and planned an eight-page spread titled "The Rebirth of the Southern Plantation," which I found odd given the fact that Waverly was nothing of the sort. Rex loved the attention, so he flew in, whipped the staff into shape, laid on the pomp and circumstance, and postured some more. I was in the barn, swinging my bat, trying to stay out of the house and away from him, when one of the photographers noticed the back side of the barn.

I was alone, hitting a single ball tied to a string looped over one of the rafters. The photographer saw me, saw the holes in the back of the barn, put two and two together, and said, "You do that?"

I nodded, not wanting to make conversation, happy without the company. He set up his tripod inside the barn, at deep center field, and started measuring the light. I put down my bat, climbed up in the loft, and watched with curiosity. The photographer, who looked like he was wearing a life vest stuffed with every imaginable gadget known to man, kept walking back and forth, measuring the light and looking for the right perspective. He snapped about a roll's worth of film, but after thirty or so minutes, he started getting frustrated because the holes in the wood were really distorting his readings. Light didn't shine into the barn; it swirled around and through it. He didn't see that, but I did. I guess that's when I began to notice how light created images.