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Chesapeake Bay, shipped in a few days before in big wooden barrels filled with shaved ice, and they were kept in the cool dark of the church basement, where the ladies fed them with cornmeal every day, thinking it would make them fatter, and maybe it did.
    They made oyster stew, scalloped oysters with cream and butter and nutmeg—so rich it threatened to stop up every artery almost immediately—oyster fritters, and fried oysters. There was a raw oyster bar, where men shucked oysters and other men slurped them down directly out of their shells, smothered in a sauce so hot it burned your tongue.
    Oysters in a land-locked valley weren’t so much a food as they were a rarity, an exotic way to while away a late summer afternoon.
    There were hot biscuits with country butter, soft and rich gold in color, and corn on the cob, picked that morning, and tomatoes from the vine, and cole slaw and sweet iced tea and lemonade.
    And there was ice cream, two kinds, mixed from Louisa Stephens’s grandmother’s recipe, butter pecan and peach, made with heavy farmer’s cream and sugar and barnyard eggs. It was made the night before by the teenagers of the church, cranked by hand in old wooden barrels packed with shaved ice from the ice man, and rock salt to make the cold set, the boys and girls cranking in turn until their arms hurt and then passing the job on to the next one. Then it was packed in more ice, and wrapped in muslin, and stored in the chill of the basement, and brought out, vat after vat, all day long.
    There was softball in a freshly mowed field in back of the church, and the boys played all afternoon, and in the evening the men played and even some of the women, the ones who had just begun to wear pants and smoke during the war.
    Even the twins came, Elinor and Ansolette Gadsden, old maids so identical that they could hardly tell themselves apart. The line that divided them as people had long since disappeared. They looked alike, of course, the creases in their sixty-year-old faces matched line for line. They also dressed alike and walked hand in hand and finished each other’s sentences.
    When they were young, they were beauties, the old ones said, the people who remembered them as girls, and Elinor and Ansolette still had a certain quality about them, a refinement, that set them apart. Their people, of whom they were the last, the end of the line, because of their stubborn refusal to marry and thus be separated, had lived in the town since the town began. They were highly sought after because they were aristocrats, and because they had buckets of money, and they were the only Gadsdens left.
    It was said that the reason they never married was because they used to tease the boys, changing places now and then, so that, when a hapless young man asked for Elinor’s pledge of marriage, he was met with a peal of laughter, only to find he was reaching out for Ansolette’s hand. They were both called Miss Allie, by everybody in town, and even Boaty Glass treated them with extreme respect and even affection.
    The old ladies played softball. They didn’t field, they just took a turn at bat, once a year, going in turn and striking out at the soft, easy pitches the men threw to them. They swung identically at any pitch that was thrown to them, in their identical dresses, and, in six swings, their athletic endeavors were over for another year.
    But that day, that day in 1948, it was Charlie Beale on the ball field who won every heart. He played tirelessly, with the boys, with the grownups, and it was a thing of beauty. He took off his white shirt, and played in his strap undershirt, so you could see the size and shape of his body, not big, but strong and slender and young, his neck and shoulders rosy from exertion. He had the power and grace of a natural athlete, and the gleam that came into his eyes whenever the ball was near him, or the bat was in his hands, was something to behold.
    He could stop any ball that was hit his way,