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the very first tree we’d come to was just loaded with cherries, though it was corn-stubble season, so I was sure, now, that I was asleep. But I sat down with them anyhow, watching as the ones who could climb began dropping sweet black cherries down to the old ones and little ones who couldn’t. And when I caught a cherry finally, and slipped it in my mouth, its taste and my body and Papa’s voice and the people and tree all began to make that whole and perfect sense which nothing ever seems to make by day.
How can there be a cherry that has no stone?
the music asked, and at once I saw the mama silhouette picking pits from the cherries.
How can there be a baby with no crying?
it asked as she passed the pitted fruit to her infant, who made no cry as it sucked the sweet juice.
How can there be a story that has no end?
it asked as we all leaned back against rocks and tree trunks and let the cherry juice and song go humming all round and through us. Then I remembered it must be Papa still making the music, it must be his voice we still heard, alone and outside our world somewhere—and I looked around at my friends, the silhouettes, afraid that, should he grow tired and end the song, our whole sweet world would end too.
    But then I felt his real hand on my real head, felt his gray eyes watching me, though my eyes were closed. And he sang every last verse again.
    And then again.
    And unless I dreamed it, yet again.
    W hen I woke it was hot, his bed was empty, it was Sabbath, and downstairs I could hear the Yankees and Indians already going at it. So all of that, more or less, is how I came to be sitting here in the situation I’m calling an Underhanded Miracle. Maybe most people won’t think a Miracle should include bad or wrong things like Papa and Mama’s fight or Papa’s dead thumb or his eight beers in it. But take a close look at Jonah’s whale or Balaam’s ass or Peter’s cock crowing three times and you’ll see that every one of those Miracles happened when Jonah, Balaam and Peter were doing a wrong or bad thing. So maybe this Underhanded Miracle of my family scattering every which way, leaving me to watch baseball and fish with Papa on Sabbath, is kind of our whale, and maybe it’ll spit us out and put us back together even better than before.
    Or maybe it won’t. How would I know? Either way it’s Cleveland 3, Yankees 1, and soon as this game’s over we’re heading up the Wind! So
concentrate!
    ·  ·  ·  ·
    S tengel has finally stopped smelling his fingers and faking signs. With two out and one on in the eighth, it’s no big secret that Mantle will be trying to bust fences. The Mick takes a ball, then takes another, and when Mudcat Grant stops to yell at the ump, Papa says he doesn’t blame him. He says both pitches were sliders thrown so close to the outside corner that Mantle couldn’t hit them and the ump couldn’t tell what they were. But inside every ump, Papa says, is a baseball fan, and for some reason baseball fans all love Mickey Mantle, so the fan in the ump called them balls.
    Mudcat fires a high fastball next, for a called strike. Then he throws a low fastball—and in a split second you can see why everybody loves Mantle. One instant he’s just standing there like any other yokel, but the next instant his body coils and explodes, and even through the TV you can hear the sweetest kind of bat-crack as the ball gets golfed to Kingdom Come. While it’s sailing toward the bleachers, though, and Pee Wee is going apeshit about how hard it’s hit, Papa just mutters, “Strike two.” And I notice Dizzy huffing and puffing like the wolf that blew the little pigs’ houses down, because he knows it’s foul too, and is trying to blow it fair.
    “FOUL BALL!” hollers Pee Wee about two years after we realized it.
    “Jammed him,” Papa says.
    “Jammed him,” says Diz.
    Papa grins.
    I like Dizzy Dean a lot. I suspected I would even before I was ever sick enough to get to stay home from