The League of Berries & Laurels: Book the First - First Chapter (Pt. V)
Continued from:
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“What were you all doing that day, the one pictured? It looks like perfect fun.” Concurring in this, they, in Indian style seated, regain the enthusiasm of moments before their elder’s significant reflection.
“Listen now of a tale of long ago, when ages had not visited here, and a boy I was, and at home. These domains you are raised in, I too was born into, to be brought up in the values implicit in the arbor and shore, and happily at that. Time before, the expanses offered greater passage where now merest sidewalks are tamely to be travelled. At that time, in my own youth, ample crops still grew in rows around many homes, and the greatest estates were not kept separate by fences high. My closest friend, rivals even to you, Ulie, and J.J., was a confident, strong fellow, named Dardanelles, and he or I would daily call taunts from the large yards between the homes. Our respective home alike in that they were of the grand, Victorian style, different in every accessory else, stood prominently on plots indivisible. Our shouts from midway where the yardage verged, would bring us from the home to look down, or over from the porch, to where the other stood in the little green stuff growing all-around, stick or football in hand. Taunts as good as evocations, then to go from porch to porch together and gather our friends for sports, stickball, football, and the like, we would, until the teams were full and evenly divided according to skill; even until we had spectators of the younger sort, unable to rank among our might, yet did they our sport attract. Spectators younger than us were by our ability ever enthralled. This day in and day out habit drew us to a grainy clearing, where passed the chaff to stream in golden light, and passed our day, once those cicada stricken columns, containing the sun’s damask, tilting all, toppled each to night of no vestige.”
“So those fields are where this picture was taken,” Ulie marvels. “And the game that day ended in a violent squabble wherefore only common recognition of the symbol, like you mentioned, brought peace to the brotherhood after a decisive and contested play at the plate.”
“No, you see, what is called a surmise, a good guess, you are over hasty in concluding. Think, albeit you boys have often taken the train into the city and also far away, knowing no day without its passage, how we felt when what was once pasture undisturbed was then graded for those rails. We with many years behind, fewer ahead of us, did not all always hear that whistle through the air. The shuttle to advance our age, it, the locomotive, did not always separate estates, Dardanelles’ from my family’s own. Know this, the pitcher we thought eternal always stood with canny study fixed upon his face, his shadow ever altering as the day made our fields the dial of the bright orb’s progress through its immutable arcs and angles. The batters stood postured, not in idleness, but watchful, and with restrained might, seeing how the start of the pitcher’s movements carried into a ball in flight. So action compels a due response, whether in the throw’s descent, crafted to deceive, which meets the bat at an ideal angle and sends it far, or in the unseen capacity of that great nation of ours. The burly lines breaking up, the throw by a quarterback would meet the outcast hands of another, a receiver on his route, only for he that held fast the ball to be decimated an instant later by a tackle directed along the muscles of the linebacker from hip through connecting shoulder. Counting stars, the dead is offered hand, helped up, embraced, and shown into the huddle. On and on, these forms, chorused in perfect competition, ruled our days. By the looks upon your faces, I see you have forgotten, as we had, and could not guess, that in the height of my boyhood, they inevitably began to lay the tracks between our homes. Our games suspended, we watched from the ravine as the lines were unloaded and brought up to those toiling with implements of labor, pickaxes, great machines, and the progress invested there divided our estates with the new-built tracks of a train, ties all conjoined to steel.” As graced prophets once took their tea-leaves for portents, the narration seeks reinvigoration in the pour from the kettle of steam and liquid fine. At that moment, as they ponder this, unnoticed due to the salience of the sound, an issue from this same line whistles faint. “Day by day the train began to charge, and our loss appeared inextricable from the general gain, for the one great mass divided, west and east, such that those nearer the lake remained loyal to me, those toward the seat of the sun in the evening to Dardanelles.”
“The railway’s means? Mean you to say the tracks and ties one summer suddenly made a boundary where once was only open yard?” A summer’s oneness, made two, sounds more a mutilation than the simpler making of moiety, such is the preeminence of the season, and such the memories seems to Ulie’s understanding.
“Yes, and east or west our once singular bands discerned more their loyalty in the west, or mine, the nearer side to the lake. You share no such quandary, but then the division ruled allegiances.”
“You say you were better friends than Ulie and myself,” J.J. stands to say, with much to say, and much, too, running over his mind. “But Dardanelles and you let this simple obstacle create disagreement, how?”
“Now with an excuse, it seemed better to leave simplicity aside, and to martial our powers, asserting each that we were stronger, bolder, because no longer did we seek the other at the outset of day, but marshaled those on our respective sides to follow us and prove the better, more esteemed, group. Revering those builders of the nation Roosevelt described, we aspired; aspiring resolved we to leave behind our trifles mundane.”
“What happened to the league in all this time? What origin does this photograph contain?”