For two hours, my lassitude held my wrath in check; then, thinking on your love of our sport and your cruel abstraction from it, I recalled that just as Michelangelo had said, “It is only well with me when I have a chisel in my hand,” you had once averred that you felt most alive when wearing a fielder’s glove or gripping a bat.

This recollection goaded me from bed. I believe I may have howled. I forsook the still, hot rooms of McKissic House. I quitted the equivocal revelry of my teammates (men somewhat more enkindled by our victory than abashed by your ill fortune) and directed myself through the twilight to Cotton Creek Street and the clapboard dwelling of Linda Jane Hoey and her four children. It had occurred to me that Ligonier Hoey, unlike other Gendarmes, had a local home to which to retire. There his wife and helpmeet would welcome him, commiserate over his season-ending loss, and absolve him with laughter and kisses of any complicity in your becripplement. This conjectural domestic scene, so tender and so unjust, heaped faggots on my rage.

As I strode, dogs of all types-spaniels, blueticks, rodent-faced mongrels-left their porches to defend their shabby fiefdoms and harry my passage. Heedless, I strode on, preparing myself for a head-to-head affray with the miscreant I had once counted teammate and friend. When a hound of umber eye summoned the brass to bite my heel, I twisted it up from the walk by its hackles, and flung it simpering into a pack of like-minded dogs trailing me along a holly row. The cur landed amidst its kindred, scattering them in girning panic. At length it scrambled lamely away into the shrubbery. I continued, impervious to the cruelty of my act and the mayhemic dimensions of my humour.

In the spacious confines of Alligator Park, I slowed my step, intuitively detecting a hint of what could lie in wait not only for my prey but also for me. I spoke one word aloud: “Atonement.” The silhouetted planks of some teeter-totters, primitive machines for the fabrication of joy, calmed me with their offset diagonals. I must bank the coals of my anger, I reasoned, and confront Hoey as one sane and well-intentioned being to another. When I knocked on his door, his youngest son-your fortuitous namesake, Daniel-opened it and gazed up at me as if from a trench.

“Jumbo’s here!” he shouted. “The biggest man in the world! The mostest homers in a season!”

Linda Jane Hoey appeared behind young Daniel, wearing a look of commingled charity and exasperation, as if a black-sheep uncle had intruded on a private celebration. I was not beloved of Mrs Hoey; my size and mien discomfited her. At every home game, she had held herself and her children frostily aloof, fearing perhaps that, if vexed, I would treat of her offspring as I had just treated of that vile dog. Before I could ask for her spouse, exasperation decided Mrs Hoey’s rejoinder to my unsolicited appearance.

“Buck’s family needs him tonight, Mr Clerval, and he needs us. What do you want?”

“Only a word or two. Let me see your husband and I will quit your neighbourhood as soon as we settle between us a certain important matter.”

“What matter?”

Whereupon, quite like an immaterial phantom, Ligonier Hoey disclosed himself and pulled both Linda Jane and young Daniel from the door. Barefooted, he stood before me, his chin outthrust-how must I put this?-gladitorially.

“Do for you, Clerval? Pretty late to drop by on a social call. I’m not much in the mood.”

“I scarcely wonder,” I said. “In trying to thwart our final double play, you acted with undue aggression. I fear you meant fo inflict injury.”

“Didn’t!” young Daniel said loudly. “Didn’t either!”

Hoey commanded his wife to withdraw along with young Daniel. When she had obeyed, be said, “Screw you, Jumbo. My motto’s play full out and don’t cry in your beer if you draw to a busted flush.”

“To date, playing full out hasn’t resulted in your utter incapacitation,” I observed.

“Look, what do you want? Crocodile tears? A written apology?”

“Buck, your dinner’s getting cold!” Mrs Hoey called. “Can’t you discuss your problem later?” The brunt of this plaintive inquiry was meant, I felt, for me.

“I have no later here in Highbridge,” I told him. “On Tuesday I leave for Philadelphia.”

“Congratulations,” Hoey said churlishly. “Rub it in.”

“What I want includes not only an acknowledgement to your hapless victim-”

“Hey, Dumbo was hopeless-I mean, hapless-long before I got to him.”

“-of your crime against him, but, yes, a written apology for the Herald, and monetary reparations for his blasted career.”

“Buck! Buck, come onnn!”

The miscreant shouted over his shoulder: “For God’s sake, woman, let us talk! We’re going for a walk to hash it out!” He stepped onto the porch with me and pulled the door to with an emphatic bang. I could not determine if be harboured more asperity for me or for his wife.

We walked side by side into Alligator Park. The dogs that had beset me earlier shunned us now, barking only tentatively. Hoey and I ended in the playground where the shadows of teeter-totters still laid an incongruous calm upon me. For an instant I believed that Hoey and I would discover not only an accord about his guilt but also a cure, Daniel, for your disability. We stood beside a metal slide-recreational equipment that had escaped scrapmetal requisitioning-weighing our provisional arguments,

“In any championship game, a real competitor goes for broke,” Hoey said. “He brawls for every advantage. I won’t apologise for that, Jumbo. You’ve got no right to ask me to.”

“Limits exist,” I said. “Today, however, to salve your lacerated pride, you robbed Daniel Boles of any chance of realising the most important goal of his life.”

“Jesus, I didn’t notice you dogging it. You powdered one off Sundog Billy. You stretched like fucking Plastic Man to take Dumbo’s last throw.”

“In neither case did I cripple a rival. Or strive to inflict any wound more distressing than defeat.”

“Horseshit.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I said, Horseshit.”

“Your dogged refusal to admit culpability pisses me off. Continue thus and I may well have cause to thrash you an inch shy of extinction.”

“You’d like to beat the shit out of me?”

“You’ve proved yourself conscienceless.”

“Listen at you. Hank Clerval, the pacifist, wants to whip my brains into a meringue.”

“I do. I do indeed.”

Hoey regaled me with a contemptuous fleer. “Well, try it, you highfalutin tower of Jell-O. You hypocrite. You’re no better than me, Jumbo-not deep down anyways, where the stinking rats of envy screw.”

“I ache for Daniel, for all the acne-ridden soldiers. I despair of their futures.”

“Worry about your own. Them guys in the bigs’ll eat a lummox like you alive. And you’re so ugly, even success up there won’t guarantee you any nookie. Zat why you’re upset I put my spikes in Dumbo’s jewels? Fraid you’re gonna have to get you a new little gal-boy?”

“Have a care.”

“Or is it the other way round? You’re a real pirate’s chest of secrets. The crap we don’t know about you, why, it’d fill an encyclopedia.”

Hoey anticipated neither the fury of my outrage nor my lunge. My left hand encircled his neck, compressed his topmost vertebrae towards his Adam’s apple, and dragged him over to a pair of shaggy sycamores on afar margin of the playground. Hoey fought, but I had effected a one-handed cloture of his windpipe, which muffled his protests and vitiated his exertions. A leopard caching a springbok-so imagine me as I clambered into the larger of the sycamores and wedged Hoey between two of its branches. My conscience had left me, nor did it soon return.