Miss Tulipa looked the colonel hard in the eye. “At the moment, dear, I’m imagining you in his predicament.”

“If you successfully wish laryngitis on me, Tulipa, we’ll have a damnably hard time singing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ in rounds on our drive home.”

That made Tulipa smile. “ Clyde, go get Daniel’s gift from his mother from the car, would you?”

Colonel Elshtain clicked his heels-maybe sarcastically-and left to do as bid.

“Your mama misses you hugely,” Miss Tulipa said. “Good heavens!” A truly bizarre shape had begun to glide out of a tree-lined inlet of Hellbender Pond, and she put a hand to her heart like a movie actress who’s supposed to’ve seen a ghost or a moody mental figment of some sort. Then I reduced the shape on the pond to something familiar.

On a page from the little notebook I carried, I printed, Its just Henry my roomate in his kyyak.

Henry paddled his kayak out of the inlet towards us. His upper body came out of its manhole like a smokestack on an ocean liner. He almost seemed to be wearing the kayak, and it sat so low in the pond, with mosquitoes and noseeums haloing him, you feared it about to swamp or roll. It didn’t, and Henry dipped his double-bladed paddle this way and that with the same hefty grace he swung a clutch of bats in the on-deck circle. He nodded-but didn’t wave or smile-as the kayak slid by. Then he sculled it towards the far shore and headed into a flock of domestic ducks paddling out to meet him. He balanced his paddle on the prow and bombarded the ducks with handfuls of old cornbread.

Miss Tulipa couldn’t get over the sight. “That’s one of those, uh, Eskimo-ish boats, isn’t it?”

I nodded, then tapped a cigarette out of my pack. Before thinking to offer Miss Tulipa one, I’d already lit up. She stared dazedly across the water like a whaler’s wife yearning after her long-gone hubby-then looked back at me with a funny goggle of disappointment.

“Good Lord, Daniel, what’re you doing?”

I wanted to say, If I’m old enough to earn my own money, I’m old enough to smoke, but my youth wasn’t Miss Tulipa’s primary objection. She snatched the cigarette, flipped it to the gazebo’s decking, and ground it out with the toe of an ankle-strap Wedgie.

“You must have mayonnaise for brains, and it’s gone bad in the sun. Nobody with laryngitis has any more business smoking than a TB patient. Do you intend to grow polyps on your vocal cords? To make your condition chronic?”

It’s already chronic, I thought, but I acted contrite and sheepishly shook my head.

Colonel Elshtain returned from the Hudson with my gift from Mama. She’d wrapped it in birthday paper, but the gift’s shape told me it was either 1) a fishing pole, 2) an ax handle, or 3) a baseball bat. If pressed to guess, I’d’ve marked 3) with the smart-alecky confidence of a guy with a crib sheet.

In fact, Mama had sent me a bat, another Red Stix model. I peeled it free of its paper and swung it a few times. Swinging it gave me a peculiar heart twinge.

“Coach Brandon wanted you to have it,” Miss Tulipa said. “He gave it to your mama as soon as he learned you never got to use the first one in a real CVL game.” With a tender smugness, Miss Tulipa watched me swing the red stick. “Doesn’t Daniel look like a hitter, Clyde?”

“He is a hitter-his average proves it. But what he most looks like to me is a combat infantryman.”

“Behave yourself, Clyde.”

Out on the water, a duck settled on Henry’s shoulder. He fed it by hand. The ducks on the pond flapped and quacked like unbribed city councilmen.

“We look forward to seeing you play at shortstop.” Miss Tulipa stepped inside the arc of my biggest swing and kissed me on the forehead. “That’s from your mama.”

A clatter arose from the pond. Two or three of Henry’s ducks, including a green-capped mallard, beat their way aboard the kayak and assaulted Henry himself.

“Don’t be greedy!” he yelled. “Monsters!”

The mallard got to Henry’s head and began to tread him with the zest of a feathered Romeo. In self-defense, Henry knocked the mallard into a side-spin, grabbed his paddle, and purposely rolled his kayak. The ducks scattered, veering off towards the far shore or gooney-bird-walking the ruffled cocoa scum to what their BB-shot brains assumed a safe distance. Henry, with pure upper-body strength and the torque on his paddle, righted the kayak in a fountain of glittery spray.

Impressive. Colonel Elshtain gave Henry a half-bow and very lightly applauded his feat.

“Care to join me?” Henry called, hair and face dripping and the kayak itself streaming.

“Only as spectators this afternoon!” the colonel shouted back.

“Ah, but the water wonderfully refreshes one on a day of such oppressive heat.” Henry paddled towards the chokegrass and red-clover lawn stretching from the gazebo to the water.

“This afternoon,” Miss Tulipa said to me, “get a hit or two for your dear friends from Tenkiller.” That request made, she and the colonel retreated to their sister-in-law’s house before Henry could reach the shore.

The game that Saturday, the first of a three-game series with Opelika, started at five. A Fourth of July twin bill, with a barbecue in the parking lot as a special attraction, would conclude the series on Sunday. Anyway, after beaching his kayak and upending it on a pair of sawhorses near the buggy house, Henry dressed out and walked with me to McKissic Field about three hours in advance of the game.

Already, three funeral-home tents covered the barbecue pits dug on the south side of the stadium. At least a dozen workers-some black, some white-stoked the pits with hickory, oak, and charcoal. Meantime, the headless carcasses of three slick porkers sizzled in the pits, and a smell a thousand times more tempting than the one from Goober Pride rose above the canopies and the gunk-encrusted Brunswick-stew pots.

“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Henry said. “Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to abide pork.”

Maybe so, I thought, but when you were with the Oongpekmut, you ate walrus, seal, sea lion, and beluga flesh. None of that fishy offal could’ve smelt half as good as our barbecue.

The closer we got to the stadium, though, the odder Mister JayMac’s preparations for the Fourth began to seem. Carpenters had built ramps from the parking lot to the concessions area and from there to the box seats behind our dugout. Just out of Tenkiller, Oklahoma, I’d never seen a boardwalk in my life-rickety piers didn’t convey the same flavor-but, looking back, I’d say these ramps had a lot in common with a promenade among the dunes at a beach resort. Mister JayMac’s workers had used sheets of plywood instead of abutting planks, though, and the crowd’s footfalls echoed like the hooves of cattle. Is this a ballpark or a lumberyard? I wondered as Henry and I entered. You could still hear hammering, and the whole deal seemed such a helter-skelter rush job it mystified-and irritated-almost everybody.

Mister JayMac met us near the batting cage.

“What’s going on?” Henry asked, nodding at the ramps and at the place where the carpenters had built a barricade and hung a sign: NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS BEYOND THIS POINT.

“Temporary renovations,” Mister JayMac said.

“Why would you wish to renovate temporarily, sir?”

“That’s none of your damned business.”

Henry looked stricken. “Pardon me,” he said sincerely.

“Loose lips sink ships,” Mister JayMac said. He rolled out the bromide as a kind of half-assed apology, but quickly turned on me. “Well, I see Tulipa’s given you your bat, Mr Boles. And a handsome, gaudy piece of timber it is. Too bad you won’t have a chance to break it in today.”

My surprise showed on my face.

“Put it in that rack,” Mister JayMac said, pointing to the dugout. When I’d racked my bat, he said, “And put your fanny to that plank.”