Catcher

Catcher:Two Herman Beavers (bio) When I see him, Daddy is 25 and sitting on the front steps of the old house on Tecumseh, years before the tornado, years before you could die at the hands of a 12-year old with a 60-year old heart. He is oiling his catcher's mitt with blood, the leather darkening to a skeptical shade of midnight, dark as cheap Dago Red in Palermo, Padua and Turin; thinking back to those days, he stops oiling, pauses long enough so I feel the exuberance and embarrassment of 25, that feeling of wanting more than my hands could ever hope to hold spreads across my chest. When he goes back to oiling the mitt, caressing it, knowing what he and it will do (the way he'll nab the throw from short to tag Amos Jefferson out at the plate), the question rings through my head: will I ever give anything, any one, this kind of love? Would a woman's thigh, her naked shoulder blazing like a flame under a bush, be the eye gone blind made whole? Daddy looks up from his work, his gaze drifting past me to take in [End Page 1052] a pair of high heels, stockings, a skirt so tight, one night'd be worth thirty years and he's saying, "You know how I'm using this blood? She won't never understand." Herman Beavers Herman Beavers is author of Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of James Alan McPherson and Ernest J. Gaines. Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies, Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama, Cross Connect, and Peregrine are some of the anthologies and periodicals where his critical articles and poems have appeared. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Copyright © 2005 Charles H. Rowell

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