With slow deliberateness he stepped forward, watching as realization dawned in Belamae’s face. He saw shame pass to surprise, to wonder, then to delight. That last came as little more than a faint smile, not unlike the surface of the stone steps they’d just climbed.
Relief held in his prodigy’s eyes more than anything else, though. And he liked the look of that. It made every moment of remembrance and backaching work bent over his table worth the pain. But there was still an emptiness in the boy. He could feel it, like the reverberating resonance felt in the head of a tightly covered drum.
As he stared at Belamae, the right thing to do occurred to him. He extended the viola to him again, as he’d done what seemed like many cycles ago. Belamae tentatively reached for the instrument. But before his student could take it, Divad whipped it around and brought it crashing down on the hard oak surface of his worktable. The viola strings twanged, the spruce split and splintered, the body smashed into countless pieces, and the neck ripped in three parts. The soundboard he’d labored over lay in ruins. He felt a pinch of regret over it.
But his own loss was nothing compared to the shock and horror that rose on Belamae’s face. It looked like the boy had been physically wounded. His mouth hung agape, his hands held out, palms up, as if beseeching an answer to the violent, incomprehensible vandalism.
“My boy,” Divad said, his voice softly intoning some reason to all this. “Won’t you help me collect the pieces. We’ll see what’s salvageable.”
“Maesteri?”
Divad smiled warmly. “Instruments can be mended, Belamae.” He tapped the lad’s nose. “Come. We’ll see about this together. I’ve decided I rather like this part of instrument care.”
He began to hum a carefree tune, as they gathered in the shattered viola.
I’ve never shied away from admitting that my work is connected to the trials of the real world or to the journey of my life. Indeed, I consider writing my way of making sense of the world, my—if you will—spiritual journey. My characters are sounding boards. I put them under pressure, bounce impossible situations against them, and in a weird way try to learn from their reactions.
Writing also gets me through the dark times. With this particular short story, however, there was yet another dimension added to that psychological mix: putting some of my own emotional baggage to rest.
I was an athlete growing up, but in the sandlot. When the movie of that name, The Sandlot, came out, my old pal Rusty called me up and said, “Bobby, you have to see this! It’s us!”
And it was. We played more baseball growing up than any kid in Little League today. Every single day, we came home from school, threw our books on the table, grabbed our gloves and bats, and rushed down to the open lot at the back of the cemetery. Four of us would play “hit the bat” for hours at a time. Hundreds of swings, hundreds of catches, hundreds of throws.
Life was good.
Then we had to go and play—or “perform”—for the adults, and life was not so good. I was a shy kid, and due to circumstance, I wound up with a coach in a less-than-ideal situation. One thing led to another, to another, to another. The coach humiliated me in front of the team, and it just went downhill from there.
So I quit. I did. And it hurt like hell. And it hurt more when I saw the crestfallen look on my Dad’s face.
So I resolved to fix it. When Babe Ruth tryouts came around the following year, I got up to bat and knocked the adult who was pitching right off the mound with a line drive. I hit one off the right field fence. I left the field dancing on air. I had nailed it.
And I didn’t get drafted. In essence, my baseball “career” was over.
I never understood it until years later, when my barber, who had a son a year younger than me, told me that my Little League coach, who had moved up that year with his sons, had blackballed me at the draft. I was a troublemaker, you see, and so the coaches crossed me off their draft list.
The profound idiocy of an adult doing something like that to a little kid haunts me to this day. I was incredibly shy, but I was also top of my class academically, never in trouble, and could play baseball, football, hockey, and basketball pretty well. In the sandlot, I was the team captain, the pitcher, the diamond quarterback…in the organized world, I was intimidated by the scowling, judgmental adults, and had gotten on the wrong side of a vindictive man indeed.
I don’t know how different the rest of my middle and high school years might have been except for this one incident (no, I have no illusions that I would have been a pro athlete!). The kid I threw passes to (because I had a better arm) in the sandlot became the star quarterback of the high school team. My aforementioned friend Rusty starred in baseball in a small college.