He was a member of a good South Carolina family, but his own branch of it had been impoverished. From his high school days the burden of self-support had rested on his own shoulders, and, as a result of this necessity, he had accumulated a variety of experience that few men knew in the course of a whole lifetime. It seemed that he had done everything and been everywhere. When Monk first knew him at college, he was already twenty-two or twenty-three years old, several years older than most of the students, and in experience twenty years older. The range and variety of his brief life had been remarkable. He had taught for a year or two in a country school. He had shipped for a year’s cruise on a freighter out of Norfolk, had been in Rio and in Buenos Aires, had gone up and down the whole Ivory Coast of Africa, had made the round of the Mediterranean ports, had known and “had” women (he was given to this kind of boasting) “on four continents and in forty-seven states of the Union.” He had peddled books in Summer through the sweltering grain states of the Middle West. He had even been a traveling salesman for a period, and in this capacity had “been in every state but one.” This was Oregon, which was, of course, the state where he had failed to “have” a woman, a deficiency which seemed to trouble him no little, and which he swore that he would remedy if the good Lord spared him just a little more.
In addition to all this, he had played professional—or “semiprofessional”—baseball for a season or two in one of the mill towns of the South. His description of this episode was riotous. He had played under an assumed name in order to protect as best he could his amateur standing and his future as a college athlete. His employer had been the owner of a cotton mill. His salary had been $150 a month and traveling expenses. And for this stipend it had been his duty to go to the mill offices once a week and empty out the waste paper baskets. In addition to this, every two weeks the manager of the team would take him to a pool room, carefully place a ball exactly in front of the pocket and two inches away from it, and then bet his young first baseman $75 that he could not knock it in.
EVEN AT THE time when Monk knew him first at college, Jim had become, for the youth of two states at any rate, an almost legendary figure. The event which sealed him in their hearts, which really gave him a kind of immortality among all the people who will ever go to Pine Rock College was this:
Twenty years ago, one of the greatest sporting occasions in the South was the football game which took place annually between Pine Rock and the old college of Monroe and Madison in Virginia. They were two small colleges, but two of the oldest institutions in the South, and the game on Thanksgiving day was sanctified by almost every element of tradition and of age that could give it color. It was a good deal more than a football game, a great deal more than a contest between two powerful championship teams, for even at that time there were in the South better football teams, and games which, from the point of view of athletic prowess, were more important. But the game between Monroe and Madison and Pine Rock was like the Oxford-Cambridge race along the Thames, or like the Army-Navy game, or like the annual contest between Yale and Harvard—a kind of ceremony, a historic event whose tradition had grown through a series that had lasted even then for almost twenty years and through the associations of two old colleges whose histories were inextricably woven into the histories of their states. For this reason, not only for hundreds of students and thousands of alumni, but for hundreds of thousands of people in both states, the game upon Thanksgiving day had an interest and an importance that no other game could have.
The greatest team Pine Rock ever knew was that team they had that year, with Raby Bennett, back, Jim Randolph hinged over with his big hands resting on his knees, and Randy Shepperton crouched behind the line calling signals for the run around end. Jim could run only to the right; no one ever knew the reason why, but it was true. They always knew where he was going, but they couldn’t stop him.
That was the year that Pine Rock beat Monroe and Madison for the first time in nine years. That was the year of years, the year they had been waiting for through all those years of famine, the year they had hoped for so long that they had almost ceased to hope that it would ever come, the year of wonders. And they knew when it came. They felt it in the air all Autumn. They breathed it in the smell of smoke, they felt it in the tang of frost, they heard it coming in the winds that year, they heard it coming as acorns rattled to the ground. They knew it, breathed it, talked it, hoped and feared and prayed for it. They had waited for that year through nine long seasons. And now they knew that it had come.