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“You was expectin’ some young fella, weren’t you, Mr. Corbett?”
“No, I—I really had no idea who to expect…”
“Well, sir, I confess I was expectin’ a young fella myself. So I guess at least one of us was right.”
Chapter 33
MAYBE IT WAS because he looked like a picture of silver-haired wisdom. I just don’t know. But the truth is, I liked Abraham Cross from the moment I met him.
When he shook my hand, he grasped my shoulder with his other hand, so that I felt well and truly gripped.
“From this moment, Mr. Corbett—”
“Call me Ben,” I said.
“From this moment, Mr. Corbett,” he said pointedly, “I am happy to be of service to you as a guide and advisor. With luck, we may also become friends.”
I told him that I felt luck would be on our side.
He offered me a seat on his porch, which had a view of everyone passing along the boards from one end of the Quarters to the other. Abraham greeted everyone—man, woman, child—with a friendly wave and a personal word of greeting. I think if that hairy old boar had come back, Abraham would have waved and said howdy.
Abraham Cross had the way of a man at ease with himself. He wore dark woolen trousers, a neatly ironed white shirt, and a navy blue bowtie. I don’t know if he’d dressed up because he was expecting me or if he dressed this way every day.
On his head was a faded blue baseball cap with the initial P faded to near invisibility. I asked him what the P stood for.
“Pythians,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Weren’t they athletes in ancient Delphi?” I said.
“Well, sir, I may be old but I ain’t as old as the Greeks in old Delphi,” he said, laughing.
Then he explained.
His greatest love in his young life, he told me, was baseball. After the War between the States he headed north, where a few Negro teams played.
“Notice I said they ‘played.’ I didn’t say they ‘flourished.’ Anyways, I made the team in Philadelphia. We was porters and butlers, iron men, lawn mower men during the week. On the weekends we played baseball.”
At Abraham’s nod, I followed him off his porch and toward the little “downtown” of the Quarters.
We were passing the colored general store, Hemple’s, where you could see the canned goods inside through gaps between the boards. By the front door stood a neat pyramid of beautiful peaches.
Abraham reached into his pocket for a couple of pennies, which he took inside to the old man at the cash box. He came back out and selected a nice fat peach from the side of the stack.
“Were you any good?” I asked the old man.
He smiled. He looked past me to a broom standing just inside the door. He asked me to hand it to him.
“You want to know if I was any good?”
He held the broom short, like a baseball bat. Then he tossed that beautiful peach into the air.
He swung.
He connected. Tasting a fine spatter of peach juice on my face, I watched it sail up and up, into the hot afternoon sky.
“Don’t bother to go lookin’ for that peach,” he said.
“I believe it is gone,” I agreed.
