Free A Quality of Light by Richard Wagamese Page B

Needed. But no, you come out with Laughing Dog after the Dietzes’ mangy collie. I hated that dog. Not because he was such a bad pooch. Just on principle.
    But you know the funny thing? Whenever I go back there in my mind, I always remember the night more than I remember the day. You and your dad dropping me off at the house and my dad coming out to the porch all sloshed and angry. I hated that son-of-a-bitch right then. Not that his drunkenness or his anger was foreign to me. I’d been through that inning lots. But that night man, I was filled with light for the first time. Light, Josh. Your parents, that day, the way I felt around you and the way we both latched onto the idea of the game. And secrets. When you live the way my mom and I had to live, you get used to having secrets. You just can’t share them with anybody. Not even each other, even though it’s the same life. They become evil somehow. Like you’re trapped by them but at the same time, you know that letting them out will trap you even more.
    Too bad. Kids and secrets should be indivisible. The world of kids is filled with a lot more magic and mystery than the world of adults, and you pretty much have to have secrets so their grown-up sense of reality can’t wash away the magic. Sharing your secrets is all part of the kinship inbeing a kid. And suddenly, I had a secret and someone to share it with. Someone to trust. Everything was filled with light and I was too. It was like the feeling you get coming out of a long tunnel in the road. It’s so bleak and dark and chilled in there, you think it’s a permanent condition. Then the light hits your eyes so suddenly you blink. You think you’re going blind because the intensity of things is too much and it takes forever for your mind and your eyes to register color, shade and texture. Dazzled. You get dazzled by the light. You Christians call it rapture, I think. Us warriors call it getting vision. Either way, it’s the world and Creation opening up its inner life to you, spooking you some by its radiance.
    That’s what I felt that day. Spooked but hopeful. Hope was a precious commodity in our house, so I clung to the little I had like the proverbial reed. And then him. Of all the things I never had and all the things he took away, I hate him most for taking away the light that day. When I walked away from you and your dad and into that house, I felt like I was walking back into the tunnel. The world, my world, closing in on me with all its shabbiness, dinginess and darkness. I quit crying over that bastard sometime in Toronto but I cried that night. For me. My mom. For the light. Funny. That’s what I remember most about that day. Crying. It felt good.

    K eeping secrets demands routine. Johnny and I began practicing baseball every chance we could get and that demanded a strict regimen of movement. For me it meant that my schedule of school, study and chores remained the same while I fit baseball into the corners of my life. Johnny, who had far more free time, began coming out every evening after school with his bike crammed onto the schoolbus. We’d chat with my mother for a few polite minutes and then head to my room with peanut butter sandwiches to leaf through the baseball magazines and cards we were collecting on the sly.
    We analyzed everything. The players in the magazines were critiqued for their proper or improper body alignment. The statisticson the cards were computed and the players rated for their efficiency or lack thereof. Science and math. We were becoming eloquent in our unraveling of hidden meaning, motion and application. We knew from the Ted Williams book, for instance, that more bat speed meant more power. Using the hips generated more speed and follow through. We knew that everyone has a sweet spot, a place in their strike zone where the most power could be directed into the ball, and that higher batting averages could be had for learning your high and low contact zones. We knew that