Butterfly Winter Read Free

“The field is not enclosed. The possibilities are endless. There is no whistle to suspend play, there is no clock to signal an ending.”
    “Look! Look!” he must have repeated the words a thousand times that fateful afternoon. And when the game ended, the little family drifted dreamily away from the ballpark, the odor of fresh cut grass still in their nostrils, gauzy memories of plays that were and plays that might have been mingling in their minds.
    It was Sandor’s father who, as they walked toward home on the gritty streets of Providence, Rhode Island, articulated the essence of baseball.
    “When,” he asked his son, “may we return to this land of dreamy dreams?”
    While his father remained a lifelong fan, Sandor Boatly dedicated his life to baseball. Instead of becoming a priest, as many of his boyhood friends did, Sandor Boatly became an evangelist of baseball, a Johnny Appleseed, who instead of flinging apple seeds in rainbow-like arcs as he walked the fields and backwoods of America, carried a strange and wondrous canvas sack across his shoulders so that at times he looked as though he was bearing a cross. The sack was filled with baseball bats, hand-carved from hickory, crafted withlove to last forever, by men who knew and appreciated the feel of a smooth and sleek weapon, which like a gun, became an extension of the holder. The sack also contained baseballs, horsehide, hand-stitched with catgut, hand-wound by people who knew what they were building.
    The day he turned fourteen, Sandor Boatly refused his father’s offer (it was more of a command) to become an apprentice glazer and contribute to the family finances. Sandor set out on his mission, which was to introduce the magic of baseball to those who did not know of it, or if they did know about baseball, to teach them to regard it with the reverence it deserved.
    On foot, Sandor moved across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and eventually made his way to the plains of Iowa and Nebraska, where like a true evangelist he spread the word of baseball to the scattered multitudes.
    Along the way he abandoned his name, for he found it took too much time to explain his ancestry, his recent history, his roots, for people were forever wondering if his family might have traveled to America with their family, plumbing the depths of their memories for common ground.
    “Call me whatever you like,” Sandor said to his multitudes, which, on the prairies, consisted often of a single farm family, dirt farmers living in soddies, some living in virtual caves built into the sides of hills. Sandor would thump at the gunnysack-reinforced door of a soddy. The pale face that answered would shade its eyes from the sudden glare of the prairie. He was often mistaken for a preacher, for he dressed in black broadcloth, wore a wide-brimmed hat, and, as soon as he was able, grew a bushy black beard.
    After introducing himself, though not always his mission, for the tough pioneer women tended to frown on sport of any kind as frivolity, Sandor would find his way to where the men were working. He would pitch in and work side by side with the farmer and his sons, picking roots, or pulling stumps, perhaps carrying rocks to a homemade stoneboat, or walking behind an ox as it pulled a plow.
    At the end of the day, by the fading rays of a low sun, or as the plains horizon flamed like prairie fire, Sandor would open his magical sack and toss a ball to a burly farm boy in work pants too short and clodhopper boots awkward as wood blocks. The three or four or five of them would lay out a rough diamond, perhaps using a barn wall as a backstop, if the homesteaders were fortunate enough to have built a barn. Sometimes there would be stumps for bases, with stringy trees in the outfield.
    Often the only clear land would take in a slough, full of frog grass and cattails, where inches of water lay hidden under seemingly innocent greenery. But no matter the obstacles, Sandor’s enthusiasm