Butterfly Winter Read Free Page A

would shine through, and the big, lumbering boys would get word to their neighbors, and by the second evening of his visit there would be almost enough players for a side of baseball.
    Then Sandor would spring the trap. He would mention the last area that he had visited, five, or ten, or fifteen miles away, and he would mention how
they
had taken to the game, and how they had formed a team and were waiting only for a challenge.
    When he moved on he would leave behind a precious ball, after painstakingly demonstrating to his converts how to re-cover it. He might also leave behind a bat, or he might simply show them how to hew a bat from a sturdy piece of timber. On rare occasions he would actually see the competition through, choosing a site, scheduling the contest, acting as umpire.
    He learned early on that the main objections to his mission would be on religious grounds. Sandor was quick to realize that pioneers, facing unbelievable hardships, often clinging to life and sanity by the thinnest of threads, needed not only to believe in the supernatural, but to believe the supernatural was on their side. Sandor realized too, that these primitive peoples lacked the sophistication to realize that there were many and various manifestations of the supernatural, Sandor Boatly himself being one.
    Since he was often mistaken, on first contact, for a circuit rider, Sandor took to carrying a heavy, leather-Bound bible. He learned toquote the passages that urged the listeners to make a joyful noise and celebrate life. He never claimed to be a minister, but if his dress and demeanor intimated such, he found no reason to deny it.
    If requested, he could conduct a brief nondenominational service of a Sunday morning, after which he would bring out his baseball equipment and retire to the nearest meadow with the men and boys. Even the most pinched and pious farm women could find no fault with a hard-working pastor who regarded baseball as a sinless pastime for a sunny summer Sunday afternoon.
    Occasionally, Sandor stumbled into a situation where a minister was clearly needed. He was known to pray with vigor over the terminally ill, preparing them for passage to the next world, easing that passage. When called upon he conducted funerals, baptisms, even an occasional marriage, though he loathed the intolerance of most Christians. “Christianity is the only army that shoots its own wounded,” he said in one of his last letters to his sister, Evita.
    As a boy he had heard or read that
it matters not what qualifications one possesses, but only that one look the part
, words that would have a profound effect on the many lives of Sandor Boatly. For instead of planting trees as a legacy, he planted the joy of baseball in several thousand hearts, and, as a seed grew into a sapling, then a tree, and eventually into a forest, so his own efforts multiplied over the years until baseball was everywhere in America, like the trees and the rain.
    Sandor worked his way as far west as Wyoming, before heading south, touring Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, crossing several Southern states before finding himself in Florida—Miami to be specific.
    Though he had never lived in a truly warm climate he always sensed deep in his bones that the natural state of the universe was endless summer, though he had only heard rumors of its existence. He had heard of places where the grass was eternally green, where snow was spoken of with nostalgia by people who had not endured it for years. But Miami, and Florida, that tropical green finger with the angelic aura of white sand, was so perfect, so magical, the possibilitiesof baseball so endless, that its mere existence almost caused Sandor to acknowledge the possibility of a God.
    What he discovered, something that disappointed him to no end, was that in Florida he was not a pioneer, for baseball was well known, played in every park, school yard, and vacant lot. Only in the farthest backwaters of the Everglades could he