If the pitch has become worn, with loss of grass, it may be said to be a dry wicket. This surface usually allows for faster bowling, but it also benefits the batsman, in that the bounce is truer and spins are less effective. A wicket that is especially dry, however, may develop cracks that can be particularly useful to a clever spinner.
in the Blue Mountains of Australia, I woke up before my father. I tried to get the fire started so I could maybe cook breakfast, but I could hardly get it going since the wood was so wet. I had to wait until he got up. He mumbled something and then he got it started like the wood was dry as could be, because that’s what someone who’s put in his time in the U.S. Army can do. He cooked bacon and powdered scrambled eggs and we ate them, and we didn’t talk much. We listened to the screeching birds overhead, and the water everywhere, and the wind in the high eucalyptus branches. Then we got all the stuff together. My father loaded most of it into his backpack.
That was our last morning in the Blue Mountains. I remember the air got the bluest it had ever been that afternoon, when we were climbing out. And then we got in the Jeep and drove back to the city.
I cried.
We still hadn’t told the girls.
I almost did the next Saturday afternoon. I almost did. I was standing with the Butler and watching Charlie at her soccer match, cheering her on as she ran up and down the field. Sometimes she kicked at a ball that was flying past her, but she never touched it. She mostly talked to one of the girls from Ellenville Elementary until they both just sat down and pulled at the grass.
When she came off the field, she asked, “Did we win?” and I hugged her hard.
On Sunday morning, the Butler and I took Emily out to breakfast because she had spent Saturday afternoon not at a soccer game but with the dentist, who had filled a cavity. So she wanted something special too now, and the Butler said we would go to a nice restaurant where they did not serve Ace Robotroid Sugar Stars, and Emily said she wanted Mom to come with us, but the Butler explained that she wasn’t feeling quite up to that and we should go along to leave the house quiet for her. So we went—I drove the Eggplant, by the way—and the Butler ordered steel-cut oatmeal with whole milk for all of us—“Shall we splurge and have cranberries on top?” he said—but after he ordered I said I had to go to the bathroom, and I found our waiter and asked if he could put Ace Robotroid Sugar Stars on top instead of cranberries. “Of course,” he said. And that’s what he did.
Emily squealed when she saw them. It had been a while.
“You have defiled the oatmeal,” said the Butler to the waiter.
“Orders are orders, bud,” said the waiter. He nodded at me.
Emily got up and hugged me. “You are my favorite brother,” she said. “Can you be my Favorite Person of the Week in school?”
I hugged her back.
The Butler did not leave a tip.
In the afternoon, we all drove to Spicers U-Pick Apples. I drove again, sitting on a cushion to give me greater height: “We would rather not attract the attention of uniformed officers who may not look kindly upon your automotive skills,” said the Butler. My mother sat in the back, pretty stiff, holding Annie, Emily, and Charlie with a death grip.
“Mr. Spicer,” said the Butler, “seems to be troubled by both a deleted apostrophe and an infelicitous abbreviation.”
“What’s infelicitous?” said Emily.
“The noxious result of not attending to one’s grammar,” said the Butler, “which, of course, will afflict no one in this automobile.”
We picked three bushels of apples, and then Emily and Charlie decided that picking bushels of apples was boring. The apple stand was selling Dreamsicles and they didn’t cost all that much, and the two of them had already helped pick three bushels of apples, so couldn’t they . . .
I went with Annie and Emily and Charlie to buy Dreamsicles, and after they’d finished getting orange hands and orange lips and—for Emily and Charlie—orange shirts, I helped the Butler carry the three bushels to the Eggplant.
The Butler drove home. He said the girls could sit up with him after a proper washing of hands and face—which they did in the water fountain—and then they squeezed into the front seat and he wrapped the seat belt around all three of them.
“That’s probably illegal,” I said.
“I have met the principal of Longfellow Middle School,” said the Butler.
“How’s that going to help?”
“One never knows how one’s associations may prove invaluable at unexpected moments,” said the Butler.
I sat in the back and my mother took my hand.
Her hand was cold.
“Do you remember the last time we picked apples?” she whispered.
I nodded.
“Remember how Currier . . .” That’s all she said. That’s all she could say.
We drove home holding hands, and the green marble was in my pocket, and all I could think about—all we could think about—was Currier biting into an apple one fall day not so long ago, and him finding a worm and spitting it out, and then holding up the apple in one hand and the worm in the other, laughing, the rest of us wanting to throw up.
“I bet you couldn’t find a worm, Carter,” he said.
“You win,” I said, and he laughed and laughed and laughed.
Monday morning, I told my mother I was going to articulate the British perspective on the Declaration of Independence.
“Really?” she said.
“Yup,” I said.
“What are you going to say?”
“That the Declaration of Independence was a marketing scam.”
A long pause. “A marketing scam?”
“Yup,” I said.
“Do you think Mr. Solaski will be okay about this?”
“It’s his assignment,” I said.
“How do you think everyone else in the class will react?”
“They’ll figure out I’m trying to think objectively in order to discern and express truth instead of parroting centuries-old propaganda,” I said.
My mother looked at me. “Sure they will,” she said.
Annie and Charlie and Emily and I got in the Eggplant to drive to school. Emily could hardly wait to get there because she was going on a field trip to the Marysville Fire Station.
“That will be splendid,” said the Butler.
Charlie was giving a report on E. Nesbit, who was now her favorite author in the whole world.
“Proving,” said the Butler, “that we are all capable of growing into discerning readers.”
Annie was trying out for the fifth-grade girls’ football team during her gym class.
“You mean soccer team,” I said.
“Football,” she said. Then she smiled at the Butler, who smiled back in the rearview mirror.
“Exactly right,” he said. “And young Master Carter, what does this day hold for you?”
“I’m about to tell my class that we shouldn’t have become independent.”
“Quite right,” said the Butler. “Think of the advantages if you had remained a colony and never taken up rebellion.”
“Like what?”
“You would not only have learned how to speak the language properly—as, for example, the avoidance of abrupt and inelegant sentence fragments—but you would have discovered the glories of cooperation while at the same time becoming aware of the calming properties of a good tea.”
“Probably they didn’t care too much about tea while they were fighting the American Revolution.”
“Perhaps in a rebellion, that would be so,” said the Butler. “In the midst of great anxiety and great sadness, it takes an honorable man to nourish the goodness around him, small and fragile as it may seem.”
“Is that one of those things you say that’s supposed to mean a whole lot more than it seems to mean at first?”
“It is one of those things that a lifetime of reading Dickens and Trollope would annotate. But given the literary limitations of an American curriculum, we should be heartened that experience and the wisdom that comes from it—as well as an adherence to decorum—are good tutors.”
I looked at the Butler. “That still sounds like you’re trying to convert me into a gentleman.”
“Thank you,” said the Butler.
And that’s how I went to school that day: wondering what was so good about stupid adherence to stupid decorum.
By the way, I’d stopped watching for an email from my father. I guess I knew it wasn’t coming.
Probably he didn’t know what stupid decorum was either.