A Quality of Light by Richard Wagamese Page A

that any distance that may have existed between us was now shrunken, diminished and spare. He grinned, waved and walked his bike slowly to the porch, where he turned, waved and disappeared into the darkness of the house.
    “My friend,” I whispered.
    Every night for those last two weeks the four of us gathered behind the equipment shed for batting practice. Soon, both Johnnyand I were connecting solidly and regularly. My dad moved beyond the rail fence and stood in the alfalfa field and my mother moved back a step or two for her lobbed pitches. Johnny and I compared notes endlessly as we hit. We knew that we needed to stay motionless in the batter’s box, that any degree of motion hindered the necessary transfer of energy into our swing. We knew we had to find the optimum height for our elbows in order to snap our hands out fast. We knew our hips were essential to our swing. We knew all of it, and once again the particular magic of baseball transformed the science into joy. As our swings leveled out and we began to hit with power and precision, we cheered and my parents cheered too. We were hitters. I was a natural line-driver and Johnny was a belter, a pure and wonderful machine that could uncoil itself effortlessly and punch holes in the sky with a baseball. Time after time my dad raced backwards as Johnny’s bat arched another long flyball deep into our alfalfa field. Each time he looked at me with blue eyes blazing and I had that odd sensation again of falling through the sky.
    “Just like Ted Williams,” he said. “I told you, didn’t I?”
    “Yeah. You did.”
    “Now I know what the answer to baseball is.”
    “What’s that?” I asked.
    “Love.”
    “Love?”
    “Yeah. You gotta love it,” Johnny said.
    “No science?”
    “No.”
    “No math?”
    “No.”
    “You just gotta love it?”
    “You just gotta love it.”
    “Johnny?”
    “Yeah?”
    “I think you’re gettin’ it,” I said.
    “Dreamer.”
    “Ditz.”

    T
hey sent me to camp one summer when I was eight. They were always sending me somewhere. I got dropped off more than junk mail. But that summer they actually did me a favor. I got to this camp, not knowing what to expect or even why to expect it. It had this hokey name. Camp Mi Ma Ho. Can you believe it? I’ll never forget it. It was perched on the shore of this little lake in the Muskokas and had all these cute little A-frame cabins that were supposed to look like teepees. Keeping it all in theme, you know? Anyway, they had a program that was designed to introduce us all to the ways of the Indian. Their idea of the ways of the Indian was canoeing, fire starting and storytelling around the fire. We also got our faces painted, put on dyed turkey feathers, waved small wood-and-rubber tomahawks and danced around the fire to some taped powwow music. It was all very sickening. I stuck to myself and read mostly. After a week the counselors knew that I was a hard sell and pretty much left me alone.
    They had this little library in the main cabin. Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew
, Treasure Island, Peter Pan,
the usual stuff for kids. But they also had a book called
Indians.
That’s all, just
Indians.
I opened that book and I was gone.
    Sometimes in life you never know that you’re searching for something until that something reaches out and grabs you. Well, I’d been needing some
thing
for as long as I could remember. My life had more holes in it than a right-wing argument. Anyway, this book was magical. Today I’d call it bullshit, but for a city kid who really needed to
be
something, it was the key to the door. There were stories in there about the Indians helping the pilgrims survive and the first Thanksgiving, about them being brave and loyal guides for the fur traders, warriors, vision seekers, hunters, fishermen, and there were pictures that showed the romance of everything. Suddenly, all I wanted to be was an Indian. A warrior. When you grow up like I did, all your dreams involve being the