Venable Park. Tom Flynn

ever toss you in the stockade?”

      “Never once, sir.”

      “Ever get away with something they should have thrown you in the stockade for?” I would not trip on that one.

      “Never once, sir,” I repeated.

      “How are you with the shovel?” he asked.

      “I use it every day at the mill and used it just about every day in the service. I haven’t had a problem yet and have dug myself some fine holes,” I said, a little proud.

      He kept looking at me, staring. I was solid enough, and no big belly to slow down the shoveling. After a little while his eyebrows rose up just a little in a good sort of way, if that makes sense.

      “Okay, then. Fill in this sheet and put it in the box there,” he said, waving at a little box at the corner of his desk like it was in another room because his desk was so big. “Then go out the way you came in, turn left, and head to the far side of the entrance. Harold’s over there, and you’ll know who he is.”

      He said that as if it was a question, wondering I bet if I even knew what Mr. Spector looked like, which I didn’t. I filled in the paper as fast as I ever wrote anything, even with my hand shaking, and I put it in the box.

      “Thank you, sir.”

      With that I was out the door before he could get in another question, and turned left. Sweat was running down my forehead now like it was the middle of July.

      4

      Sometimes something easy comes after something hard, and sure enough it turned out it was real easy finding Reginald’s father. Both are about 6 feet tall I’d say and thin as a wire. They look damn near the same except his dad’s hair was all gray and his face is a little pulled down from the years weighing on it. I walked up towards him, and he stood waiting for me. Reginald must have told him what I looked like.

      “Henry,” he said, more telling than asking, and holding his hand out to me.

      “Yes sir.”

      “You get the job?”

      “Well, I got directions to where you are, and here you are, so I think I might.”

      “You tell them you was my apprentice?” he asked.

      “That’s what I told them.”

      “They think that was funny or peculiar?”

      “He was expecting me to be colored, and I wasn’t, so that was peculiar for him, I suppose. It wasn’t for me.”

      I looked around because it sounded funny, and after all that business inside, I was looking for a laugh, so I let out a good one. Mr. Spector couldn’t help it either, so only a minute into things and we were laughing hard. I figured that was a good start. But a white man and a Negro laughing hard together at a job during working hours is a swell way to get fired, so we covered up pretty quickly.

      After the laughing I was out of words, having said more so far today than I might after two days at the Point. Fortunately Mr. Spector was not the standaround type. Without another word he handed me a shovel, and we got to walking up the ramp on that side. It was mighty high and took you clear up to the top of the stadium.

      What was waiting for me at the top, I will have trouble describing, given my limitations, but I will try. Down to my left at the bottom of the hill was the greenest field I’d ever seen. It was all mowed in lines, and there wasn’t a speck of dirt down the middle. I do believe it had just been cut and the grass was almost shining. Around it was a cinder track for races like I imagine you might see in the Olympic Games.

      If that wasn’t enough, circling the outside of the track there was more of the greenest grass, and circling that a concrete wall about five feet high that was done up like it was stone or marble. Hell, maybe it wasn’t concrete at all. It had little rectangular designs in it and the wall was like a frame around everything. You have to understand that at the mill the only things they built was for working, and you just didn’t see anything like this. I am not the type of fellow to say this, but it was beautiful. I almost fell forward down the hill just looking at it all.

      Reginald’s dad saw me, and since it was still just me and him, he didn’t hustle me on immediately like he might have had to if somebody was watching.

      “Like the front lawn of Paris out there. Worth all this work,” he said, stepping up next to me to look longer at something he must have seen every day.

      “Hard to imagine,” was all I could come out with.

      We had our moment looking at it, and then it was time to turn back the other way. The grass was green as clover, but the slope that ran out from the stadium was altogether different. First off, it clearly had done some settling since it was built because there was spots that just sank like something heavy pressed on them, but nothing had. Down at the bottom of the slope, was a little house that in its way was as nice as the front gate, only small and not as grand. Turns out that it was a ticket booth, of all things, just about as nice as you could picture it being. Our job for today was working the slope above it.

      “If we just let it be, this whole hill would be down on top of that booth,” Mr. Spector said, pushing his hands forward to give the picture of it going down. “We need to work on this slope, keep the grass steady, and hope that someday it’s just a hill without much help. Right now it’s a pile of dirt, and it wants to get back down to where it came from.”