Excerpt from The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

For the next seventeen years, Love and Death watched their players. Watched and waited for the Game to begin.

Chapter 2
Friday, March 26, 1937

Beneath a heavy cushion of clouds, Henry Bishop stood in the soft dirt of the infield. The space beyond and between the first two bases was a fine place for thinking. It smelled like cut grass, and the Douglas firs that wrapped around the outfield sealed out the noise of the rest of the world. Henry swallowed, crouched, and socked his glove as the pitcher let loose with a fastball. The batter swung and connected — pok! The ball leapt off the bat and streaked through the infield. Henry jumped and reached, but the ball took its own surprising course past the tip of his mitt.

When his feet touched the ground again, Henry had an epiphany about the rhythm of baseball, and why it meant a damn to him. It was connection. Without the answering swing of the batter, the work of the pitcher meant nothing. Likewise, the fielder's throw found its meaning in the baseman's glove or in the grass. The connection completed the rhythm. Two opposing forces crashed together with their individual desires, creating something unpredictable between them. Triumph. Disaster. Heartbreak. Joy. Baseball was a love story, really. Just a different love than the kind he'd always sought.

His feet touched the grass as the team's center fielder, Ethan Thorne, bare-handed the drive on the run, his long and loose limbs so sure of every movement. Ethan fired it at Henry in time for him to tag the runner dashing back toward second. Henry loved being part of this complicated life-form made from the hands and feet of his schoolmates.

"Nice save," called the coach, who wore a cap, sweater-vest, and necktie that almost cleared the distance from his belly to his waist. "But use your glove, Mr. Thorne. That hotdogging is going to leave you with a busted knuckle."

"Yes, sir," Ethan said. "I thought I'd return the ball faster that way."

The coach snorted and shook his head. He looked up at the sky, grimaced, and scrutinized his athletes. The practice continued a few minutes more, until something in the air shifted. Henry felt it as it happened, this sudden burst of pressure. The rain turned from a light mist to a regular shower, darkening the players' shoulders. Puddles, sizzling with falling water, filled the low spots on the diamond.

Holding a clipboard over his head in a fruitless attempt to keep the rain at bay, the coach blew his whistle. "Hit the showers! Every-one but Bishop."

Henry jogged over and looked down at his coach.

"Usual drill. Bring in the equipment and clean the mud off the bats and balls. Make sure you get them good and dry or we'll have to replace them, and that's just not in the budget." He glanced at Henry's sagging socks.

"Yes, sir," Henry said, half expecting the heat on his face to turn the rain to steam.

A sparrow lighted on the grass nearby and tugged at a worm that had been lured by the pounding drops. The bird cocked its head at Henry, appearing to study him intently. Henry pulled up his socks.

"Once you get this cleaned up, you can go," Coach said. "I'm heading in. It's a mess out here."

Henry nodded and bent to pick up the closest ball. He winged it into a bucket and did the same with the next and the next, never missing a throw, even as he moved farther and farther away from it, creating a steady thup, thup, thupof baseballs as they piled up. Rhythm. Connection. They went where he did, like shadows, like ghosts.

Henry whistled as he worked, the theme from a Russian ballet he'd played in the school orchestra. He lifted his cap to wipe water from his forehead and moved on to the bats, gathering them into bouquets that he swung as he walked. He rinsed them, dried them, and lowered them into a wheeled cart, which he pushed toward the storage shed with one hand as he carried the ball bucket in his other, his face angled away from the rippling curtain of falling water.

Excerpted from The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough. Copyright © 2015 by Martha Brockenbrough. Excerpted by permission of Arthur A. Levine Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.