ELEVEN
DENVER, COLORADOAgnes sat quietly at the Sunday breakfast table before church, picking at her scrambled eggs, listening to Ramona read aloud the most recent multi-paged letter from her son to the captivated audience of six.
Agnes silently treasured these sessions. She pictured Chester’s vivid descriptions of the raw Nebraska and Iowa countryside and how he gave a complete game-by-game account of how he had played. To date, he had made only one error, collected three outfield assists, and was hitting over .400. The team was teasing him about the “magic bat” as they were calling it. Some players even seemed to think that it was jammed with cork. Agnes could tell that Chester had writing talent, the result of a good education. His sentence structure was excellent. He was expressive a
