Rain, rain, my lady,
Fell o’er my heart and o’er my soul.
A floodplain, my darling,
Like Noah’s storm the waves did roll.
But like the prophet I heard a voice
Sweet and mild, a clement zephyr,
And I built an ark for two, my love,
On which we shall sail safely, forever.
Reshawn immediately marked the similarities between the poem and the fight song—“Reign” and “Rain,” the same jouncing music of the lines, the use of “forever.” He spent the next days researching the fight song’s origins and learned its author was one Samuel Ginty, a King professor of rhetoric. Ginty was an old man by the time he published the song, old enough that his alma mater had been known as Triune College when he attended it, old enough that he had been in the same graduating class as Jedediah King. It was difficult to imagine Samuel not knowing about—if not interacting regularly with—CSK when the slave accompanied his master to Triune’s campus, and Reshawn believed the King fight song was an appropriation of the love poem written by CSK, which in turn meant our team’s chant “King King motherfucker!” was a bastardization of a bastardization.
It was precisely the intellectual adventure for which Reshawn had so yearned, whole mornings and afternoons and evenings doing nothing but reading scanned newspaper articles and searching for more clues to Carmichael King’s life. And yet no matter how far his dark library room might have stood geographically from King’s sun-blasted practice fields, Reshawn still hadn’t been able to stop football from coming into the library with him, couldn’t stop the game from sitting down in the chair next to his and restlessly tapping its foot, waiting for him to acknowledge what he was supposed to be doing, where he should be.
Arnold Duffy might have been respectful about giving the McCoys their space during their time of need, but he was far from the only journalist to learn Reshawn had left camp. The phone rang repeatedly at the McCoy house in Archerville, and though Senior and Ali said no, they didn’t want to comment, the journalists had succeeded in interviewing the McCoys’ neighbors, Reshawn’s old high school teachers and coaches. And this wasn’t even the biggest source of stress. The McCoys had been receiving two checks a month from Mr. McGerrin, one on the first and one on the fifteenth. Reshawn had fled Blenheim on July thirtieth, and as a show of good faith, as a sign he believed this was just a temporary blip, Coach Zeller had allowed the first August payment to go through. But the fifteenth was fast approaching, with Reshawn still in Georgia, and the night finally came when Zeller called to say his patience was at an end; the next check would remain unwritten until Reshawn returned to King. Reshawn knew Ali and Senior had come to structure their whole lives around those checks—grocery runs, mortgage payments, Ali’s physical therapy and her medications—and when Reshawn told them the next check wouldn’t be coming and they should start making a contingency plan, his mother had had to get off the phone, she was so upset, while Senior stayed on the line and, for the first time since Reshawn had come to King, lost his temper. What, exactly, is so hard about your life in Blenheim, son? Is it the free tuition? The complimentary food and clothing? Or is it the free housing and textbooks? Are your grades a single point lower than they’ve ever been? Do you really think you could get those things—that you can get anything in this world—without working for it?
—I couldn’t stop crying after I got off the phone.
You’re not half as smart as they say, Reshawn—you fucking idiot, you fucking fool. His bedroom was next door to Grayson’s, and Reshawn sobbed so hard Grayson came to check on him. Reshawn confessed everything: his falling-out with football, his father’s business failure, his mother’s diagnosis, the bribes, his hatred for Coach Zeller and the team. It was good to get all of this off his chest, but Reshawn knew he wasn’t confessing merely for confessing’s sake, it was also a last-ditch attempt to escape the game. He hoped Grayson would interrupt and tell him there was still a way out, some academic scholarship Reshawn could get from King. But Grayson did no such thing. When Reshawn finished talking, Grayson told him about his own time as an undergraduate at Williams College, another elite, expensive school where he had taken out the same loans Reshawn would have to take out, loans that had led to two decades of crushing financial stress before Grayson managed to pay the last of them off. And though he made the point more gently than Senior, Grayson also came down on the side of staying in football, of viewing the game as just a job—and not even a permanent one, at that. Only, what, eight or so years? His mother would be taken care of, Reshawn would still be a young man when he left, he could count on a superlative recommendation from Grayson whenever, forever. Reshawn nodded and dried his face, thanked Grayson for talking, and spent the rest of that night in bed wondering if he should sneak out and drown himself in the Savannah River. But by the next afternoon he was on the road again, driving north.
—Zeller told me McGerrin’s sending the check tomorrow.
That was the last thing Reshawn told me that night. We had been in our Marriott beds the whole conversation, lights off, and when Reshawn finished he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. I wanted to ask where the hell my car was; but that could wait.
It doesn’t matter how great an athlete you are, if you miss two weeks of training in the torrid August heat it’s going to show, and when Reshawn made his return to practice the next day he must have felt like he was
