Four Inches

Kabir played cricket in the winter because nobody had told him he couldn’t, and by the time somebody did, it was too late; he already loved it.

He played it alone, in the crescent, with a bat an uncle had sent from India two sizes too big and a tennis ball gone bald, while up the street the other boys played road hockey, which was the correct winter game, the one the crescent had agreed on before Kabir was born. They had asked him to play, once. He had asked them why the net had no back to it, so a goal and a miss looked the same from behind, and how anyone could be sure. They had not asked him again. So he played cricket, alone, and told himself, mostly, that this was the better deal.

The trouble with cricket in a crescent is that a well-hit ball goes exactly one place, and that place is over Mr. Doerksen’s fence.

Mr. Doerksen was retired, and Dutch by way of Manitoba, and had built the fence himself, and kept, under the snow, a lawn he defended in all four seasons as though winter were a temporary thing, which in Saskatchewan it is not. When a ball came into his yard, Mr. Doerksen collected it. This was the oldest law in the crescent.

The tennis ball went over. Kabir walked to the fence.

“Mr. Doerksen. My ball is in your yard.”

“I know.” Mr. Doerksen already had it in his fist. “It’s my ball now.”

“It isn’t, though. It’s my ball. It went into your yard, but it’s still mine. A thing doesn’t change owners just because it rolls.”

“In my yard it does.”

“Why?”

“My yard, my rules.” And he turned and went into his garage, and through the closing door Kabir saw, in the corner, a bucket.

Kabir did not accept my yard, my rules. It was not a reason. It was only a louder way of saying no, and Kabir had spent his whole life declining to be impressed by volume.

So he opened an investigation, the way he opened all of them, which was thoroughly and without any sense of proportion whatsoever.

He got the tape measure from the kitchen drawer. He measured the fence, and the sidewalk, and the distance from the fence to the crack in the driveway that everyone agreed was the edge of the Gill property. He wrote the numbers down in a notebook, because Tyler had taught him that a true thing you write down is heavier than a true thing you only say. He asked Papa what a property line was, and Papa, tired, told him it was an invisible line the government drew that decided whose snow was whose, and Kabir said that sounded made up, and Papa said most important things did.

By the third day Kabir had a case.

“Mr. Doerksen.” He stood at the fence with his notebook. “I measured. Your fence is four inches onto our side. I have the numbers. Which means four inches of your yard is actually our yard, and I think my ball landed in the four inches, so I think my ball landed in our yard, which was in your yard, which was really our yard.” He looked up, pleased. “You’ve been confiscating balls in a place that’s ours. For years, maybe. I’d like all of them back. I brought a bag.”

Mr. Doerksen looked at the notebook. He looked at the boy. He was quiet for a moment, and Kabir felt the specific thrill he felt right before an adult ran out of reasons and the true thing fell out.

“No,” said Mr. Doerksen.

“But the four inches are ours,” said Kabir.

“No.” And he went inside.

This had never happened before. Kabir had taken the ground out from under a teacher, a substitute, a principal, and a whole assembly. He had a notebook full of true numbers. And Mr. Doerksen had looked at all of it and said no, the way you say no to weather, and gone inside, and the no had no hole in it, because it was not made of reasons. It was made of something else, and Kabir did not have a tool for it yet.

He would have to find a different tool. He went home to look for one.