And yet…You have to find your way home and he will need you to be his daddy and Dear Luther and most important…Your wife.

Your wife.

He looked back at the letter. He unfolded it again. Held it taut between his fingers.

You have to find your way home.

Yes, ma’am.

Dear Luther.

Dear Lila.

Your wife.

Your husband.

BABE RUTH and the WHITE BALL

CHAPTER twenty-four

At noon on the fifteenth of January, 1919, the United States Industrial Alcohol company’s molasses tank exploded in the North End. A vagrant child, standing beneath the tank, was vaporized, and the molasses flooded into the heart of the slum in waves three stories high. Buildings were heaved to the side as if by a callous hand. The railway trestle that ran along Commercial was hit with a scrap of metal the size of a truck. The center of the trestle collapsed. A firehouse was hurled across a city square and turned on its end. One fireman perished, a dozen were injured. The cause of the explosion was not immediately clear, but Mayor Andrew Peters, the first politician to arrive on the scene, stated that there was little doubt terrorists were to blame.

Babe Ruth read every newspaper account he could lay his mitts on. He skipped any long stretches where words like municipal and infrastructure were commonly used, but otherwise it tickled him to his core. Astounded him. Molasses! Two million gallons! Fifty-foot waves! The streets of the North End, closed off to automobiles, carts, and horses, stole the shoes of those who tried to walk them. Flies battled for pavement in swarms as dark and thick as candied apples. In the plaza behind the city stables, dozens of horses had been maimed by rivets that had flown like bullets from the exploding tank. They’d been found mired in the muck, neighing hideously, unable to rise from the sticky mess. In the middle of that afternoon, forty-five police gunshots punctuated their execution like the last blasts of a fireworks show. The dead horses were lifted by cranes and placed on the flatbeds of trucks and transported to a glue factory in Somerville. By the fourth day, the molasses had turned to black marble and residents walked with their hands pressed to walls and streetlamp poles.

Seventeen confirmed dead now and hundreds injured. Good God—the looks that must have been on their faces when they turned and saw those black waves curl up by the sun. Babe sat at the soda counter in Igoe’s Drugstore and Creamery in Codman Square waiting for his agent, Johnny Igoe. Johnny was in the back, primping for their meeting with A. L. Ulmerton, probably going too heavy on the petroleum jelly, the cologne, the toilet water. A. L. Ulmerton was the big cheese of Old Gold cigarettes (“Not a cough in a carload!”) and he wanted to talk to Babe about possible endorsements. And now Johnny was going to make them late with his showgirl fussing in back.