Treat Us Generously

Jilly was a war baby. Not from the battlefields of World War II Europe and its now shabby cities. She lived in Nova Scotia, on Canada's Atlantic coast, in a small town three thousand miles away from the European front. Yet the war seemed to find her. Every Nova Scotian town is near the ocean, and yet Bridgewater was considered inland, in a way as insulated as eleven-year-old Jilly. The big house in Bridgewater was on a main highway, full of old antiques and plenty of noise, with spoiled uncles running off to Halifax in new cars earned by way of those old-fashioned antiques to where the girls were the prettiest in the province. Yet the war took them away from Bridgewater, and from Jilly, not to a war-torn front, but the far reach of their own country. Except for Skip. Best friend. Tall, handsome, athletic. Shipped overseas to the swamps, jungles, and heat of Burma. And then there is the improbable and contrary sport of baseball. For Skip, an old man of thirty, bent over by disease, torture, and humiliation, all would vanish with a crack of a bat on an extraordinary field far away. Nostalgic and winsome, Treat Us Generously has woven the threads of self-assured young men, a young girl on the inharmonious side of her teens, and baseball, with a war fought not only thousands of miles away, but also at home.