vel with a baseball game that Reuven is playing in against a school of Hasidic Jews. Reuven pitches against his soon-to-be best friend Danny Saunders, and is struck in the eye with a line drive propelled from Danny’s bat. Reuven is taken to the hospital where he has surgery to remove a shard of glass from his eye that was driven in by the devastating blow to his face. It was this incident that made Reuven appreciate his ability to see much more than he had previously. The glass in his eye could have caused him to become blind which scared Reuven. This is evidenced by his saying, “I tried to imagine what life would be like if I had only one good eye, but I couldn’t. I had just never thought about my eyes before. I had never thought about what it might be like to be blind” (Potok 52). While in the hospital, Reuven has a roommate named Billy. Billy was very young and was to have special surgery to try to repair both of his eyes, which were damaged in the car accident that killed his mother. Reuven discovered that the surgery was unsuccessful and that Billy would be blind for the rest of his life. Reuven felt Billy’s pain and thought about how fortunate he was to have been spared that fate.

Every harvesting season, Luke goes with his grandfather (whom he calls Pappy) down to the highway to pick up some hill people from the Ozarks who are looking for work. In this group of workers there happened to be a young man by the name of Hank Spruill who would change the way life was in the small town of Black Oak while he was there. Hank was a very large, menacing character that intimidated Luke for the time he was there. On one Saturday, the day the whole family goes into town, the Spruills came too. Usually there are little scuffles behind what the townspeople call the Co-op. On this Saturday, Hank was involved in a fight with the Siscos, a notorious family known for fighting. Hank beat one of the Siscos so badly, that he eventually died from a fractured skull. Luke witnessed all of this. Later, he was questioned by the local sheriff and was forced to lie for two reasons. First, he was afraid of Hank, and second, he did not want Hank to be arrested and have his family leave, making the Chandlers do all the work by themselves. If he told, “The Spruills would lick their wounds and pack up their ragged belongings. They’d move down the road to another farm where they were needed and appreciated, leaving us shorthanded”(Grisham 75). So he told the sheriff that Hank beat the Siscos in self-defense, which was partially true, until he picked up a board and started beating them with it.

Reuven truly felt the pain and suffering of Danny after he was told that he could not continue his friendship with Danny because Reb would not all

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