The Grills We Set Up Across the Road
Nobody had an answer. We stood there with the wind coming off the fields and the yard light buzzing over the bus barn.
Then Connie said the thing that changed it.
“You know who I’m going to miss,” Connie said. “The boys on the visiting buses.”
We all knew what she meant.
Some of the schools we play are bigger than us and have money. Some of them are not. There’s a town two hours west, out where the sandhills start, that has about six hundred people and a school that has been consolidated twice. Their bus rides two hours to get to our field.
“Those boys get out of sixth hour and get on that bus,” Connie said. “No supper stop. Their school can’t pay for one, and half of them can’t pay for themselves. I’ve watched them stand at our fence and look at the grill for twenty-two years. Some of them have a dollar. Most of them don’t.”
“We used to slip them something,” Patty said. “When it was slow.”
“We used to,” Connie said. “That truck won’t.”
We stood there a while longer.
“Gary,” I said. “How many grills does the church have in the picnic shed?”
He thought about it. “Two good kettles. The big black ones. And the old barrel one that leaks.”
“Could you haul them?”
He looked at me the way he looks at a fence line he’s about to fix. “On the flatbed. Sure.”
“Then we’ll feed them,” I said. “Not our town. The visitors. For free. Every home game.”
Lori laughed, one short laugh, like she couldn’t help it.
“Deb Schroeder,” she said, “that is the most stubborn Christian thing I have ever heard.”
There were rules, and we followed them, because Jan would not have let us do anything else.
Jan called the state food inspector the next morning. She told him exactly what we planned. Six women, two grills, free food, no money changing hands, not on school property.
“He asked if we’d be selling anything,” Jan told us that night at my kitchen table. “I said no. He asked if it was on the school grounds. I said no. He said, ‘Then that’s a church picnic. Keep your meat cold, cook it through, wash your hands. Don’t charge for it.'”
“And if we put a can out for donations?” Patty asked.
“I asked that too,” Jan said. “He said if the food is free to anybody who walks up, and the can is for something else, that’s between us and our pastor.”
The ground across the road from the football field belongs to Gary’s cousin Dale. It’s a strip of brome grass along the gravel shoulder, and in the summer Dale cuts hay off it. Gary called him.
“Dale says park wherever we like,” Gary reported. “He says if anybody asks, tell them it’s his and he said so.”
We called Mr. Pohlman, too. Mr. Pohlman is the athletic director and the principal both, because our school is that size. He’s a decent man near retirement who has worked under four superintendents and learned to keep his head down.
“Deb,” he said on the phone, “I can’t tell you what to do on Dale’s land. I just can’t be part of it.”
“We’re not asking you to be part of it,” I said. “We’re asking you to let the visiting coach know there’s supper across the road.”
There was a long pause.
“I’ll pass it along,” he said. “But you didn’t hear it from me.”