The Trophies Cutler Took Back From the Curb
My father built the store in 1979 with a $4,000 loan, a used cash register, and a lot of nerve. He was 34. Tate Hardware was where everything in the county got known. You could buy a hasp and a half-pound of roofing nails, and you could also find out that old Mrs. Wexler’s well pump had gone out and somebody ought to take her a jug of water.
The Little League came in 1984. Truman Wexler, her son, was on the town board, and he had no money for a trophy case and no building to put one in. “It goes in my window,” Dad told him. “Where people can see it.” He cleared the Christmas village off the left half of the glass and built three oak shelves that same weekend.
Every September, when the season ended, a new trophy went up. Then Dad did the part nobody asked him to do. He bought a small brass plate for every boy on the team, 14 names, 17 names, whatever the roster held, and set them into the base at his own expense. The bench boys. The boy who got a hit once. The boy who cried when the ball came at him and played right field anyway.
“Why do you do the little ones, Dad?” I asked him once. I was maybe 12, helping him dust.
He ran a rag over the batter’s gold cap. “Every kid ought to see his name on something,” he said. “Somewhere he doesn’t have to explain it.”
Over 40 years, that made more than 600 names. I counted them on the workbench Thursday night.
My father’s shop sits behind the house at the end of Birch Street, a cinderblock building with a roll-up door and a fluorescent fixture that buzzes. I carried the boxes in and laid the trophies across the bench the way you’d lay a baby down.
I wiped each one with a dry towel. The sun had bleached the gold off the south side of a few. One, from 1996, had lost its bat at the wrist, and I stood the little figure on the bench with its empty hands up and looked at it.
Then I got out a legal pad, and I started reading plates.
1984. Jerry Underwood, pitcher. 1985. Bart Egan. Darrell Kimbrough. 1991, Marty Hollis, Most Valuable Player, who now runs the co-op. 1996, Luis Mendoza, whose father had come up from Texas to work the feedlot and who now owns the meat locker on Second Street. 2004, a boy I had babysat.
I worked until nearly midnight. The rain drummed on the roof the whole time.
Somewhere in there it came to me that in a town of 1,640 people, every one of those names had a mother or a wife or a brother in my contacts. My father had spent 40 years making sure every link had a plate on it.
I did not call anybody yet. I wanted to hear from my father first.
Friday morning I drove to Kearney with the smallest trophy in the pocket of my coat.
It was a tin cup, the cheap kind, no taller than my hand, with a gold plastic ballplayer on top and a brass plate that read Most Improved, 1988. Quentin Pelham.