The Shoebox Full of Box Scores

“It matters,” Travis said.

“I know that now.”

He looked at the clipping in my hand. “What’s that one?”

“The state game,” I said.

He held out his hand again, and I gave it to him. He read the box score first, out loud, because I think he needed to.

Lost 3 to 2. Albrecht, two for three, a double in the seventh. Then he read the margin. He read it to himself first. Then he looked up at me.

“I was here, bud,” he said.

Nobody in that room moved.

“You were there?” he said. “At state? You came to state?”

I took my glasses off. I folded them up and put them in my pocket, because I could not see through them anymore anyway.

“The last inning,” I said. “I was raking first crop on the Hanson place that day. Sixty acres, cut on Tuesday, dry and ready to bale. The game was on the radio, and it was tied up in the fourth, and I just shut the tractor off at the end of a windrow and walked to the truck and drove. I didn’t even go home and change.”

It was ninety miles to the ballpark in St. Cloud. I told the room I did not want to say how fast I drove, and the sheriff’s deputy at Jenna’s family’s table laughed and covered his ears.

“I got there in the top of the seventh,” I said. “The lot was full. I parked on the grass by the road. I couldn’t get a seat, so I stood behind the fence down the left field line, with my seed cap on and alfalfa all over my jeans.”

“I saw a guy out there,” Travis said slowly. “In a seed cap. I thought he was somebody’s grandpa from the other team.”

“That was me,” I said. “You doubled in the seventh. Off the wall in left center. It went right over my head and I couldn’t holler, because I didn’t want you to look over and see me and lose your head. Then the next kid flew out, and it was over.”

“Why didn’t you come find me?”

“There was rain coming,” I said. “That hay was down and dry. If it got rained on, it was ruined, and that was most of what the neighbor was paying us that year. So I watched you shake hands. And I watched you hug your mother. And I got in the truck and drove home and baled until two in the morning with the headlights on.”

I could feel the room looking at me. Dale from our church, a dairy man, was nodding slowly at one of the back tables. He has put up enough hay in his life to know what sixty acres on the ground with rain coming means.

“I wrote that the next Wednesday,” I said. “When the paper came. I couldn’t think of anything else to put.”

Travis looked at the clipping for a long time. Then he did something I did not expect. He put his arms around me, right there at the microphone in front of Jenna’s whole family, the box squashed between us, and he held on.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he said into my shoulder.

“Don’t be,” I said. “You told it right. You just didn’t have all of it.”