The Seat I Saved Every Saturday

The coat was brown canvas with a corduroy collar gone shiny from wear. On the left elbow there was a patch my wife sewed on crooked in 2019, and I have never once told her it was crooked.

I laid it across the seat on the aisle in row seven and smoothed the sleeves flat, the way you would for a man lying down to rest. Then I set my thermos on the aluminum between my boots.

It was the tenth time.

Nobody asked about it anymore. That is one of the things I noticed that last Saturday, with the sun bouncing off the bleachers and the band tuning up on the track behind the home side. In the beginning, everybody asked. By the tenth game the whole town of Beech Run, Ohio, had worked out what that coat was doing there, and people walked around it the way you walk around a sleeping dog.

My name is Marv Mattingly. I am sixty-six years old. I ran a road grader for the Washington County engineer’s crew for thirty-four years, and I have been retired for two.

I am not a man who does sentimental things. Ask anyone. My wife says I once got misty at the grocery store over a sale on charcoal, and that is a lie, but it shows you what kind of reputation I am up against.

So I want to explain how a man like me ended up folding a coat onto a bleacher ten Saturdays in a row. It started with a handful of words in a parking lot, and I did not know I was taking them seriously until I had already done it.

The lot behind the armory

Our son Nate is twenty-nine. He is a sergeant in the Ohio Army National Guard, and for eleven years the Guard was a thing he did one weekend a month and two weeks every summer. It felt like a hobby. It felt like a bowling league with better boots.

He fixes trucks, in the Guard and out of it, at Dill Brothers Truck Repair down on Route 7, where the owner says Nate can hear a bad injector from the parking lot.

Then in June a letter came. His unit was being mobilized and sent overseas. I will not tell you where, because he never told me more than he was allowed to, and I have never asked him to.

It would be about a year over there. With the training before and the paperwork after, my wife counted it out on the kitchen calendar and came to fourteen months.

Arlene is sixty-four. She cooked in the Beech Run school cafeteria for thirty-one years. She wrote the dates on the calendar in pencil. I noticed she used pencil.

The unit left on the third Saturday of August. The buses were scheduled for six in the morning, and the families were told to be at the armory on the edge of Marietta by five.

We were there by quarter to. It was still dark. The lot behind the armory is gravel, and the lights on the poles had moths in them.

Nate came across the lot in his uniform, the desert-colored boots and the patterned camouflage they wear now, with his duffel on one shoulder. He is two inches taller than I am. When he was sixteen that bothered me, and now it just seems right.

He hugged his mother first. It was a long hug. Arlene had decided in advance that she would not cry in front of the other soldiers, and she kept to it for just about the length of that hug.

Then he got to me.

He shook my hand, which is what we do, and then he pulled me in by the hand and we did the thing men do with one arm and a lot of back slapping.

He said into my ear, “Don’t let anybody take my seat, Dad.”

I did not think he meant it as anything. It was the sort of thing you say. We both knew what seat. There was only one.

“Never,” I said.

He grinned at me, and then the sergeant major or somebody like him called out something I could not make out, and Nate picked up his duffel and went and got on the bus.

I stood there, sixty-five years old at the time, with my hand still out in front of me like I was waiting on change.