The Seat I Saved Every Saturday

The seat

Let me tell you about the seat, because it will not make sense otherwise.

The Beech Run Rams play on a field that sits in a bend of the creek, about fourteen miles up the river from Marietta. The home side has nine rows of aluminum benches. Visitors get six, on the other side of the track, and they get the sun in their eyes.

My father started taking me to those bleachers in 1964. I sat in row seven on the aisle, because that was where he sat, and when I was big enough I sat there with him, and when he died I sat there for him.

When Nate was three years old I carried him up the steps in the crook of my arm. He was too short to see over the man in front of us, so the next week I brought a feed sack, folded in quarters, and put him on it.

He played for the Rams himself, tight end and long snapper, class of 2015. He was not very fast. He was reliable, which in a long snapper is the whole job, and Coach Gary Spiker once told me that in twenty-two years he had never had to think about where the ball was going when Nate Mattingly was snapping it.

I watched him from row seven, on the aisle.

After he graduated, the arrangement did not change. Every home game, he came and sat in the same spot, with a thermos of his own. He said it was the only place he could think. Sometimes he brought a girl, and she sat beside him, and then another season she was gone, and the seat stayed.

For eleven years the two of us went to every home game. Nobody else sat in that spot, and not by any rule. A seat on a bleacher is not assigned. It is only that in a town of nineteen hundred people, nobody takes another man’s place on the aisle in row seven, the same way nobody parks in the spot at the diner where the old fellows drink coffee.

So when Nate said “my seat,” and I said “never,” that is what we both meant.

I found the coat that Sunday.

He had left it in my truck. We had gone to the diner the night before the buses, just the three of us, and he had thrown his canvas coat on the passenger seat. I put it on a kitchen chair, and for two weeks Arlene dusted around it.