The Seat I Saved Every Saturday

Game one

The first home game was two weeks after the buses left.

Now, I need to explain that our field has no lights. There was a storm in the summer of 2019 that took the light poles down like a man pulling weeds, and the school board looked at the price of new ones and said they would think about it. They are still thinking. So all our home games are on Saturday afternoons at one o’clock, in whatever weather the river sends us.

When I climbed up to row seven, the aisle seat was empty. It was always empty, because the aisle is where Nate sits and Nate was gone.

So I unfolded the coat and laid it down there, and smoothed out the sleeves.

Then I took out my thermos and poured two cups of coffee.

I always bring coffee. The thermos is a green steel one that belonged to my father, with a dent in the side from the flood of 1998, and the lid doubles as a cup. For eleven years I had poured two, one for me and one for Nate, since he always forgot his own on the kitchen counter.

I poured the second one anyway, into the tin camp mug I keep behind the truck seat, and set it on the bench beside the coat. Then I sat down.

Orville Wendt came up the steps at ten till one, the way he has every Saturday since Nixon. He is eighty-one, a widower with a bad knee and a fine mind, and he has sat to my right since before I was married. He stopped and looked at the coat, and then at the coffee, and then at me.

“That boy coming back, then?” he said.

“He is.”

Orville nodded slowly, like I had told him something about the weather that he had suspected all week. He sat down on the other side of me, folded his hands on his cane, and said nothing else for four quarters.

That was game one. We lost to Wolfe Valley by two touchdowns, and I could not tell you a single thing that happened on the field.

At the end of the game, I poured the second coffee out through the gap in the benches. It had gone cold. I did not want to drink it, and I did not want to carry it back.

I did it again the next week.

What people say

My wife came to the second game with me. She sat on my other side, which meant she was two seats away from the coat, and she lasted three quarters.

At halftime she stood up and said she was going for coffee. She came back with a hot chocolate she did not drink. She sat holding it with both hands and looking at the coat, and about two minutes into the third quarter she said, very quietly, “I can’t, Marv.”

“It’s all right.”

“I know it’s all right. I can’t look at it.”

Then she went down the steps and across the track to the Boosters stand, where Peggy Lund was short a pair of hands on the chili, and she has been there ever since. From the window she can see the bleachers, but at that distance the coat is only a brown thing on the aluminum.

She said it was easier. I believed her. I would not have asked her to come back.