The Umpire Who Called His Son Out
The other grandmothers at the park adopted her by the third week. They brought her things. Banana bread, rhubarb bars, a sack of tomato plants from somebody’s greenhouse.
One of them told her I was the best umpire they’d had in years because I didn’t let the dads push me around.
I called the games the way Dale taught me. I called a ten-year-old out on strikes when his dad was the league president.
I called a girl safe at home on a close play when her own coach had already started arguing.
Each Sunday at the Casey’s lot, I handed Courtney another white envelope. Eighty dollars. Then eighty dollars more.
She stopped saying I didn’t have to do it that way. She just took the envelope and nodded.
By the second week of May, I had paid her four hundred dollars.
I had two games left on my count, and Jace’s team had its first tournament the next Saturday. I had worked it out so the last envelope would land right before.
Jace’s team is the Ford County Thunder, twelve-and-under, and his coach is Mike Daly, who runs the tire shop out on Route 45 and has coached that same group of boys since tee ball.
The tournament was a three-day spring event run out of the big complex in Champaign.
There were so many teams that the early pool games got spread out to town diamonds all over the area, wherever there was a field with lights and a bathroom.
The Thunder’s first game was at two in the afternoon on Saturday at the park in Gibson City, which is about twenty minutes from Paxton.
It is a little town diamond with silver bleachers and a row of trees just starting to leaf out past the left field fence.
That morning I worked my last two rec games at the Paxton park. A nine-and-under game and a twelve-and-under game, both clean.
Nobody followed me to my truck. Mom poured me the last of the thermos and said she was proud of me.
I didn’t take my gear out of the truck when I was done. I had been running it straight from the park to the duplex every Saturday, and I just didn’t think about it.
I threw it in the back seat and drove to Gibson City in my umpire clothes.
I handed Courtney the last envelope right there in the Gibson City parking lot. Fifty dollars, the last of the four hundred and fifty.
She was getting out of her car with a folding stadium seat and a bottle of water.
“That’s the end of it,” I said. “Paid in full. Twelve games.” I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t make a speech. I just handed it to her and walked toward the field.
She stood there holding the envelope while I walked away. I felt her looking at the back of my navy shirt. I didn’t turn around.
At one forty-five the Thunder were warming up along the third base line, and the other team, a club out of Bloomington that wore all gray, was throwing in the outfield. Everybody was ready except for one thing.
There was no umpire. The tournament had a man assigned to the Gibson City field, but at two o’clock he still was not there, and nobody could reach him on his phone.
The tournament director drove over from another field in a golf cart with a clipboard and a walkie-talkie.