The Fourteen Steps to Row Nine

Row Nine

My father is Gordon Haverkamp, and everybody in Ellery has called him Gordy since 1961. He worked on the university grounds crew for thirty-three years. He mowed the practice fields at five in the morning and hand-lined the gridiron on Friday afternoons with a rolling marker and a level eye. Every white stripe that got a television camera pointed at it between 1974 and 2007, my father walked behind a machine and made straight.

In the winter of 1985 he took his Christmas bonus, four hundred and ten dollars, and bought four season tickets. Section 14, east side, Row 9, seats 1 through 4. Every March the renewal came in a long cream envelope, and every March my father wrote the check at the kitchen table before he opened the electric bill. That was how you knew where his priorities lived.

Saturdays were the center of my childhood. Mom packed a thermos of cocoa and four ham sandwiches in wax paper. We were in our seats ninety minutes before kickoff, because Dad could not stand to watch the field used before he had looked it over. He took the aisle, seat 1. I asked him once why, when the best view was in the middle.

“So you two can get to the bathroom without climbing over your old man,” he said.

Lonnie sat next to him. I sat next to Lonnie. Mom took the far end, seat 4, with the thermos between her feet. When the teams ran out, my father would not look at the teams. He would look at the paint.

He kept a scorebook. Pencil, one printed program per game, every play he understood and a margin note for the ones he did not. There are forty seasons of them in banker’s boxes in his garage, two hundred and seventy-one programs. Lonnie and I used to fight over who got the pencil in the fourth quarter.

Then my mother died, and his heart started to go, and there was the fall in the garage two winters ago. He moved into Maple Grove, a good assisted living place twenty minutes from the stadium, with a bed by a window and aides who call him Mr. Gordy.

The stairs were real. I have to say that, because it is the part that made my brother’s sentence work. There is no ramp on the east side of that stadium, only the tunnel and fourteen steep concrete steps up to the section. The accessible seating is on the west side, and my father would not sit on the west side. “I’m not watching my own field from the wrong end,” he said, and that was that.

So last fall he got to one game. This fall, none. And every Saturday at ten o’clock, one of the aides told me, he stood at the window in his good sweater and asked whoever was nearest, “Are we going today?”

“Next week, Mr. Gordy,” they said.

He had been told next week for fourteen months.

That is what I could not forgive myself for. My brother’s sentence was cruel, and it was also half true, and the true half belonged to me as much as to him. I had been saying “we’ll figure out the stairs” for a year. I live seventy miles away. Lonnie lives eight minutes from Dad and drove him to the cardiologist every other Tuesday, and he looked at the same stairs and decided there was an easier answer.

Neither of us tried to carry him.