The Fourteen Steps to Row Nine

The Fourth Quarter

Gene Ruzicka made sure everybody ended up where they belonged. He walked down the row with his notepad and a face like a judge, and by the anthem it was settled.

Phyllis and Roy insisted on keeping their promise and sat on the aisle steps in their coats on two cushions from Gene’s stash, as happy as I have ever seen two people. Dad took seat 1. Mike and Lonnie each took an arm and eased him out of the wheelchair onto the cold plastic. Lonnie folded the chair and stowed it behind us with his own hands.

My brother sat in seat 2. I sat in seat 3.

Seat 4 stayed empty. Phyllis had brought my mother’s old flowered thermos, the one that had sat in a cabinet at Maple Grove for two years, and she set it on the seat without a word. My father looked down the row and put two fingers to the brim of his cap.

The teams came out. He did not look at the teams. He looked at the fifty-yard line, at the paint Pete’s crew had laid at dawn, and when he was done he nodded once, like a man checking another man’s work and finding it good.

He took the program and the pencil stub from his pocket, held them in his lap, and wrote nothing.

In the middle of the third quarter, with the score tied at seventeen, he turned to my brother. “You keep the book this half.”

“Dad, I don’t know how.”

“It’s a pencil, Lonnie. A check when they run, a circle when they pass. I’ll tell you the funny ones.”

My brother took the pencil like it was made of glass. For the fourth quarter of the rivalry game, with a wind off the plains and our father’s hand on his shoulder, Lonnie kept the book. Now and then Dad leaned over and said, “That was a draw, not a run. Put a D.” They lost by a field goal, twenty-four to twenty-seven, and at the final whistle Lonnie wrote the score in the margin in his blocky hand and signed the page with his initials. Underneath, without being asked, he wrote the date.

I have that program in a drawer now. Number two hundred and seventy-two.