The Little Team Nobody Would Take

Thirty-one springs

People ask me why Bob did not just fight it. I understand the question.

A man coaches the same team for thirty-one springs and his own boy hands it to a fellow who sells crop insurance, and you would think there would be words.

But it was a volunteer league. Nobody owned anything. The association was a board of seven parents and a president, and the president that year happened to be our son, and Bob would never in this world fight his own son over a ball team.

Bob started coaching in 1993, the spring Craig turned twelve and made the team.

Somebody had to do it, and Bob carried mail on a rural route and was done most days by two, so he raised his hand. He never put it back down.

He missed two springs in all that time. One was 2008, when his mother was dying at the nursing home in Celina and he sat with her every afternoon.

The other was 2020, when the whole season was called off and nobody played anywhere.

Thirty-one springs. You could ask anybody in town under the age of forty-five and odds were good Bob Albers had hollered at them to get their glove down.

Half the men at the grain elevator had played for him. So had two of the men on the board.

He was not the kind of coach who screamed. He was the kind who stood behind the backstop with his arms crossed and said your name once, quiet, and you knew.

Boys who would not listen to their own fathers listened to Bob.

He kept the equipment in our garage, and every March he oiled every glove in the bag, even the ones nobody had used in years.

He kept the bats on a rack he built himself out of two by fours and a broom handle.

That Sunday afternoon after Craig left, Bob went out to the garage and took the equipment bag down from the shelf. I watched him from the kitchen window.

He took out the bats one at a time and wiped them down and set them in a row against the wall.

Then he put them all back in the bag, zipped it, and sat on the overturned bucket by the workbench for a long time with his hands between his knees.

The garage door was up and the March sun was coming in across the concrete.

I did not go out. Fifty years teaches you when to go out and when to leave a man be.

I washed the roaster and dried it and put it away, and when I looked again he was still sitting there, and the sun had moved off his boots.

What Craig did not say

I want to be fair to my son, because I love him and because he is not a bad man.

I knew why he did it. I think I knew before he ever opened his mouth at that table.

Last October, Bob was splitting oak behind the shed for the wood stove when the pain hit him.

It was a Saturday, the middle of a bright fall morning, and Craig had stopped by to borrow the log chain and found his father on one knee beside the splitting maul.

Craig drove him to St. Rita’s in Lima himself. He did not wait for the squad. He told me later he ran two stop signs on the county road and did not care.

By supper Bob had a stent in his heart and a cardiologist telling him he was a lucky man.

The doctor cleared him for everything by Christmas. Walking, raking, cutting wood with a little help, all of it.

Bob walked two miles every morning on the road past the Hemmelgarn place and came home pink in the cheeks. He felt better than he had in years.

But Craig had seen what he had seen. He had seen his father gray in the face on the ground beside the woodpile, and I do not think he ever stopped seeing it.

He called the house every day for a month. He checked Bob’s pill box when he thought nobody was looking.

So when it came time to pick coaches for the spring, I believe my son looked at his father, seventy-four years old with a stent in his chest, and thought about him out there in the heat of a June doubleheader, and could not stand it.

And instead of saying that, instead of saying Dad, I am scared, he said younger blood.

Because younger blood is easier to say at a supper table than scared. Men in our family have always had trouble with the second one.

Scared is a reason. I understood the reason. But it was not an excuse, and it was not his to decide.

Bob was a grown man and his doctor had said yes. Craig took something from his father to make himself feel better and called it a board decision.