The Bucket Behind the Backstop

Coach looked at Kyler a long moment. He looked at the boy’s hands, and his knees, and the set of his shoulders. He looked at him the way he had looked at me through a fence in February of 1997.

“You flinch?” he said.

Kyler swallowed. “No sir.”

“Let me see that mitt.”

“I didn’t bring it, sir.”

“It’s in the truck,” I said.

I went and got it. It was a good mitt, but nobody had oiled it since June. Coach took it in both bad hands and worked his thumb into the pocket and put his nose to the leather.

“Needs oil,” he said. “Neatsfoot. Verdie, where’s the neatsfoot?”

“Back left shelf,” she said. “Behind the brake fluid.”

“Come on, son,” Coach said.

And he walked, slowly, with a hand on that boy’s shoulder, into the bay of his own closing shop.

I stood alone in the lot with my hands hanging, and something went slack in me that had been wound tight since I was sixteen.

Verdie came up beside me. She had left her walker. She took my arm with both hands.

“Boyd Allen. Do you know why he did it?”

I looked at her. In twenty-nine years nobody had told me.

“His daddy worked the railroad out of Macon,” she said. “Gone more days than home. Gaylon was the best second baseman in three counties, did you know that? He played in the state championship game in 1964. His daddy told him he’d come. He was late. He missed every inning. He never saw Gaylon play one game his whole boyhood.”

My throat closed.

“Gaylon told me the night he asked me to marry him. He said, ‘If I ever get the chance to show up for a boy nobody’s showing up for, I’m going to show up every time.’ I thought he meant a son of ours. We never had one.” She smiled with her eyes full. “I think he meant you.”

“And that bucket,” she said. “He didn’t leave it by accident. He told me in the truck the day you graduated. He said, ‘I left it for him. He’ll either take it or he won’t.’ He said it was the only thing he ever gave away that he was afraid you’d throw out.”

I put my face down in her hair, in front of the whole town, and wept like a boy.

Kyler came out an hour later with his mitt shining like a church pew and his eyes red. He walked straight to the truck and sat in the cab with the door open.

Coach came out behind him, slow, one hand on the doorframe.

The old man looked at me, and I saw all the years in his face. Then he looked out at the lot, where the folding tables had been stacked and the fryers were cooling.

“What time’s the game Monday?”

“Four-thirty. In Marbury.”

“That’s a ways.”

“Two hours.”

“I’ll bring the plate,” Gaylon Tippins said. “Verdie’s got a chicken she’s been looking at.”

“Shop’s closed. I’m a free man,” he said.

He picked up the bucket, which he was not supposed to be lifting. He tucked it under one arm like a football and carried it across the lot to my truck and set it in the bed beside the moving blanket.

“I’ll need that Monday,” he said. “I’ve got a customer over that way.”

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.