The Bucket Behind the Backstop

“You hurt, son?” he said.

“No sir.”

“Hungry?”

“No sir.”

My stomach said otherwise, loud enough to carry across the infield.

He did not smile and he did not lecture. He walked back across the road to his truck, and I sat there deciding whether to run. I did not run.

He came back with a plate wrapped in foil, so hot the steam leaked out at the corners, and set it on the bench beside my shoe. Then he walked out to home plate and started laying down lime with his back to me, so I could eat without being watched.

Under the foil were two fried bologna sandwiches, a pickle spear in wax paper, and a slice of pound cake. I ate all of it in about a minute and a half.

When the lines were laid he came back and looked at the empty plate and the feed sack and the dent where my head had been.

“Practice is Monday at four,” he said. “I need a catcher who doesn’t flinch.”

“I’m not any good.”

“I watched you sleep through the six-ten freight,” he said. “A boy who can do that can take a foul tip.”

That was the whole recruiting speech. He picked up his string and went back to work.

On Monday he put a catcher’s mitt in my hand that smelled of neatsfoot oil and had been broken in by somebody else’s boy. He did not ask where I had slept. He did not ask why I was wearing the same shirt as Saturday. He just threw me strikes until the light went.

Within a week his wife knew. Miss Verdie Tippins was a small woman with a big laugh and a way of looking at you that made lying feel like a waste of breath. By March I was sleeping four school nights a week in the sewing room of their brick house on Depot Street, under a quilt that smelled like cedar.

Nobody ever said the words taking in. Verdie just set one more place at the table and said grace a little longer than she needed to.

My mother lasted until the summer. She and Jerry took jobs at a plant in Florida, and she said she would send for me once they got settled. I believed her for about a month.

In August a woman from the county welfare office came out with a clipboard. The rule, she said, was kin first. Coach and Verdie told her they would gladly keep me. She wrote down my Aunt Nell Whitlock instead, my mother’s sister in Pelion Springs, because blood came before everything else on her form.

I stood in the Tippins driveway beside Aunt Nell’s Buick with my clothes in two grocery sacks. Coach shook my hand like I was a grown man closing on a truck.

“Two hours ain’t anything,” he said.

I did not believe him. Nobody in my life had ever come two hours for me, and I had a pretty clear idea what a promise was worth.

Aunt Nell was a nursing assistant who worked double shifts at a care home and loved me in notes on the refrigerator and a pot of something on the stove.