The Bucket Behind the Backstop

She had a son named Lyndon, nineteen, funny and fast and no good. He slept in the shed room out back and drove a Chevy pickup with one blue door. He taught me to drive it in a cotton field on a Sunday, and for a while he was the closest thing I had to a brother.

I made the baseball team at Pelion Springs High in February as a freshman, third string, and told no one a word about Sardis Mill.

Our first game was a Tuesday in late February, against a school whose name I have honestly forgotten. We were taking infield at ten past four. I was standing by the dugout fence, throwing a ball against the cinder block.

A white Ford truck pulled into the gravel lot behind the backstop.

I knew it the way you know your own handwriting. It had a toolbox across the bed and a dent in the tailgate.

Gaylon Tippins climbed out in his work shirt with his name stitched over the pocket and grease to the elbows. He had a foil plate in one hand and a five-gallon joint compound bucket in the other.

He walked to the fence behind home plate. He turned the bucket upside down in the gravel and sat on it. He set the plate by his boot. Then he put his hands between his knees and looked at the field like he had paid good money for the seat.

After warm-ups I walked over. I could not think of one thing to say.

“What are you doing here?”

“Had a customer over this way.”

“Over this way is two hours.”

“Man’s got to go where the customers are,” he said, and handed me the plate through the fence.

That was the lie. He told it for four years. In ninety-six games that man had more customers in southwest Georgia than the Chamber of Commerce.

He never yelled, never waved, never called a pitch from behind the screen. When I got a hit, he nodded once, the way you nod to a neighbor across a road. I played that whole game with my face hot. I was fourteen years old and somebody had driven two hours to look at the back of my head.

Afterward he stood by his truck. “You dropped the third strike,” he said. “But you went and got it.”

Then he drove home, two hours back in the dark, to a shop that opened at seven in the morning.

He closed the shop at two o’clock on game days, with a sign in the window that said Gone to the ball game, back tomorrow. People in Sardis Mill figured he had taken up fishing. His hired man, a fellow named Lunsford, locked up behind him.

Every game, the bucket. Every game, the plate.

I think about the plates when I cannot sleep. They were wrapped in two layers of foil, tight as a drum, and they were always hot when he handed them over. Fried bologna, or pimento cheese when Verdie felt fancy, or a chicken leg and a biscuit. A pickle in wax paper. On Fridays, pound cake.

I did not know until I was grown that Verdie got up at noon on game days to cook them. She had a rule that a plate had to leave the house hot.

On the sixth of March in my sophomore year I turned sixteen. I had not said a word about it to anyone.

That afternoon Coach handed me the plate the way he always did, and I carried it behind the dugout wall to eat.