The Bucket Behind the Backstop

I would have been in that truck. I would have been in that cab or standing on that road with a flashlight, and the only reason I was not is that a man who owned a tire shop had closed up early to drive two hours and hand me a chicken leg.

I never told anyone. Not my aunt, not Verdie, not the preacher, not the wife I married a few years later. I carried it twenty-eight years like a stone in a pocket I could not turn out.

And Coach Tippins sat on his bucket for two more springs and never said one word.

I graduated in May of 2000. Coach, Verdie, and Aunt Nell were the only three people in the stands for me.

My last home game came two weeks before that, a loss in the first round of the playoffs. I came out of the dugout with my mask under my arm.

Coach stood by his truck. His bucket sat by itself in the gravel behind the backstop, the way it had sat ninety-six times.

“Good four years,” he said, and put out his hand.

I shook it. I had been trying to say something since the sixth of March, 1998.

“I appreciate you coming,” was what came out.

“Had customers,” he said.

He got in the truck and drove two hours home. I never saw him look back.

I walked over to that backstop. I do not know why I picked up the bucket. I think I could not stand to leave it out in the weather.

When I turned it over I saw the bottom. On the underside, in carpenter’s pencil, were ninety-six tally marks, struck through in groups of five. The last row had one lone line standing by itself.

He had counted. Every game. Every time he sat on that bucket he had turned it over when he got home and made a mark.

I did not know there was one other person in the world keeping count of me.

I put it in the trunk of Aunt Nell’s Buick. I have kept it twenty-six years. It has sat on a shelf in the office of every shop I have opened, and every employee I have hired has asked about it.

“It’s a bucket,” I tell them. I have never told one of them the rest.

Coach gave me a full-time job that summer, and I worked for him four years, until he ran me off himself. “You’re too good to turn tires for me,” he said, like a man giving bad news.

The thing is, I never said it. Twenty-six years, and I never said it.

I tried. At my wedding in 2003 he stood at the back of the church with his hat in his hands, and when I came down the aisle to shake his hand I opened my mouth, and he said, “Pass me that program, I’ve lost my glasses.” The moment went by like a train.

Every time. I think he knew what was coming and stepped around it on purpose, kindly, the way you step around a man’s bad knee.

This fall a friend from Sardis Mill called and said Coach was finally closing the shop. His hands would not close around a lug wrench anymore, and there was nobody to hand it to. The volunteer fire department was putting on a fish fry for him the last Saturday of October.

“You ought to come,” my friend said.