The Bucket Behind the Backstop

I sat in my office with the bucket on the shelf above my head for a good hour. Then I went home and told Marla everything, the dugout, the plate, the candle, and the Friday in April.

She did not say anything for a long time. Then she put her arms around me in our kitchen and said, “Boyd, take the bucket.”

And then she said one more thing. “Take Kyler.”

I will tell you about Kyler in a minute.

We pulled into Sardis Mill at ten past two. The lot behind Tippins Tire was full of pickup trucks parked in rows like a church homecoming, with folding tables strung along the shop wall.

A bedsheet banner hung between two light poles, painted red by what looked like a child’s hand. Thank You Gaylon.

About two hundred people stood holding paper plates, most of them gray at the temples now. I parked at the edge, behind the church vans. I did not take the bucket yet. Kyler stayed in the cab, looking at his shoes.

“You don’t have to come out,” I told him.

“I know,” he said, and got out anyway, straightening his tie with both hands. He is a thin kid with a buzz cut and wrists that stick out of his sleeves, and he followed me across that lot like a boy following a man into deep water.

I saw Coach before he saw me. He sat in a green lawn chair by the air compressor with his cap on his knee. He had gone white and small. His shoulders had folded in. His hands lay open in his lap, big and ruined, like two tools somebody had set down.

Miss Verdie sat beside him in a walker chair with tennis balls on the legs. She was seventy-seven and tiny as a bird, and she saw me from sixty feet away.

“Gaylon,” she said, loud enough to turn heads. “Look who drove up.”

He lifted his eyes. For two seconds nothing happened in his face. Then something loosened around his mouth, like a man putting down a thing he has carried a long way.

“Boyd Allen,” Verdie said, and held up her arms. I bent down and she gripped my neck with a strength I had forgotten. “You used to be skinny. Look at you.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Coach had not said a word. He looked at me from that lawn chair with the old face that gave nothing away.

“You lost?” he said.

I knew exactly what he was doing.

“Had a customer over this way,” I said.

The corner of his mouth went up. It was the smallest smile you have ever seen, and I have been trying to earn it for thirty years.

“Man’s got to go where the customers are,” he said.

About three o’clock the fire chief, a heavy man named Amos Rouse, tapped the microphone and asked if anybody wanted to say a word about Gaylon before the pie.

A woman I did not know stood up first. Her husband had been laid off in 1991, she said, and Coach kept their truck on the road a whole year on a handshake. A man said Coach once opened the shop at nine on Christmas Eve for a doughnut spare and would not take a nickel.

Then nobody else stood, and the chief looked around the lot. “Anybody else?”

I had not planned to stand. I fix tires. I am not a man who gets up in front of crowds. My legs got up anyway.