The Bucket Behind the Backstop

I did not go to the microphone. I walked the other direction, across the whole lot, to my truck, and pulled the moving blanket off the bed. There it sat. A white five-gallon bucket, scuffed gray, with a crack in the rim mended by a strip of duct tape gone brown with age.

I walked up front. I set the bucket on the concrete right in front of Gaylon Tippins’s lawn chair, and I turned it upside down.

Coach looked at it. It took him a while. The cracked rim. The tape. His lips moved, just barely, the way a man’s do when he is counting.

“That’s mine,” he said, to nobody.

I took the microphone. My hand shook so badly I had to hold it with both.

“My name’s Boyd Mobley,” I said. “Some of you know me. In the winter of 1996 I slept in the third base dugout at the county ballfield. In my coat. Under a feed sack.”

“A man came to line the field one Saturday morning, and he found me, and he did not ask me a single question. He walked back across the road to his truck, and he brought me a plate.”

I looked at Coach. He had not moved.

“That was the first plate. There were ninety-six more.”

I told them about the freight train, the sewing room, and the birthday candle. I told them he drove two hours to ninety-six games and never called one of them anything but a customer.

“There’s one thing I never told him. I never told anybody. I’m forty-four years old and I’m tired of carrying it.”

I told them about the Friday in April. I told them about the duffel bag and the Chevy with the blue door and the feed store. I told them how I stood at that fence with one foot out in the gravel, and about Lyndon’s horn.

“He walked up to me,” I said. “He looked at the bag. He looked at that truck. He held out a plate and said, ‘Verdie fried you a chicken leg.’ And then he turned his back and sat down on that bucket and did not look around.”

I made myself lift my head.

“I got in that dugout because a man turned his back on me. He gave me room to pick for myself. And I picked him.”

Nobody in that lot moved. Behind the fryers a man blew his nose, and somebody started to cry without any shame at all.

Coach stood up. It took a long time. Nobody helped him. He put one ruined hand on the arm of the chair and rose over that bucket, and then he reached down like a man reaching toward a hot stove and took hold of the rim.

He tipped it an inch at a time, so the bottom came up toward the light.

The pencil marks were there. Ninety-six of them, in groups of five, the lines gone silver with age. He ran his thumb along them slowly, like a man reading Braille.

“I left it,” he said. His voice was hardly a voice. “I never did know if you’d taken it.”

“I counted the marks when I picked it up,” I said. “I didn’t know you were counting.”

“Somebody ought to,” Coach said.

I came off the little stage and stood beside him. I put my hand on his shoulder, the first time in my life I had done it, and he leaned into it the way an old tree leans into wind.

“Coach,” I said, so only he could hear. “I almost got in that truck.”