The Diamond We Mowed Into Our Hayfield

What I did not do

People have asked me since why I did not go to the rec board meeting and make a fuss.

I thought about it. I thought about it the whole drive home on the county road.

But the rec board lets Tracy make the schedule. That is how our town does it.

If I had stood up at a meeting, it would have been Kari against Tracy, a family fight in front of everybody.

And the girls would have been the fight. Every mother on that team would have picked a side, and every girl would have heard about it at school, and nobody would have played any better for it.

I did not want twelve little girls to learn that softball was something grown women argued over in the village hall.

I wanted them to learn it was something you did in the sun.

So I went home and fixed supper, and I told Dustin while he washed up at the kitchen sink.

I told it plain, the way Tracy had said it, word for word.

Dustin is forty. He farms six hundred acres of corn and beans with his dad, and he runs a small cow-calf herd, and he is not a man who talks a lot about how he feels.

He dried his hands on the towel and stood there a minute looking out the window over the sink, toward the hayfield east of the house.

“She said the church lot,” he said.

“She said the church lot.”

He did not say one word against his sister. He never has, not in sixteen years, and I did not expect him to start at the kitchen sink. He just hung the towel back up on the oven handle.

Then he went out to the shed, and I heard the big mower turn over, and I watched him through the window check the oil and look at the blades.

The Saturday the dads came

Rylee had cried at supper, and then she had stopped crying and gotten angry, which is more like her.

She has her daddy’s quiet and my temper, and the temper comes out in the evening.

“So we just don’t get a field?” she said. “Aunt Tracy gets to decide that? She’s not even our coach. She’s not even a softball person.”

“She’s the one who makes the schedule,” I said.

“That’s not fair, though.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.” I was not going to lie to her about that. I have never believed in telling a child something is fair when it is not.

Dustin came in from the shed a while later and sat down across from her and asked her how many girls were on the team.

She told him twelve. He asked her how far it was from the rubber to the plate.

“Forty feet,” Rylee said. “For twelve-U. And the bases are sixty.”

“You sure about that?”

“Daddy, I’m sure. I’ve been pacing it off in the shed all winter. You watched me do it.”

He nodded and went to bed, and she looked at me like he had lost his mind, and I told her to go take her shower and stop worrying for one night.

On Saturday morning, at seven o’clock, a pickup pulled into our lane. Then another one.

By a quarter after seven there were four dads standing in our yard with coffee in their hands.

Dustin had made phone calls. He did not tell me about them.

I found out when I looked out the window in my robe and saw two riding mowers coming off a flatbed trailer.

They walked out to the northeast corner of the hayfield, where the ground is flattest and drains best, and somebody had a hundred-foot tape measure, and they started pounding in stakes.

I took the coffeepot out to them. The hay was coming up to their knees by then, almost ready for the first cutting.

“You’re going to lose that whole corner,” I said to Dustin.

“About forty bales,” he said. “Maybe forty-five.”

“That’s real money.”

“It’s hay,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of hay.”

It was also the best hay on the place. I did not say anything else.