The Diamond We Mowed Into Our Hayfield

Building it

They mowed the infield short first, and then they set it down again, lower, until it looked like a lawn.

They left the outfield a little longer, and they left the tall hay standing all around the edges.

One of the dads ran a box blade on his little tractor to shave down the base paths and the pitcher’s circle, so the girls would have dirt where they needed dirt and grass everywhere else.

They measured from the back point of home plate to the front of the pitching rubber three times.

Forty feet. Then they measured sixty feet down each line and squared it with the tape.

Then Dustin went behind the barn, where the old pens used to be, and came back dragging a cattle panel.

Then another one. He had four of them back there, rusted a little on the bottom wires.

A cattle panel is a welded steel grid, sixteen feet long and about fifty-two inches tall.

Every farm I have ever known has a few of them leaned against something, waiting for a use.

They drove steel T-posts in a half-circle behind home plate, about twenty feet back, and stood the panels up on end, two high in the middle, and wired them tight to the posts with fence wire.

When they were done, it was a backstop. It was not pretty.

But you could throw a softball as hard as you wanted at it and it would ring and drop the ball right back in the dirt.

“That’ll stop a foul ball,” one of the dads said, pushing on it with his whole shoulder. “It stopped a bull once.”

“It did not,” Dustin said.

“Well, it slowed him down.”

They laughed, and I laughed, and for the first time since Wednesday I did not feel like my chest was in a vise.

Grandpa and the lime

Around ten o’clock, Dustin’s dad drove over from his place in his old farm truck. He is seventy-nine.

His name is Hosea Brandt, and he is Dustin’s father, and he is Tracy’s father too.

I had not called him. I had not wanted to put him in the middle.

But he got out of the truck with a fifty-pound bag of white marking lime on his shoulder, the kind the school uses on the football field, and an old wheel liner under his other arm.

“School was throwing this liner out,” he said. “Wheel’s a little crooked. It’ll do.”

He did not ask what had happened. He did not ask why the girls needed a field.

He filled the hopper and set the wheel on the back point of home plate, and he walked the first baseline slow, bent over at the waist, the way he walks a row of seed corn in April.

He walked it straight. It was the straightest line I had ever seen anybody put down, sixty feet of white across that short green grass, and he did not look up once until he reached the bag.

Then he turned around and walked the third base line. Then the batter’s boxes.

Then the pitcher’s circle, which he did with a stake in the middle and a piece of baling twine.

When he was done, he stood at the backstop and looked at it a long time.