The Diamond We Mowed Into Our Hayfield

Rylee’s question

The girls had their first practice in the hayfield that Tuesday evening, right after supper.

Their coach was a woman who teaches second grade at the grade school, and she cried a little when she saw it.

Our coach had been ready to quit the team. She told me so later.

She said she could not ask parents to drive girls to a gravel lot and watch them skin their knees all summer.

The girls ran out to it like it was Christmas morning. Twelve of them, in shorts and T-shirts and visors, with their bat bags banging against their legs, through the tall hay to the short grass.

Rylee went straight to the pitcher’s circle. She stood on the rubber and looked at the plate, and then she turned around and looked at me at the fence and grinned.

“It’s forty,” she said. “It’s really forty. Daddy measured it right.”

“Three times,” I said.

Grandpa was there, sitting in a lawn chair behind the backstop with a thermos of coffee.

Rylee walked over to him before she threw a single pitch. I heard what she asked him.

“Grandpa, why did you come?” she said. “Aunt Tracy’s your kid too.”

I held my breath. I did not know what he would say. I would not have blamed him for anything he said, or for saying nothing at all.

He looked at her a long time, the way he looks at a calf he is deciding about. Then he said, “Because you girls showed up.”

That was all he said. Rylee nodded like that made perfect sense, and went back out to the circle, and threw her first pitch into the cattle panels so hard they rang.

The summer in the hay

So the girls practiced in the hayfield. Tuesdays and Thursdays, from six to eight, while the sun was still high over the timber on the west side of the road.

Dustin cut the rest of the field for first cutting in early June, all around the diamond, and the boys who help us bale stacked it in the barn. He left the edges of the diamond long on purpose.

“Keeps the balls from rolling to the road,” he said. Then the hay grew back thick for the second cutting, and the diamond sat there in the middle of it like an island.

A few dads came every practice. They stood along the baseline in ball caps and T-shirts and shagged throws and caught bullpens and hit grounders until their own arms hurt.

They were not soft men. One was a welder, one drove a milk truck, one worked at the grain elevator.

They had all put in a full day before they ever got there, and they came anyway.

The grandpas came too. Not only Hosea. By the end of June there were five or six lawn chairs behind the backstop every Tuesday, old men in seed caps with their coffee and their opinions.

They had opinions about everything. Whether a girl was dropping her elbow.

Whether the second baseman was cheating toward the bag. Whether the coach ought to bunt more, which she never did.

One of them was a widower who farmed down the road from us, and he brought a cooler of popsicles every single Thursday. He said his wife would have wanted somebody to.

Hosea came every Saturday morning with his bag of lime and his crooked liner, and he put the lines down fresh so they would be bright for the whole week. Every Saturday, without fail.

I asked him once in late June if I could pay for the lime.

He looked at me like I had asked to pay him for breathing, and he put the bag in his truck and drove home.