The Diamond We Mowed Into Our Hayfield

The girls start winning

The thing nobody expected was that the girls got good. Not a little better. Good. There is something about practicing on your own field that makes a team into a team.

Maybe it was just that they had nowhere to go and nothing to do on those long evenings but throw.

They won their first game in the county league in the middle of June by eleven runs.

The other coach shook our coach’s hand and asked where on earth they had been practicing.

“In a hayfield,” our coach said, and he laughed, because he thought she was joking.

They won their second game, and their third. Rylee pitched every other game and played first base the rest, and she started throwing a changeup that she had worked out against the cattle panels.

She would stand out there by herself after practice was over, with a bucket of balls, and throw at the panels until the supper dishes were done. Then she would come in with her arm aching and smiling.

“Mom,” she said one night, sitting on the back step with an ice pack on her shoulder. “Do you think Aunt Tracy knows we’re winning?”

“I’m sure somebody’s told her,” I said.

“Do you think she’s mad?”

“I don’t think she thinks about it much,” I said, which was the kindest true thing I could say. “She’s got her own team to worry about.”

Rylee thought about that. “I’m not mad at her anymore,” she said. “I was. But it’s better out here. It’s ours, though. Nobody can give it to somebody else.”

The town notices

By the Fourth of July the girls were nine and oh. Nine games, no losses, in a twelve-team league where they had finished seventh the year before.

People in town talked. They talked at the post office, which meant they talked to me, or near me.

I sold stamps and weighed packages and smiled and did not say much of anything.

A woman from church came in one morning and leaned on the counter and said, “I hear your girls are practicing in a cow pasture.” She meant it kindly.

“It’s a hayfield,” I said. “The cows aren’t allowed.”

She laughed and said her husband had driven by on the county road and seen the old men in their lawn chairs and the girls out there in the evening light. She said it looked like a postcard.

Tracy did not say a word to me about any of it.

I saw her twice in that time, once at church and once at the grocery store, and both times she said hello and asked about the weather.

I said hello back. I asked about her boys. They were doing well too, she said.

They were going to state for certain now, and they had a real shot at it. I told her I was glad, and I was.

I want to say that clearly, because I know some people will not believe it.

I was glad for those boys. My nephew is a good kid. He had nothing to do with any of it.