The Diamond We Mowed Into Our Hayfield

The water main

Then it was July, and two things happened in the same week. The first was that the village dug up the town park.

There had been a water main leaking under the outfield for most of the spring, and in the second week of July it finally gave out.

The village crew came in with a backhoe on a Monday morning.

By Monday afternoon there was a trench six feet deep running across left field and through the corner of the infield, and orange fence all the way around it. The park was closed for two weeks.

Tracy’s boys were leaving for state in nine days. They had nowhere to practice.

The school field was booked for a summer camp. The field in the next town was booked for their own league.

The second thing that happened is that her boys found out about our hayfield.

Not from Tracy, and not from me. From their own sisters and cousins and girls they rode the bus with.

Several of those boys had sisters on Rylee’s team. They had heard about the cattle panels and the lawn chairs and the popsicles, and they had heard that the girls were nine and oh.

And some of them, I found out later, had driven by with their fathers on the county road and watched Rylee throw, and they had gone home and told each other that she was fast.

The Thursday in July

It was a Thursday afternoon, nine days before state. It was hot, with a high clear sky and no wind at all, the kind of day the hay smells sweet from the road.

Practice had started at six, the way it always did. The coach was running infield, and two dads were standing along the first base line in their ball caps catching throws.

Hosea was in his lawn chair behind the backstop. The widower from down the road was next to him with the cooler.

Four other old men were spread out along the third base side, arguing about something.

Rylee was pitching to a girl named Garnet, our catcher’s younger sister, who was only ten and was just filling in at the plate so Rylee could work on her changeup.

Rylee was in her red T-shirt, and her blonde ponytail was pulled through her visor, and she was working hard, the way she always does.

She wound up and threw a changeup that Garnet swung at so early she nearly fell down.

The old men laughed. Garnet laughed. Even Rylee smiled a little, the way she does.

That was when one of the dads looked up, past the backstop, out across the hay toward the county road.

He stopped laughing, and the other dads looked where he was looking.

Tracy’s truck was parked on the shoulder by our mailbox. And Tracy was walking toward us across the hayfield, through the tall uncut hay, alone.

She was not wearing her coach’s shirt. She was in jeans and a plain T-shirt, and she was walking slow, the way you walk when you have decided to do something and you are not sure you can.

She came to the edge of the short grass, where the dads had strung a single wire on T-posts to mark the foul line, and she stopped there, and she put her hand on the top of a post.

She watched Rylee throw three pitches. Garnet missed all three. It was not a fair fight. Garnet is ten and Rylee had been working on that changeup since May.

On the third strike the dads went quiet. The old men went quiet. The coach stopped hitting grounders and held the bat in both hands and waited.

Tracy looked over at her father in his lawn chair. He looked back at her and did not say anything.

He did not nod and he did not frown. He just looked at her.

Then Tracy looked at me. I was standing by the backstop with my water jug.

“Kari,” she said. “I need to ask you something.”