The Diamond We Mowed Into Our Hayfield

Tracy in front of the girls

Tracy stepped over the wire. She walked out onto the short grass, past first base, and the girls drifted in from their positions, the way girls do, until they were standing in a loose knot near the circle.

Twelve girls in visors and shorts with dirt on their knees. A few dads behind them.

The old men in their lawn chairs. And her own father, sitting very still with his hands on his knees.

“In May I gave your field away,” Tracy said. “I told Rylee’s mom you could use the church lot. I thought my boys mattered more this summer. I was wrong about that.”

The girls did not say anything. Garnet chewed on the strap of her batting glove.

“You made your own field,” Tracy said. “And you went nine and oh on it. And now I’ve come out here to ask you for help, and you’re going to give it to me. I don’t deserve it.”

She stopped and pressed her lips together. Then she said, “When the park opens back up, the Tuesday and Thursday slot is yours again. Next spring too. I’ll move my boys. That’s done.”

One of the girls, a tall one who plays shortstop, said, “Okay.” And then another one said, “Okay.” And that was all. Girls that age do not hold a grudge the way grown women do.

Tracy turned around to walk back to the wire, and she had to go past her father’s lawn chair to do it. She stopped there, and he looked up at her.

He did not say anything. He reached up and took her hand, the way he must have done when she was little, and held it a moment, and then let it go. Then he looked back at the field.

Grandpa’s reason

The scrimmage was set for Saturday morning. Tracy went home to call her parents.

The girls went back to practice, louder than before. Rylee threw harder than I had ever seen her throw.

When it was over and the girls were picking up the balls, I went and sat down on the cooler next to Hosea.

The others had gone home. It was just the two of us and the long gold light on the hay.

“I didn’t ask you to come out here in May,” I said. “I want you to know that. I wouldn’t have put you in the middle.”

“I know you didn’t,” he said.

“Then why did you?”

He was quiet a long time. He took off his seed cap and turned it in his hands.

His hair is white all the way now. He has been farming that ground since 1966.

“Dustin’s mother played ball,” he said. “Did you know that? Fastpitch. Before we were married. In a pasture behind her daddy’s barn, with her sisters and the hired man.”

I did not know that. She died before I ever met Dustin.

I had seen her picture on the wall at the farmhouse a hundred times, a dark-haired woman laughing on a tractor fender.

“There wasn’t a team for girls then,” Hosea said. “Not around here. So they made one. They lined the bases with lime from the barn. She told me about it on our first date.”

He put his cap back on and looked out at the diamond, where Rylee was carrying the bucket of balls in from the circle, her ponytail swinging.

“When I heard what Tracy did,” he said, “I went and got that lime. I figured her mother would have wanted the lines straight.” He cleared his throat. “That’s all it was.”

I put my hand on his arm and left it there, and we did not say anything else for a long time.

Then Rylee came over and asked him if he had seen her changeup, and he said he had.