The Diamond We Mowed Into Our Hayfield

The scrimmage

Saturday morning was clear and already warm at eight o’clock. Hosea came out at seven to put the lines down fresh. He made them extra bright. He walked them twice.

The boys came out at nine in three pickups and a minivan, with their fathers and their baseball bags.

There were fourteen of them, and they stood at the edge of the hay looking at the cattle panels.

“That’s the backstop?” one of them said.

“It stopped a bull once,” a dad told him, and the boy laughed and did not know whether to believe it.

They worked out rules on the spot, the dads and our coach and Tracy, standing around home plate.

The girls would hit against the boys’ pitchers with a baseball, from forty-six feet, which is their distance.

The boys would hit against the girls’ pitchers with a softball, from forty feet. Each team would bat three innings. Nobody would keep score, which of course everybody did anyway.

Rylee pitched the first inning to the boys. She was nervous. I could tell by the way she kept pulling at her visor.

She walked the first batter on four pitches, and I saw her bite her lip.

Then she struck out the next three. The second one was her cousin, Tracy’s boy, who is their best hitter.

He swung through the changeup so far ahead of it that he spun all the way around.

He stood there a second and looked at her, out in the circle. Then he grinned and pointed at her with his bat and said, “That’s not fair.” And Rylee grinned back.

“It’s forty feet,” she said. “It’s really forty. My daddy measured it.”

The boys did not get a hit off a girl until the third inning.

When they finally did, a little blooper over second base, the old men behind the backstop clapped for the boy the same as they would for anybody.

The girls got four hits off the boys’ pitchers, which was four more than anybody expected.

Garnet, the ten-year-old, got one of them, and she ran to first base like she was running for the bus.

After

When it was done, the boys and the girls shook hands at home plate in two lines, the way they do at real games.

Then everybody stood around in the sun eating popsicles out of the cooler and not wanting to go home.

Tracy’s boy came over to Rylee. I watched him do it. He was red in the face and he did not quite look at her, but he went.

“Can you come pitch to us again Tuesday?” he asked her. “Before we leave? Coach says hitting off you is the best thing we could do.”

Rylee looked at me. I said it was up to her. She said yes, if the girls could still have their practice afterward.

He said that was fine. Then he went back to his friends, and they punched him in the arm.

The boys practiced in our hayfield every day that week, in the morning, before the heat.

Our girls practiced there in the evenings. Rylee threw to the boys on Tuesday and again on Thursday.

The dads stayed late. The old men came early. The cooler came twice as full.

And Hosea came every single day and put the lines down fresh, because he said a field that gets used that hard deserves it.

Tracy came every day too. She did not say much. She ran her boys through their drills, and she thanked Dustin twice, and she picked up trash along the backstop when nobody asked her to.

On Thursday, she brought a case of water and set it down in the shade of the backstop for the girls without saying a word.

Rylee saw her do it. She did not say anything either, but she nodded.