The Camper by the Ballfield

Here is the honest answer. My son was 600 miles away, working twelve-hour days on a pipeline crew, sleeping in a man camp with a wall so thin he could hear the fellow next door snore.

If I called him, he had two choices, and both of them were bad.

He could quit and drive home and lose the job that was keeping that house afloat.

Or he could stay, and fight with his wife over the phone every night, and take his son’s side or his wife’s side from a parking lot in North Dakota.

Either way, that house would break. And when it broke, everybody would know whose fault it was. Not Shawna’s. Colter’s. He would be the boy who split up his dad’s marriage three weeks before graduation.

I was not going to hand him that. He had enough to carry.

So I did not call. Colter did not call either. When I asked him, he said, “Dad’s got enough going on, Grandma.” He was more grown up than either of us.

Sunday morning I went to church. I go every Sunday, the eight o’clock service, and I sit in the same pew my husband and I sat in for thirty-one years.

Colter came with me. He did not have to. He put on his one good shirt and came.

We sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” I have sung that hymn a thousand times. That morning I could not get through the second verse. I stood there with the hymnal open and let everybody else sing it for me.

Thirty years ago my husband and I bought a lot on the north side of town, right up against the town ballfield.

It was a corner lot with good grass and an old cottonwood, and he meant to build us a house there when he retired.

He got as far as having a power pole set and a meter put in.

He used to go over there in the evenings in his work boots and pace out where the kitchen would go. Then he got sick, and then he was gone, and the lot just sat there.

And in my own driveway sat my own camper. A little white-and-tan travel trailer, older than Colter, that my husband and I used to take to Buffalo Bill Reservoir to fish.

I had kept it up. New tires two years ago. It was small, but it was clean.

When church let out, I shook the pastor’s hand and told him it was a fine sermon. Then I drove home, changed into my slacks and my purple windbreaker, and backed my car out of the way.

My neighbor down the block, an old rancher named Merle who works as the groundskeeper at the ballfield in the summers, came out of his house while I was cranking down the tongue jack. He watched me for about ten seconds.

“Wilma,” he said. “You fixing to go somewhere?”

“Just across town,” I said. “I need to borrow your arms for a minute and your truck for an hour.”

Merle is 71 years old. He has known me since we were in the same Sunday school class. He did not ask me another question.

He just went and got his truck and backed it up to the hitch and hooked the chains like he had done it every day of his life.