The Camper by the Ballfield

That afternoon I drove by the lot on my way home. There was a pickup parked on the grass beside the camper, and a man was carrying something in through the door.

It was his coach, a man named Jody who has coached baseball in Powell for nineteen years.

He was carrying a mini fridge. A brand new one, still with the cardboard corners on. He set it inside, plugged it in, and came back out wiping his hands on his jeans.

He saw me and nodded. I rolled down my window.

“Jody,” I said. “That was kind of you.”

“Didn’t do anything,” he said. “My wife needed the room in the garage.”

It was a brand new fridge in a box. Nobody’s wife ever needed room in the garage that bad. But I did not say so.

He did not want it said. He got in his truck and drove off, and I sat there in my car for a minute with my hand over my mouth.

On Tuesday Merle came with a shovel.

The ballfield has a water spigot on the back of the concession stand, maybe a hundred feet from my lot line.

Merle walked over to the town office first thing in the morning and talked to somebody, I never did find out who. He came back with permission and a roll of black poly pipe.

Then he dug a trench from the spigot to the camper. By hand. A seventy-one-year-old man with a bad shoulder and a garden spade, in the morning sun, before the heat came up.

It was only about eight inches deep, because it was May and there was no frost to worry about, but it was a hundred feet of trench.

When Colter got out of school, Merle was sitting on an upside-down bucket next to the camper with the hose hooked up and running. Colter stood there looking at it.

“You do this?” he asked.

“Town did it,” Merle said. “I just held the shovel.”

Colter tried to pay him. He had a twenty in his wallet. Merle looked at the twenty like it was a snake.

“You catch a clean game Friday,” Merle said. “That’ll pay it.”

Colter caught a clean game Friday. He threw out two runners trying to steal second, and Powell won by three runs. I was in the bleachers.

I could see the camper from where I sat, just past the left field fence, with the cottonwood leafing out over it.

The second week, folks started noticing. Powell is not a big town. When an old white-and-tan camper shows up on a lot by the ballfield with a high school catcher living in it, people talk.

Most of what they did, though, was not talking. It was showing up.

A lady from my church left a pan of chicken enchiladas on the camper step with a note that said: Heat at 350 for 30 minutes.

Return the pan whenever. She did not sign it. I knew her handwriting from twenty years of potluck sign-up sheets.

Two of Colter’s teammates came over on a Wednesday and mowed the lot without being asked. One of them brought a weed eater and did all the way around the camper and the power pole.