The Hoop Across From the School

What Lena knew

After Brody went home to bed, Lena and I sat at the kitchen table. I told her what Vernon had said at the door, word for word.

She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “You know his wife left him.”

I did not know. I am not a man who keeps track of such things. Lena keeps track of everything, not because she gossips, but because she brings casseroles, and you have to know who needs a casserole.

“Two years ago,” she said. “She took the house and most of everything in it. They sold the house and split it, and she got the furniture. He moved into that little place by Kirsten’s.”

“And the truck,” I said.

“And the truck,” she said. “That truck is about all he walked away with, Orvin. He told somebody at the coffee hour once that it was the only thing in his life that still looked the way it was supposed to.”

I sat with that for a while.

I understood it. I am 67 years old and I have seen enough men lose enough things to know that a man will hold onto the last one with both hands. I understood why that dent hurt him more than a dent ought to.

But understanding a thing is not the same as saying it was right. He took a boy’s hoop. He took it while the house was empty, and he locked it up, and he shut his door on the boy who came to say sorry. That was wrong, and nothing in his divorce made it less wrong.

“So what are you going to do?” Lena asked.

I looked out the front window. It was dark by then, and across the street the middle school sat quiet, a long low brick building with one light on in the office.

“I’ve got a front yard,” I said. “And I’ve got a shovel.”

The hole

Our house sits on a corner across from the middle school. I have lived in it for 38 years. I raised Kirsten in it. And the front yard, the part on the school side, has always been a flat open stretch of grass that I mow and nobody uses.

Tuesday morning at eight I was out there with a tape measure, four stakes, and a ball of string.

I am not going to tell you it was easy. I am 67. But I am also a man who spent three decades around concrete, around bins and pits and loading pads, and I know how it is done, and I know you do not cut corners on a footing in South Dakota.

The frost here goes down about four feet. If you set a pole any shallower than that, the ground heaves in the winter and your pole leans like a drunk by March. So I dug a hole four feet deep and about two feet across.

It took me most of the morning. I used a post hole digger for the first two feet and a spade and a coffee can on a rope for the rest. Lena came out at ten with a glass of iced tea and stood there watching me.

“You’re going to kill yourself,” she said.

“Not today,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow when I’m framing.”

She shook her head and went back in, but I saw her watching from the window off and on all morning.

The kids at the middle school came out for recess around eleven-thirty. A few of them drifted over to the fence along the sidewalk and watched me. One boy asked what I was building.

“A basketball court,” I said. “A small one.”

“For who?”

“For whoever shows up,” I said, and he looked at me like I was a little touched in the head and went back to the swings.