At ten past seven on a Monday morning, I pulled my truck onto the gravel shoulder of Mill Street in Briar Mill, Ohio, and watched a crew in orange vests string chain-link fence around the only ball field our church boys have ever had.
The field was four hundred feet from my own back door. Forty years of boys had worn the grass off its infield, and I stood on the shoulder with a thermos of coffee and a bucket of bats in the truck bed, watching two men with a post driver finish what a hundred rainstorms never could.
They were setting the last corner post when the first bicycle came up Mill Street.
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It was Lathan. He is twelve, a catcher, built like a fence post himself, and he rides a bike two sizes too small because his grandmother cannot spend sixty dollars on a bigger one. He had his glove hanging off the handlebar and his mask looped over his shoulder, because on Monday mornings he gets to the field forty minutes before school to throw against the backstop with anybody who will catch for him. He stopped in the gravel and looked at the fence. He looked at the white sign wired to it, red letters, Private Property, No Trespassing, and under that, in smaller type, Brightline Storage Partners.
Then he looked at me. He did not ask me anything. He is a boy who has learned not to ask a grown man for what the grown man may not have.
I am Orval Rinehart. I am fifty-five years old, I fix tires and brakes at the service shop on Route 9, and for twenty-two years I have run the Briar Mill Church boys’ ball league out of the bed of that truck. I have never had a title. I have a bucket of bats, a tape measure, a box of chalk, and a key to the church kitchen, where the snacks live.
“Mr. Orval,” Lathan finally said. “Is it just for today?”
I did not have an answer, so I did what a man does when he has no words. I got out of the truck and went to find the foreman.
His name was Curtis, and I want to be fair to him, because I have thought about him a great deal since. He was a man of about forty-five in a clean white hard hat, with a clipboard and a tired, decent face, and he was standing by the new gate with a padlock in his hand like a man holding a dead bird.
“Morning,” he said. “You’re the fellow with the baseball.”
“Twenty-two years of it,” I said. “Those boys are going to be here in an hour. We have a game Saturday.”
“Sir, I understand,” Curtis said, and I could tell he did, which made it worse. “The company closed on this property the first of the month. The old feed mill, the warehouse lot, and the acre and a half on the north side. This is all one parcel now. We have forty pallets of drainage pipe coming Wednesday, and the lot is going to be a storage yard. I wish I had better news.”
“That acre and a half is a ball field,” I said.
“It’s a vacant lot with a backstop on it,” he said, gently.