The Ball Field Built in a Weekend

I walked over after the game and asked the boy his name.

“Carter,” he said. “We moved too much to play, sir.”

“Come Wednesday,” I said. “We practice at four. There’s a spot on the bench.”

I looked at Curtis then. He gave me a small nod. He did not say a word, and I did not make him.

I should tell you the rest, because a story that stops at the good part is not an honest one.

Curtis was called to Columbus on Monday. I do not know what was said in that office. I know that by month’s end Brightline had moved him to a yard in Dayton, and that he sent me a Christmas card with a picture of Carter in a Briar Mill shirt. The company never sent us another word. The acre and a half on Mill Street still sits behind its chain-link, full of drainage pipe, and I drive past it every morning. I used to grind my teeth. Now I say a name. I say Curtis, and then Alyssa from Columbus, whom I never met, and then the three levels above both of them. I am not sure I have always meant it. But I say them.

Dovie will not let us call it Dovie’s Field. When Pastor Chester suggested it the Sunday after, she told him, “It’s a ball field. The boys have a name for it already.” They call it the Pasture. Glenn’s shop class made a plain board for the gate that says The Pasture, and under it in smaller letters: Briar Mill Church Boys, since 1986. She sits behind home plate for every game with her green notebook in her lap, and when a boy comes up to bat she writes his name down. I asked her once what she did with those names, and she handed me the notebook. Page after page, in her small pencil handwriting. Every boy, going back through every spiral she had kept.

“You didn’t think the chain stopped at the fence, did you, Orval?” she said.

I have thought about that every day since.

I used to believe the question of prayer was whether anything came back. I sat in my truck behind the shop that Wednesday and asked God for a field, and what I got was silence, and a long bad afternoon, and then a seventy-nine-year-old woman in a cardigan telling me she had eleven acres. Here is what I have decided. The answer was not silent. It was sitting in a fellowship hall. It was in a green notebook in a purse, in Dovie’s handwriting, three-quarters of a mile from where I stood, waiting for me to stop being angry long enough to ask the right person.

The names are still under the pew. Last spring a new boy, a quiet one named Jonah, carved his at the very end of the bench with a pocketknife, and I saw him do it. I did not say a word. I walked out to the mound and stood a minute with my cap in my hands, looking in at the plate.

My father had said he would pretend not to see as long as nobody carved anything shorter than a name.

I have pretended for twenty-two years. I will pretend as long as they keep coming.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.