The Ball Field Built in a Weekend

I should explain that he was not wrong on paper, and that this is the part that stung. For forty years the family who owned the feed mill had let the church use that lot on a handshake. The old mill owner shook my father’s hand in 1986, and in 1998 his daughter shook mine, and nobody ever wrote a word of it down. When she died, the mill went to an estate, and the estate sold it to a company in Columbus none of us had heard of. Nobody told the church. There was never a paper to tell us about.

I asked Curtis if the boys could finish the fall season. Six more Saturdays. I told him I would sign anything he put in front of me.

“It’s liability,” he said. “It’s insurance. If a boy trips on a pipe fitting on company property, it’s a company problem, and I am the one who gets the call. It isn’t me, Mr. Rinehart. It’s three levels up from me. I will pass your request along, I promise you that.”

“Does the company know it’s a ball field?”

Curtis looked over my shoulder, and I turned around, and there were eleven boys standing at the edge of the gravel with their gloves.

They stood in a line along the new fence as quietly as I have ever seen eleven boys stand. Nobody climbed it. Nobody yelled. A boy named Dub, who is nine and talks through his whole life, stood with both hands wrapped in the wire and his mouth shut.

“I think it does now,” Curtis said, and he looked down at the padlock, and he did not look up again for a while.

Let me tell you what that field was, because anybody who has never had a place like it will think I am making a fuss over dirt.

In the spring of 1986, I was fifteen. My father, Walt, ran the church men’s breakfast, and he came home from it one Saturday with a tape measure in his shirt pocket and said the mill owners had agreed to let us use the lot behind the mill. Nine men showed up the next weekend with two push mowers and a borrowed tractor, and cleared out a summer’s worth of ragweed and rusted mill parts. My father had me hold the end of his tape at home plate while he walked it out to first base, sixty feet, the way the rule book says. I was fifteen, and I thought it was the most important job I would ever have.

They built the backstop from three utility poles and a roll of chicken wire. They poured home plate out of a bag of concrete in a pan from the church kitchen, which is why it was slightly crooked, and why for forty years every umpire who worked our games called it “the biscuit.”

And the dugout bench was a pew.

When First Church put in new seating in 1988, the old oak pews were stacked behind the fellowship hall, and my father asked if the boys could have one. It took six men to carry it down Mill Street. They set it along the first base line on four cinder blocks, and from the first week on, every boy who ever sat on it carved his name into the underside with a pocketknife, which is something my father said he would pretend not to see as long as nobody carved anything shorter than a name.