I carved mine the summer I was sixteen. Shep, who has been my friend since the first grade and frames houses for a living, carved his underneath mine. Over the years the names went all the way to the end of the pew and started down the back. By the time I took over the league in 2004, a boy had to lie on his back in the dirt with a flashlight to find the one he was looking for, and they did it every spring, all of them, without being asked.
Briar Mill is a town of about nineteen hundred people at the end of a county road. We do not have a park department or a rec league. The nearest organized youth baseball is in the county seat, fourteen miles away, and it costs eighty-five dollars a boy to sign up, plus the uniform, plus the gas, which for some of our families is the difference between a boy playing and a boy not.
So eleven boys, and some years nineteen, played on the church field for nothing. Lathan’s grandmother raised him on her Social Security check and a little money from cleaning at the school. I knew what she paid for his glove, because I had asked a man at the Elks to sell it to me at cost, and then I put the extra in the church donation box and called it nothing.
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The field was the one thing in Briar Mill a boy did not have to pay for.
I called the number on the sign that morning. It took until Tuesday to reach a person, a pleasant woman in Columbus named Alyssa, who said she was “empathetic” and then explained that the company’s insurance carrier “could not approve third-party occupancy.” I said we were not a third party, we were a church. She said she would escalate.
On Wednesday morning, Curtis called me himself.
“I have two things,” he said. “I’m not going to dress them up. The company would be willing to make a goodwill donation of five hundred dollars to your league. That’s for uniforms, or whatever you need.”
I said nothing.
“And I asked, because I figured you would. The company would consider selling the north acre and a half. Corporate came back with a number. Forty-one thousand dollars.”
I laughed. It came out ugly. Forty-one thousand dollars for an acre and a half of gravel and broken ragweed, from a company that had paid, as I later learned from the county auditor’s website, less than that for the whole parcel with the building on it. I told Curtis the church did not have forty-one thousand dollars, and that if it did, it would not buy a ball field it had been playing on for forty years for free.
“I know,” Curtis said, quietly. “I figured that’s what you’d say.”
That was the day I lost my temper in prayer.
I do not usually pray in my truck. I pray at the kitchen table, early, the way my father did. But on Wednesday, parked behind the shop with a wheel hub in my lap, I said some things to God that I would not have said to Pastor Chester. I said that for forty years a church had done a good, small thing in a vacant lot, and a company from two hours away had padlocked it in an afternoon. I said I was supposed to be the one who looked after the boys, and I had stood on the shoulder of the road and watched.