I did not hear anything back. No feeling, no verse, no warm hand on my shoulder. I sat there until the coffee ran out. Then I went on to church, because it was Wednesday, and on Wednesday night Briar Mill Church has prayer meeting, and I did not know what else to do with the rest of the day.
If you have never been part of a small church’s prayer chain, I will describe how it works, because it is the engine of this whole story.
There is a list. In our church it lives in a green spiral notebook in the purse of a woman named Dovie, who is seventy-nine and has kept it since 1991. When something happens, a hospital stay, a lost job, a barn fire, somebody calls Dovie, and Dovie calls three people, and each of those three calls three more. By supper there are fifty people saying the same name under their breath at the same hour. It is only that it is relentless, and kind, and nobody ever forgets to make their calls.
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That Wednesday night we had thirty-some people in the fellowship hall, on folding chairs, under the buzzing lights. Pastor Chester opened with a short reading and then asked, the way he does, if anyone had a request. I stood up before I knew I was standing.
I told them about the fence.
I told them about the forty-one thousand dollars and the five hundred. I did not make a speech. I said the field was gone, the bench was inside the fence, and the boys had come up Mill Street on Monday morning and found a padlock. I said I had one prayer, and it was that those boys would have somewhere to play on Saturday.
When I sat down, nobody said anything. Then Pastor Chester said, “Let’s pray,” and thirty people bowed their heads in a fellowship hall that smells like coffee and floor wax, and one by one, aloud, they said the boys’ names. Lathan. Dub. The twins. Little Teddy, who is eight and cannot catch a ball but loves the sound of it. They said the name of the company, too. Dovie did, and I heard her say it plainly: “Lord, be kind to the people at Brightline, they don’t know what they’ve done.”
I will confess something. I was not praying that prayer. I was angry enough to want Brightline to know exactly what it had done. But I listened to a seventy-nine-year-old woman ask for mercy for the people who had hurt my boys, and something in me loosened a notch.
After the amen, as the folding chairs were scraping and the coffee urn was gurgling, Dovie came and stood in front of me. She is about five feet tall, in a cardigan she has worn since the Reagan administration, and she looked up at me with her jaw set.
“Orval Rinehart,” she said. “How much ground does a ball field take?”
“Standard youth diamond, with a little outfield,” I said, because I knew the answer by heart. “Two acres. A little more for a decent outfield.”
“I have eleven,” she said.
I stared at her.
“Out behind the house, on Millrace Road. Harold’s old pasture. It hasn’t had a cow on it since he passed, and the neighbor boy only hays it twice a summer because I can’t stand to see it go to weeds. It’s flat as a table. I have been sitting in that kitchen for six years asking the Lord what to do with it, and I thought it was for my funeral expenses.” She waved a hand. “My funeral will cost what it costs. A field is a field. You can have the north five.”