The Ball Field Built in a Weekend

“Dovie,” I said. “That’s three-quarters of a mile from the church.”

“It’s three-quarters of a mile,” she said. “The Lord did not say the answer would be next door.”

Behind her, Shep had come up quietly with his big arms folded. Shep does not talk a great deal. When he does, he has usually already done the arithmetic.

“Friday and Saturday,” Shep said. “If we have forty people. Maybe fifty. If Ned will give us clay for the infield.”

“Forty people to build a ball field,” I said. “Between now and Saturday.”

“Orval,” Shep said. “Your daddy built the first one with nine.”

I did not sleep Wednesday night. At four in the morning I was at the kitchen table with a legal pad, drawing a backstop, a mound, a home plate, three bases, and two dugouts, and my wife Leona, who has been married to me for thirty-one years and knows when a man is going to talk to himself until sunup, came in her robe and sat down across from me without a word. She looked at my drawing for a long time. Then she took the pencil and wrote in the margin, lumber, who?

By six, Dovie’s chain had been running for twelve hours.

I do not know how to describe what a prayer chain can do when it is given something to do besides pray. By Thursday morning my phone held thirty-one text messages. Pete, who hauls gravel, would bring two loads of crushed limestone. Delia, who runs the fabric store, would get the chalk and lime wholesale. Russ from the co-op had three utility poles he had been trying to get rid of since spring. Glenn, who teaches shop at the high school, said he could bring six boys with their own tools, and that if the school asked, it was a field trip.

Ned, at the quarry in Pike Creek, called me back at eleven. His mother was on Dovie’s list. “How much infield mix?” he said. I told him I did not know what it cost. “I did not ask what it costs,” Ned said. “I asked how much.” I did the math on the legal pad and said eighteen tons, and he said he would have two trucks there by seven in the morning. I thanked him, and it came out cracked, and he said, “Orval, I broke my wrist on that mound in 1994. You are going to have to let somebody do something.”

At noon, Shep came into the shop with a feed sack on which he had drawn the entire field in carpenter’s pencil. He had walked Dovie’s pasture at dawn with a hundred-foot tape and a can of orange marking paint.

“It’s not as flat as she said,” he told me, grinning. “But it’s close. We’ll need a skid steer for about two hours.”

“Whose?”

“I have one,” Shep said. “I have just never had a reason to bring it.”

And at six o’clock that evening, Leona came home from the church office with a clipboard and a sign-in sheet, a plain sheet of paper with a line for each name, the way she makes the sign-up for the funeral dinners. She had printed the heading at the top. It said: Briar Mill Boys’ Field, Friday and Saturday, bring gloves and a shovel. She had put a phone number and a time, seven in the morning, and nothing else.

“How many do you want?” she asked.