The Ball Field Built in a Weekend

“Sixty would be a miracle,” I said.

She looked at me over the clipboard. “Orval. You have been to church every Sunday of your life, and you still use that word like it’s a lot to ask.”

Friday dawned clear and cool, the kind of September morning that smells like cut hay and woodsmoke. I pulled up to Dovie’s pasture at ten till seven, and I could not see the grass for trucks.

I want to tell you exactly what I saw, because I have been trying to hold on to it. There were pickups along both sides of Millrace Road for a quarter of a mile. There was Ned’s first dump truck, backing in with its beeper going, and behind him Pete’s gravel trucks, and behind them a minivan from which two women were unloading folding tables and a coffee urn the size of a fire hydrant. There were men in Carhartt jackets with their breath smoking, and women with leather gloves in their back pockets, and teenagers who had no business being up that early, and a row of old people on lawn chairs with thermoses, there for no reason except to be there.

And Dovie stood at the end of her gravel driveway in her cardigan, holding the green notebook against her chest, watching the whole thing arrive.

Leona’s sign-in sheet had run out of lines by seven fifteen. She kept count with a tally mark in the margin of each page, and when I came over at noon with a sandwich, she looked up from the folding table and said, “Fifty-three.”

I did not say a word. I put the sandwich down and went and stood behind the folding table, where nobody could see my face, and looked out at the pasture.

Shep ran the skid steer like a man conducting an orchestra. By nine he had the infield graded flat. By ten Glenn’s shop boys had laid out the baselines with string and stakes, and I watched a seventeen-year-old named Elzie walk off the sixty feet to first base with a steel tape, heel to toe, saying the numbers under his breath, and for a second I could not breathe, because I was fifteen again and my father was twenty feet away with the other end of the tape in his hand.

I walked over. I took the end of the tape from the boy.

“Let me hold it,” I said. “I have done this one before.”

He gave it to me. He did not ask why my hands were shaking.

It went like that, all day. Russ’s poles went in at eleven, set four feet deep. By one o’clock the backstop frame stood tall and dark and straight out of the pasture, and four men were stretching new netting across it. Glenn’s boys built two dugouts under plain shed roofs. A woman named Tess who runs a landscaping business brought a pickup full of sod for the ground around home plate. A retired county road foreman I had never met, a man named Walt who happened to share my father’s name, which about knocked me over, built the mound himself and refused to let anyone else touch it.

“Forty-six feet from the rubber to the plate,” he told me. “Ten inches up. I did two hundred of these for the county in my life. I’ll tell you something, I have never been asked to build one for free before. I’d almost forgotten how much I like it.”