The Ball Field Built in a Weekend

Ned’s trucks came and went. Eighteen tons of infield clay went across the diamond in a long red-brown wave, and Shep’s skid steer pushed it out like a man frosting a cake, and the rest of us followed behind with rakes. Teddy, who is eight, stood at the edge of the clay holding a rake twice as tall as he was, and nobody asked him to do a single thing, and he raked the same square foot of dirt all afternoon.

I looked up at three o’clock, and the boys had arrived.

They had come after school, walking and on bicycles, in a loose line up Millrace Road, and they stopped at the edge of the pasture as if they were afraid it was a mirage. Lathan came last, his mask over his shoulder and his glove in his hand. He looked at the half-finished field with the sun on the new backstop and sixty-odd grown people moving around it like ants, and I watched his face.

He walked out slowly to the place where home plate was going to be. A man named Hank was setting it in the ground, a regulation rubber plate that Delia had ordered overnight from a sporting goods store in Dayton, because she did not like the idea of a biscuit in a new field. Lathan crouched beside him and put his bare hand flat on the dirt.

“Is it going to be ready by Saturday?” he said.

“Son,” Hank said, “I believe it’s going to be ready by suppertime.”

It was not. But by dark we had the basepaths down and the dugouts framed, and Leona counted fifty-eight names across four sheets. People ate Delia’s chili off paper plates in the last of the evening light, and Pastor Chester prayed over the food and the dirt in about nine words, because he is a man who knows when to stop. As the last trucks pulled out, Dovie came over to me holding a handful of the red clay.

“Harold said that pasture was good for nothing but looking at,” she said.

Saturday morning I was at the field by six. I wanted it to myself for a little while.

It was a clear day, the sky washed so blue it hurt to look at, with the first brown edge of autumn on the sugar maples along Millrace Road. The new field lay in the grass like something that had always been there, the infield raked smooth and dark, the baselines crisp and white, the morning light coming through the new netting in a hundred little squares.

I walked it once, slowly, my boots leaving the first prints on the infield. I sat down on one of the new benches in the first base dugout, a clean pine plank, and ran my hand along the underside of it. It was smooth, with not a name on it.

I prayed there, on the bench. I did not pray for the game. I prayed for Curtis, in the end. I thought of him standing at that gate with a padlock in his hand, and I said, Lord, he had a job to do and he did not like it. And I said, Be kind to the people at Brightline, and for the first time in five days, I meant it.

By seven Leona had drawn a line under her last sheet. “Sixty,” she said. “Exactly.” By noon the place was full.