There were a hundred and some cars along Millrace Road, and lawn chairs and blankets across the whole of the first base side. Some of the old men from my father’s breakfast sat in a row along the third base line with their caps on their knees, and a few of them were crying, in the open, without any shame about it, and I loved them for that.
Pike Creek had sent their boys, in matching shirts, to be the other side. Their coach, a big man with a whistle he never used, shook my hand at the gate and said, “I heard what happened. We’d have driven here if you’d played in a ditch.”
At one-forty, Lathan came out of the dugout in his gear.
He had his mask, his chest protector, his shin guards, all of it secondhand from a bin in the church basement. He looked like a small knight. He crouched at the plate, pounded his glove twice, and looked out at the mound, where Dub stood with the ball in both hands, the way he always does, like it might get away.
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And then I heard an engine.
It was a diesel, coming down Millrace Road slowly, like a driver not certain he is in the right place. A white flatbed, with a company decal on the door. I knew it before I read the lettering.
The whole crowd turned. A stillness went down the first base line and across the lawn chairs, three hundred people gone quiet, and a few of the old men from the breakfast getting slowly to their feet.
The truck pulled up by the gate and stopped. The driver’s door opened. Curtis stepped out.
He was not wearing his hard hat. In a flannel shirt and jeans, without his clipboard and vest, he looked like what he was, a tired man in his forties with a boy at home, I would find out, of eleven. He stood by the cab looking at three hundred people. Then he found me. I walked over to the gate, and Shep came with me and stood at my elbow, and I could feel the heat coming off him.
“Mr. Rinehart,” Curtis said. “I won’t stay. I know I’m the last man anybody wants to see today.”
“What do you need, Curtis?”
“I need to give you something.”
He walked around to the back of the flatbed. A tarp was tied down over the bed with ratchet straps, and he undid them one at a time, slowly, as if he did not entirely trust himself. He pulled the tarp back.
It was the pew.
Eight feet of dark oak, scarred and honey-colored where thousands of boys had sat on it, still on its four cinder blocks. I stood there with my mouth open. I could not make a sound.
“We got the order Monday afternoon to clear the lot by Wednesday,” Curtis said. His voice was not steady. “Backstop, bases, the scoreboard, all of it, to the dump. A crew was scheduled for Thursday. I wasn’t there Thursday. I told them I’d handle the bench myself.” He swallowed. “I went out to the lot Wednesday night after everybody had gone home. I don’t know why. I turned the bench over to load it. And I saw what was underneath it. The rest went to the dump Thursday without me. The bench I took home on the yard loader.”