“I stood there with a flashlight for an hour,” Curtis said. “I read every one of them. There was one from 1987 that said Orval R. with a crooked R. There’s one from 1994 that says Ned, broke wrist. I found forty years of boys, Mr. Rinehart. I have a son that age, and he’s never had a place to put his name.” His eyes were wet and he did not wipe them. “Whoever carved forty years of names into a church pew wasn’t trespassing. They were home. I could not put it in a dump.”
“I’m not a hero. I’m going to have a conversation with a lot of people on Monday, and I might have a different job after it. But I could not leave it with the pipe.”
I do not remember deciding to do it. I put my arms around a man I had known for five days, a man who had padlocked my boys’ field, and he was shaking, and I held him there by the gate with three hundred people watching, and I said into his shoulder, “Thank you.”
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Shep cleared his throat behind me. “Well,” he said, his voice thick. “It’s not going to carry itself.”
It took eight men. They lifted the pew down off the flatbed the way you would lift a casket, slow and level, and carried it across the grass to the first base dugout, and the crowd parted for them and closed behind. They set it along the bench line on its cinder blocks, and somebody checked it twice with a hand level. Then Dub’s father turned on the flashlight on his phone, and one by one the boys got down on their backs in the dirt and slid under.
Lathan was first. I heard him, from under the pew, in a voice I will carry with me till I die.
“Mr. Orval. Mine’s still here.”
“I know,” I said. “They’re all still here.”
We played the game at two.
I would like to tell you Briar Mill won, but they lost eleven to four. Dub walked six batters. Teddy, who cannot catch a ball, caught a fly in right field in the fourth inning, by accident, on the top of his head, and the crowd on the first base side made a noise I have never heard a crowd make. Lathan threw out a runner at second in the third, a low line drive from his knees, and the old men from my father’s breakfast stood up in their lawn chairs.
In the bottom of the sixth, Lathan came up to bat with two outs and a runner on third. The first pitch was inside. The second was a strike. The third was a high fastball, and he swung at it with his whole twelve-year-old body, and the ball went up over the second baseman’s head and kept going, out past the center fielder, into the new-mown grass where the neighbor boy had cut a perfect circle on Thursday.
There was no fence, only Dovie’s pasture running out to the tree line. The ball rolled and rolled, and Lathan came around the bases, and I do not remember which base he touched, because I was watching his face. He crossed home plate, a regulation plate, five-sided and correct, and the whole field came apart.
He stood at the plate with his mask under his arm, and he looked up into the stands, and for the first time since Monday morning he was smiling.
And I looked across the field to the first base line, where Curtis stood in a lawn chair somebody had given him, and an eleven-year-old boy I had never seen stood next to him. Curtis had his arm around the kid. The kid was wearing a glove.