The Coach Who Would Not Bench Him

“Mason caught that ball,” he said.

“He did.”

“Cricket threw it.”

“He did.”

He turned his hat around in his hand, once, twice.

“I would have sat that boy down,” he said. His voice did not sound like his voice. “Over a position. For one game. I would have sat that boy down, and it never occurred to me to ask what it was costing him.”

“Tobias,” I said.

“Don’t.” He shook his head. “I’m not asking for anything. I’m only saying it out loud because there’s no sense in saying it anywhere else.”

He put his hat on. He looked at the sleeve of the boy nearest to us, the little white circle with the two words, and I saw him read it. I saw him read it twice. Then he walked out of the dugout and across the grass to where his grandson was sitting, and I did not hear what he said. I only saw Mason look up at him, serious, and Tobias put his big hand on the boy’s cap, the red one, the one that said Cedar Grove, and leave it there.

That is the end of what I saw. On Sunday morning, Pastor Enos told me there was an envelope in the offering plate with my name on it, in Tobias’s handwriting: For the boys’ fees, whatever year they need it. Thirty-two hundred dollars, signed with his name, in front of God and everybody, because he is not a man who knows how to do it any other way. Oleta opened a little account at the credit union that afternoon in the name of the Cardinals. On the first deposit slip she wrote, in her clipboard hand, For the next boy who is used to it.

I do not tell you this to say it came out neat. Tobias and I have not had supper. He has not asked me to bench anyone again, and I have not asked him for a thing. When we pass in the church lot, we nod. I think he is working on something, and I think it is slower than a car wash.

Every spring now, the Cardinals take the field in red, with a small white circle sewn on the sleeve, and there is a long list of boys who have never once had to say it’s okay. Oleta starts a new sign-up sheet every year. It is always eighty lines. We do not always fill it. But I have noticed that the lines fill themselves in, in the end.

Here is what I think I know about prayer.

You do not pray for the answer. You pray to be shown. And then you stand where you are, in the heat, in the dirt, with your clipboard and your small cold voice telling you it is only one game, and you say no. And somewhere behind you, in the parking lots and the kitchens and the casserole line, a phone starts ringing.

Every boy bats. Every boy plays. And every boy is seen.

I say it before every game, and now they say it with me.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.