The Coach Who Would Not Bench Him

And he did say it was okay. That is the thing that has never left me. Cricket was standing in the dugout with his glove under his arm, and he had heard every word, and he walked out to the fence and put his little hand through the chain link and said, “It’s okay, Coach. I didn’t really need the finals.”

I looked down at that boy and thought, He has been saying “it’s okay” since first grade.

I did the figuring that night at my kitchen table. Fourteen new jerseys and caps, with lettering, would run twelve hundred and sixty dollars. The tournament and umpire fees Tobias had stopped were nine hundred and fifty. Four boys’ league fees came to four hundred and eighty. And the gear he had taken back, the catcher’s sets and helmets and bats, would cost five hundred and ten to replace. Add it up: thirty-two hundred dollars exactly, the same number he had said to my face. Joanne, my wife, looked over my shoulder and said, “He knew what he was taking.” I think he did.

We did not have thirty-two hundred dollars. We had Wednesday night, Thursday, and Friday, and a game on Saturday at ten.

Before I left the field that afternoon, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I called the boys together on the grass behind home plate. They came slowly, in their T-shirts, dragging their cleats. I put my hand in the middle, and they put theirs on top of mine, thirteen small hands and one that belonged to Wyatt’s little sister, who had wandered in and nobody had the heart to send out. Mason’s place in the circle stayed empty.

I said the prayer. The same one. “Lord, thank You for the day, the dirt, and each other. Let every boy leave this field knowing he was seen.”

I could not get the rest of it out. My voice stopped.

And it was Cricket, of all of them, the boy who never said a word at the circle, who said it for me. “Amen, Cardinals,” he said, in that thin little voice, and the boys said it right back, and I swear it carried across the park like a bell.

I drove home and told Joanne, and she asked one question: “Did you do right?” I said I did. “Then go call Oleta.”

Now, you have to know about Oleta. She is the Cardinals’ team mother, forty-three, five foot two, with a clipboard permanently attached to her arm. Four summers ago, when a boy named Hunter broke his arm sliding into third, she started the Cardinal Mothers’ Chain: one mother calls five, each of those calls five more, everyone prays for the boy by name, and somebody shows up at the door with a casserole.

I picked up the phone and I did not even have to explain. Before I said four words, Oleta said, “I heard. I’ve got eleven calls out already.”

“Oleta, I don’t want you to feel like you have to.”

“Dell Ostrander.” I could hear her clipboard hit the table. “Hush. How much?”

“Thirty-two hundred.”

There was a silence on the line. Then she said, “That’s not a big number. That’s eighty families at forty dollars apiece.”

“Eighty families? In two days?”