The Coach Who Would Not Bench Him

I have thought about how far that boy had to ride, and what he must have said, or not said, to be allowed to leave the house. He was eleven, and he had watched Tuesday from the fence, and he had known, the way children know, that something was wrong.

Oleta took the bag. She counted out singles and quarters, all of it, slowly, in front of everyone.

“Sixteen dollars,” she said.

“Sixteen even?” said Mason.

“Sixteen even.” And she took her pen and wrote on the eightieth line of the sheet, and I leaned over and saw that she had not asked him for his family name. She had asked, “What do you want me to put?” And he had said, in his small, careful voice, “Just Mason.”

Three thousand, two hundred dollars. Eighty families. The eightieth line in a child’s handwriting, because Oleta let him hold the pen.

I looked at Cricket. He was sitting at the end of the curb with his glasses fogged and his ears red from the sun. He was looking at Mason, and Mason was looking at him, and neither one said a word. After a while, Cricket scooted over and made a space on the curb, and Mason sat down. Somebody passed him the peppermints.

I stood there with my eyes stinging, and Pastor Enos came up behind me, put his big hand on the back of my neck, and said, very low, “Dell, that is what we mean by the body of Christ. Look at it. Nobody’s in charge of it.”

Across the street, the window at Tobias Tire was dark.

I do not know when he turned the light off. I did not see it. I know that at some point in that long hot day, the man at the window stopped watching.

Oleta had the money in an envelope inside of four minutes, and she was on the phone to her cousin Rhonda, who owns the screen-print shop on the square. “I need fourteen jerseys and fourteen caps by Saturday morning. Red. Cedar Grove across the front. A number on the back.” She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “I know it’s Thursday. I’ll bring the money myself in ten minutes.” She hung up. “Rhonda says she’ll be there till midnight, and you owe her a church supper.”

That evening I paid Rhonda her twelve hundred and sixty dollars and Gail at the league office the nine hundred and fifty for the umpires and the field. I handed Dena an envelope Oleta had marked in clipboard pen: For Cricket, league fees, paid in full. Three more envelopes went to three more mothers, and every one of them cried and not one argued. The last five hundred and ten dollars bought two catcher’s sets, four helmets, and a bag of bats at the sporting goods store in town.

When I stood in my kitchen at eleven that night with the receipts on the table, Joanne put her hand on my back and said, “Your prayer got answered.”

“I didn’t ask for money,” I said.

“What did you ask for?”

“To be shown.”

She looked at the empty sandwich bag Oleta had given me to keep. “Well,” she said. “I think you were.”

On Friday I drove out to Dena’s house after work. I had never once seen where Cricket lived in six summers, and I am ashamed of that.

It is a single-wide off the county line road, painted white, with a little vegetable garden and a tire swing nobody had swung in years. Cricket was on the porch step oiling his cousin’s glove, cracked at the thumb, like he was polishing a trophy.