The Coach Who Would Not Bench Him

I sat down next to him. I did not say anything for a while.

“Coach,” he said finally. “Was it because of me? The thing with Mr. Tobias?”

I thought about how to answer that. There is a version where I tell him no, it was nothing to do with him, he should not worry. And there is the truth.

“It was because of you,” I said. “And because of every boy who ever got told that he was used to it.”

He turned the glove over in his hands. “I am kind of used to it.”

“I know you are.” I put my hand on the back of his neck, the way Pastor Enos had done with me. “That’s what I’m trying to fix.”

He nodded for a while. Then he said, very quietly, “Mom says a lot of people came.”

“Eighty families,” I said.

“Is that what you pray for?” he asked me. “At the circle? That we’re seen?”

“Yes.”

He looked out at the garden, at the crooked little rows of tomatoes, and he said, “I think it worked.”

On Saturday I got to the field at a quarter after seven because I could not sleep. A red van was parked behind the dugout. Oleta was already there with Rhonda and a stack of boxes, and when I walked up, she did not say hello. She just opened the first box.

The jerseys were red, the color of the bird on Hank’s sign, which I will always say looked like a chicken. Across the front, in white letters, it said Cedar Grove. On the back, each boy’s number. And on the left sleeve, where a sponsor’s patch goes, there was a small white circle, stitched, with two words in it. It said, Eighty Families.

I picked one up and ran my thumb over the stitching. I could not talk.

“I added that,” said Rhonda, from behind a box. “No charge. It seemed to me that’s who your sponsors were.”

I had never seen those bleachers full. They were full: every plank, every rail, folding chairs along the fence, the old men from the Veterans hall in their lawn chairs again, Frank from the funeral home, Hank in his apron, Pastor Enos, and Walt and Virgil and three more men from the tire shop sitting together in the last row, in shirts of their own. They had not come against Tobias. They had just come.

And in the front row, in a folding chair he had set up alone, with a thermos on the grass beside him, sat Tobias.

When it was time for the prayer, I gathered the boys behind home plate, and I put my hand in the middle, and I looked up, and what I saw undid me. Because the whole bleachers stood. Nobody had said to. Oleta had not sent a message. The mothers just rose, one at a time, and then the fathers, and then the old men, and then the church ladies in their hats. Eighty families, and more, standing on the planks with their heads down.

I do not know if Tobias stood. I did not look. I know that at the end of the prayer, when I said, “Let every boy leave this field knowing he was seen,” and fourteen voices said “Amen, Cardinals,” a lot of people in the stands said it too, loud, and some of them were crying.