The Day I Walked Out of the Dugout

“Dropped it like a dead fish. Get off my field, Sparrow, and take your glove with you.”

That is what I said to an eleven-year-old boy on the last Saturday of June, eighteen years ago, in front of about two hundred people in the bleachers at Cutler Field in Quarry Gap, Tennessee. I did not say it quietly.

I had a coach’s voice, built over twenty-two seasons of calling signals across a ball field, and it carried clear to the gravel parking lot and the old men standing along the fence with their arms folded.

He took his glove. That is the part I have never gotten around. I told him to take it, and he did exactly what I said. He bent down, picked it up off the grass, and walked out through the gate in center field.

He did not run and he did not cry where I could see it.

He just walked, cleats clicking on the gravel, and then he was a small shape on the shoulder of Quarry Road with his glove hanging from his hand, and then he was gone.

I stood there with my clipboard and I thought, good. That is how little I understood about myself.

Last March, a few minutes past eight on a Saturday morning, a diesel tractor started up across the road from my kitchen window.

I had kept the curtain on that window shut for the four years since Tressie, my wife, died.

Before that she kept it open every morning, and I learned to eat my breakfast with my back to it. Afterward I told myself I kept it closed for the sun on the linoleum.

It was not. The window looks straight across Quarry Road onto the ball field, and I had not wanted to see what was out there.

But a tractor does not care what you want, and the sound of it rattled the cups in the cabinet, so I pulled the curtain back.

Someone was bush-hogging the infield.

The weeds had taken Cutler Field the way they take anything you leave alone long enough. Sumac and johnsongrass higher than a man’s head, cedar saplings along the first base line, honeysuckle strangling the backstop.

The dugout roof had caved in. The bleachers were a rusted frame with half the planks hauled off for firewood. The concession window where Tressie served hot dogs for twenty-one years was boarded over and gray.

I did not know him from the back. I knew the white pickup at the gate, and the young woman beside it holding a small boy by the hand, a boy in a ball cap that came down over his ears.

She stood with her feet planted and her chin up, like somebody who has decided not to be sorry for being somewhere.

My name is Burrell Tovey. I am sixty-seven years old.

I ran a road grader for the county highway department for thirty-four years, and for twenty-two of those years I coached youth baseball in Quarry Gap, a town of about eleven hundred people on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, built around a limestone quarry that quit hiring when I was a young man.

We have a feed store, a Dollar General, three churches, a volunteer fire department, and a ball field. At least, we used to.

I started coaching at twenty-seven because nobody else would, and I stayed because I loved it in a way I did not have words for. The smell of cut grass and neatsfoot oil.