She was nine, skinny as a fence post, with a braid down her back and a glove too big for her, and she was the most serious child I had ever seen. She had asked me every single evening if she could play center.
A boy on the other team hit a fly ball. It went up into a clear blue sky, an ordinary fly ball, no sun, no glare, the kind I could have caught at sixty-seven with a bad shoulder.
Lark got under it. She raised her glove. The ball hit the pocket, popped out, and landed in the grass at her feet.
Two runs scored. The Limestones’ bench went up. And Lark stood there looking down at the ball with her glove hanging at her side.
The whole field went still. I could feel it, the way you feel the air change before a storm. Every parent in those bleachers was looking at me. Some of them remembered.
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Out of the corner of my eye I could see Joel on the other side, standing perfectly still in the first base coach’s box with his hands at his sides.
And I felt it come up. I will not lie to you. Even then, at the end of everything, I felt the old thing rising, the voice from the bottom of the well.
I do not think it ever goes away. I think you just learn which voice to feed.
I stepped out of the dugout and filled my chest, and I used the voice I had built over twenty-two years of calling signals across a ball field, the voice that carries to the parking lot.
“That’s all right, Lark!” I yelled. “That one’ll find your glove next time! Shake it off! We’ve got you!”
The whole bleacher breathed out. Lark looked up at me. Her chin was shaking. I watched her take a breath and pick the ball up and throw it in, a good clean throw, all the way to the cutoff man.
“Eyes up, feet soft!” I called to her.
She grinned. She could not help it. And somewhere on the first base side I heard Joel Brannock laugh out loud.
I wish I could tell you the next ball found her glove. It did not, not that inning.
But in the fourth, a pop-up came out to center, and Lark went under it and caught it with both hands and her whole body, and held it over her head so the whole town could see.
I yelled so hard I lost my voice for two days.
That night I went home and took the curtain off the kitchen window. I took down the rod, too. I carried the whole thing out to the burn barrel and set it on fire, and I stood there in the dark and watched it go.
The window has a view now. At about a quarter to seven most evenings, the sun comes down over the quarry wall and lights the whole field. By late June it will sit in the notch again, and the kids will be ready.
I stand at the dugout rail with a cup of coffee. Out in center field a row of kids hold up their gloves against the glare, laughing, squinting, learning where to stand.
I yell something from the dugout. Usually it is “Eyes up.” Sometimes it is only their names.
Tressie was right. There is no unyelling a thing. But I am sixty-seven years old, and I have the rest of my life to yell something better, and I have fifty-three reasons to start every Saturday morning.