The Day I Walked Out of the Dugout

A nine-year-old finding out his feet knew where a ground ball was going before his head did. Tressie ran the concession window and wrote the lineup on a paper plate every Saturday, and the boys crowded around it like it was the Book of Revelation.

I will tell you what I did not love, because it is the thing that matters here. I did not love losing.

But I had taken my teams to the county championship three times and lost all three, and every loss sat in me like a swallowed stone.

I was a good man to play for when we were winning. I was a different man when we were not, and nobody had ever told me to my face.

The year of the fourth final, I had the best team I ever coached. We called ourselves the Stonecutters, after the quarry.

We had a pitcher with a real arm, a catcher who could throw a runner out at second from his knees, and a center fielder who had not dropped a fly ball all season.

That center fielder was Joel Brannock, and everyone called him Sparrow.

He earned it at eight, the smallest kid on the roster, so thin the uniform pants hung on him like laundry on a line. He ran like something let out of a cage.

At ten I put him in center because he could cover more ground than the other two outfielders combined, and by eleven he was the best defensive player in the county.

He would squat in center field between pitches, dig at the dirt with his fingers, and look over at me in the dugout like he was asking whether it was all right to be that happy.

His mother, Corabeth, worked the second shift at the chicken plant in the next county and came to every game she could.

His father drove a truck and was not around much. Sparrow rode his bicycle to practice and stayed to help me rake the infield, and I had gotten used to that.

The championship was against the Hartsell team, who had beaten us in the semifinals the year before. It started at five-thirty. By the bottom of the sixth, the last inning in that league, we were ahead five to four.

I need to tell you about the sun.

Cutler Field sits in the bowl of an old quarry. The stone wall rises behind the backstop, and in it there is a notch where the cutters took out a seam, a gap shaped like a slice of pie.

For about three weeks at the end of June, around a quarter past seven in the evening, the sun drops straight into that notch and sits there like a lamp for eleven minutes.

If you are standing in center field facing home plate, you are looking directly into it.

Every coach in Quarry Gap knew that.

We had an old rule from before my time: in the late innings of a late June game, you moved your best outfielder to left, where the angle was kinder, and put a boy with a good cap in center. Nobody wrote it down.

I had followed it for twenty-one years. That evening I meant to.

I told myself in the fifth inning to move Sparrow at the break and put Dalton Pugh in center, but the fifth went long, and a parent was hollering at me from behind the dugout, and I forgot.