The Day I Walked Out of the Dugout

Between innings, Ansel Boyce, the umpire, called time. Ansel was past sixty then, with a chest like a rain barrel and a voice like gravel sliding down a chute.

He took off his mask and walked up the first base line toward our dugout with the look of a man who has something to say.

I waved him off.

I did it with my hand, the way you wave away a fly. I said, “Not now, Ansel, I got a ballgame.” He stopped. He looked at me a second, and then he put his mask back on and went back to the plate.

I thought nothing about it. I did not think about it again for eighteen years.

The first batter popped out. The next walked, and the next singled. Then we struck one out, and it was two outs with runners on first and second. The next boy drove a high fly ball to dead center.

I remember how it looked. It went up into the notch, into the white sun, and hung there. Everybody in the bleachers was standing.

Out in center I saw Sparrow go back, and back, and put up his glove, and I saw him turn his head, just a quarter inch, the way you do when the light is in your eyes and you are trying to see around it.

The ball came down on the heel of his glove and rolled out onto the grass.

Both runners scored. Hartsell won six to five. And the whole bowl of that old quarry went quiet for as long as it takes to draw one breath.

Then I came out of the dugout.

I do not know how to tell you what happened inside me, except that it was not anger. I wish it had been. Anger would have been a better excuse.

It was every one of the finals I had lost, and the feeling that the world had cheated me out of the one thing I wanted most, and I needed that feeling to have a face. And there was the smallest face on the field.

I could have put my hand on his cap and said, tough break, son. I have thought about that for eighteen years.

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

I said it in my coach’s voice. I said it so the whole town could hear it, and I think part of me meant them to.

Nobody said a word. A woman in the third row set her paper cup down on the plank without drinking. Corabeth Brannock stood up in the bleachers and started down the steps toward the fence, but by then Joel was already walking.

He picked up his glove. He went out through the center field gate and down the shoulder of Quarry Road, and I never saw him in a uniform again.

Tressie said nothing to me that night. We drove home without a word, and she went in and shut the bedroom door. I would have given a hundred dollars for her to yell at me.

Months later, in the kitchen, she said the only thing she ever said about it. “There is no unyelling a thing, Burrell. All you can do is yell something better after.” Then she went back to washing the dishes.

I did not coach the next season. I told people my shoulder hurt, and it did, a little.

I let the registration deadline go by, and the next spring I let it go by again, and the league moved to the county complex in Hartsell, forty minutes down the highway.