The Day I Walked Out of the Dugout

Quarry Gap kids who wanted to play got driven. Quarry Gap kids whose parents worked second shift did not play. I watched the field go to weed from my kitchen window, and then I turned my chair around and stopped watching.

I will tell you what shame does to a man. It does not make you humble. It makes you small. I stopped going to the feed store on Saturday mornings. I changed my pew at church.

When I saw Corabeth Brannock at the Dollar General I turned down the cereal aisle until she was gone. I became the man who used to coach, and people were kind about it, which was the worst part.

Tressie died four years ago in October. In her last week she woke one afternoon and looked out the window and said, “That field’s a shame.” I told her I knew.

She said, “You could do something about it,” and I said I knew that, too, and she closed her eyes. I buried my wife and pulled the curtain shut, and I sat in that kitchen four more years doing exactly nothing.

So that is who was standing at his window last March when the tractor stopped.

The man in the gray shirt climbed down, left the engine running, took the little boy by the hand, and the two of them walked across the road. The young woman stayed by the truck and just watched.

He was twenty-nine. I did the arithmetic standing there. He had filled out through the shoulders and neck, and he wore a canvas shirt with an electric co-op patch on the pocket and boots with the toes worn pale.

But I knew him the way you know a song after the first line. It was the way he looked up at me. It was the exact same look.

I walked out onto my porch because there was nothing else to do.

“Morning, Coach,” Joel Brannock said.

I do not know what I expected. A fist, maybe. I was braced for eighteen years of something coming at me all at once.

Instead he stood at the bottom of my steps in the March cold, his hand wrapped around a little boy’s hand, and his voice was as steady as a level.

“I am not anyone’s coach,” I said. It came out as a croak.

“You were mine for two years.”

“Joel.” I could not get farther than his name. “Son, I am…”

“I know,” he said. “You don’t have to start there. I didn’t come over here for that.” He looked down. “This is Teddy. He’s seven. Teddy, this is Mr. Tovey. He taught your daddy how to field a ground ball.”

The boy looked up at me from under that big cap. He had his father’s eyes, the same careful, hopeful stare.

“Hey,” Teddy said.

I could not answer him. My throat had closed.

“I’ve been working up to this for about two years,” Joel said. “I’m sorry it’s a Saturday morning and I’ve got a tractor running across your road. I figured if I thought about it any longer I’d talk myself out of it.”

He told me what he wanted, plain, the way a man reads a work order. The rec league in Hartsell cost a hundred and forty dollars a kid and was forty minutes each way.

He had counted forty-one kids in the Quarry Gap end of the county who did not play.