Chief Mabry at the fire department, who owned the field now, had said Joel could have it for a dollar a year if he cleared it and carried the insurance himself.
He had a canvas duffel in the truck bed with a set of used bases, a rake, a tamper, a bucket of balls, and a catcher’s mitt.
“I want to start a league,” he said. “T-ball up through twelve. Free. Out here, where it’s supposed to be. I can clear it and drag it and build the bleachers.
Where I’m stuck is the part I can’t do. Coaching. Real coaching. I never got past eleven. I know how to play. I don’t know how to teach it. Not the way you did.”
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I stood on my porch in my slippers with my hand on the post.
“Joel,” I said, and this time I got it out, though it came out wrong. “You don’t owe me a thing. After what I did to you out there, I would not blame you if you drove that tractor right through my front window.”
He did not smile. But something in his face loosened.
“I’m not here to collect anything,” he said. “I want to tell you something, and then you can say no, and I’ll go back to mowing and we’ll never talk about it again. Okay?”
“All right.”
He looked across the road, at the field, with the tractor shuddering in the weeds.
“That night I walked home on Quarry Road,” he said. “It’s about two miles. My mom caught up with me at the bridge and tried to put her arm around me and I wouldn’t let her.
I had my glove in my hand, and I thought, I’m not going to cry until I get home.
And I made it. I went in the bathroom and shut the door and made myself a promise. I was eleven. I said, if I ever have a kid, nobody is ever going to say that to him.”
“And then I went further,” he said. “I said, and if I ever coach, I’ll be the one who says the opposite. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t touch a ball again until Teddy was four.
But I think that promise is most of why I turned out the way I did. I got a job and I stayed at it.
I married a good woman. A lot of that was me trying to be a man who wasn’t that. If that makes sense.”
“It makes sense,” I said.
“I’m not saying you did me a favor. It about killed me. But it’s what I built out of it.” He looked up at me. “I’m not asking you to be forgiven, Coach.
I’m asking you to run the infield. I want my boy to learn from the man who taught me to love this game. And I think there’s a second half of that job you never got to do.”
“I need to think,” I said.
“That’s fair.”
“I do not trust myself, Joel. The first time one of these kids drops a ball in front of me, I do not know what comes out of my mouth.”
“That’s fair, too,” he said. “Honestly, that’s the part I’m counting on you figuring out.”
He took the boy back across the road and climbed up on the tractor. I went inside and stood at the window with my hand on the curtain, and I watched him cut.