The Day I Walked Out of the Dugout

He cut all day. Around three, I saw him standing by himself at home plate with his hands on his hips, looking out toward center field.

Then he turned and looked up at the notch in the quarry wall, and he stayed that way a long time.

I did not sleep that night. At two in the morning I was at the kitchen table with the lamp on, thinking about what Tressie said.

All you can do is yell something better after. I had been living in the after for eighteen years, and I had been filling it with nothing.

At six the next morning I took the rake out of the garage and walked across Quarry Road.

He was already there, with a thermos on the hood of his truck. He looked up when he heard my boots on the gravel. He did not say anything.

He reached into the truck bed, took out a second rake, and handed it to me. That was all. We started at the first base line and worked toward home.

My shoulder ached and my hands blistered inside an hour.

But Joel did not talk about it, and he did not look at me like a man being kind, and by nine o’clock I had found the old pitching rubber, buried under four inches of dirt and gone green, and I stood with my boot on it like a man who has found a bone.

“That’s the rubber,” I said, stupidly.

“Looks like it.” Joel came and stood beside me. “Dig it out. We’ll keep it.”

That was how it began.

I want to tell you about the seven weeks that followed, because they were the best of my life since my wife died, and I did not earn them.

It turns out a town is a thing that waits. By the second Saturday, six men from the feed store showed up with chain saws, men I had not talked to in almost two decades.

The first, a big sandy-haired fellow named Fenwick Larue who owned the store, walked right up to me, turning his feed-store cap around and around by the bill, and said, “Burrell.

I’m glad to see you out here.” He put out his hand and I took it. That was the whole conversation. I think he was as scared as I was.

By the third Saturday the bleachers were rebuilt and the fire department had put a roof on the dugout. Somebody pried the boards off the concession window.

I stood at that window alone one afternoon with a bucket of soapy water and scrubbed the sill where Tressie had set the hot dog tray every Saturday for twenty-one years, and I will not tell you what else I did while I was doing it.

Then, the fourth Saturday, a ’98 Buick pulled up to the gate and an old man got out.

He had shrunk, and his hair had gone thin and white, but he still had that chest like a rain barrel and he still carried his mask bag in the same hand.

Ansel Boyce was eighty-one years old and had called his last game fourteen years before. He walked across the infield and stopped in front of me.

“Burrell.”

“Ansel.”

“I hear you’re opening up.”

“Joel Brannock is opening up,” I said. “I’m just raking.”

“Mm.” He looked past me to center field. “I’d like to work your opening day. If you’d have me. I’ve still got my plate shoes.”

“Walk with me a minute,” he said.