The Day I Walked Out of the Dugout

We sat in the new dugout on a bench that still smelled of cut pine.

It was almost six in the evening, and out past the backstop the light was getting long. Ansel set his bag between his feet and rubbed his knees with both hands.

“I have been wanting to tell you something for eighteen years,” he said. “And I have been a coward about it.”

“Ansel.”

“The sixth inning. I walked up to this dugout. You remember that?”

I said nothing. Up on the quarry wall, the notch sat dark and empty. It would not catch the sun again until June.

“I came to tell you the sun was about to be in that boy’s eyes,” Ansel said. “I’d done it for twenty years at this park. It was a courtesy. And you waved me off. You said, not now, Ansel, I got a ballgame.”

“I remember,” I said. My voice sounded small to me.

“I went back to the plate and let it go. I thought, he knows, he’s coached here twenty years.

Then the ball went up into the sun and I saw that boy turn his head, and I thought, oh Lord, he forgot.” Ansel looked at me, his eyes red at the rims.

“And then you walked out on that field and said what you said. I thought about telling the whole town the drop wasn’t the boy’s fault.

But a man doesn’t embarrass another man in front of his town. So I took off my mask and walked to my car.”

“You should have told them,” I said. It came out like a question.

“I should have told you. Later. Privately. I never did. I told myself the not knowing was your business, and I think that’s a lie I told so I could sleep.

I think I was a little scared of you back then. I think everyone was, when you lost.” He shook his head. “That boy walked home on that road believing it was his own hands that failed him. I let him.”

I put my face in my hands.

I want to be honest about what went through my head, because it is not pretty. The first thing I felt, God forgive me, was relief.

There. It was the sun, a thing outside of me, a thing in the sky. For about ten seconds I felt eighteen years come off my back.

Then I felt the second thing, and it was worse. The sun was not the sin. The sun was a ball falling out of a glove, and every ballplayer in the world drops one sooner or later.

The sin was what came after the drop, and it was mine. And the warning had been handed to me, and I had waved it off like a fly because I was too busy to listen.

“Don’t use it,” Ansel said, as if he could see my thoughts. He could always read a batter. “Don’t you walk up to that boy and say, Joel, it was the sun. That’s not an apology, Burrell. That’s a defense.”

“I know it.”

“You can tell it. But tell it as yours. Tell it as one more thing you got wrong.”

We sat there while the low sun came across the quarry rim and lit up the whole west wall. Out in center field the boys who were raking looked up and held their hands in front of their faces and laughed.