The Coach Who Cut a Grieving Boy
The text came in at 7:48 on a Thursday night, and I read it standing at the kitchen sink with my hands still wet from the last foil pan.
Four days of casseroles. Funeral ham, scalloped potatoes, a green bean thing somebody’s aunt had made. I had just found room for the last of them in the chest freezer in the garage, and I was drying my hands on a dish towel with a little rooster on it when my phone buzzed on the counter.
The Ames Creek Rangers 10U group chat. Twelve boys, one coach.
I read it once.
“Parents, as of tonight Eli is off the roster. He has missed practices and he is dragging the boys down heading into regionals. Fees are nonrefundable per the sign-up sheet. Thanks for understanding. Coach Kent.”
I felt somebody behind me before I heard him.
My son Eli is ten. He reads fast, and he had come in from the living room in his socks and put his chin almost on my elbow. He was reading it right along with me, line by line, the way he reads the backs of cereal boxes.
I should have turned the phone over. I wasn’t quick enough.
He didn’t cry. He stood there with his chin on my arm for what felt like a full minute, and the refrigerator hummed, and the rooster dish towel was damp in my fist.
Then he said, “Mom, what does dragging mean?”
I put the towel down.
“It’s a word grown men use,” I said, “when they have run out of better ones.”
He nodded as if I had told him something useful. Then he went and sat down in his father’s chair at the end of the table, the one nobody had sat in since Sunday, and put both hands flat on the wood.
His catcher’s mitt was lying on the table in front of that chair. Ron had oiled it the Saturday before he died. He had sat right there with a rag and a can of neatsfoot oil and worked it into the pocket while Eli told him, for the third time, about a runner he had thrown out at second.
Ron was 43. He worked service for the irrigation dealer out on Highway 30, the man farmers called when a pivot quit in the middle of a field in July, and on a Sunday morning in October he drove out to look at one and never got out of the truck. A hired man found him at nine, parked at the field gate with the window down and the thermos open on the dash, like he had stopped to think something over. His heart. The ambulance took forty minutes to come out from Grand Island, and it did not matter how fast they drove.
We buried him that Wednesday at St. Paul Lutheran. The church basement ladies did the ham sandwiches. Half the county came, seed reps and elevator men and the fellows from the volunteer fire department in their good jackets, and Eli stood next to me in the front pew in a clip-on tie a size too big.
Kent Mallory sent a text on Monday and did not come to the funeral. “So sorry for your loss. Take all the time you need.” I remember because I read it twice. I thought it was kind.