Paula DeBoard - The Mourning Hours

We piled out of Mom’s Caprice Classic an hour before our first game at Fireman’s Field, Johnny leading the charge. Dad followed him, whistling, tossing a ball and catching it in his glove. Emilie slumped behind Dad, her hands in her jeans pockets. “This is going to be so boring,” she’d protested on the way over. “Almost as boring as staying home.”

Mom waited for me to free myself from my roost in the middle of the backseat and leaned over, shutting the door behind me. She pointed to the encyclopedia-sized book I carried, Myths and Half-True Tales. “You’re bringing that with you?”

I considered. I was too small for softball, too small for most things—I needed a boost from the top rung to reach the monkey bars and a step stool to see the top of my head in the bathroom mirror. It went without saying that I couldn’t swing a bat by myself, and that a fly ball would probably knock me down.

“What if I get bored?” I replied.

Mom and I walked toward the infield, where Bud Hirsch, captain of Hirsch’s Haybalers, waited with his clipboard. He took one look at me and, with his massive gut thrust forward, said, “You here to watch, shorty?” He chuckled as I sidled away, offended, and turned away to bark orders at the rest of the team. Johnny was going to start out in left field, Dad at first base.

Mom leaned down to me. “Never mind him. You can share my position with me if you want.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll just watch.”

During the warm-up, I sat cross-legged on the bench in the dugout, leaning back against the chain-link fence. Bud Hirsch’s son, Raymond, was pitching slow arcing lobs to Sandy Maertz, a member of our church. Dad, Johnny and the rest of the men in the infield passed the ball back and forth, rolling grounders and tossing fly balls. Mom stood awkwardly in right field, waiting to be included.

The other team, Loetze’s Lions, was starting to arrive, and the bleachers on both sides were beginning to fill up. Someone unlocked the concessions stand, flipped the wooden door down, and raised the Watankee Elementary Academic Boosters Club banner. The money raised tonight would finance our school field trips to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc and our less academic but equally inspiring annual visits to Lambeau Field in Green Bay.

I tracked Emilie as she made her way up to the top row of the bleachers, her honey-blond hair swinging behind her. It amazed me how she moved, how much confidence she had. A year ago she’d been a clumsy eighth grader. Now she was ready to take Lincoln High School by storm. “I’m going to join pep band,” she’d announced to me proudly when we were lying side by side in our twin beds one night. A shard of moonlight had fallen through the curtains and cut her slim body in half—her hipbones and long legs on one side, the small buds of her breasts, like plum halves, on the other.

“Why do you want to be in pep band?” I’d asked, thinking of the few football games I’d attended in my life. The pep band was a group of shivering kids who took the field at halftime after the cheerleading routine, right about when half the stands decided they needed a hot dog or a trip to the bathroom. “Those kids never get to watch the game.”

“I don’t care about the stupid game,” Emilie had said, sighing dramatically. “I want people to watch me.”

Bud Hirsch called my attention back to the game with two toots on his whistle. “All right! Switch it up!” Our team started a slow jog through the infield to our dugout, and Loetze’s Lions took a turn at their warm-ups.

Panting as he came off the diamond, Dad gave me a high five—as if by staying out of the way, I’d performed some huge feat.

I slid from the bench. “Can I have a dollar?”

“Sure.” Dad dug in his pocket and came up with a handful of change.

“Stay close,” Mom said.

I could feel her eyes on me as I walked behind the batter’s box, my feet kicking up little swirls of dust that instantly coated my tennis shoes. I resisted the urge to hike up my shorts, Emilie’s from years before. Sometimes I hated the way Mom looked at me, like I was a medical specimen.

A dollar bought me a can of Coke and three blue Pixy Stix, the kind of pure-sugar pleasure I was never allowed at home. Clutching the soda in one hand and my book in the other, I scanned the bleachers for a place to sit. A few people from church smiled encouragingly in my direction, but I spotted Emilie in the center of a tight, whispering circle of recent Watankee Elementary graduates and changed course. A few of my own soon-to-be-fourth-grade classmates were sitting in the stands with their parents, but we glanced away from each other with summertime awkwardness, as if we knew we weren’t meant to connect again until the Tuesday after Labor Day.

I lugged my volume of Myths and Half-True Tales to a shady spot beneath the bleachers and opened to the dog-eared page on Atlantis. The game began and cheers erupted.

We were only a mile or so from our farm, but to hear Dad yell, “Hammer one home, Hammarstrom!” during Johnny’s turn at bat was to imagine that we’d been transported somewhere far away, like an island in the South Pacific. Dad was only here at all because he’d worked out a deal with Jerry Warczak: Jerry, who had no interest in softball, would cover Dad’s last milking on these nights if Dad and Johnny would lend him a hand on Saturdays with the chickens. This was typical of the sort of deals they worked out. “It’s just being neighborly,” Dad had explained to me, but it had seemed that he was being more than neighborly when he’d clapped Jerry on the shoulder and said, “He’s like another son to me.”

When the noise of the game finally faded into the background, I spent the next few innings reading about Atlantis and wondering how a city could go missing—poof!—just like that. What would happen if Watankee, Wisconsin, and all the people I knew were to fall off the face of the earth one day—a sudden crack, then a quick slide into Lake Michigan? How long until the rest of the world missed us?

I lay back and closed my eyes, listening to the crack of the bat, the sudden burst of applause. I imagined the ball hurtling through a blue sky deepening into purple with the sunset. The tall grass under the bleachers prickled and dented the undersides of my legs, and a mosquito seemed intent on sucking my blood. I was swatting my ankle when a shadow covered me.

“Hey, you’re Kirsten Hammarstrom, aren’t you?”

I struggled to sit up. For a moment, it looked like an angel was standing over me, even though my Sunday School teacher Mrs. Keithley said there was no such thing anymore, unless maybe you were a Catholic. The voice belonged to a girl who wore cutoff denim shorts and a checked shirt with the tails knotted at her waist, so that just a teensy strip of skin at her stomach showed. I realized that what looked like a fiery halo on top of her head was actually just her red hair, backlit by the stadium lights.

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I’m Kirsten Hammarstrom.” Suddenly I felt guilty, as if I’d been caught sneaking a sliver of pie before dinner.

“Your brother’s Johnny Hammarstrom, right?” she said, bending down to my height. Up this close, she was the loveliest person I’d ever met. Creamy white skin, a tiny bridge of freckles spanning her nose. A smile so wide and welcoming, she might have been pictured on a travel brochure.

“Yeah,” I said again, suddenly ashamed of my dirty hands, my teeth sticky with the residue of Coke. “Why?”

She smiled and held out a hand, poised as any church greeter. “I’m Stacy Lemke.”

We shook hands. Nothing drastic happened, no fireworks or a sudden crack of thunder, but somehow the moment felt significant.