Romey's Place by James Calvin Schaap

Author:James Calvin Schaap
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2007-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Baseball Practice

A day or two more of bean-picking, one and a half actually, and the work finally stopped that Saturday when Nick Van Dam ran out of fields and the beans left on the vine hung thick and hard as calloused fingers. It was late July, and even the cold waters of Lake Michigan were calm and warming up in the hot sun.

Once it was over, I went home and, in the few hours before baseball practice, got out some particleboard, sawed out goose decoys with a jigsaw, and painted them up— black necks, white chins—like Canadas, a job I’d planned on doing with Romey that summer. But I’d not seen him since the day he had walked home from the beanfields. I was reluctant to hang around with him again anyway, afraid of what he might say after what had happened at his place the night my dad and the preacher came.

Maybe Zoot was right, I thought. Maybe Romey was trouble and trouble wasn’t always fun. That’s what I was thinking. So I didn’t go back to Romey’s place right away, even though my parents asked me about him when we sat around the kitchen nook eating breakfast Cheerios— whether I’d seen Romey, a question always asked innocently enough, but never meant in an innocent manner. They honestly didn’t want to destroy our friendship, even though I’m sure they would have been happy to see it over.

It was baseball that drew us back together again, even though Romey never was much of a player. In later years he’d become one heckuva linebacker, I’m told—lean, tough, quick, smart, a kid who would throw his head into any fracas. In pure agility, in what sportswriters today call athleticism, he was not as blessed as a number of others, but he knew no fear. I was never the kind of football player Romey turned out to be.

The baseball team played in what was called the Pony League, for some reason no one knew or remembered. It was made up of high school wannabees—kids preparing to play high school ball. The whole structure was geared toward development, and we knew it. Even if we didn’t like the coach or didn’t care for the schedule, we knew that to be candidates for the high school baseball team the next summer, we’d have to stay with the program and take our licks.

Baseball practice is the most boring hour and a half in the year’s entire schedule of sports. Batting practice is always first priority, and the only way to get that accomplished is to let each of the eighteen kids take dozens of cuts while the others shag whatever pitches the kid at the plate can get ahold of.

On our Pony League team the coach—a man nicknamed Beaner, for reasons that had nothing at all to do with beanfields or putting guys down with high hard pitches to the head—threw batting practice. He was thirty at least and had played semipro ball after graduating from college.

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