The Bonus Find

I can see him standing on a baseball diamond, ready to play.

         We knew he had been good every sport he’d played, particularly baseball, so good that he signed with the Phillies at 18, right out of high school. He went to spring training down in Florida, and was fiercely homesick for his mountains. Nevertheless he had made it to the Big Leagues, a country boy from Piney Flats, Tennessee who threw right and batted right. Philadelphia Phillies scout Tom “Shaky” Cain called him a “bonus find.”

            It was all so much for a boy of 18, but how good it must have felt. And when he battled that longing for home, he must have weighed it against the dream he was living, must have remembered the encouraging, proud words of people back in Piney Flats when they saw him off. And how many times he must have imagined himself jogging onto the field in that first Major League game, lights shining like diamonds against a sunset, crowds roaring, the fabric of his uniform wonderfully thick and unyielding because he’d have to break it in.

            A rogue ball during spring training shattered it all. “Lord, he didn’t know himself or anybody else for six months,” his sister told me. The head injury sent him home to recover, to realize it had come to an end, and to figure a way to start over.

He followed his beloved Tennessee Vols, called a few minor league games here and there, and moved the outfielders back in some family softball games. We all, of course, wanted him on our team. His time with the Phillies was a memory that he mentioned once in a blue moon, but I believe he carried it, tucked away in his heart, just as a reminder of what he could once do.

Growing up, I admired his athleticism. I’d watch him palm a basketball in a hand as big and tough as a baseball glove and send it sailing through a net 20 times without even hitting the backboard. Coaching us from the sidelines in our elementary years, he wanted my brother and me to love playing sports as much as he did. If he was disappointed that we never turned out to be athletes, he didn’t let it show. He was a fan of bluegrass and Big Orange football and basketball and never minded listening to a crackling, static-filled game on the car radio if that was the only way he could keep up with it.

He worked in the tire business for a while, then the funeral industry, where his compassion and big laughs, ironically, made him a perfect fit. He picked up bodies from hospitals, funeral homes, nursing homes, private homes, airports. He enjoyed his life, the hundreds of miles he logged to different places, sometimes with my Granny riding shotgun or a good buddy who would go along to make sure he didn’t fall asleep.

It was never what he intended to do, but he did it well. When my dad’s mother died, Bob was called to the hospital. I remember him stepping out of the elevator, pulling a gurney with the blue velvet covering that he would drape over her body. He stopped in the hallway and gathered my dad and uncle in a circle, and wept with them. “I know just how you feel,” he said between sobs.

He dug graves and oversaw funerals and then went home to mow the grass, feed the goats, and watch whatever game he could find until his beeper or the telephone rang to tell him he'd be traveling that night. It was a matter of fact that we were all going one day or another; being confronted with mortality every day will make you think that way. But a year ago, when a doctor told him how many days he probably had left, he was heartbroken.

When we realized what was causing the tremor in his hand, the cancer had progressed before he would have much of a chance to fight it. He did fight for a while, until it broke his spirit because the treatment was so awful, because he couldn’t drive, couldn't work like he wanted to, couldn’t get down in the floor with the grandbabies, couldn’t walk down to the pond and fish with Landon.

            He’d become a bonus find again when he met my grandmother and came into our lives. My first memory of him takes place at a park, where he's holding my hand as I try to balance on plastic roller skates. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I believe, were as thrilling for him as that Phillies contract.  Cancer was the second rogue ball that flew out of nowhere and took it away.

            At the end, he was lost to us for several days, hovering in the in-between. The good to be found in all that suffering is the togetherness, particularly when people are called in who haven't seen each other in decades. We all stayed together for nearly a week by his bedside, witness to what Jill McCorkle beautifully describes as someone moving throughout the body, turning off the lights until only the heart is left beating.

I’ve been with others who died and I have searched their faces, wondering what they see when they pass beyond.  My brother, who is one of the smartest people I know, said he figured Bob, young and healthy in his crisp new uniform, would be running onto a baseball diamond as the roaring crowds cheered for him once again.

            That image comforts me and makes me cry at the same time. It’s what I thought about at Landon’s first Tee Ball game, feeling the emptiness in the seat beside me where Bob ought to have been. I told someone at the funeral how much it hurt that he didn’t live to see Landon’s first ballgame. Some people know just the right things to say in those moments; I am not one of them.

            “Now,” she said, “he’ll be able to see all of them.”