Part 3 — The Last Entry
The second page was taped to the first with a strip of old scorekeeping tape, and I peeled it back slowly while the whole ballpark waited.
Dad had ruled it into columns in pencil, the way he ruled every box score. Month, check, deposit, difference.
At the bottom, circled twice, was one number. “Thirty-four thousand, five hundred and sixty dollars. Twenty-four months of Max.”
I read it into the microphone, and then I read the line beneath it, because Dad had left one.
“Orrin, do not make a scene. Make a phone call. The VA has a fiduciary office, and a payee who misuses a veterans money has to answer to it.”
Max lowered the plaque. His new blazer suddenly looked two sizes too big.
A man in the front row stood up. He was Ellis Brandvold, who had played shortstop for Dad in 1981, and he now worked as a benefits officer. He said quietly that he would make the call himself if Max wanted it done properly.
Max did not argue. He sat down on the home dugout bench with the plaque across his knees and said that he owed money to people he was ashamed of, and he had told himself Dad would never know.
Dad had known to the dollar.
Wendell wrote in the last line of his last entry that everybody plays, and that included the boy who struck out every time.
The next week the VA office confirmed what the pencil said. A payee must return every payment received after the month of a veterans death, and must account for the rest. Max would repay through a plan, with the VA overseeing every dollar, and a new fiduciary would be named for the estate.
The pickup keys, the VA card and the funeral money were on my kitchen table by Friday.
Peg poured the coffee. She did not say let Max be. She said she was glad I had gone back to the dumpster.
Then came the letter that made me cry in the bus barn. The state Little League office had a shoebox from my father. Every fall for forty years, he had mailed them a photocopy of that seasons scorebook, in case the green ones ever burned.
Thirty-nine copies came back to us in a cardboard box, every kid and every name.
In June we set a long bookshelf in the new concession stand at Wendell Memorial Park. On the last page of 1987, Max wrote one more name in pencil, his own, and the date he made his first payment back.
It is the only entry in forty years that Dad would have called a hit with two strikes.