The summer I was nineteen I worked the tarp crew for the Fox River Lumberjacks, a Class A club in a league that doesn't exist anymore, in a wooden ballpark that doesn't either. It paid a dollar an hour and all the hot dogs that were left over after the seventh inning, which on a slow night could be a lot of hot dogs.

There were four of us on the crew, and we answered to Mr. Olander, the head groundskeeper, who was seventy years old and had taken care of that field since before the grandstand had a roof. He talked to the infield dirt. I'm not saying that as a figure of speech. He'd rake the base paths and say things to them under his breath, and on a good night the dirt looked like it was listening.

On a Tuesday in August it started to rain in the top of the fifth, and then it really rained. We got the tarp out in about ninety seconds, which was a record for us, and then we sat in the dugout and watched it come down. Everybody with any sense went home. By ten o'clock there were eleven people left in the stands. I counted. You had a lot of time to count things.

There was a nun. There was a young couple who were clearly on a first date and clearly didn't want it to end. There was a grandmother in a plastic rain bonnet with a boy of about eight asleep across her lap. There was a man in a bowling shirt who had brought his own umbrella and his own cushion and looked like he'd been coming since the Coolidge administration. There were a few others I don't remember so well. And up in the little booth behind home plate there was Mrs. Dahl, the organist, who kept playing through the whole thing, softly, every song she knew with "rain" in it and then a few she was making up.

At ten o'clock the other two fellows on the crew went home. They had a ride and it was leaving. That left me and Mr. Olander.

At twenty to eleven the rain stopped. Just like that, like somebody turned off a tap. The umpire came out and looked up at the sky and looked at his watch and came over to the dugout.

"Walt," he said to Mr. Olander, who was a Walter too, which is a whole other story, "if that field's ready in twenty minutes, we play. If it's not, it's called, and it doesn't count, and everybody here sat in the rain for nothing."

Mr. Olander looked at me. I looked at the tarp. A tarp for a whole infield is a terrible thing when it's wet. It weighs about what a Buick weighs. It takes six men to pull it right, and there were two of us, and one of us was seventy.

We started anyway. We got hold of one corner and pulled and got it about four feet.

Then the nun stood up.

She came down the aisle and climbed over the rail, habit and all, and walked out onto the field and took hold of the edge of the tarp next to me, and she said, "Tell me which way." I told her. The young couple came next, holding hands, and then they had to let go of each other's hands to take hold of the tarp, and they did. The man in the bowling shirt folded up his umbrella very carefully, laid it on his cushion, and came down. The grandmother woke up the boy and brought him, and he pulled harder than any of us. And from the booth, Mrs. Dahl started playing a march.

A dozen people in the rain, most of them on a field that wasn't theirs, rolling a wet tarp toward right field in time to the organ. Mr. Olander was out in front of us walking backwards, calling out "Easy, easy, that's it, that's it," the way he talked to the dirt.

We made it in seventeen minutes. The umpire looked at his watch and said, "Play ball," and everybody went back where they came from, soaked, and the Lumberjacks came out and lost nine to two. Nobody cared.

In the bottom of the ninth, the public address man, who had been asleep, came on and read off the names of "tonight's grounds crew." He didn't know most of them, so the nun went up to the booth and told him, and he read them out one at a time, and each one of them stood up in the stands and waved, and the others clapped.

That's the part I'm sure happened. The rest I might have improved a little over the years. Mr. Olander would forgive me. He was always improving things.