Shaun Bradbury

Shaun Bradbury

He was the hardest hitter.
Grass in his face mask,
He led with his helmet,
The way they say you shouldn’t now.
You get flagged for that.
Spearing, they call it.
Back then it was just a hell of a hit.
A drill where we were set against one another
In a cage meant to train us to stay low
Coming out of our stance.
I didn’t stand a chance.
I don’t remember the white 
Concussive light of being hit by him,
Then helped waveringly to my feet.
There was no meanness in it.
He was just doing what he was told to do.
I went to his house once.
Out of pads he was sweet and shy,
The kind of boy girls die for.
Think Travis Kelce
If he’d never become Travis Kelce.
Cluttered kitchen table,
Mess of bills pushed aside
To make room for place settings. 
This back when there was still a middle class.
His dad worked at the factory
That made the switches
That turned on the lights we ate by.
Brainy spaghetti. Horror
Of another mother’s way of making
Something you loved. 
Parmesan shaken out of a green cylinder. 
Remember that America, America?
A house you might conceivably own one day,
A son good at football, no fear,
In those years, about what all
The hits were doing to his brain?
A simpler time. I didn’t say
Better — simpler.
Senior year, he caught a Hail Mary
The coach’s son hurled
Into the bug-haloed lights.
Took years for that ball to fall
Into his soft, receptive hands.
Something natal in that.
I was watching from the bleachers.
Tired of being hit, I’d started running.
I didn’t care who won, 
But I was glad for Shaun.
For all his braun he had a tender heart.
And then he was just a kid
I went to high school with.
Every now and then he ran
A neat crossing route across my mind
And I’d wonder where he was,
But never bothered trying to find him.
He got caught in the backfield.
Next thing I knew he’d gotten caught
In the crossfire of some Facebook beef
He didn’t even spark.
The hardest hitter got hit.
What was he doing in the Cedar Inn, 
That plywood dive off the highway,
If not searching for that feeling
Of weightlessness he’d felt that night
He was lifted onto the town’s shoulders
And paraded around the field?
He can be forgiven for wanting
To get a little drunk, but not too drunk
To drive, to feel himself rising up 
Out of the claustrophobia of that place,
His daughters asleep at home.
Fathers are immortal
Until they die.
Wrong place, wrong time.
Used to be you had to get close enough
To a man to kill him, get intimate,
Mingle your blood with his.
How often in history
Have two men walked away
From a patch of scuffed ground,
Feeling a begrudging respect for each other?
Bullets cross, in an instant,
The distance we used to have to cross on foot,
The other’s face growing nearer, clearer,
So that the harm we mean them
We have to really mean.
I wish the kid who killed him had
Had to face Shaun Bradbury in the cage.
Then he’d have been the one who got hit
And would have forgotten
Not only his rage, but his very name,
And he wouldn’t be in a jail cell now,
Serving life as punishment 
For taking one, and Shaun 
Would still be on this side of the grass.