The Prayer Chain and the Birthday Party
Getting ready
Here is what you need to know about Eli and his tractors, so you don’t get the wrong idea.
He is not one of those children in the movies who can count the toothpicks on the floor.
He is a five-year-old boy who loves tractors more than most five-year-old boys love anything, and he loves them the way he loves everything, completely and in order.
He started with toy ones, the green and yellow ones you get at the farm store.
Then, the summer he turned four, Ben’s dad took him into the machine shed and handed him a spark plug off an old Allis-Chalmers, and that was the beginning of the end.
Now he has forty-one parts. I know because he counts them every night.
They live in an egg flat and two tackle boxes under his bed, and every one of them has been washed in the laundry sink with dish soap and a toothbrush.
He knows their names because he asked. Over and over. “What’s this, Grandpa? What’s this one? What’s it do?” Ben’s dad answered every time, the same way, and Eli remembered, because when something matters to Eli, he does not let go of it.
On Friday night I sat him on the bed and told him that on Saturday, a lot of people from church were coming to his birthday, and that they wanted to see his collection.
He thought about it. “How many people?”
“I don’t know yet, bud. Maybe a lot.”
“Are they going to touch the magneto?”
“Only if you say they can.”
He thought about that, too. Then he said, “They can look at it,” and went back to lining up his socks.
I made a plan the way I would make a plan for a nervous dog at the clinic. His noise-canceling headphones on the hook by his door.
His room as the quiet place, door open, no one allowed in but him. No balloons, because he hates the pop. No party horns. No singing loud.
On Saturday morning I wrote a note on an index card and taped it to the front door: Eli does not like loud clapping.
If you want to cheer for him, please wave your hands in the air instead. Thank you for coming.
Then I vacuumed the living room carpet twice, and I let Eli lay out his collection however he wanted, which was in one long, careful row from the couch all the way to the woodstove, with the toy tractors at one end and the real parts at the other.
Ben hung green and yellow streamers from the light fixture, because he said a birthday ought to look like a birthday. Eli inspected them and approved them because they were John Deere colors.
Donna came at noon with the sheet cake in a foil pan and six candles in her purse. Chocolate, white frosting, no writing.
She set it on the dining room table and stood there looking at it like she wasn’t sure it was good enough.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
“I didn’t sleep,” she said. “I kept thinking nobody would come.”
“Me either,” I said. And that was the first time we laughed together since Sunday.
Two o’clock
At five minutes to two, there were no cars on the gravel road.
At two o’clock, there were still none.
I stood at the front window with my arms folded like Donna’s in the parking lot, and I watched the road past the elevator and thought about how many people say they’re coming to things.
Eli was on the floor behind me, moving his Farmall H magneto one inch to the left and then back again.
At two oh four, a dust plume came up from the gravel, and a maroon Buick turned into our lane.
Then a silver pickup behind it. Then the Olsons’ minivan. Then two more pickups. Then a little white car I didn’t know at all.
Behind me, Eli sat up on his knees and looked past me out the window, at the line of dust coming down the road. “Mom,” he said. “Who are all those people?”
They parked in the yard and along the ditch and out by the grain bins, and Ben went out to wave them in where the ground was hard.
Thirty-one people came up our gravel road that afternoon. Ben counted the cars after and I counted the coats on our bed, and we came out to the same number.
The quilting ladies came. The retired band teacher came. Pastor Jim came with his wife and a bag of Werther’s.
Jeff came on his new knee, with a cane, and his wife scolded him the whole way up the porch steps.
The post office clerk came. The preschool mom came with Brayden, who ran straight for the cake and was caught.
And Harold Lind came, last, in his 1979 Ford, with his blue heeler riding shotgun. He left the dog in the cab with the window cracked.
He came up the porch steps one at a time, read the index card on the door, and nodded like it made perfect sense to him.