The Wheelchair They Took Away

Bud rapped the porch rail with his knuckles. “Where’s the old chair, Jackie? The one that quit last August.”

“In the pole barn. Under a tarp.”

“Show me.”

We rolled it out of the barn together, six of them and me. It sat in the grass, heavy and gray, its seat cushion gone flat, and I saw Glenn on the porch in Lorinda’s folding chair, with a blanket over his knees, looking at it the way you look at a dog that has died.

“What’d the supplier say?” Bud asked.

“Controller. $1,900.”

“Controller,” Bud repeated, in a voice I knew. It is the voice he used to use on the flat-rate book, the voice of a man who has been told what was wrong with something by a person who did not take it apart.

Garth squatted by the right arm. He pulled back the rubber boot at the base of the joystick with his thumbnail and peered inside.

“Glenn,” he called. “You ever pull this boot back? Look at this cable.”

“Can’t hold a meter,” Glenn said from the porch.

It came out flat and quiet, and nobody answered it. The men stood around the chair, and I saw Don look at his boots. A meadowlark on the fencepost sang its few notes twice.

Then Garth said, “Well, it’s not a controller.”

He held up the end of a cable between two fingers, and I saw a thin copper wire, snapped clean inside its own sleeve.

“It’s broke right where it bends,” Garth said. “Every time he moved the stick, it flexed. It finally gave. This is a twenty-cent wire, Glenn.”

“I can see that now,” Glenn said.

“Somebody sold you a $1,900 controller for a twenty-cent wire.”

“It wasn’t a bad guess,” my husband said. “I’d have said controller myself. I just wasn’t the one holding the cable.”

“Well, you’re going to hold it now,” said Bud. “Come down here and tell us where to cut.”

“Greg,” Glenn said. “Roll me down. I can’t see a thing from up here.”

Greg took the handles of the folding chair and brought him down the ramp and across the grass and set him beside the old gray chair, close enough to touch it. I thought he might say something about the look of the thing. I held my breath for it. But he looked up at the sky for a second, at the high, plain blue of an Iowa morning in October, and when he looked back down his jaw was set and he said, in a voice I had not heard since before the diagnosis:

“All right. Greg. Get the meter. You’ve been reading it wrong since you were nineteen.”

“Yes, sir,” said Greg Fielder, who is thirty-six and has two boys.

For the next three hours my yard was a shop. Garth and Greg worked the cable with a razor knife and a soldering iron run off Tony’s truck. Leroy Sutter lay on his back under the footplate with a flashlight in his teeth. Tony took the left drive motor apart on a tarp and held the brushes up to the light, and said one was worn to a stub and that was why the chair would pull left. Ken Fahey drove to Theisen’s for two deep-cycle batteries and came back with a receipt he would not let me look at. Wayne set out the sweet rolls in neat rows and said, “Everybody eat something, I’m not doing this twice.”