The Wheelchair They Took Away

Glenn directed all of it. He did not touch a tool. He sat in the folding chair with his hands in his lap and his eyes on their hands, and said, “No, that’s the red one.” And, “Back it off a quarter turn.” And, “Garth, that’s not how you strip a wire, I taught you better than that,” and Garth said, “You taught me exactly that, and I’ve been doing it wrong for twenty years just to hear you say it,” and every man in the yard laughed, and my husband laughed too, the real laugh I had not heard since the winter before last. I went and refilled the coffee so nobody would see my face do whatever it was doing.

By noon the chair hummed.

It pulled to the left. Tony had done what he could with the brush and said it would need a new motor to be right, which was $140 and a catalog order. But the lights came on. The joystick moved, and the chair moved with it, in a short wobbling circle on my grass, and a cheer went up from nine grown men and a woman holding a coffee pot.

Greg went up the porch steps then, and came back holding something in his hand. I knew it before he got close. It was Glenn’s own torque wrench, the one with the handle worn pale from thirty years of hands, that had hung on a nail in the pole barn since the day Glenn retired. I had not known anyone had found it.

“One bolt’s left,” Greg said. “The armrest. It’s got a torque spec. It’s got to be done right.”

He knelt in the grass beside the old chair and fitted the socket on the bolt and held it there with two fingers, steady, the way you hold a nail for someone else’s hammer.

“Your wrench,” he said.

“I know whose wrench it is,” said Glenn.

He took it from Greg’s hand himself, with his right. He set the left one over the top of it, curled as it was, and leaned his shoulder into the handle, and the whole yard went still. I could hear the wind in the cottonwood. I could hear a truck on the county road, far off, and a dog.

He pulled slowly, with everything he had. His arm shook from the shoulder to the wrist. It was a very long five seconds.

Then the wrench clicked.

That was all. A small, clean click, the sound a torque wrench makes when a bolt is tight to spec.

Bud Gentry turned around and walked to the edge of my yard and stood with his back to everyone, looking out at the barn for what felt like a long time. When he came back he blew his nose like a man with hay fever and said, to nobody in particular, “Monday we go see this man.”

“Not all of you,” Glenn said. “I’m not walking in there with a parade. That’s what he’d expect.”

So it was Bud, and Garth, and Greg, and me. The rest of them said they would sit in their trucks, and Don said he had never in his life minded sitting in a truck.

We were in the parking lot at 8:50 on Monday morning.