The Wheelchair Swing The Men Built

The fence line

My name is Carol. I am sixty-two years old, and I have lived in the same house on the same street since the week I got married.

It is not much of a street. Twelve houses, a lot of old maples, and a cul-de-sac the school bus has to back out of every afternoon.

I know who planted every tree. I know which porch lights burn all night and which ones never come on anymore.

Toby lives two doors down from me, in the little white house with the green shutters his daddy keeps meaning to paint.

He is seven years old. Or he was seven that summer, with a gap in his teeth and a bicycle he rode like he was being chased.

In June he got sick. It started like a summer cold, the kind every child on this street carries home from the pool.

By the third day his mother was carrying him to the car at two in the morning, and by the fifth day the doctors in the city had a word for it I still cannot pronounce.

A fever had settled into his spine. When it finally broke, the use of his legs had gone with it.

He was in that hospital for six weeks. The whole street took turns mowing their grass and leaving casseroles on their step.

I kept a light on their porch the whole time, so the house would not look empty when they finally came home to it.

They came home on a Thursday in a car I did not recognize, with a folded wheelchair in the trunk.

His daddy, Wes, had to lift him up the three porch steps, because there was no ramp, and you could see it cost that man something to do it in front of the neighbors.

I waited a day before I went over. I have buried a husband and raised three children, and I know you do not crowd a family the first day they are home.

I brought a pan of chicken and dumplings and I did not stay long.

It was the next evening that his mother came and stood at my back fence, the way neighbor women have stood at fences in this country for a hundred years.

She was not crying. She was past crying by then, into that flat, tired place a mother goes when she has run out of things to fix.

We talked about the ramp they would need, and the bathroom, and the insurance that covered some of it and not nearly enough.

Then she got quiet, and she looked out at their backyard, and she said the thing I have not been able to put down since.

She said, Carol, you know what he asked me today. He asked me when he could swing again.