The Wheelchair Swing The Men Built

I am not a carpenter but I have a telephone

I started making calls the next morning, right after I rinsed my coffee cup.

The first man I called was Earl, who lives at the top of the circle. Earl framed houses in this county for better than forty years before his knees retired him.

I told him the whole thing, about the fever and the legs and the empty seat turning in the yard, and about what the boy had asked his mother.

Earl was quiet on the phone for a second. Then he said, Carol, what are you asking me for.

I said, I am asking you if a swing can be built that a boy in a chair could ride. And if it can, I am asking you to draw it.

He said give me till supper. He called me back in two hours. He said it could be done, and that it was not even hard, and that he was ashamed he had not thought of it himself weeks ago.

That was the thing I would hear again and again that week. Not one person I called said no. Every one of them said some version of, why did I not think of this.

I called Wes last, on purpose. I did not want to ask the boy’s own father for help building his boy a swing. That felt like a thing that might wound a proud man.

So instead I told Wes we were going to do it, and I told him the only job I had for him was to keep Toby inside the house until Saturday morning, and then to carry him out when I knocked on the door.

Wes did not say anything for a long moment. Then he said, in a voice I had never heard him use, thank you. That was all. Thank you.

In between I called nine other men. The two Hartley brothers who run the feed store on the highway. The young fellow who moved into the Dobson place and keeps to himself. Earl’s son-in-law. The retired mail carrier. A few more.

I did not ask a single one of them for a dollar. I had decided that from the start. I asked each of them for a Saturday and whatever tools they could throw in a truck.

Here is what I want you to understand about that. I expected to have to talk people into it. I had my little speech ready.

I never once got to use it. The feed store brothers said they would bring the long clamps and a generator. The mail carrier said he had a whole box of galvanized hardware left from a deck. The quiet young man from the Dobson place said, what time, and I will be there.

By Wednesday I had eleven men committed and a plan drawn on the back of a feed sack. By Thursday I was not sleeping, but it was a different kind of not sleeping than before.