The Wheelchair Swing The Men Built

Six in the morning

They came at six in the morning. I had said seven, to be kind about it, but the first truck pulled up at ten minutes to six with its headlights still on.

It was Earl. He had the feed sack with the drawing on it folded in his shirt pocket like it was a deed to something.

By quarter after, there were four trucks nose to tail along the curb and a fifth backing a trailer of lumber up over the gutter.

I stood on my own porch in the gray light with a percolator going behind me and I watched them unload in near silence, the way men work when they have decided a thing matters.

Earl spread his drawing out on a tailgate and the others gathered around it with their coffee. I went down to listen.

It was a good plan. Simple. A low platform swing, four feet by five, hung on heavy chain from a frame built like a barn beam would be built.

Not a seat you climbed into. A deck you rolled onto, with a lip that folded up, and a ramp running up to it off the grass.

Earl had figured the ramp at a gentle slope, gentle enough that a boy could push himself up it when his arms got stronger, and a parent could push him up it until then.

There were to be bars along both sides at the right height for small hands to grip. There was to be a harness, and the Dobson boy’s wife had taken that part to the ladies at the church.

Those ladies had sewn a harness out of seatbelt webbing and quilt batting, padded and soft, with a buckle a child could work himself. They had it there in a grocery sack by seven.

I remember Earl straightening up from that drawing and looking around at all of them and saying, all right. We have got a boy inside that house and we have got until church to do this. Let us not waste the morning.

And then the drills started. That is the sound I woke the whole street with, whether they liked it or not. The sound of eleven men deciding a backyard was going to belong to a little boy again.

I went inside and got to work on the only thing I am any good at.

The coffee and the eggs

I have fed this neighborhood through more mornings than I could count, and I knew what eleven working men would need before they knew it themselves.

I had three dozen eggs, two pounds of bacon, and a ham I had been saving. I had biscuits in the oven by six thirty.

My kitchen is small, so I set a folding table up in my carport and ran an extension cord out for the big coffee urn I keep for funerals.

I am sorry to say that is true. The coffee urn I own, the forty-cup one, I bought for after my Harold’s funeral and have loaned out for a dozen more since. That day I used it for something being born instead.

Around eight I carried the first platters out. The men came off the job in shifts, wiped their hands on their jeans, and ate standing up over paper plates.

Nobody sat. Nobody lingered. They would eat a biscuit in four bites and drain a cup and go back to it.

The feed store brothers had the frame up by then, two heavy posts set in holes they had augered and filled with concrete they mixed right there in a wheelbarrow.