The Wheelchair Swing The Men Built

I kept the sandwiches coming at midmorning and the sweet tea cold in the cooler, and I will tell you, there is a particular happiness in feeding people who are too busy with a good thing to even thank you.

Toby’s mother came across to my carport around nine. She could not go in her own backyard. Wes had the boy up front, reading to him, keeping him from the windows.

She stood next to me at the folding table and watched through the gap between the houses, and she wrapped sandwiches with me, and her hands shook the whole time.

She said, Carol, I do not know these men. Half of them I have never said two words to.

I told her that was the point. That a street takes care of a child whether it knows the child or not. That is what a street is for, and most people forget they live on one.

By ten the frame was done and the platform was hung, swinging empty and level on its four chains. By half past, the ramp was bolted to it and to a concrete footing set in the grass.

Earl walked up and down that ramp himself, a big man of seventy, bouncing on it to test it, and then he had the Hartley brothers roll an empty wheelbarrow up it and off the other side to be sure of the lip.

It held. It was solid. You could have driven a lawn tractor onto that deck and it would not have shuddered.

Toby’s name on the board

The last thing to go up was not structural at all, and it is the thing I think about most.

Earl has a grandson, maybe sixteen, who had come along to carry and fetch. Somewhere in the morning that boy had found a scrap of pine and a can of blue paint in the Dobson man’s truck.

Off to the side, where I did not notice him, he sanded that scrap smooth. Sanded every edge round so there was not a splinter on it.

Then he painted the boy’s name across it in careful letters, Toby, with a little curl on the Y, and under it he painted the year.

He brought it to Earl shy about it, like he thought he might be in the way. Earl looked at it a long time.

Then Earl said, that is the best work anybody has done here today, and he had the boy climb the ladder himself and nail it over the top beam where everyone would see it.

It is a small thing, a painted board. But I watched a sixteen-year-old boy who had come to carry lumber understand, right there on that ladder, that he had made something that would outlast him on this street.

He came down red in the face and would not look at anybody, and his grandfather put a hand on the back of his neck and left it there.

By then it was near eleven. Church bells would ring across town in a few minutes. Every man there was due in a pew with a wife who was already dressed.

Not one of them moved toward his truck. They stood around that finished swing in their sawdust and their work boots, and they looked at it, and they looked at the little white house two doors down.

Earl took his hat off. I did not understand why until the others did the same, one after another, eleven men standing bareheaded in a backyard around a swing.

Then Earl said, go get him, Carol. Go knock on that door.