The Wheelchair Swing The Men Built

And then the Dobson man, the quiet one, reached out one hand and gave the platform the gentlest push you ever saw.

The whole thing swung. Smooth as anything, out and back, Toby and his chair and all, the chains creaking in that old familiar way.

I have fed this neighborhood through funerals and christenings for forty years. I have seen a lot of faces do a lot of things.

I have never, before or since, seen a face do what that child’s face did when that swing carried him up and the ground fell away under him for the first time since June.

He threw his head back. He threw his head all the way back the way he used to, so the whole world turned upside down, and he laughed at the sky.

His mother made a sound I will not try to describe. Several of those grown men turned around and found something to look at in the other direction.

Then Toby said the only thing he said that whole morning. He said, higher.

And eleven men who were late for church lined up to take turns pushing him higher.

The bill that was already paid

It was over an hour before anybody left, and when they did go, it was in a hurry, waving, already late, their wives surely wondering.

I was folding my funeral table back up in the carport when Earl came over. He had his hat back on. He had something on his mind.

I said, Earl, I do not know how to thank you and I am not going to try. You will just have to live with being thanked by being fed for the rest of your days.

He smiled at that. Then he got that quiet look again, the same one he had on the phone the first day.

He said, Carol, there is a thing you ought to know, and I did not want to say it in front of everybody.

I said, what is it. I thought somebody had gotten hurt, or that the concrete was not going to hold, or some ordinary trouble.

He said, the lumber. All of it. The frame posts, the decking, the chain, the hardware, the concrete, every bit of it.

I said, what about it. I had it in my head that we owed somebody money, and that I would be passing a coffee can down the street for a month.

Earl said, it is paid for. It was paid for before I ever loaded it. I went to the yard on Tuesday to price it all out and the man behind the counter told me the ticket was already settled.

I said that did not make any sense. Nobody knew I was buying lumber. I had not even told Earl what yard to go to.

Earl said he thought the same, and that he had stood there and argued with the counterman about it, sure there was a mistake.