The Wheelchair Swing The Men Built

The counterman had pulled the ticket. Every item on Earl’s list, down to the box of two inch screws. Paid in full, in cash, the day before Earl ever walked in.

Earl asked him who. The counterman said he had been told not to say. That the fellow had been plain about it. Pay for whatever this list needs when a man named Earl comes in asking, and do not give my name to anybody.

Earl said he had pushed, and the counterman had just shaken his head and said, I gave my word, and that was the end of it.

So the swing that eleven men built with their own hands and their own Saturday had stood on lumber that some stranger had already bought and paid for in secret, before a single one of us had even picked up a drill.

I sat down on my own porch steps when Earl told me that. I had been on my feet since five. But it was not my feet that put me down.

For three days I could not find out who it was. I am a woman who knows everybody. I asked everybody. Nobody knew a thing.

The old man by the stove

It was the counterman at the lumberyard who finally told me, and only because I wore him down with a pie.

I drove out to the yard on the highway on the third day with a chess pie still warm in a towel, and I set it on his counter, and I said I was not leaving until he told me something.

I said, I am not asking for a name to thank him in the paper. I am asking because a little boy is going to want to know someday who believed he should fly, and I mean to be able to tell him.

The counterman looked at that pie a long time. Then he looked over his shoulder, toward the back of the store where they keep an old woodstove going even in summer, with a couple of chairs around it.

He said, he sits back there most mornings. He is here right now. But you did not hear it from me, and you be gentle with him.

There was an old man by that stove. Older than me by twenty years, in a seed cap and a flannel shirt in July, with his hands folded over a cane.

I pulled a chair up beside him and I introduced myself and I told him I knew what he had done.

He did not deny it. He just looked at the stove. And then he told me, slow, in his own time, why he had done it.

He had a son once, he said. Long ago, before I was born, near about. A boy who dove off a bridge into the river one August the way country boys do, and hit the bottom wrong, and never walked another step.