The Wheelchair Swing The Men Built

That was in a different time, he said. There was no money and no county help and no neighbors who knew what to do with a crippled child. There was just him and his wife and a boy in a chair in a house with three steps up to the door.

He built his son a ramp himself, he said. At night, after the fields, by lantern. It took him most of a winter because he did it alone and he did not know how, and nobody came to help, and he never once thought to ask.

His boy lived to be nineteen, he said. And in all those years, the one thing that boy had wanted and never gotten was to swing again. There had been no money for such a thing, and no strong backs offered, and the summers had just gone by.

The old man said he had carried that for fifty years. The ramp he was proud of. The swing he never built was the thing that woke him at night.

He said, I was in this very store buying nails on a Tuesday, and that big fellow Earl came up to the counter with a list and got to talking about what it was for. A boy two towns over, come home from the hospital, could not walk, and the neighbors fixing to build him a swing he could ride in his chair.

He said, I did not sleep that night either. But for once it was not the old reason.

He came back the next morning before the store opened, he said, and he waited in the lot until the counterman came, and he paid the whole list in cash, and he asked that no name be given.

I asked him why he did not want the credit. A thing that kind, a man could hold his head up over.

He said, it was never mine to be thanked for. He said, fifty years ago my boy should have had a yard full of men on a Saturday, and he did not, because I was too proud to knock on a door and ask.

He said, your little fellow got what mine never did. I just wanted to buy the wood. Let the men who showed up have the thanks. They did the part I did not know how to do.