Thirty Bales
Wade was at the kitchen sink when we came in. He was washing grease to the elbow off a wheel bearing he had spent all day cussing at.
I told him the whole thing standing in the doorway with my coat still on. The dollar. The box. Cole turning six in August.
Wade is not a man who says much. He listened with his hands under the water and his jaw working.
When I got to the part about paying two dollars so my boy would not cry, he turned the faucet off. He dried his hands.
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“Bales,” he said.
“What?”
“We got thirty in the shed.” He was already looking out the window at the yard, the same stretch of grass I had been looking at.
“We can have the whole township’s kids out here and it won’t cost one of them a nickel.” He hung the towel on the oven door. “Let Donnie sell tickets to an empty lot.”
I want the men who read this to know that about Wade.
The women will already know their own husbands. Some of them are waiting for me to say he sat there and did nothing.
He did not sit there. He was out in the shed with the tractor and the bale fork before I had the kids’ coats hung up.
It is not a small thing to move thirty bales of straw. These are the big three-string squares, not the little ones you can toss by hand.
Each one goes better than eight hundred pounds. You do not stack those by arm. You stack them with a loader and a prayer.
Wade ran them out on the loader two and three at a time while the light went. The kids and I dragged the loose flakes and swept the grass.
I marked out with a can of orange paint where the walls would go. Cole followed the line I sprayed like it was a treasure map.
“Here’s the door,” I told him. “And here’s where the tower goes. Right where you’re standing.”
He looked down at his boots like the tower might come up through them. “A real tower?”
“A real one. Tall as your daddy.”
We did not finish that night. We got the base course down, a long double wall and the start of a tower.
We stood back in the yard dark and looked at it. Cole had straw down his collar and in his boots.
He was so happy he could not stand still. “Is it ours?” he said. “Nobody has to pay?”
“Nobody has to pay,” I said. “Not ever. This one’s free.”