Building It
We built for three days. I did it between chores. Between getting the kids on the bus and getting them off it. Between supper and dark.
Wade did the heavy courses with the loader. I did the climbing parts, the tucking and the trimming.
You shape a thing so a child can run it without barking a shin. There is a way to do it and a way not to.
A straw fort is not just a pile. If you do it right there is an art to it.
You step the walls so a little one can climb without a boost. You do not make a six-year-old ask for help to get up.
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You cut a maze through the middle that dead-ends twice and comes out somewhere a kid does not expect. There has to be a shriek of surprise in it.
You leave a low tunnel that only the small ones fit through. The little ones need one thing the big kids cannot do.
You build a high lookout with a bale seat where the big ones can be king of the yard for a minute.
I put a tower at each end and ran a wall between them with two gates. I cut the maze so it wound back on itself like the inside of a snail shell.
I set our own pumpkins on the corners, the ones off the garden that we would have carved anyway.
Wade dragged out the old flat wagon. We filled it with the leftover flakes for the little ones to jump into.
On the second evening a neighbor stopped his truck on the road and backed into our lane. It was old Merle Hoffman, who has farmed the quarter east of us since before Wade was born, and he sat with his elbow out the window and watched us work for a while without saying anything.
“That for the kids,” he said finally. It was not really a question. Merle does not ask many.
“It is,” I said. “No charge. Just come when you want.”
He chewed on that. “I heard the other one’s charging.” He said it careful, the way a man does when he does not want to be caught talking family against family. “Two dollar, somebody said.”
“You heard right.”
Merle nodded once and put the truck in gear. Before he pulled out he reached across the seat and came back with a feed sack full of the little pie pumpkins he grows, and he set it on the ground by our gate without a word, a dozen of them, orange as fire.