“For the corners,” he said, and drove off. I set every one of them on the walls the next morning, and I thought, that is how it is supposed to work out here. A man sees a thing being done right and he adds to it. He does not stand at the end of it with a box.
Tara made the sign. She wanted to make the sign more than anything, and I let her.
I did not fix her spelling. It said Everybody welcom. Free.
That is the sign that is still leaned against the first tower. It is the best sign I have ever seen in my life.
Word got to the in-laws before we were done. Everything gets to everybody out here.
Wade’s mother called the house. “Donnie says you’re building a fort to spite him,” she said.
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“I’m building a fort so my kids don’t have to pay their uncle to play,” I said. “He can call it whatever he likes.”
There was a long quiet on the line. Wade’s mother is not a woman who picks sides out loud.
But before she hung up she said something I did not expect. “Your father-in-law cut the first fort on this place forty years ago out of oat straw.”
She let that sit. “He never charged a child a cent for it.”
Then she hung up. I stood there holding the phone, understanding that she had, in her own way that cost her nothing with Donnie, picked.
Word Gets Around
I did not put it on Facebook. I want that known. People assume everything starts with a post now.
I told two mothers at the bus stop. That is all.
You tell two mothers at a country bus stop and by Friday the whole township knows. There is a free straw fort out at the Nelson place.
No gate. No box. No man counting dollars.
The first car came Friday after school. It was the Websters from down the creek, three kids and a grandma.
The grandma got out slow and looked at the whole thing with her hand up against the sun. “How much,” she said, reaching for her purse.
She is of an age where everything costs and you are a fool if you do not ask first.
“Not one thing,” I said. “Turn those kids loose.”
She stood there a second. Then she put her purse back in the car.
She watched her grandkids run screaming into the maze. When she looked back at me her chin was doing something.
“We went to the other one last weekend,” she said. “Two dollars a head and a dollar for the little one.”
She said it quiet, not mean, just the arithmetic of a woman on a fixed check. “Cost me seven dollars to watch my own grandbabies play in some hay. Seven dollars.”
I did not say anything about Donnie. There was nothing to say that the number had not already said.
By Saturday morning there were six cars in the yard before I had the coffee made.