A Hay Wagon Castle for Eli

The drive home

We live eleven miles south of town on the farm Jesse’s grandfather started. We milk ninety cows.

The road home runs through corn that was half picked, past the Lindqvist place and over the little bridge at the creek.

Jesse drove. He had stayed inside to talk to Elwin about the furnace and had not heard any of it on the steps.

I told him in a low voice while Eli sat in the back seat with his chair folded in the bed of the pickup.

Jesse’s jaw went tight, but he didn’t say anything right away. That is how Jesse is.

He is a quiet man who thinks a thing all the way through before he opens his mouth, and I have learned to let him.

We turned onto our lane. The gravel popped under the tires. Jesse slowed down by the mailbox like he always does, and that’s when Eli said it, in a small voice I had not heard from him in a long while.

“Am I in the way, Mom?”

Jesse stopped the truck right there by the mailbox. He put it in park.

Neither of us said anything for a second, and I could hear the engine ticking and a crow out in the stubble field.

I turned around in my seat. “No,” I said. “No, you are not in the way. You have never been in the way one day of your life.”

“Aunt Kristy said the chair takes up too much room.”

“Aunt Kristy is worried about cars,” I said. “That’s a different thing. She’s worried about the wrong thing, but it’s a different thing from you being in the way.”

He thought about that. He is seven, and he thinks about things harder than most grown men I know. Then he said, “So can I be a knight or not?”

Jesse looked at me across the cab. He had the look he gets when a heifer is in trouble and he has already decided what he is going to do about it.

“You can be a knight,” Jesse said. “I don’t know how yet. But you can be a knight.”

Eli

I should tell you about Eli, because you need to know him to understand any of this.

Eli was born with spina bifida. We found out at the twenty-week ultrasound in Madison, and I cried in the parking ramp for an hour while Jesse sat with his hand on my back and didn’t say a word.

He had his first surgery when he was a day old, at the children’s hospital in Milwaukee. He has a shunt.

His legs don’t work the way other kids’ legs do, and he has never walked, and the doctors say he won’t.

What he does have is arms like a fencepost driller. He got his first manual wheelchair when he was three, a little red one, and he figured out in about a week how to pop a wheelie and spin on the spot.

Now he has a lighter gray one that the Shriners helped us with. He can turn it on a dime.

He wheels himself across the barnyard gravel, which is harder than it looks, and up the ramp Jesse built onto the milkhouse.

He loves the cows. He loves the barn cats. And more than anything since he was five, he has loved knights. Castles, swords, shields, dragons, the round table, all of it.

Arnie, Jesse’s dad, got him started. Arnie found a library book about castles at the rummage sale and read it to him on the porch swing every afternoon one summer until the binding came apart.

Eli has a cardboard shield in his room that he painted himself.

He has a foam sword from the dollar store that he has worn the tip off of. He says “verily” at the supper table, and his father lets him.

So when Kristy said the chair would block the cars, it wasn’t just about candy.

It was about a boy who wanted, for one afternoon, to sit where everybody else sat and be the thing he loved.