A Hay Wagon Castle for Eli

The machine shed

The two of them went out to the machine shed after dinner, and I did the dishes, and then I put my boots on and went out after them because I could not stand not knowing.

By the time I got there, Arnie already had a sheet of plywood up on the sawhorses. He had his tape measure out.

Jesse was standing beside the old hay wagon, the one we don’t use much anymore since we went to round bales.

“Who says a knight needs a trunk,” Arnie said to me when I walked in. He didn’t even look up.

He was marking a line on the plywood with a carpenter’s pencil. “A knight needs a castle.”

I looked at the hay wagon. It’s an old flat rack on a low running gear, about eight feet by sixteen, with a wooden deck Arnie rebuilt himself in 1998.

The deck sits about two feet off the ground on tall rubber tires.

“You want to build a castle on the hay wagon,” I said.

“We want to build a castle on the hay wagon,” Jesse said, “and park it somewhere it doesn’t block anybody’s car.”

“Where?”

Jesse pointed east, which made no sense in a machine shed, but I knew what he meant.

“Boyd’s hayfield. It runs right up to the end of the church lot. He cut second crop the middle of September. It’s nothing but short grass.”

Boyd Lindqvist is eighty-one. He has farmed that field across from the church since before Jesse was born. He and Arnie have played sheepshead together every Thursday for about forty years.

Arnie was already dialing. He talked to Boyd for about two minutes, mostly about the weather and someone’s hip replacement.

Then he said, “Say, Boyd, can we park a hay wagon on your field Saturday afternoon?”

I could hear Boyd’s voice from where I stood, because Boyd is hard of hearing and talks loud on the phone.

“Park anywhere you like, Arnie. Second crop’s been off a month. What do you need a hay wagon in town for?”

“We’re building a castle,” Arnie said.

There was a long pause on the other end. Then Boyd said, “Well, all right then,” and hung up, because Boyd does not need to know any more than that about anything.

The plan

We drew it on the back of a feed bill on the workbench. Jesse drew the walls. Arnie drew the towers.

I drew the window, because I was the one who knew exactly how high Eli’s hands came when he sat in his chair.

The window would be cut in the front wall, facing the line, exactly at the height of Eli’s elbows when he sat in his chair.

Twenty-eight inches off the deck. I measured him twice that night to be sure.

The ramp was the hard part. The wagon deck sits twenty-four inches up. For Eli to wheel himself, the ramp needed to be long and gentle.

Jesse did the arithmetic on the feed bill with Arnie looking over his shoulder.

“Sixteen feet,” Jesse finally said. “Two-by-ten stringers, plywood decking, cleats every foot so his wheels don’t slip. He can do most of it himself, and Dad or I will give him a push at the top.”

“I’ll give him the push,” Arnie said. “That’s my job.”