A Hay Wagon Castle for Eli

Tuesday through Thursday

We built it every afternoon that week, between noon dinner and evening milking.

That is the only time a dairy farm has to spare, and it is not much, and we used every minute of it.

Tuesday the men framed the walls and bolted them to the deck. The shed smelled like sawdust and diesel and the cold coming in under the big door.

Arnie hummed “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” under his breath the whole time, which I did not think was an accident.

Eli got off the school bus at three-fifteen and came straight to the shed.

When he saw what was on the wagon, he stopped his chair in the doorway. He just sat there with his mouth open.

“Is that a castle?” he said.

“It’s going to be,” Arnie said. “If the knight helps.”

Wednesday we painted. Jesse rolled the walls with gray barn primer we had left over from the calf hutches.

It was the only gray paint we had, and it turned out to be exactly the right color for a castle.

Then Eli painted the stones on. I cut a kitchen sponge into a rectangle, and he dipped it in darker gray and pressed it on the walls, over and over, one stone at a time, as high as he could reach.

He got more gray on himself than he did on the castle. He had gray in his hair, gray on his ears, gray all down the front of his sweatshirt.

When he went to bed that night I could still see it on his elbows.

Arnie cut the doorway and the window with his jigsaw. He sanded the edge of the window smooth so there wouldn’t be a single splinter where Eli’s arms would rest.

He went over it three times with the sandpaper, then ran his own palm across it to check.

Thursday Jesse brought the refrigerator boxes home. We taped them into square towers, and cut the tops into notches.

Jesse and Eli painted them gray, and Arnie wired them to the corners of the wagon so they’d stand up in a breeze.

The ramp went on that afternoon. Jesse built it in two eight-foot sections with hinges so it would fold for the road.

He nailed the cleats on with Eli handing him each one, counting them out loud as they went. Sixteen cleats.

Then Eli tried it. He sat at the bottom, looked up the slope, spit on his palms the way he’s seen his dad do before a hard job, and started pushing.

He made it about twelve feet on his own. The last four feet, he was breathing hard and his arms were shaking.

Arnie stepped up behind him, put one hand on the back of the chair, and gave him the easiest little push.

Eli rolled onto the deck of his castle. He turned his chair around to face the window.

He put his elbows on the sanded ledge, exactly where I knew they’d go, and looked out at the shed and the three of us.

“Verily,” he said. And Arnie had to go stand by the workbench for a minute with his back to us.