A Hay Wagon Castle for Eli

The question

That evening, after milking, while it was still light out, I was sorting Eli’s laundry on the porch, and he was sitting beside me in his chair. He had his foam sword across his lap.

He asked me something I wasn’t ready for.

“Mom, does Aunt Kristy get candy too?”

I stopped folding. “What do you mean, buddy?”

“At my castle,” he said. “If she comes to my window. Does she get candy too, or just the kids?”

I looked at him for a while. I thought about the church steps, and the bulletin folded into a square, and “Am I in the way, Mom?” by the mailbox.

And here he was, worried about whether his aunt would get candy.

“Yes, buddy,” I said. “Everybody does. Everybody who comes to the window gets candy.”

“Good,” he said. “Because she likes the peanut butter cups. She always takes them out of Pansy’s bucket.”

I laughed so hard I had to set the laundry down. That is true. Kristy has been taking the peanut butter cups out of her children’s buckets for years, and she thinks nobody notices.

Friday

Friday was my day off from the pharmacy, so I drove to Fleet Farm in Janesville and bought candy.

I don’t know how many kids come to that trunk-or-treat. Kristy says about a hundred and twenty most years, from all over the county.

I bought enough for a hundred and fifty, just in case. Bags of fun-size candy bars, suckers, and three big bags of peanut butter cups.

It came to $84 and some change. Jesse didn’t say a word about it.

That afternoon Arnie came over with something under his arm. It was a cardboard helmet, a knight’s helmet with a visor cut out. He had made it himself at his kitchen table.

He put it on Eli’s head. It came down over his eyes. Arnie tipped the visor up. “There,” he said.

“Now you’re properly dressed.” Eli wore it to supper and wore it during evening prayers and tried to wear it to bed.

Arnie had made a second one too. A bigger one. He didn’t say who that one was for.

He just set it on the bench by our back door, and I noticed it and didn’t ask.

Saturday morning

Saturday the trunk-or-treat ran from three to five in the afternoon, the way it always does, the last Saturday before Halloween. Kristy has it in the church calendar a year ahead.

Jesse milked early, at four-thirty in the morning, and again early in the afternoon so he could be on the road by one-thirty.

The cows did not love the change. A few of the older girls let him know about it.

At one-thirty, Jesse hooked the hay wagon to the tractor. He folded the ramp and strapped it on the deck.

I tied the cardboard towers down with baling twine in four places so they wouldn’t go in the ditch.

Arnie followed behind in his pickup with his flashers on. Eli rode with Arnie in the front seat, wearing his helmet, with his chair folded in the bed.

I rode on the tractor with Jesse, standing on the step, holding on.

We went to town at eleven miles an hour. Eleven miles. It took us a full hour. People pulled over on the shoulder and honked and waved.

Old Mr. Weber out by the cheese plant took his hat off and held it over his heart, which made me laugh and then made me cry a little.

We came into town at two-thirty. The church lot was already filling up.

The trunks were lined up in two rows on the gravel, tailgates open, decorated with fake cobwebs and hay bales and pumpkins.

Kristy’s trunk was first, right by the church door, the way it is every year. She had a big plastic cauldron for candy and a sign-up table with her clipboard.

She saw the tractor pull past the end of the lot. She stopped what she was doing.

Jesse drove through Boyd’s gate and out onto the hayfield. He parked the wagon on the short grass, well away from the cars, a good forty yards past the last trunk. He unhooked it and drove the tractor back across the field.

We unfolded the ramp and set the candy out in two big bowls on the window ledge, one on each side, where Eli could reach them both.

Then Arnie put on the second helmet, the bigger one. It was a little crooked. He didn’t fix it.

“Every castle needs a gatekeeper,” he said, and he took up his post at the bottom of the ramp.