A Hay Wagon Castle for Eli

Three o’clock

At three o’clock the church bell rang three times, and the kids came out of the cars and the minivans and from up the sidewalk, already in costume, buckets swinging.

The sun was out. It was one of those late October afternoons in Wisconsin where the air is cold but the light is warm, and the trees all along the edge of the lot had turned. You could smell leaves and somebody’s wood stove.

Eli sat at his window in his silver-gray knight costume, with the cardboard helmet pushed up on his forehead.

He had his hands flat on the ledge on either side of the candy bowls. He looked out over the field like he owned it.

I stood beside the castle in my black witch hat and my purple sweater.

I had gotten the hat at the dollar store, and I was the least important person in that whole field, and I knew it.

Then a little girl dressed as a ladybug got to the end of the trunk row and stopped.

She stood on the edge of the gravel and pointed out at the field. She didn’t say anything. She just pointed.

Then her brother pointed. Then a grandma holding the hand of a very small Spider-Man looked where they were pointing and said, so loud I could hear it forty yards away, “Well, would you look at that.”

The ladybug came first. She walked across the grass, slowly, looking up at the towers. She stopped at the bottom of the ramp.

Arnie bowed to her, deeply, with one hand on his cardboard helmet so it wouldn’t fall off.

The ladybug looked at Arnie. Then she looked up at Eli in the window. Then she did the most natural thing in the world. She bowed, too.

Eli bowed back from his chair, as much as a boy can bow from a wheelchair, with one hand over his heart the way the knights do in the book.

Then he leaned out the window and dropped two peanut butter cups in her bucket.

“Thank you, my lady,” he said.