A Hay Wagon Castle for Eli

The line

After the ladybug, the brother came. Then the grandma with the little Spider-Man. Then three boys from Eli’s class, who shouted his name and ran the last ten yards.

By a quarter past three there were twenty kids on the grass.

By half past three, the line ran back off the field, across the end of the lot, and up along the trunks, past every single one of them.

The kids still stopped at the trunks on the way. Nobody skipped anybody.

But they kept walking after the last trunk, out onto the grass, to the castle. It was like water finding the low spot in a field.

Every one of them bowed at the bottom of the ramp. Nobody told them to.

Arnie bowed to them first, and they bowed back, and then they bowed to Eli, and Eli bowed to every single child.

I kept count in my head, the way I count pills at the pharmacy. Thirty. Fifty. Sixty-five.

The bowls went down, and I refilled them from the bags under the wagon, and they went down again.

Boyd Lindqvist came walking across his own field with his cane. He stood next to Arnie at the bottom of the ramp for about ten minutes, not saying much, watching the kids.

Then he took his seed cap off and put it on the ramp rail and went home.

The youth group kids came over and stood along the edge of the gravel and made sure every little one crossed safely from the lot to the grass. They held hands with the smallest ones and walked them over.

At a quarter to four, Eli’s arms got tired from leaning. Arnie came up the ramp and stood behind him for a while, handing him candy from the bags so Eli didn’t have to reach.

He didn’t say a word. He just stood behind his grandson and handed him candy for a few minutes, then went back down to his post at the bottom of the ramp.

Kristy’s trunk

Somewhere past ninety, I looked down the row of trunks.

But nobody was standing at Kristy’s trunk. Not one child. Hers was the first trunk, right by the church door, and every child had already been through it once on the way down, and now they were all out on the grass.

She was standing there holding her cauldron of candy, watching the line go by. She had her witch’s hat on, a different one from mine, a store-bought one with a big floppy brim.

And then I saw that her own two kids were in our line. Warren, who is eight, and Pansy, who is six.

They had gotten in line by themselves, without asking her, and they were about ten kids from the front.

Sir Warren

When Warren got to the bottom of the ramp, he bowed to Arnie, and then he bowed to Eli.

He was dressed as a cowboy, with a felt hat that had belonged to his grandpa.

“Hi, Eli,” he said.

“Greetings, Sir Warren,” Eli said, very formally. Then he forgot to be formal and said, “Do you want to come up? Grandpa, can he come up?”

Arnie looked at me. I nodded. Warren went up the ramp, counting the cleats out loud the way Eli had.

Sixteen. He stood next to Eli’s chair in the castle and looked out the window at the line.

Then Eli reached down beside his chair and picked up his foam sword. The one with the worn tip. He held it up with both hands.

“Kneel,” he said.

Warren knelt on the plywood deck of that hay wagon. He took his cowboy hat off and held it against his chest.

The whole line went quiet. I don’t think anybody told them to. They just stopped talking.

Eli touched the foam sword to Warren’s right shoulder, then to his left. His hands were steady. His face was so serious I almost couldn’t look at it.

“I dub you Sir Warren of the Castle,” Eli said. “Rise, Sir Warren.”

Warren stood up. He put his cowboy hat back on. He looked at his cousin, and then he leaned down and hugged him around the neck, hard, the way little boys hug when they forget anybody is watching.

I stood beside the castle in my witch hat and I could not see anything clearly for a while. Arnie had his back turned again, looking at the trees.