The Blind I Built on Our Farm Pond

He had already gotten himself in the cab and was folding the chair, pulling the wheels off and handing the frame back behind the seat the way the therapists had taught him up at the hospital.

He did not look at me while I got in. He looked out the windshield at Ronnie’s marsh, flat and brown and shining past the shelterbelt, with the cattails standing up gold along the edges.

“It’s fine, Dad,” he said. “He’s right about the boats. I’d have to have somebody lift me in and out every time. I’d just be in the way.”

I started the truck and did not say anything for a while.

We drove the two miles home on the gravel with the dust hanging behind us in the still air, and neither one of us turned on the radio.

Grady had joined the Army at nineteen. He did six years, and he was good at it, and he liked it.

He was a sergeant the last two years, and his men liked him, which tells you something.

Fourteen months before that Friday there was a training accident, a truck that rolled on a wet hillside a long way from home.

Grady was in the back. His spine was broken low, below the ribs.

He has his arms and his hands and his chest, and he is stronger in the shoulders now than he ever was.

But he will not walk again. The doctors told us that the second week, plainly.

He spent most of a year in hospitals, the last part of it at the big veterans hospital up in the Cities, where they taught him how to live in the chair. Then in May he came home to us.

Marcy and I had widened the bathroom door and put a ramp on the back porch before he got here. I built that ramp myself, out of treated lumber, with a rail on each side.

He had been quiet since he came home. Not sad exactly, or not only sad. Quiet. He did his exercises, he helped me with the books for the farm, he watched a lot of baseball.

And then in late August, out of nowhere, he asked me at supper if I thought Uncle Ronnie would let him come out for the opener.

Marcy put her fork down and looked at me across the table.

It was the first thing he had asked for since he got home. I told him of course Ronnie would.

I told him I would talk to Ronnie myself. I never did, and that part is on me.

So when we pulled into our yard that Friday, I parked by the machine shed and sat there with my hands on the wheel.

Grady reached back for his chair and started putting the wheels on.

“Where’s Dovie?” he asked. Dovie is our black Lab, seven years old, the best dog I have ever owned. Grady picked her out of the litter himself the summer before he enlisted.

“Probably under the porch,” I said. Then I said, “Grady, how long would it take you to get down to the pond in that chair, if there was a path?”

He looked at me sideways, holding a wheel. “Our pond? Couple minutes. Why?”

Our pond is not much. It is maybe four acres, spring-fed, in the low corner of the pasture east of the house.

My father dug it out in 1971 to water cattle, back when we still ran cattle.