The Hayride Grandma Asked For

Bud and the wagon

Bud doesn’t argue with people. He never has. When something needs doing he just goes out to the shed, and that’s where he lived for the next two Saturdays and most of the evenings in between, with the radio going and the big doors open to the yard.

The flat wagon is sixteen feet long and eight feet wide, on rubber tires, with a solid oak deck his dad built in the seventies.

Bud took it apart and checked every bolt, then put new boards in two places where the old ones were soft.

He bolted pipe rails down both long sides, waist high on a seated grown-up, and padded them with foam pipe insulation and duct tape so nobody would bruise an elbow.

He left the front open for the driver’s seat and the back open for loading, with a chain across it.

Then the bales. He bought small square bales of good grass hay from a neighbor, nice and tight, and laid them two rows deep down each side, with a second row standing on end behind them for backs.

He tied every one to the rails with twine so nothing could shift.

I came out with the quilts. Every quilt we owned, and some we didn’t. My mother’s Dresden Plate. A log cabin from my aunt on the other side.

Two that Grandma herself made back in the sixties that we kept in the cedar chest. I laid them over the bales and tucked them in like making beds.

Last, Bud built a set of steps. Three wide treads with a handrail on both sides, hooked onto the back of the wagon with two heavy pins so it couldn’t slide.

He made Rufus’s set of practice steps exactly the same height, so the residents had already climbed them all week without knowing.

On the Thursday before, he hitched Ivo and Tolbert and loaded the wagon with eighty fifty-pound sacks of feed, two tons all told, to stand in for twenty people.

Then he drove the whole route twice, once at a walk and once slower than a walk, to find every rut and low limb.

He came home with a chainsaw in the truck bed and sawdust in his beard.

“Reva had a limb down by the creek,” he said. “It’s gone. And there’s a washout by the cemetery. I filled it with gravel.”

The night before

There’s nothing much to tell about the night before, except that I baked six dozen cookies and Bud brushed the horses until they shone like new pennies, and we went to bed early because Bud has to be up with the team before light.

But I want to tell you one thing. I texted Gail at supper time.

I wrote, “We load at noon at the back door. Bud’s saving you a seat up front next to your mother.”

She didn’t answer. I didn’t expect her to. I just wanted her to know there was room.

Saturday

Saturday came up sunny and still, with a sky so blue it hurt to look at, and the kind of October cool that makes you want a sweater in the shade and nothing at all in the sun.

Bud’s cousin hauled the wagon over on his flatbed at ten.

Bud trailered Ivo and Tolbert over at eleven, unloaded them in the back lot, and harnessed them in the grass while a row of faces watched from the dining room windows. By eleven thirty there were people at every window.

By noon, fourteen residents were waiting at the back door in their coats and scarves.

Families had come too, a few dozen people standing along the curb with coffee from the kitchen. Somebody’s grandson had a camera. The cook came out in her apron.

Dorcas had four aides lined up, one for each corner of the wagon: Cordia, Idell, Rufus the therapist, and a big farm boy who works weekends in the kitchen.

Beulah, the charge nurse, would follow in the van with the wheelchair and her bag, ten feet behind the wagon the whole way.

Rufus and Cordia loaded every person themselves, one at a time, up those three steps. Slow.

A hand on the rail, a hand on an arm. Nobody was rushed. Glennis corrected Cordia’s grammar on the second step and everybody laughed, including Cordia.

Grandma went last, because she wanted to sit up front.

She had on her red knit cardigan, and when she got to the top step Bud, in his brown canvas coat, reached down from the seat and she put her hand through his arm and he lifted her the last little bit like she weighed nothing.

Her white hair was set in soft curls the way she has always worn it. I tucked a quilt over her lap. One of her own, a scrap quilt in every color.

She smoothed it with her hand and looked at it and said, “I made this the year your daddy was born.” Then she looked at the horses.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s go.”