The Wooden Fire Truck for Wesley

The promise

Last December, Wesley sat on my porch step in a coat two sizes too big and watched a fire engine go by on County Road 77 with its lights going. The volunteers were headed to a chimney fire down the road. He was five years old, and he talked about it for the rest of the afternoon.

“Grandma, why can’t I ride one?”

“They’re for firemen, honey.”

“Then why can’t somebody make a little one? That I could ride?” I laughed, because it was the kind of question a child asks. But he did not laugh. He turned his whole face up at me, serious as a deacon, and said, “You could make one. You make everything.”

I do make things. I always have. My father ran a sawmill outside Berlin, and I grew up with a pencil behind my ear and sawdust in my shoes.

Ernest and I were married thirty-nine years, and for most of them I shared a long cinder-block shop with him behind the garage, with a woodstove and a pegboard of tools he had labeled in his own square handwriting. After he passed, I kept the stove going and kept on building.

Birdhouses for the church sale. A pie safe for my sister.

“Give me a year, buddy,” I told Wesley on that porch step.

“A whole year?”

“Good things take a year.” He thought it over and put out his hand, and we shook on it. I remember how cold his fingers were.

That was the deal, and I kept it. I started the truck in the first week of August, after the church picnic, and I worked on it every evening that the arthritis in my left thumb would let me.

The steering wheel was a real one. I cut a hole through the cab floor, set a hardwood shaft in a bronze bushing, and tied it to the front axle with a tie rod, so that when Wesley turned the wheel the front wheels turned too. It took me nine nights and one very bad word to get that right.

Behind the cab there was a long bench for two small riders. Behind that, a hose reel made from an old wire spool, wrapped in a length of garden hose I had bought for six dollars. A ladder along each side, pegged and glued, with rungs spaced for a child’s hand.

A push handle at the back for whoever was the engine that day. At a flea market in Berlin I found a brass ship’s bell for twelve dollars, a little thing the size of a coffee cup with a clapper on a leather cord. I mounted it on a bracket by the cab so a child could reach up and ring it.

I painted it barn red, two coats of enamel, with a light sanding between. I let it cure for nine days with a space heater going. Then, last, on the underside where no one would see it, I burned in a line with Ernest’s old wood-burning pen: For Wesley, from Grandma and Grandpa Ernest.

Ernest was not alive to build it, but his pen was, and I felt him in the room every night.

By the third week of October, the lumber and hardware had come to a hundred and eighty-six dollars and some change, and it was finished. I had not told a soul except my neighbor Otis.

So that was the truck. And on the Thursday before the party, in my own kitchen, a woman I had tried for seven years to love told me that the most important thing I had ever made would not be welcome in her photographs.