The Playground Behind the Church

What the money already bought

The park board is five volunteers who meet in the back room of the library. They walked Maple Street Park in March with Josie and a tape measure, and voted four to one to approve a site beside the ball diamond. The council signs off on anything permanent, but it is a formality, like a deacon signing the bulletin.

So we bought the kit.

The kit came from a company in Minnesota that builds cedar playsets: a tower, two slides, a climbing wall, a rope bridge, and a swing beam with four seats. Seven thousand three hundred and fifty dollars with freight, paid in full by check in August. Josie signed the order form herself, in her best cursive, on the line that said Purchaser.

The crates showed up on a flatbed the second week of September and sat in the town maintenance shed, stacked to the rafters. The remaining six hundred and fifty dollars was set aside for wood chips, concrete, and an auger rental.

Then, two weeks later, I got a call from the mayor’s wife that Doug Hesse had put the site on the agenda.

I should tell you about Doug, because you might think he is a monster. He is not. He is fifty-eight, eleven years on the council, and he drives a feed truck for the co-op mill on the night run. He sleeps from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon, with a box fan in the window and a towel over the curtain rod.

His house sits on Maple Street, right at the park’s edge. His bedroom window faces the ball diamond. I understood that. I am a night nurse myself. I know what it is to lie there at eleven in the morning, listening to a mower down the block and hating the whole world.

That explains it. It does not make it right. If he had come to the park board in March and said, I sleep days, can we put the playground on the far side by the road, they would have moved it in a heartbeat. He said nothing in March. He said it in October, after the money was spent, from behind a microphone, with a vote.

Ryan did not tell me for a whole evening after the call, because he knew what I would do. I would do nothing, and it would eat me alive.

“He’s family,” Ryan said, when he finally told me, standing at the sink with his work boots still on. “He’ll come around.”

“He won’t.”

“He’s got to.” Ryan rubbed his forehead with the back of his glove. “We were at his house for his fiftieth. He cried when his dad’s old truck came out of the barn.”