The Playground Behind the Church

Five days

Del Hargis, who has run the town maintenance shed for twenty-two years, showed up at our door that afternoon with the town’s flatbed. He did not wear the town’s jacket and he did not say a word about the vote. He just said, “Where do you want them?” and hauled the crates three blocks to the church lot, on the clock.

Councilman Lyman Haskins and Rita Ames, the two who had voted against denying, both called that night to say they would be there Saturday.

Ryan took Wednesday off from the co-op. He rented a two-man auger for a hundred and fifty dollars, talked three truckloads of wood chips out of the tree service that clears the electric lines, and bought forty bags of concrete with the six hundred and fifty dollars that was left.

I called 811, the one-call line for utility locates, because you do not dig in Iowa without it. A man marked a buried phone line along the back edge of the lot, and we moved the layout six feet east. The frost line here is forty-two inches, and the posts had to go below it or the first January heave would have them leaning like drunks.

I put one post in the Elm Prairie community group on Facebook, and I wrote it plain.

“Playground build. This Saturday, seven sharp. Church back lot. Bring a drill, a wrench, and gloves. Kit and lunch are covered. Josie raised the money, we just need the hands.”

I figured maybe twelve people. The directions said two days for six adults. I did the math in my head and I did not like it.

Doug called Ryan on Thursday night.

I was at the stove. Ryan took the phone out to the porch, but the screen door does not shut all the way, so I heard most of it.

“Ry,” Doug said. His voice came across the kitchen small and scratchy. “You went around me.”

“I went around the corner, Doug. It’s three blocks.”

“The whole town knows. Tammy had three women ask her at Casey’s today why I hate children.”

“You voted, Doug.”

“I have a right to sleep. I work nights. Nobody in this family ever once asked about that.”

Ryan was quiet for a moment, and I held my breath.

“You’ve got that right,” he said. “Nobody’s taking it. The park’s yours, Doug. You keep it. We just built somewhere else.”

“This is a slap in the face to me.”

“It’s a playground, Doug.”

There was a long silence on the line. Then I heard the click.

Ryan came back inside. His face was gray. He washed his hands at the sink, slow and thorough, the way he does after a day on a pole. He did not say anything more about Doug that night, or on Friday, or on Saturday, and I loved him for it.

Saturday

At 6:40 on Saturday morning I stood in the church back lot with a thermos of coffee in a cold wind. The grass was silver with frost, and the sky was the thin clean blue you only get in October in Iowa.

Josie stood next to me in her green coat, with her hat pulled down to her eyebrows.

“What if nobody comes?” she said.

“Then we start with the two of us.”

“The directions say two days with six people.”

“Then we’ll be here two days with two people,” I said. “And your father.”

She almost smiled. She put her hand in my coat pocket, which she had not done since she was six.

At 6:55 the first pickup turned in off Church Street.

A gray Silverado, Lyman Haskins at the wheel, two boys in the cab and an impact driver in a box on the dash. Then a second pickup right behind it. Then a third, a long white flatbed with a ladder rack, and I heard the diesel of the fourth behind it.

I stopped counting at twenty.

They came down Church Street bumper to bumper, headlights still on in the morning blue. They parked on the grass and along the curb. Men in canvas jackets and seed caps. Kids in rubber boots. Chief Larry Moeller with six of his firemen, and a line of linemen from the co-op in reflective vests, because Ryan had asked and none of them had said no.

Forty-one people, by the time I did count. I knew almost every one of them by name.

Pastor Lindquist came out of the shed with a lard pail in his hand and walked over to my daughter, who stood frozen in the middle of the lot.

“Go ahead, boss,” he said. “Tell them where the first post goes.”

Josie took the pail with both hands. It held the box hardware, hundreds of bolts and washers, sorted by the kit’s own little paper bags. She looked at the line of people, and then at the string lines, and then at me.

I nodded.

She walked to the first orange flag, and she pointed at the ground.

“Here,” she said.

It was a small, clear voice, and forty-one grown-ups stopped talking at the same moment to listen.

The auger started up.