The Playground Behind the Church

The work

I have never watched a town work before.

Chief Moeller took the posts, because firemen know how to carry heavy things in a line. Lyman Haskins and two of the linemen ran the auger, and the holes went down forty-two inches, one every two minutes. Rita Ames sorted the hardware bags into piles by number, because she had been a bookkeeper for thirty years and could not help herself.

And a woman named Jenna Albrecht, who I knew a little from the school pickup line, took one look at the pile of cedar planks and the paper instructions and said, “Who has the plan? Somebody read me the plan.”

Jenna is thirty-four, a dental hygienist with three kids and a big laugh. She stood at the center of the lot with the instruction booklet and organized forty people into four crews in ten minutes: posts, tower, slides, swings. Nobody argued.

By nine the first posts were in the ground, plumb and braced. By ten the concrete was going in, with kids carrying water in buckets.

Around eleven the Lutheran women’s group came out of the church kitchen with roasting pans. Sloppy joes, scalloped potatoes, three kinds of bars. The men ate standing, with one hand on a tool.

Alvin Gruber came at noon with a green webbed lawn chair under one arm. He set it up at the corner of the lot, next to the swing beam, and sat down with a thermos between his boots. He did not pick up a tool. Nobody asked him to.

“He’s eighty next spring,” Pastor Lindquist told me, low. “He’s been sitting out here since six.”

“Since six? I did not see him.”

“He came before the rest of you. He wanted to look at the lot.”

I walked over with a cup of coffee, and I sat down on an overturned bucket next to him.

“Alvin,” I said. “Thank you for the quarters.”

He did not look at me. He looked at the tower, where Ryan and two linemen were bolting the climbing wall to the frame.

“Verna had a jar,” he said.

I waited.

“A quart jar of quarters on the pantry shelf. Every year, the last Sunday of Sunday school, the church had a picnic back here, before they tore the house down. Verna stood by the old maple and gave every kid a quarter for the gumball machine at Casey’s. Thirty-one years. She said a child should always walk away from church with a little money in his pocket.”

His voice did not change at all. He might have been telling me the price of corn.

“I found the jar in the cellar last August,” he said. “Six years it sat down there. I did not know what to do with it. And your girl was on that corner with her sign, a child asking people for money for other children.”

He nodded slowly.

“That was Verna’s whole idea of the thing,” he said. “I only drove it over.”

I could not say anything. I sat there on the bucket with a paper cup in my hand and the tears just ran down, and I did not wipe them. Alvin looked straight ahead, at the cedar frame going up against the blue sky, where his wife’s maple used to be.