The Wheel from the Wagon

I remember the sound before I even opened my eyes — metal hitting the hard-packed dirt of the backyard, rhythmic, like someone had been rolling it since dawn. That was Mikey, the neighbor kid from across the fence, chasing his old iron wagon wheel around Grandma Dottie's yard in Millbrook, Ohio, at seven in the morning. He was nine then, I was eight, and that wheel was our entire July.

Grandma Dottie stood in the doorway with a mug of buttermilk and hollered across the yard, "Carol, get moving, Mikey's already done three laps and you're still in your pajamas!" I'd run out barefoot onto the gravel, still warm from yesterday's sun, and grab the stick leaning against the barn. The wheel — rusted, with one dented edge — rolled unevenly, veering right when you least expected it, and you had to chase it like it was alive.

Nobody bought us that wheel. It had just been sitting in the shed ever since Grandpa Earl sold his last wagon and bought a tractor. We turned it into something more than a toy — we turned it into a whole day.

The road through Millbrook ran from the old Baptist church all the way down to the pond, where Mrs. Alberta's geese grazed. We knew every pothole, every gate, knew which dog at the Hendersons' you had to swing wide around, and whose porch you could ask for a glass of water without explaining whose kid you were. When Mr. Delbert's tractor came through, you had to scramble to the shoulder fast, and from the Pruitt's window there was always the same shout: "Quiet down, y'all are kicking dust clear to the orchard!"

We'd come home hungry, cheeks red, dust up to our knees. Grandma would hand us a slice of bread with butter, a tomato straight off the vine, sometimes a scoop of cottage cheese — and fifteen minutes later we'd be back outside. It wasn't an easy childhood. It wasn't safe either, not in the way we use that word now — nobody watched us every step. But it had something we're missing most these days: the whole day fit inside one street, and a rusty iron wheel was enough to keep boredom away until dusk.

Thirty-two years have passed. I live in Columbus now, work at an accounting office on Bethel Road, drive a Honda Civic, pay nine hundred dollars a month in rent, and sit in traffic on I-70 every day. Mikey moved to Texas right after high school, comes back once every couple years, around the Fourth of July, and says the same thing every time: "You remember that wheel? I had a scar on my knee the whole month of August."

Grandma Dottie passed eleven years ago, in February, when there was snow ankle-deep in the yard. The house in Millbrook sat empty for three years, until my father, her son, decided to sell it to the neighbor for extra land behind his barn. I didn't go to that closing — I was pregnant with my second kid and didn't have it in me to watch him sign papers on the house where I'd learned to walk barefoot on sun-warmed gravel.

But last year, while we were clearing out my father's attic — he'd died suddenly, a heart attack, sixty-three years old — I found that same wheel in an old seed bin. Rustier than ever, with that same dent on the side. My father had taken it from the shed before the house changed hands, and kept it for thirty years without telling anyone.

I stood there in the attic holding that piece of iron, and my six-year-old son, Jacob, asked what it was and what it was for. I couldn't explain it in a way he'd understand. I just told him we'd drive out to Millbrook, that I'd show him the street, the old church, and the pond, and that maybe, if the neighbor didn't mind, we'd look for a stick together.

I don't know if Jacob will ever understand why I drive forty minutes to a town that's barely there anymore, just to stand by the fence of a yard that belongs to strangers now. But the wheel still rides in my car, wedged against the back seat, wrapped in an old towel — just in case someone ever asks where my whole summer began.