on a red wagon

Sun-bleached now the red wood paint, the Radio Flyer has been towed around the world for 26 years.

My friend’s children the last to ride and mostly now with pot plants to be moved or just to fill a sacred space in my backyard — a space seen from my window, a glimpse each day of the child that he was.

This wagon, sent as a flat pack from the Midwest to the North of Italy on the occasion of his 2nd birthday, my son.

An American icon in Italy, the Radio Flyer, with wood-slatted sides for removal and bumping down a steep hill with legs splayed and the toddler in between — rare moments of abandon with uncertain wheels on the rutted and hardened earth of a hillside in urban Venteto.

And to the market the wagon would take us with only the boy at first, but on return the boy and vegetables, or linens, or sweets from the paneterria.

It made the outing a covered wagon odyssey down the paved lanes towards the market on a Saturday morning when nothing else was to be done on the early awakening of a too tired mother and her little boy.

The gift of the wagon was from her father, probably seen in a Wal-Mart store and looking like the shiniest red thing a boy turning two could want — a grandson too far.

Too far away by land and sea and feelings. An opportunity lost — the first grandson — Preston, named after the grandfather’s hometown in the plains of Kansas in the midwest of the United States of America. She opened the heavy box with its brackets, screws, boards, hinges and shiny black wheels with white in the centre.

She assembled the tools she thought she would need and settled down on the driveway of the appartemento and the little boy rode his Big Wheel around and around…‘dai mama, dai!’ — ‘hurry mama, hurry!’

And she bites her bottom lip a little and slowly begins to assemble the big wooden toy that promises so much. It promises so much of her father’s presence and forgiveness and acceptance and love for her and the little boy who didn’t ask to be born and was not called to be born but nevertheless was born.

Later the wagon was shipped back to the States after her orders from the Army sent them away from their Italian home. Then there were trips to the supermarket in Virginia where people smoked in the aisles while they chose their toothpaste and baked beans.

The boy is older, A Ninja Turtle, but not too old for the wagon though he careened then on his own, a bit unsafely for his mother’s liking, down a long grassy hill near the school at the corner of the street that led to the store.

One day his mother tells him they are moving to Australia. She tells him there are kangaroos there which is really the only thing a four-year old boy would care to know about a place. And the wagon is packed again.

A big wooden container arrives at their house and is filled with all of their things and the boy and his mother lock the door on the little wooden house on the street around the corner from the hill near the supermarket and fly to Australia.

When the boy is 21 and it is his sister’s birthday and he is supposed to fly home on the Qantas plane for Christmas…

he trips and falls and hits his head and dies on the train tracks on the overpass at Shenton Road in the suburb of Claremont by the show grounds in Perth, Western Australia.

The train was traveling at 80kms an hour.

The boy was slumped over a girder and dead before anyone could reach him.

The mother wants to think that he didn’t know what hit him — and probably that is true, his red cap knocked from his head and landing nearby, a pocketful of change and some notes in his wallet, a mobile phone with the number of the taxi dialed in but dialed in with a digit out of place — so the boy missed the taxi that could’ve delivered him home that Christmas to the mother and the sister and the brother waiting by the presents in the living room of the house in Australia so far away from where they had been in Italy and Virginia and red wagons and hills to roll down with legs and arms flailing and gasping mouths full of one another’s excitement and laughter.

The flowers on his casket were Australian natives — big plump proteas, choppy eucalypts and feathery banksia — high gold, fuschia plum and frosted fire with a kangaroo paw extending. She brought them home and laid them in the wagon that had been parked at the door at the back of the house under the lemon tree by the verandah.

And every morning after that day, for more days than she could count, and until she packed up this house too and moved away, she burned a stick of incense, as she had seen people do in Vietnam to worship the ancestors, and placed it in the wagon. She didn’t know what else to do.

It doesn’t seem quite right to have the wagon and not the boy. But she does have it still and the emptiness of it.  She has that too.