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What love can build

Could a father and his son make an important dream real?
by Meg Laughlin

    Delia Carricaburu kept on looking at the pediatrician's report as she drove to her home in Miami with her month-old son, Agustin. Chromosome 21 had three dots instead of two. Three dots meant Down syndrome.

    Focusing on the road, Delia tried not to think about what the pediatrician had told her: Agustin will probably not speak so anyone can understand him, and probably never read or write. He may be able to feed and dress himself, but he will never be able to work or live on his own.

    Delia couldn't bear to tell her husband, Carlos, the news. It was the second marriage for both, and Agustin, born on June 22, 1988, was their first child together.

    That night she wrote a note on a scrap of paper: "Precious bundle, guardian of my secret, you and I are going to show the world that a tiny chromosome will not control us."

    Delia never totally understood why she hid their child's condition from her husband. But her need to deny the truth was so strong that she actually convinced herself that the Down syndrome would go away.

    "If I'd made myself face the truth, I would have fallen apart," she says.

    Carols realized there was something wrong when his son did not talk by 20 months. He remembered that Delia had once received some test results from a pediatrician, and he confronted her.

    Delia told Carlos that their boy had a condition called Down syndrome, hoping that her husband, raised in Argentina, would not be familiar with this term. But Carlos knew immediately. "Our son is a Mongoloid?" he gasped.

    Shortly thereafter, Carlos went into denial. He did not speak about Agustin's condition, but it was clear he never thought about anything else. One night, when Delia was reading aloud to him from a biography of Henry Ford, he interrupted her and said, "I was slow as a child."

    But more than anything, Carlos was afraid that he'd never be able to get close to Agustin, that his paternal love would be blocked by an extra chromosome that would keep him from ever connecting with the child.

Reaching Out

    By the time Agustin was almost three, he was saying only a few words. During a series of evaluations at the University of Miami Mailman Center for Child Development, he was asked to pick up coins from a table in order to judge his fine-motor skills. He fumbled, unable to grasp the coins in his pudgy little fingers, so he pushed them over the edge of the table into his other hand and gleefully held them up.

    Anther tester showed Agustin a picture of flowers in a vase. "Find the other vase of flowers," he said, pointing to another page with several images. Agustin walked over to a nearby table, picked up a vase with flowers in it, and put it down next to the picture. Carlos, watching with growing amazement, was exultant. "Our child is thinking all of the time," he told Delia excitedly. A staff member then told Carlos that Agustin was unusually bright for a Down syndrome child and that the most important factor in how well he did would be how much his parents and teachers worked with him.

    Suddenly the wall between Agustin and Carlos dissolved. Now the father believed he could reach his son. And he knew exactly how he would do it.

A Father's Faith

    Carlos's father had been incredibly resourceful. He and Carlos made a go-cart together out of wood and metal scraps when Carlos was ten. Next they made a boat motor out of found objects. His father's passion and skills wore off on Carlos. As a teenager, he built a car. Later he became a machinist, making a decent living working with his hands - just as his father had done. Just as my son will, Carlos vowed.

    Carlos's plan was to get Agustin to do increasingly difficult things with his hands and mind. Maybe they would eventually build a boat motor together - maybe something much more spectacular. Sure enough, before Agustin could say "Big Bird," he could nail two boards together, take the pedals off his mother’s bicycle with a wrench and fix his sister's in-line skates.

    By age five, Agustin was fluent in English and Spanish. A test measured his IQ in the low seventies, which meant mild retardation. Still, he could read and write by the time he was six years old.

    At the age of seven, however, when Agustin was enrolled in a public school class for "the educable mentally handicapped," Delia and Carlos noted a regression. He couldn't sleep at night. He had trouble keeping up in physical education. Agustin claimed he couldn't see the blackboard, and he refused to do a lot of his schoolwork. But a vision test showed that his eyesight was fine. "OK, I can see," the child finally admitted, "but it's boring to copy off the board."

    With Agustin sliding backwards, Carlos decided to accelerate his own teaching program. The boy loved to look at huge cranes in books, so after school father and son would drive around town looking at and sketching cranes. Later the two scraped up some jar lids, old wagon wheels and metal shelf frames and built a crane of their own. "For picking up my toys," Agustin told his father.

    Then Agustin spotted a picture in a book of a 1906 Case steam-traction engine. It was red, green and yellow with silver studs, copper pipes and brass trim. Best of all , it had a smiling farmer driving it. "I want that to be me," Agustin said.

    It had occurred to Carlos that his son would probably never drive, never know what it was to be in charge of a big machine. Carlos thought it would help his son's self-esteem to be behind the wheel - even if it meant taking on an expensive, next-to-impossible task. He asked Delia how she would feel about his taking time off from work so he could concentrate on building the tractor with his son.

    Delia was skeptical - and worried. This would mean more work for her and less money for the family. Then she read the poem "Ride a Wild Horse" by Hannah Kahn, whose daughter has Down syndrome.

                    Ride a wild horse
                    against the sky -
                    hold tight to his wings

                    before you die
                    whatever else you leave undone -
                    once ride a wild horse
                    into the sun.

    That was it - Delia had her answer. She sold her piano and the couch to help finance the project.

Side by Side

    Before Carlos and Agustin set out to build the tractor in November 1997, Carlos spent weeks trying to work out how to fashion the transmission gearing, the countershaft pinions, the flywheel and friction clutch. Their tractor wouldn't run on steam - that would be too dangerous - but with a five-horse-power motor. And it would be scaled down in size so Agustin could drive it. Otherwise, it would be just like the original.

    Once the planning was done, Carlos and Agustin would get up at daybreak, grab their toolboxes and take off for Carlos's workshop. There the two would work joyfully together until dark.

    Carlos especially wanted Agustin to get into the habit of seeing something and thinking what else it could be. They made the tractor's crankshaft from a print roller. The wheel hubs came from the discarded rotor of a dough mixer, the motor casings and fenders from barbecue-grill drip pans. The axle was cut from a wrecked car. They used old brake shoes for the clutch and counter top for the platforms.

    Agustin put in bolts and tightened them. He oiled and painted. He picked out parts. He could spot something in a scrap yard and explain to his dad how they would fashion it into a certain part. A couple of times Delia found Agustin under her car with a torch, trying to work out how the parts connected.

A Wild Horse in the Sun

    In May 1998, after Carlos and Agustin had worked for six months, the Carricaburus drove to Carlos's shop for an inaugural tractor ride. Agustin would be the first driver.

    As Carlos lifted the garage door and wheeled the tractor out into the car park, Delia gasped. It was nearly standard size, and even more beautiful than the tractor in the book.

    When Carlos started the motor, kids from the surrounding neighborhood gathered to watch. "Where did that tractor come from?" yelled one boy.

    "My dad and I made it," Agustin shouted over the sound of the motor. "I'm the driver."

    "Awesome!" the boy said.

    Agustin then climbed aboard, into the custom-made cabin. He placed one hand on the steering wheel and the  other in the window, just as his father did when he drove the family car. He then put the vehicle in gear and it lurched forward, chugging along the pavement with all of the power and perseverance that went into its making.

    "It's beautiful," whispered Delia.

    "We did it!" shouted Carlos.

    Agustin didn't hear his father. He was too busy being what so few people with Down syndrome ever get to be - in control.

    "Listen to the whistle!" Agustin shouted excitedly to his mother. As he pulled chain, out came a blast like the sound of a faraway train - like the sound of a hopeful journey through a dark night.

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