Porch Chair
Grandpappy's house sat at the crossing of two dirt roads that didn't go much of anywhere.
It was a small house, three little bedrooms, cracker box style my mother called it. Corn came up to all four corners of that crossroads except the one where the house stood, so that in July, sitting on his porch, you had the feeling of being on an island in a green sea that went clear to the edge of the world.
He built the house himself. Took two years. The land was payment from a farmer who owed him for two seasons of work and didn't have the cash. Grandpappy took the corner lot without complaint, the way he took most things. He raised my father and my aunt in that house along with a back yard garden and a chicken coop. The farmer let him gather all the corn he wanted.
The summer I was 12, there was a funeral down in Kentucky for a cousin so distant nobody could quite explain to me how we were related. I asked if I could stay with Grandpappy instead. My mother looked at my father and my father looked at the ceiling and that was that. They dropped me off on a Wednesday with a knapsack of clothes and my mother's usual instructions to Grandpappy about what I should and shouldn't eat, which he listened to all the way through and then ignored.
Granny had been gone over a year by then. He took it hard, though you'd have had to know him a long time to see it. The house was the same as she left it. Her chair at the end of the porch was still her chair. She'd watched a thousand sunsets from it. Now, nobody sat in it. Nobody said not to.
I missed her, too. Her fresh soap smell when I got tight hugs, the aroma of baked oatmeal cookies from the kitchen, and the forgiving roll of her eyes when Grandpappy and I caught her cheating at Flinch, the only card game they had in the house.
People around the county knew Grandpappy as a quiet man. Plenty of men are quiet because they've got nothing to say. Grandpappy was quiet the way a giant oak is quiet. He worked hard all his life, hired out as a farmhand, planting and then helping with the harvest for farmers around the county. The rest of the year he worked at the feed mill and its adjacent store. He'd done these jobs his whole life. Grandpappy was also the type of man where the farmers and mill owners were forever asking his opinion on one thing or another. He never gave it unless they asked. When they asked, they listened and usually considered what he said. They wanted to put him on the co-op board once and he declined, politely. They went right on coming to him anyway, standing around in the dust of the loading dock while he thought about their question longer than most men would find comfortable before he responded.
He'd been a deacon too, for years, because the church asked and it wasn't in him to refuse the church. Granny had done her part there as well, running with the charity women, canning and quilting and carrying casseroles to the ones who'd fallen on hard times. She'd come from money, or what passed for it in that county.
Her family's car broke down near the feed mill when she was eighteen, and by the time it was fixed something had sparked between her and the hired man who'd walked out to look at it. Her family spent the better part of a year trying to stop it and failed. They started their marriage in a shed behind my great-grandparents' place that had been fixed up into something you could nearly call a house. She never worked a paying job in her life and she never once acted like she'd married down. Her family came around eventually, most of them.
I was not a quiet child. I was the kind of boy who got sent home from school with notes. But something about that porch worked on me. I loved my grandpappy. You'd sit down beside him in the evening with a hundred questions and somewhere in the sitting, most of them would answer themselves or stop mattering. His favorite answer was "Why don't you think about that one for a while.". Half the time I did and never came back to it. The ones left over were usually worth asking. He'd answer those. Sometimes it took him a full minute to start, and I learned to wait, because what came after the minute was always better than what other grown-ups gave you right away.
That Friday evening we were on the porch watching the sun go down over the corn. There were just enough clouds strung out low in the west to catch fire. Tonight you could tell the whole sky was orchestrating into something. Grandpappy had his coffee. I had the porch rail under my bare feet. Neither of us had said anything, and neither of us minded, as I had learned.
A car came up the north road slow, dragging its dust behind it. A newish sedan, not the kind of car you typically saw on these roads. It slowed at the crossroads the way strangers did, and then instead of picking a direction it eased over and stopped along the edge of the yard.
It sat there. A minute, maybe three. Long enough that I looked at Grandpappy. He looked at the car and then back at the sky.
The door opened and a man got out. Shirt and tie, sleeves still buttoned at the wrist despite the heat. I could see a suit jacket laid over the passenger seat.
"Salesman?" I quietly asked no one in particular. Grandpappy didn't say anything.
The man wasn't old and he wasn't young. He stood by the car a second like he was still deciding, and then he came up the driveway, walking slow, his fine, leather shoes gathering dust.
At the bottom of the porch steps he stopped and looked up at Grandpappy.
"Evening," he said.
"Evening," Grandpappy responded.
"I apologize for intruding," he continued, taking a glance at me. "I wondered if I might sit with you a while."
Grandpappy nodded toward Granny's empty chair without saying a word. The man came up the steps and sat down. The chair creaked.
Grandpappy went still for a breath that only I noticed. He wasn't watching the man, he was looking at the chair. And then just as suddenly his eyes went back to the corn.
The man didn't say a word. He just sat, hands on his knees, and looked out at the sky, the same as we were doing.
I nervously looked at the man, and I then looked at Grandpappy. I had my mouth halfway open when Grandpappy ever so slightly raised one finger off the arm of his chair, and gave me a look I knew. "Why don't you think about that one for a while." So I let him be.
We sat there, the three of us, when the sun went down. I have watched a lot of sunsets from that porch, before and since, and I will tell you that was the finest. The clouds went from gold to rose to a purple, and the corn went dark from the ground up. The birds went quiet and the crickets took over. A deer crossed the corn out to the south, just its head above the tassels, and the three of us watched it till it was gone.
None of us said one single word. The man's breathing changed once, early on, and then it settled.
The light was almost gone when he spoke. He said it quiet, not to either of us exactly, more to the corn.
"I buried my youngest three weeks ago."
That was all. Nobody said anything back. Grandpappy didn't look at him and I took my cue from that and didn't either, though I wanted to.
The man kept to Granny's chair, watching the dark come the rest of the way.
After a while he stood up. The chair creaked again. Grandpappy went still, but it was a different stillness, the kind that comes after amen.
The man straightened his tie, which had never been crooked.
"Thank you for your company," he said.
Grandpappy nodded once. The man went down the steps and down the driveway, steadier than he'd come up. He climbed into his car and pulled out onto the west road driving off with headlights making a tunnel through the dark, dust rising up like a dark shroud behind him.
We watched him disappear. And sat there for a long time.
Grandpappy's coffee had to be cold but he drank some anyway.
"Think he'll come by this way again?" I asked.
"Probably not." He was looking at Granny's chair. "Don't need to."