ROGER’S CHAIRS
Published: Houston Literary Review
http://thehoustonliteraryreview.com/Documents/january_2011_prose.pdf

Roger and his brother, Jay, grew up on a farm, not much of one, just 75 acres of beans and tomatoes located 12.6 miles from the town of Murdock. Roger’s dad worked it himself, no hired hands, and he made Roger work it with him after school in the spring and all day in the summers from the time he turned five years old. Jay started working the fields the year after Roger. Their mother did clothing alterations for the one dry cleaning store in town She was always in the sewing room.

The boys went to school on the bus like other rural kids. Roger first.

In first grade when Roger brought home outlines of his hands printed in yellow paint on a piece of construction paper, his mother put it right in the trash. Roger’s dad didn’t teach his boys to throw a ball or ride a bicycle. Roger and Jay taught each other. Birthdays were forgotten. They ate a lot of meatloaf and leftovers, and if there was a sale at Piggly Wiggly on frozen dinners, they ate that for a week. They celebrated Christmas by decorating a curtain rod with popcorn strung on thread. Each boy got a gift of $20 for which they were grateful. Christmas dinner was a real extravagance of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and string beans.

Roger made a friend in first grade and they spent recess together playing on the jungle gym. After school they went home on separate busses in opposite directions, and never met each others families. When Jay started at the elementary school the next year, Roger forgot about playing with anyone else.

In middle school, Roger waited a year before trying out for a sports team. The following year, Roger and Jay signed up for the football and baseball teams. Roger was a better football player because he had the stocky build of their mother. Jay was a better baseball player because he was taller and had longer arms, like their father. The boys were popular with the other athletes because they made the teams better, but they didn’t get invited to parties. Their parents never attended a game.

In high school, Roger didn’t want to play sports because his last game in eighth grade had ended with him at the bottom of a pile-up. He might have suffocated if Jay hadn’t pulled the guys off. In high school, he signed up for shop class and began learning carpentry. For Christmas he crafted a baseball bat for Jay even though Jay wasn’t playing anymore.

Jay didn’t sign up for sports in high school, saying it wouldn’t be any fun without Roger, but they still played catch in the field out back of the house and took turns batting. Jay signed up for the Math Club.

The brothers didn’t have classes together, but they studied together at night. On weekends, Jay liked to go to the movies with a girl from the Math Club. Roger worked on weekends at a garage in town and used his salary to buy a jigsaw, a lathe, and other carpentry tools. Roger started building furniture and selling it at a store in Austin. The summer before his senior year, he used part of the proceeds to visit the Shaker village in New Hampshire for a week. His mother told him it was a waste of good money.

Two months before Roger graduated from high school, his dad had a heart attack plowing a field and died. The day after the funeral his mother gave notice at the dry cleaners that she was quitting, and three weeks later, she moved to Tyler, 165 miles away, to live with her married sister.

Roger finished the plowing and planted thirty acres. Jay got a job as a sacker at the Piggly Wiggly after school and Saturdays. No one in town even knew that their mother was gone. Since she quit her alterations job, no one missed her.

Roger stayed on the farm a year after he graduated, waiting for Jay to finish high school so they could join the Army and get the G.I. Bill to pay for college. The boys went to boot camp together and then got sent to war in different countries. They wrote letters to each other, never mentioning the danger or ugliness.

Roger was discharged first. Jay came later with a medal. Jay was killed in a mortar explosion. Roger looked at Jay’s mangled body in the mortuary and went home to build him a coffin.

Every week after the funeral, Roger traveled to the specialty lumber store in Briar County where he bought rare woods – white limba and bloodwood. He spent his mornings working the farm and his afternoons building chairs. Whenever he finished one to his satisfaction, he carried it outside and placed it somewhere in the field.

At night, Roger sat down on one of the chairs in the field and waited.

The townspeople driving by eventually noticed the chairs and started talking about why Roger was putting chairs in a plowing field. Was he setting up an outdoor store? Well, that was plain stupid because the weather would ruin those chairs. Was he setting up some kind of artist display? Roger was a carpenter not an artist. Was he planning to hold a party when he built enough chairs? That wasn’t likely since Roger had put a ten-foot barbed wire fence along the property line at the highway and refused to answer his door or his telephone. The final conclusion was that Roger was losing his mind, and everyone steered clear of him.

That might have been part of the truth, but the whole truth contained the fact that when Roger was visiting the Shakers, he learned that when they built a chair, they took great care because they expected that an angel might sit in it. Roger was expecting that too.

He hoped that one of the angels would be Jay.