Sewanee Review

One morning, when the shadows drew backlike sheets pulled from the summer people'swintered things at the start of the season,

not far from the wild apple tree split oncein a lighting storm that still ripens apples,mealy and sour and misshapen, each fall,

a chair stood in the middle of the clearing.None of us knew how the chair came to the field.Or who carried it there, the chair propped

against a back bent below two elbows crookedhigh over the grasses where ticks hide in waitfor something blood-rich to brush past,

and over yellow flowers burst like the fireworksstunning themselves above the bay each Fourthbefore slipping into streamers of ash and smoke.

Wild parsnips the plants are called, though it's bestto avoid them. They blister the skin, a chemical burnthe sign warns at the head of the trail [End Page 312]

the sort of wound we'd find in a storyabout refugees rushing from a country at warthough there's nowhere really for them to go.

How should we imagine what it's like for thosewho leave everything they've known, who crowdonto boats shoved recklessly toward some shore

where, once arrived, they don't know how to askfor what they need, nor who would even answer?Maybe that's not for us to know.

Better to fold the paper, set it aside. Better to cometo the clearing that, despite the parsnips, isn't all bad.Not at all. Which is why we follow the trail

between one patch of woods and the otherat the field's far end, and pause sometimesin the middle to watch clouds cross mindlessly

in front of each other above the apple tree.And why we found the chair in the first place,and recognized it. We all recognized the chair.

It was one of the assortment dragged outto ring the table in the house overlooking townwhen the family there would have us to dinner.

The odd seat that didn't match any of the others—shorter than the rest, bright and childish, broughtfrom one of the children's rooms where it normally [End Page 313]

hunkered below a desk to catch the odd spillfrom a knapsack—a book or two, a sheet of doodles,a bobby pin. We joked about who would sit

in the chair and earn the privilege to be singled outas conversation coursed the table, threadinginto channels above the plates, the wine,

the roast's wreckage of bone and clotted fat.The talk? News. And gossip. The good candidate.The bad candidate. The one who should have been.

Drownings on somewhere else's shore. The old bearbreaking into so-and-so's garbage again.The young man who walked from no one knew where

into town to ask for odd jobs though he was goodat none of them. No one right-minded would chooseto live that way. But we invited misery only so far in—

someone would clear her throat like a door grating shut.Or the wine would be passed, dessert bustledto the table. And we'd grow comfortable again,

one of us tipping back a bit in a chair while makinga new point, and our hosts would nod, smile,admire the faces lit with talk, the ones they knew so well.

And we knew our hosts, too, didn't we. But nowthe family's gone. Without word from wherever they went—another town, another state. Another table [End Page 314]

crowded with other faces. We don't even knowwho owns their house now, the emptied roomscrossed by shadows slinking in from the trees.

We've stopped collecting the papers that swelledinto new topographies, bloated, bleared,surfaces sloughed by rain at the driveway's end.

How could someone bring us into their housefor years, seat us at their table, talk and talkand never say what curdled there? Hadn't we earned

the right to hear? Should we have read whatwe couldn't see then, imagine what...