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PROWELL’S CUSTOM WOOD PORCH SWINGS

Thinking of squeaking swings and suddenly the woodworker is young again, brought back to a magical stretch of years so long ago.
Copied from a passage in Charles’ novel Possessing the Seasons, The Planting Logs of Linkum Regards. ( April Gloaming Publishers, Nashville, TN. Publication date: January 28, 2025.). Available at your favorite outlets.

For the longest time it was only my sisters and I who noticed the subtle changes in our mother’s behavior. Although it was never mentioned, not even to one another. We were less than adults and distracted, like everyone, by the slow culmination of events beyond anyone’s control. Tip-toeing, circumventing direct confrontations in lieu of indirect insinuations. Straining to maintain a pretense of normalcy, as if everything was fine at a time when it was not fine. Our culture was being threatened on so many fronts that we simply dug in, adhered to our rituals and routines as if the good life would continue forever. And it worked. All things considered, it worked.

Late in that third drought-stricken summer we would sit on the back porch of our sprawling old farmhouse, fanning ourselves, talking. Mother standing over a chair with bobby pins pursed between her lips, setting Mariah’s curlers with Aunt Dee and Verity occupying the far swing and Aunt Bim and myself on the opposite swing and if it was a Saturday night, the twins, Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Madeline, sharing the living room couch in matching floral frocks, yelling at the radio, at the ref for allowing an infraction, an illegal full nelson by a wrestler known for his cowboy hat.

Countless evenings passed like this. Father standing at the screen, his trousers hiked up over his boots, staring into the changing light as the sun dropped down behind Kickapoo Ridge a mile off and every so often flicking the screen to send a fat clinging june bug somersaulting back toward the yard. Back where it belongs with the fireflies and the mosquitoes and those black flies big enough to choke on.

Uneventful is what mostly comes to mind. The sound of the chains riding against the ceiling hooks while from the barn Horse talking to Cow and Cow responding, followed by Sow One and Sow Two and for a few moments a flurry of snorts and whinnies coupled with a thousand crickets in a cricket symphony along the river punctuated by a holler from the living room and Aunt Bim making funny sounds to mimic a good scalp rubbing while running her fingers through my hair as I leafed through a photo book of Civil War battles. And from the opposite swing Aunt Dee grazing her open palm along Verity’s arm as Verity leafed through one of her horse books and when she found something she liked Dee would nod and because Dee ran the Alterations shop in town, yet another likeness of yet another horse photo would show up embroidered on yet another one of Verity’s identical white blouses.

At some point, we would be rewarded with a breeze. It would come up slowly once the sky had gone from blue to blood red to a fluctuating purple hanging off the horizon over the ridge like a changing kaleidoscope. Working its way down off the gorge and along the river to carry over the lower dell and up the rise of the lawn and onto the screened-in back porch to graze our cheeks with the relief of a swamp cooler. We would turn collectively toward the canopy of cottonwoods along the river, turn head-on toward the breeze as darkness settled in and as a lone car might approach the bridge from Snead’s Corner, creeping up onto the elevated bridegboards and then the clap of the loose oak planks before dipping back down onto the roadbed with the headlights bobbing to the sound of shifting gravel and if I remember any one of those hundreds of identical summer evenings, it would be when we first heard proof of the albino’s voice. Singing up off the river, lifting out from the cover of the thicket and the river canopy to wend its way up over the lower pasture like the Messiah. A clear, sustained medley of alternating octaves that silenced the crickets and the bullfrogs and had us all on our feet, pressed to the screen, knowing for the first time how it was more than a mere rumor, more than fanciful exaggerations appearing sporadically over the past 185 years in the handwritten planting logs stashed in the attics of every single one of the forty-seven farms situated along southern Illinois’ Salt Fork River.

We stood to the screen, all of us, quiet, listening, as I imagined running down to the river, in the dark, barefoot over Slave Hill and through the cool basketgrass below and along a riverbank pocked with snakeholes to rout the legend from the thicket and lock it into a full nelson and drag it up into civilization, into the light of the moon and thereby, at eleven years old, accomplishing something magnificent. Something legendary.

chas prowell

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