Chapter 10 - The Porch Swing
Two years later.
I am seventy-five years old today.
My hip is completely gone now—I use a heavy oak cane carved from a branch of the big tree down by Sugar Creek, and I walk with a hitch that makes small children in the grocery store stop and stare.
My farm is leased out now to the Miller boys—not because I couldn't drive the combine, but because I realized five decades of corn was enough for one man to leave behind. I kept twenty acres around the house—just enough for a garden, three pear trees, and a small patch of clover for the honeybees.
It is a quiet Tuesday afternoon in November.
The greasy rain is falling again—the same cold, slate-grey mist that came down five years ago when my truck went off Sugar Creek bridge.
I am sitting on the porch swing.
I am wearing my old heavy canvas work coat, a wool cap pulled down over my ears, and my heavy rubber boots.
Beside me on the wooden slats sits Buster.
He is nine years old now—an old man in cat years, his orange fur heavily streaked with silver around his muzzle and paws, his head still tilted five degrees to the left where the skull fracture healed into a permanent mark of the day we almost died together.
He doesn't run after field mice anymore. He doesn't climb the steps to the grain platform.
He sits on the swing with his warm, heavy body pressed tight against my left thigh, his eyes half-closed as he watches the rain drop off the tin roof into the rain barrel below.
My daughter Sarah came down from Indianapolis this morning. She brought a cherry pie, two books on Indiana history she thought I'd like, and a clean white blanket for the porch swing.
She stood in the doorway for a long time, watching us through the screen door, before she went back to her car to drive home.
"Dad?" she had asked softly, leaning over the swing to kiss my forehead before she left.
"Yeah, Sarah?"
"Are you lonely down here?"
I looked at the empty gravel driveway where her blue sedan was parked.
I looked at the kitchen door where Ellen's hand-drawn wreath still hung on the inside panel.
I looked down at the old, scarred orange cat sleeping against my leg, his white chest patch showing bright and clean against the dark wool of my trousers.
"No," I told her, my voice clear and steady as an anvil strike in a quiet blacksmith shop. "I ain't lonely at all."
She smiled, squeezed my shoulder, and walked down the steps into the rain.
I leaned my head back against the white cypress house, feeling the slow, rhythmic sway of the porch swing beneath us.
Swish... thump... swish... thump...
The rain fell on the tin roof. The wind rattled the dry oak leaves in the yard.
Buster let out a long, heavy sigh, turned his head, and laid his chin right across my thumb—the same thumb he used to dig his claws into when he wanted me to get out of an empty bed five years ago.
May you like
I didn't move my hand.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath of the damp pine air coming off the pasture, and sat there on the porch with my best friend, waiting for the dark to come down over Montgomery County, totally at peace with every single acre I owned.
