The Rocking Chair
The attic was terribly cluttered. Johnny was in awe of the possessions stacked here and there. The boxes. The trunks. Old furniture and coiled rugs. Yet no memories held him to the things there. He tapped a rickety old rocking chair and sent it swinging to and fro in a plume of dust motes.
The steady rasp of the chair brought forth an image of a two-roomed house, with cracked adobe and a single patched window…and another rocking chair. Not as fancy as this one used to be, but handy just the same for someone who loved to rock in it. He remembered his stepfather more than once calling out in a deep tenor, "Maria, quiet! Why must you sit there? I'm trying to sleep!" And the rocker would fall silent.
Johnny was two when his mother and real father didn't see eye to eye anymore, and they moved away from Lancer to one beaten down village after another. Johnny never saw Murdoch again. There were never any letters addressed to him, or telegrams coming to the house. And if there had been any, his mother would have ripped them up and thrown them into the garbage bin.
The day he turned seventeen, after eating his arroz con leche and sliding his thumb under the string that held a new hand-sewn shirt in rough cotton tic, his mother sighed and asked him to stay for a while. She outlined the cracks in the table with a trembling finger, stopping only to cough into her fist. Johnny waited patiently until the spell had passed and she could talk again.
"I wanted only the best for you." She raised her hand to chop the air and had to catch her breath. "Well, the past is of no matter except this one thing. Today, you are old enough to fight and take what is yours. Go to Murdoch Lancer and demand it. Rightfully so, mi hijo. He's your father after all." She looked steadily at him. "Don't throw it away like I did"
His mother left the table then, taking with her countless things left unsaid. It had sent him slowly down a path, those words. One he never fully realized until a Pinkerton showed up with an offer of a thousand dollars. He wondered what she would say if she could see him now.
With a shake of his head, the memory faded just as quickly as the dust motes. He pushed the chair aside and closed the attic door with a tight snick.
Two steps down the dark hallway, he heard the creaking of wood against wood. Like two tree limbs rubbing against each other on a windy day. When he opened the door again, the noise stopped. Yet there was a sense of something going on, and not just the mice running along the baseboard trim.
He smiled and walked over to the old chair with the missing spindles. Splayed out his hand to stop its motion. It felt like the piece of him that had been missing was finally chinked back in.
"I know it took me too long to come back," he said. "I could say the same of you."
Then, in a whisper soft voice, "It's all right, Mama. You can rock all you want to here."
The End