The Rocking Chair

     The chair rocked back and forth, like a pendulum swinging in an old-fashioned grandfather clock. The interesting thing is that no one presently sat in it.

     When Sharon and I first saw the rocking chair, it was coated with a thick layer of dust.

     “Someone, don’t know who, dropped it off on my mother’s front porch many years ago. I was just a boy!” said the old man with a steady and piercing look. “Along with an old quilt, which I eventually sold to the only antique shop in town. For some odd reason, everyone who’s bought that old rag keeps bringing or sending it back and asking for a refund. Old hag over there that owns it never gives them their money back, though,” he told us with a cagey grin.

     “Hell, she’s made more money off that old rag than all the things she’s ever sold combined!” he cackled and coughed.

     We brought the rocker home and placed it on the front porch of our Victorian-style house. Sharon’s mother had willed the house to her. It’d been in the family for generations and we were happy living in it. I’d remodeled two old rooms into separate offices for us, as well as a darkroom for Sharon. She’s a freelance photographer and I sell commercial real estate, farmland mostly. The majority of farms I sell and buy had been in the same families for generations. Some were sold at rock bottom prices by farmer’s kids who’d decided early on they weren’t cut out to “toil the land” like their ancestors.

     I’d been taken to a land auction by a friend a few years back and couldn’t believe what properties were going for! After talking to Sharon about it and convincing my parents to loan me a few thousand, I began my real estate venture. I paid my parents off in less than a year and have been going strong ever since. Our house is near town and the closest city is about eighty-five miles from us, so it’s country living for the most part. Weekends bring city people who come antique hunting or for weekend getaways at the local bed and breakfast. They cause a bit of a traffic jam on our main street then, but it helps our town’s tax rolls.

     Oh, the rocker! The first time we saw it move I thought it was just the wind. We didn’t pay it any attention because we were on our way out for a viewing. Sharon laughed and clicked a picture just for fun. We jumped into the truck laughing and joking about it as we drove off. Later that evening, I sat on it rocking and sipping an iced-tea while Sharon was in her darkroom developing photos. I’d been dozing off when Sharon screamed so loud I fell and broke the tea glass, cutting myself in the process. I ran to the back of the house leaving a trail of blood droplets all the way there. The door to the darkroom was open, revealing its red hue. Sharon was in the dark facing me and holding a photo in one hand, her arm extended, out as far as she could reach and covering her mouth with her other hand. Her eyes, wide open in shock, didn’t focus on me. I stood there for a minute and slowly, but forcefully, pulled the photo out of her hand. Tears began to fall from her eyes as she pressed her face into my shoulder and she began sobbing. I couldn’t look at the photo right then; I brought it down next to me. Sharon eventually stopped crying and asked me to follow her to the kitchen so she could help clean and bandage my cuts.

     As she cleaned and patched me up I remembered the photo, which I’d placed face down on the counter without thinking. I reached for it and Sharon quickly slapped my hand down over it. I angrily snatched it out from under her hand and looked at the picture. My hand shook as my eyes focused on a fuzzy white image of a comely woman who held a quilt tightly to her bosom. For a minute or so, I couldn’t understand why this had shocked Sharon so, until my mind began to clearly see that she was sitting in the rocker on our front porch. Everything that was ours, the plants, the patio table and the portable radio, all those things that belonged to us were there clear as day; the only thing that wasn’t was the fuzzy image of this stranger sitting there on the rocker on our front porch. She wasn’t an old woman. She appeared to be in her late thirties although she could pass for much older in bright sunlight. She seemed to be from another era, her dress was old fashioned with an apron pulled to the side. Her eyes looked pleadingly into the camera with just a hint of a tear in her right eye. Her wrinkled but strong hands wrung the quilt holding it tightly.

     The more time I looked at it, the image seemed to become clearer, not as clear as the inanimate objects around her but clearer still. I began to make out a word stitched around the top of the apron; it was Sharon, the same name as my wife’s.

     Sharon slowly took the photo from me and gently touched the image. She quietly told me that she had been named after her great-great grandmother. She’d been widowed at an early age and had raised two daughters on her own while running a dairy farm. It was said that both girls had been raped by a farm hand, who was found dead later. Despondent and shamed over the affair, she suffered until she couldn’t stand it anymore. One early evening, after a day of cooking and baking, she took her favorite quilt, sat on her rocker and drank a glass of poisoned milk. Sharon had never mentioned this sordid past and now here she was, quietly sobbing at the picture of a long-suffering ghost.

     The owner of the antique store grinned from ear to ear as she parted with the old quilt; after all it always found its way back to her. The chair, which rocked back and forth from time to time, came to a complete halt soon after Sharon and I placed the quilt on the lap of its rightful owner.

 

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