A while back, Missus and I had another bout of COVID, or something darn near like it. When it was over, and things were returning to normal, I was out in the yard one day and had to rest a moment, having still not regained all my strength or attitude.
The old chair was where it usually sits, right beside Dorothy’s House (the shed that landed wopsided and provides a much more practical pump house than its predecessor.) I sank into the ancient, smooth, multi-colored steel and sat for a few minutes, content as the lazy dogs who joined me in a spot of sunshine.
I’m not really a recliner type of guy, although I am not opposed to the occasional chair nap. My usual chair at home is the office chair used by my father for decades; before him, another ancestor reportedly passed away in the chair at work. It’s unpadded, ancient wood, worn to the shape of a couple generations of Weaver backsides and leaning habits, polished by wool and serge and seersucker and denim and tactical polyblend, depending on the wardrobe of the particular generation. It’s comfortable as well as practical.
Scattered across my yard back in the holler are benches, chairs, a block of styrofoam and other convenient seats, strategically placed for times when my will overcomes good sense but cannot defeat the misfiring neural pathways in my back. The first rest area a visitor sees is the blue, green, rust and primer steel lawn chair with a Yoo-hoo bottle for an ash tray, since pine straw is always looking for a reason to burn. It’s right beside Dorothy’s House, often occupied by an opportunistic cat.
The chair is a close contemporary of the much-beloved glider I have previously mentioned, but it’s not of the same style, manufacturer or even age. I like it since it’s easy to get into and out of, it’s low maintenance, and I can drag it around fairly easily should there be a need to sit somewhere else. In the past it has moved due to mud, too much sunshine, a lack of visibility on what the almost-trespassers were doing at the end of our lane, or a copperhead who disputed my right to that particular piece of property.
There’s nothing particularly special about the chair; it just sits well, as a friend said one day when we ducked under the porch of what we call the “hunting cabin” during a thunderstorm. Indeed, it sits well enough that I threw it in the back of the truck one day and brought it to the house, where it serendipitously landed beside Dorothy’s House and more or less stayed. Someone before me thought enough of to repair the base on the back, and it might have been the same someone who repainted it at some point, back when things were fixed or refinished rather than tossed in the junk pile and replaced with an ergonomically-perfect folding chair with two cupholders and fabric that wicks away moisture and weighs a pound or two,
As I half-fell, half-sat in the chair by Dorothy’s House the other day, I noted for the first time a small dent in almost exactly the same place as another scar I knew on a similar chair years ago. Having been banished by the housewife (the chair, not the hunter) to a deer camp, my host gave it a hasty camo paint job and placed it beneath an oak at the intersection of two deer trails and a feed plot.
The dent in the arm came from a nervous young hunter who set his shotgun on the arm one day and disobeyed about five hunting safety rules in his excitement over the sound of the hounds turning a deer in his direction.
Turns out while he was balancing the butt of his shotgun on the arm of the chair, looking for the deer, he neglected to check the hammer or his trigger finger. The Iver Johnson fired straight up as a nice November buck rounded a curve and pounded past him. He claimed both the deer and the hounds in hot pursuit gave him a look that said “What are you, a special kind of stupid?”, but that might have been an exaggeration.
The tracks didn’t lie, however; he had time and a clear enough shot to have dropped the deer three or four times with no danger to the dogs, but by the time he got his shotgun reloaded, the deer was possibly in the next county. Thankfully there was no harm done, save to an overhead limb on the tree and his pride, but the young hunter manfully embraced and indeed may have embellished his buck fever episode at his own cost for years.
I sat in what was called the “chair stand” any number of times but never had a close enough encounter to have a story worthy of teasing around the campfire.
I use the chair at Dorothy’s House the same way sometimes, but I usually have a lever gun across my lap and wait to hear if a coyote has the temerity to come calling. Most often it’s just a convenient place to sit, relax and think important thoughts; the old metal feels good on my aches and pains when the sun hits it just right.
There was a similar lawn chair on a plot I hunted decades ago, when I was a callow idiot youth who did get a bad, shaking case of buck fever from time to time. Thankfully God provided me with a mentor on literally my first day there, a gentleman who understood that young hunters need guidance, a steady hand under the forearm of a hundred-pound military surplus rifle turned deer gun, and patience.
Mr. Earl had a ragged, rusted, dented 1950s police car that was his hunting ride. The seats were ripped out of the back and a screen installed, creating a readymade dog box for his hounds. I do not think it had springs, shock absorbers or a heater, and I doubt it had passed a safety inspection for more than a decade, but many was the deer strapped across the trunk.
The second time we ran across each other (I know he was was silently asking God for forgiveness for whatever he had done to be saddled with a noisome 12-year-old) Mr. Earl took me far to the back of the property, past landmarks such as the Red Barn and the Bee Tree and the Old Well. He directed me to a five-gallon bucket near a rusted, crumbling lawn chair that had less structural integrity than the average discarded soda can.
He assured me that if a deer was moving up from the Black River, it would pass through there en route to the cut cornfield. His brother had always hunted from that chair and brought home at least one a year. He’d even tagged a couple bears there. I wasn’t entirely without manners, so I asked if I would be getting in his brother’s way.
No, he told me. No one had hunted from that chair since his brother died in Korea, years before I was born. He was so matter-of-fact I didn’t know what to say. The bucket wasn’t claimed that day and the hounds chased the deer in another direction entirely, but I wondered about the hunters who had been there before me.
I have no idea if the chair at Dorothy’s House ever held a nervous young unblooded hunter, or hosted a veteran who only shot for the freezer unless a particularly spectacular set of antlers rattled through the bushes. I have no idea if it ever served any purpose other than that which it serves me now, as a convenient place to sit when my legs and back don’t work right, or when it’s just too pretty a day to sit inside.
It’s just a comfortable chair, and sometimes that’s all you need.
