Dirt: Place

Bridges: Van Buren to Fort Smith, Arkansas, ca 1912

12

     Take the even, take the odd,
     I would not sleep here if I could
     Except for the little green leaves in the wood
     And the wind on the water.

 Archibald MacLeish, J.B.

1949

On summer evenings after supper — fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and corn bread cooked by a large dark woman named Juanita — my grandfather and I sat on the front porch of the house atop the bluff as the day cooled. My grandfather had his own rocker with a seat woven from split white oak. He smoked Pall Mall cigarettes and stubbed them out in an amber glass ashtray on a metal stand by his rocker. I sat in the porch swing that hung from chains attached to the roof. It creaked softly as I pushed off the floor and swung my legs. My grandmother rarely joined us. I think she preferred the brighter light of the parlor where she sewed, or the kitchen, where she continued with the day’s chores.

Under the bluff next to the river was a double track of the Union Pacific Railway. When the evening freight came through, my grandfather would take out his Illinois pocket watch. It was his habit to check the trains. If we were to walk out on the bluff we could see down to the east where the railroad crossed the river. But usually we stayed up on the porch.

The best view from the porch was to the south and west in the direction of Fort Smith and Oklahoma. From there we could watch a sunset. Sometimes we watched summer storms come up out of Oklahoma and sweep across the river bottoms below us. The storms were black boiling clouds that darkened the day and pulsed with lighting. Then we would go inside and watch the flashes through the windows and hear the wind shake the oak trees in the yard. The next day I would find the husks of cicadas scattered on the ground where they’d been blown from their attachment to the rippled bark.

Sometimes all we saw was a light graying of the sky and a light summer rain would come to wash across the air, caressing the roof of the porch, as gentle as a Bob Wills song coming from the huge Philco console radio inside the house.