The Sugawn Chair

by Sean O’ Faolain

EVERY autumn I am reminded of an abandoned sugawn chair that languished for years, without a seat, in the attic of my old home. It is associated in my mind with an enormous sack which the carter used to dump with a thud on the kitchen floor every October. I was a small kid then, and it was as high as myself. This sack had come “up from the country,” a sort of diplomatic messenger from the fields to the city. It smelled of dust and hay and apples, for the top half of it always bulged with potatoes, and under a layer of hay, the bottom half bulged with apples. Its arrival always gave my mother great joy and a little sorrow, because it came from the farm where she had been born. Immediately when she saw it she glowed with pride in having a “back,” as she called it — meaning something behind her more solid and permanent than city streets, though she was also saddened by the memories that choked her with this smell of hay and potatoes from the home farm and apples from the little orchard near the farmhouse. My father, who had also been born on a farm, took great pleasure in these country fruits, and as the two of them stood over the sack, in the kitchen, in the middle of the humming city, everything that their youth had meant to them used to make them smile and laugh and use words which they never used during the rest of the year, and which I thought magical; words like “late sowing,” “clover crop,” “inch field,” “marl bottom,” “headlands,” “tubers,” and the names of potatoes, British Queens or Arran Banners, that sounded to me like the names of regiments. For those moments my father and mother became a young, courting couple again. As they stood over that sack, as you might say, warming their hands to it, they were intensely happy, close to each other, in love again. To me they were two very old people. Counting back now, I reckon that they were about forty-two or forty-three.

One autumn evening after the sack arrived, my father went up to the attic and brought down the old sugawn chair. I suppose he had had it sent up to him from his home farm. It was the only thing of its kind in our house, which they had filled in the usual peasant’s idea of what constitutes elegance, with plush chairs, gold-framed pictures of Stags at Bay and exotic tropical birds, pelmets on the mantelpieces, delft shepherdesses, Chinese mandarins with nodding heads, brass bedsteads with mighty knobs and mother-of-pearl escutcheons set with bits of mirror, vast mahogany chiffoniers, and so on. But the plush-bottomed chairs, with their turned legs and their stiff backs, were for show, not for comfort, whereas in the old country sugawn chair my da could tilt and squeak and rock to his behind’s content.

It had been in the place for years, rockety, bockety, chipped, and well polished, and known simply as “your father’s chair” until the night when, as he was reading the Evening Echo with his legs up on the kitchen range, there was a sudden rending noise, and down he went through the seat of it. There he was then, bending over, with the chair stuck onto him, and my mother and myself in the splits of laughter, pulling it from him while he cursed like a trooper. This was the wreck that he now suddenly brought down from the dusty attic.

The next day, he brought in a great sack of straw from the Commarket, a half gallon of porter, and two old butties from the street — an ex-soldier known to the kids around as “Tear-’em-and-ate’em” and a little dwarf of a man who guarded the stage door at the opera house when he was not being the sacristan at the chapel. I was enchanted when I heard what they were going to do. They were going to make ropes of straw — a miracle I had never heard of — and reseat the chair. Bursting with pride in my da, I ran out and brought in my best pal, and the two of us sat as quiet as cats on the kitchen table, watching the three men filling the place with dust, straw, and loud arguments as they began to twist the ropes for the bottom of the chair.

More strange words began to float in the air with the dust: “scallops,” “flat tops,” “bulrushes,” “cipeens,” “fields in great heart. . . .” And when the three sat down for a swig of porter and looked at the old polished skeleton in the middle of the floor, they began to rub the insides of their thighs and say how there was no life at all like the country life, and my mother poured out more porter for them and laughed happily when my da began to talk about horses, and harrows, and a day after the plow, and how, for that much, he’d throw up this blooming city life altogether and settle down on a bit of a farm for the heel of his days.

This was a game of which he, she, and I never got tired, a fairy tale that was so alluring it did not matter a damn that they had not enough money to buy a window box, let alone a farm of land.

“Do you remember that little place,” she would say, “that was going last year down at Nantenan?”

When she said that, I could feel the little reedy fields of Limerick that I knew from holidays with my uncle, and the crumbling stone walls of old demesnes with the moss and saffron lichen on them, and the willow sighing softly by the Deel, and I could smell the wet turf rising in the damp air, and, above all, the tall wild flowers of mallow, at first cabbage-leafed, then pink and coarse, then gossamery, then breaking into cakes that I used to eat — a rank weed that’s the mark of ruin in so many Irish villages, and whose profusion and color are for me the sublime emblem of Limerick’s loneliness, loveliness, and decay.

“Ah!” my da would roar. “You and your blooming ould Limerick! That bog of a place! Oh, but, God blast it, why didn’t I grab that little farm I was looking at two years ago there below Emo!”

“Oho, ho, ho!” she would scoff. “The Queen’s! The lousy Queen’s! God, I’d live like a tiger and die like a Turk for Limerick. For one patch of good old Limerick. Oh, Limerick, my love, and it isn’t alike! Where would ye get spuds and apples the like of them in the length and breadth of the Queen’s County?”

And she grabbed a fist of hay from the bag and buried her face in it, and the tears began to stream down her face, and me and my pal screaming with laughter at her, and the sacristan lauding Tipperary, and the voices rose as Tear-’em-andate-’em brought up the River Barrow and the fields of Carlow, until my da jumped up with: “Come on, lads, the day is dyin’ and acres wide before us!”

For all that, the straw rope was slow in emerging. Their arguments about it got louder and their voices sharper. At first all their worry had been whether the kitchen was long enough for the rope; but, so far, only a few, brief worms of straw lay on the red tiles. The sacristan said: “That bloody straw is too moist.” When he was a boy in Tipp, he never seen straw the like o’ that. Tear’em-and-ate-’em said that straw was old straw. When he was a lad in Carlow they never used old straw. Never! Under no possible circumstances! My da said: “What’s wrong with that straw is, it’s too bloomin’ short!” And they began to kick the bits with their toes, and grimace at the heap on the floor, and pick up bits and fray them apart and throw them aside until the whole floor was like a stable. At last they put on their coats and gave the straw a final few kicks, and my pal jumped down and said he was going back to his handball, and, in my heart, I knew that they were three imposters.

The kitchen was tidy that evening when I came back with the Evening Echo. My da was standing by the sack of potatoes. He had a spud in his fist, rubbing off the dust of its clay with his thumb. When he saw me he tossed it back in the sack, took the paper, took one of the plush-bottomed chairs, and sat on it with a little grimace. I did not say anything, but young as I was, I could see that he was not reading what he was looking at. God knows what he was seeing at that moment.

For years the anatomy of a chair stood in one of the empty attics. It was there for many years after my father died. When my mother died and I had to sell out the few bits of junk that still remained from their lives, the dealer would not bother to take the useless frame, so that when, for the last time, I walked about the echoing house, I found it standing alone in the middle of the bare attic. As I looked at it I smelled apples, and the musk of Limerick’s dust, and the turf tang from its cottages, and the mallows among the limestone ruins, and I saw my mother and my father again as they were that morning, standing over the autumn sack, their arms about one another, laughing foolishly, and madly in love again.