The River Keeps a Chair

In the village of Mere, every household carried a chair to the river on the first evening of winter. The chairs faced the water. Nobody sat in them, and nobody took them home until sunrise.

When Ivo arrived to mend the mill wheel, he asked what would happen if it rained.

“The chairs would get wet,” said his landlady.

He decided the villagers disliked questions.

At dusk he followed them down the bank. Some chairs were polished oak. Others had string seats or legs repaired with mismatched wood. A small stool stood between two grand dining chairs, all three tilted toward the dark current.

Ivo had brought nothing. He stood beside his landlady, who carried a kitchen chair with one blue spindle.

“Who is it for?” he asked.

“That depends who you ask.”

The baker said the river had once returned a child to the bank on a piece of driftwood, and the chairs thanked it for carrying him gently. The ferryman said the custom began when an old woman waited through winter for a boat that never came. The schoolteacher said both stories were newer than the chairs.

Ivo listened, then returned to the mill. Before dawn he woke to a scraping sound. The river had risen. Water moved through the reed beds, lifting broken branches against the bank.

He went outside with a lantern. One of the chairs had toppled, and another stood half submerged. If the river rose farther, the village would lose them all.

He began dragging them uphill. Halfway through the work, his landlady appeared in her shawl.

“They belong down there until sunrise,” she said.

“They will float away.”

“Yes,” she said. “They might.”

But she took the opposite end of a heavy bench. Together they carried it beyond the waterline. Soon other lanterns approached. People lifted their own chairs and then whatever stood nearest. The baker rescued the schoolteacher’s stool. The ferryman carried a chair that had belonged to a man with whom he had not spoken for years.

When daylight spread across the water, they sat on the wet grass, exhausted. Ivo asked again what the chairs were for.

His landlady rubbed her sore hands. “My husband drowned here. His father taught him the river was a road. I wanted it to be a wall afterward. Something nobody could cross.”

She looked along the bank, where neighbors were sorting the furniture without much agreement about ownership.

“The chairs give us somewhere to put the waiting,” she said.

The next winter Ivo was still in Mere. The mill wheel ran smoothly, and he had rented a house by the hill. At dusk he carried a chair to the river. It was newly made, with a broad seat and strong legs.

Nobody asked whom it was for. When the first drops of rain fell, his landlady moved her blue chair a little closer to his.