Iverson did not wait to be asked. He went to the building committee, which back then was three farmers and the pastor’s wife, and he said he would build new pews for what the lumber cost him, no labor charged, if the church would let him do it in his own shop on his own time. They said yes because they did not have the money to say anything else. He worked on those pews at night for the better part of a year, after he had already put in a full day building cribs and cabinets and coffins for paying customers. I would bring him supper out to the shop in a covered dish and sit on a sawhorse and watch him work by the drop light, and I remember thinking that I had never seen a man care about something the way he cared about getting the curve of a pew back right so that a person could sit in it for an hour and a half of a hot July sermon and not want to get up and leave.
Other men helped him. That is a thing I need you to understand before I tell you the rest of it, because it matters more than I knew at the time. Vandergriff Hensley hauled lumber for him for free because Iverson had fixed his hay wagon the winter before and never sent a bill. Dunbar Prewitt, who ran the hardware store then, donated every screw and every can of varnish and spent six Saturdays that spring standing at Iverson’s side with a plane in his hand, learning the joinery because he said a church ought to be built by more than one man’s hands if it could be. A dozen others gave money in five and ten dollar amounts that the church ladies collected in a coffee can they passed at potlucks, the way you’d take up a collection for a family whose barn burned. There was a Grange hall potluck every other Sunday that whole rebuilding year, casseroles and fried chicken and Harwood’s mother’s rhubarb pie lined up on folding tables, and somebody would always stand up before the blessing and give an update on the sanctuary, how many pews were framed, how much lumber was still needed, and the coffee can would go around the room one more time. Nobody who gave to that fund was rich. Most of them were farm families who did not have five dollars to spare any easier than they had it to spare the next month, and gave it anyway, because that is what this town has always done with the little it has.