By November of that year, fourteen new pews sat in the rebuilt sanctuary, golden oak, each one with a gentle curve in the seat back that Iverson had shaped by hand with a spokeshave because he did not believe in a straight-backed pew for people who had come to be comforted. The congregation dedicated them on the second Sunday of Advent, and Pastor Newland said from the pulpit that the pews were not furniture, they were an offering, and that every family that had given wood or money or hours toward them ought to feel, every time they sat down, that they were sitting inside something they themselves had helped to build. I sat in the third pew from the front, right side, near the window, that first Sunday and every Sunday after for forty-six years, because that was where Iverson had set me down the week the pews went in and said, this one is yours, I made this one a little different for you, and would not tell me what he meant by that.
Iverson died six years ago this coming October. His heart, sudden, in the shop, with a chisel still in his hand and a half-finished bookshelf on the bench that I still have in my spare room. Ivy Junction buried him out of that same sanctuary, on those same pews, and half the town filed past the golden oak he had built to say goodbye to the man who built it. I kept coming every Sunday after that, alone, to the third pew, right side, near the window, because it was the last place in the world that still felt like him.
Six years is long enough for a church to forget who paid for its walls with sweat instead of money, if the people who remember start to die off or move to Florida to be near their grandchildren. And six years was long enough for a new man to come to town, buy the old Mercer place on the edge of Ivy Junction, and get himself voted onto the church board inside of eighteen months, because he was loud and organized and good with a budget spreadsheet in a way that made the older farmers on the board feel like they had finally found someone competent.
His name was Prewitt. No relation, he told everyone, to Dunbar Prewitt who had run the hardware store, though he had bought the old Mercer place mostly because it was cheap and had good internet, not out of any family history in this county that he knew of. He ran some kind of consulting business out of a spare bedroom and drove into Des Moines twice a week, and within a year of joining the board he had become its chairman, because nobody else wanted the paperwork.