The Pew My Husband Built

I went to see Prewitt myself, on the Tuesday before the removal, at the hardware store where he sometimes worked the counter for the current owner as a favor. I asked him, plain, if there was any way to slow this down, to let the congregation vote on it properly instead of nine people on a Wednesday night, to let me at least explain what those pews were before they went on a truck to become bar stools in some brewery up in Chicago.

He was not unkind at first. He said the church could not survive on sentiment, that a congregation that could not change would shrink until it died, that he had seen it happen to three other churches in three other towns and he was not going to watch it happen here. I told him my husband built those pews with his own hands, for free, out of grief for a burned sanctuary, and that men who were dead now had given lumber and Saturdays and coffee-can dollars to see them finished. And that is when Prewitt said the thing I will remember on the day I die.

“Norwood, dead men do not get a vote on this board. And neither does his furniture.”

He said it flat, not even cruel in his own mind, I think, just tired of arguing with an old woman about wood. He did not raise his voice. That is somehow the part that stayed with me longest, that he could say a thing like that in the same tone he’d use to quote me a price on a box of drywall screws.

I drove home and I did not cry until I was in my own kitchen, and then I cried the way I had not let myself cry since the funeral, because it was not really about the pews. It was about a man telling me my husband, the whole of a good man’s life’s work, did not get a vote in the place he had built with his hands, because he had had the poor manners to die.

That night I went up to the spare room, the one with Iverson’s unfinished bookshelf still on two sawhorses under a sheet, and I opened the cedar chest at the foot of the bed that I had not opened in six years. I want to tell you what was in it, because it is the reason any of what happened next happened at all.

Inside that chest was Iverson’s old shop ledger from 1979, a black composition book with the cover half worn through, where he had written down in pencil every hour donated and every dollar given toward the pews: Hensley, forty hours hauling lumber. E. Prewitt, six Saturdays, joinery, donated hardware and varnish. Nineteen other names, some of them families still in this church, most of them gone now, a few of them names I recognized as grandparents of people who had voted for the sale on that Wednesday night without knowing it.