The Pew My Husband Built

And underneath the ledger, wrapped in an old flannel shirt of his, was a scrap of golden oak about the length of my forearm, the offcut end of one of the original pew boards, with letters chiseled into it in Iverson’s own hand, small and careful and a little uneven in the way a man’s lettering is uneven when he is teaching himself something new. He had told me once, the year he built the pews, that he was going to carve something into the wood before he set the boards, and that he had practiced the lettering on a scrap first so he would not ruin good oak learning how to hold the chisel at the right angle. I had forgotten. I had forgotten for forty-six years that he had ever said he was going to carve anything at all, and I had never once thought to look underneath the pew I sat in every Sunday to see if he actually had.

I did not sleep that night. I sat with that offcut board in my lap and I thought about Monday morning and a flatbed truck and I decided, somewhere around two in the morning, that I was not going to let it happen without at least looking first.

Monday morning I was in the parking lot before the salvage crew arrived, and so was Quill.

Quill had apprenticed under Iverson starting when he was seventeen years old, a shy, big-handed boy from a family with no money for tools, who used to sweep the shop floor for free just to be allowed to watch. Iverson taught him everything, and when Iverson got too old to take the heavy jobs, Quill took over Wickham’s Woodworking outright and kept the sign the same because he said the name still meant something in this county and he was not going to be the one to take it down. Prewitt, wanting the removal done cheap and fast and by someone local so it would look respectful in the church bulletin, had hired Quill to take the pews out.

Quill did not want the job. He told me so, standing in the gravel lot that morning with his hand already on the sanctuary door. He said he had lost sleep over it, that it felt like being asked to dig up a man’s grave, but that if somebody else did it they might not do it careful, might crack the wood getting the bolts loose, and at least if it was him the pews would come out whole, whatever happened to them after. I told him about the ledger. I told him about the offcut board with the practice letters on it. I asked him, before he took anything out, to just look underneath. All fourteen of them. Please.