The Workshop They Threw Me Out For

I kept one eye on the fourth pew. My father did not get in the line. He sat there while it emptied around him, and my mother sat beside him with her hand on his arm, and I thought, all right, that is how it ends then, he will sit there like stone until the stone outlasts us all.

And then the church was almost empty, just a few of us left and the slanted afternoon light coming in the tall windows, and Vernon Ryder got up out of the fourth pew and walked to the front.

He was seventy-four by then. He had gotten old while I was not watching, the way they do. He walked up to the communion table, my table, and he stood in front of it a long moment with his hat in his hands, and then he reached out one finger, just one, and he touched the top of it, the walnut, light, the way you touch something you are not sure you are allowed to touch.

And I watched my father, who had never in my life been at a loss for a hard flat word, stand there and open his mouth and have nothing come out.

I could have let him stand in it. Part of me, a part I am not proud of, wanted to, wanted to make him say the whole thing out loud in the empty church the way Eunice had said it, the way my mother had said it in the sawdust. But Amos Ryder taught me to read a board, to find the way the grain wants to go, and I looked at my father’s face and I saw the grain of him, and it was not stubbornness anymore. It had changed. It was just a frightened old man standing in front of a thing his son had made, understanding at the last possible hour that he had been wrong about the one thing he had been most sure of, and not knowing how a person comes back from that.

So I did the thing. I walked over, and I turned the table a little, and I showed him the underside, where the initials were. AR and CR. I ran his father’s name under his finger.

He made a sound I had never heard him make. He put his hand flat over both sets of initials, his whole rough farmer’s hand covering them, and he bowed his head over my grandfather’s communion table and he wept, standing up, the way men of his kind weep, like it is being pulled out of them against their will.

He did not say he was sorry in any clean way. I want to be honest about that, because the clean version is a lie and you would smell it. What he said, when he could say anything, with his hand still on the wood, was, My father would have, and then he stopped, and started again, My father would have been proud of this, and I could not even. And that was as far as he could get, My father would have been proud, which was the nearest thing to proud of you that a man that hard could carry up out of that deep a hole, and I understood it, and I took it, because I had learned from Amos that you take the joint the wood will give you and you do not force the one it will not.