The Woodshop She Sold Before The Funeral

That landed the way she meant it to land, I think, square in the chest, because she was not wrong, and I have had a long time since to sit with the fact that she was not wrong about that part even while she was dead wrong about the rest of it.

“There’s a cradle out there, Charlene.”

Silence.

“Half built. White oak. He was building it for Dana’s baby. Did you tell Denny Prewitt that.”

“I didn’t know what every piece out there was for, Russ. It’s a shop full of wood and half-built things. I’m not a woodworker. I couldn’t tell you a cradle from a toolbox lid.”

“It’s got rockers on it, Charlene. It’s shaped like a cradle.”

She didn’t answer that one. I heard her breathing on the other end, and somewhere behind her a television playing low, and I understood that she had either truly not registered what she was looking at when she walked through that shop with Denny Prewitt and pointed at things to be hauled away, or she had registered it and decided it did not change the arithmetic. I did not know which was worse and I still don’t.

“I have to go, Charlene. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I hung up before she could answer, which is the only time in eleven years I had ever hung up on that woman, and I set the phone face down on my leg and I drove the rest of the way to Larkin without turning the radio on, with Kim quiet beside me, her hand still on my arm, not saying a word, because Kim has known me since I was twenty two and she knows when talking would only make a thing worse.

My father was Hollis Coley. He ran the parts counter at the John Deere dealership in Larkin for thirty one years and he kept a woodshop behind the house the whole time, in a pole barn he built himself the summer I turned nine, and from the time I could hold a pencil steady he had me out there sweeping shavings and learning the names of things. A spokeshave is not a drawknife. A mortise gauge is not a marking gauge. You do not call a hand plane a sander in front of my father, not twice.

He built furniture the slow way, the way almost nobody does anymore, dovetails cut by hand with a backsaw, no biscuits, no pocket screws, no glue doing work that a joint ought to be doing on its own. He built my grandmother’s hope chest. He built the pew ends for the little church up on Dry Fork Road after the flood took the old ones. He built, over one long winter after my mother died, a jewelry box for Charlene that I know for a fact he never once showed me how he felt about her through words, because Hollis Coley did not say much, but he showed you with his hands, every time, and that box was the clearest thing he ever said to anybody.