The Woodshop She Sold Before The Funeral

The fellowship hall at Larkin Baptist is a long low room with folding tables end to end and a kitchen pass through at one end where three generations of women have been feeding this town through every funeral, wedding and homecoming since before I was born. By the time we filed in from the graveside, the tables were already groaning. Fried chicken. Three kinds of green beans. A ham somebody’s husband had smoked overnight. Cornbread in cast iron. Banana pudding in a dish the size of a bathtub. Sweet tea in a drink dispenser older than me. The whole county’s version of saying we are sorry and we do not know what else to do with our hands.

I was standing near the coffee urn with a plate I was not eating off of, shaking hands, saying thank you for coming, when I saw a man I did not know come through the side door, hat in his hands, the way a man does when he is not sure he belongs somewhere but came anyway because he felt he ought to.

“That’s Denny Prewitt,” Patty said quietly, at my elbow, following my eyes. “I heard he’s the one that bought the shop stuff.”

I felt the old anger come back up through my chest, fast and hot, and I set my plate down on the table a little harder than I meant to.

“Russ,” Patty said. “Not here.”

“I’m not going to do anything, Patty.” And I meant it. I was tired in a way that went past anger, the particular tiredness of a man who has used up every bit of fight he had just getting through a eulogy, a graveside, a receiving line. I watched Denny Prewitt cross the room, an older fellow himself, maybe seventy, broad through the shoulders in the way of a man who has spent a life lifting things he had no business still lifting at his age, wearing a clean shirt and good boots, and he came up to Earl Dunnigan first, and the two of them talked low for a minute, and I watched Denny’s face change.

I did not hear that conversation. I heard the one that came after, because by then Dana had come to find me, her hand on her belly the way she had taken to holding it those last months, and she was crying, quiet, trying not to be seen crying at her own grandfather’s funeral dinner, and she said, “Daddy, is it true. Patty said Grandpa’s shop got sold. Did somebody take the cradle.”

“I don’t know yet, baby.”

“He was almost done with it, Daddy. I saw it at Thanksgiving. He had the rockers shaped and he wouldn’t let me see the rest, he said it was a surprise, he said he’d have it done before Christmas, he said,” and here she had to stop and breathe, “he said it was going to be the first thing his great grandbaby ever slept in that somebody built with their own hands just for her.”