The Pine Boxes His Class Built

The Box He Was Buried In

My husband Dale died on a Tuesday in October, in the back bedroom, with the maple outside the window gone the color of a struck match.

He had been sick since the spring, so it was not a surprise, and I have learned that the slow kind of leaving carries its own particular weight.

I am Ruth. I was his wife for forty-one years. I still live in the same farmhouse in Garnett County where we raised two children and, over the years, buried both our mothers.

The morning after he passed, I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee going cold, and I did not call the funeral home about a casket.

I did not have to.

For thirty years that had been Dale’s work, and now it belonged to his boys, though most of them had gone gray at the temples.

On the Saturday before the funeral, I drove to the high school where he taught shop for thirty-one years.

The gravel lot was full. I had not expected that on a weekend.

Inside, the big overhead lights were burning, and the room smelled the way it always smelled, cut pine and machine oil and sawdust warm from the blade.

There were nine of them in there, grown men in flannel and work boots, and in the middle of the floor, up on two sawhorses, sat a plain pine casket.

They were sanding it by hand. Nobody was saying a word.

A big man by the window looked up and I knew him right away, even after twenty years. It was Cody Mills.

He wiped his hand on his apron and came across the room and he did not say he was sorry. He just took both my hands in his.

“We’ve got him, Mrs. Ruth,” he said. “We’ve got him.”

I stood in that doorway where I had stood a hundred evenings, and I watched the same thing I had always watched, young hands made quiet by a box.

Only these hands were not young anymore, and the box was for the man who taught them.