The Pine Boxes His Class Built

How It Started

To understand that Saturday, you have to go back to 1994, to Dale’s first year with his own shop class.

He was twenty-nine. The school had handed him a room full of saws and a catalog of projects, and that fall the boys were building spice racks and birdhouses, same as every shop class in the state.

Then a boy named Petey Vance died.

Petey was nine years old, the son of a hired man out on the Ketterman place, and he took sick with something in his chest and was gone inside of a week.

The Vances had nothing. The father worked for shares and the mother cleaned at the motel out on the highway, and a child’s casket in those days ran more than three hundred dollars, which was a month of groceries for them.

Dale heard about it at the feed store, the way you hear everything in a county like ours.

He came home that night and sat at this same table and did not eat.

Finally he said, “Ruth, that family is going to bury their boy in a borrowed box.”

I asked him what he thought he could do about it.

He said he did not know. But the next morning he asked three of his seniors to stay after, and he told them what he wanted to try, and not one of them said no.

They built Petey Vance a casket over two Saturdays. Dale had never built one either, so they figured it out together, measuring twice and cutting once and sanding every edge until a hand could run along it and not catch.

He would not take a dime. He told the Vances a man at the school had donated the lumber, which was not strictly true, because the man was Dale and he had paid for it out of our grocery money.

I did not find that part out until years later. When I did, I did not say anything about the grocery money. I just set another place for supper and kept my mouth shut.

The Vances came to our door that spring with a jar of chokecherry jelly, which was about all they had to give, and Mrs. Vance could not get three words out before she started to cry.

Dale took that jar and thanked her for it the way another man might thank you for a side of beef.

We kept the empty jar on the kitchen windowsill for years. It is still there, as a matter of fact. I washed it out and I never could bring myself to throw it in the recycling.

Petey Vance was buried on a cold bright morning with maybe eleven people at the graveside, and three of them were teenage boys in their church clothes, standing a little apart, who had planed the box smooth.

Dale went to that funeral. He went to almost all of them over the years, whether he knew the family or not, and he stood in the back and he never once said he had anything to do with the casket.

He told me a box is a small thing next to a child, and that the only decent way to give it was to give it and then disappear.