The Pine Boxes His Class Built

Coffee in the Doorway

I was a teacher’s wife, which meant I knew the shop as well as I knew my own kitchen.

On the casket evenings I would make a big thermos of coffee and fill a tin with whatever I had baked, and I would drive it down to the school after supper.

I would stand in the doorway and not go in, because that room on those nights was Dale’s church, and a church does not need a woman bustling through with a cookie tin.

I would just set the coffee on the bench inside the door and watch.

What struck me every time was the quiet.

These were sixteen and seventeen year old boys who could not sit still for a bell, who shouted down the hallways, who thought everything in the world was funny.

In that room, over that box, they went still.

Dale moved among them in his gray apron, and he did not lecture. He would put his hand over a boy’s hand on the plane and show him the angle, and then step back.

Once I watched a boy, a big rough kid who had been in trouble all year, run his thumb along a finished edge and then look up at Dale with something in his face I can only call wonder.

Dale told me later that the box did the teaching. He said, “You cannot build something a dead person is going to lie in and stay a child inside yourself. It makes a man of you for an hour, whether you want it or not.”

There was one boy, I will not give his name because he grew up to be somebody in this county, who came from a house everybody in town whispered about.

His father was known for the worst reasons, and the boy wore it on his face like a bruise, and by October of his senior year he was one failing grade from not walking at graduation.

Dale put that boy in charge of the jig, the squaring of the boards, which is the one job on a casket you cannot fake, because a box that is out of square will not close right and the whole county will see the gap at the viewing.

I watched that boy measure the same corner four times before he would cut it. I watched him stay until ten at night. I watched him learn that somebody trusted him with a thing that could not be redone.

He graduated. He is a deacon at his church now and he has three kids of his own, and he was there on the Saturday they built Dale’s box, and he took the squaring job again without anybody asking him.

I carried a lot of cold coffee back home over the years. The boys were too caught up to drink it, and I never minded.