The Pine Boxes His Class Built

The Grandfather’s Plane

There was one tool in that shop that was not the school’s, and Dale guarded it like a Bible.

It was a wooden hand plane, the old kind, with a worn beechwood body and a blade his grandfather had sharpened so many times it was half the width it started as.

His grandfather had been a carpenter in the days before power tools, and that plane had smoothed barn doors and coffin lids back when every county buried its own.

Dale used the power sanders for the rough work. But every casket lid, the last pass, the pass that mattered, he did by hand with that plane.

He would clamp the lid in the jig he had built, a simple frame that held the boards dead square, and he would lean into that plane and send up long curls of pine that smelled like the inside of a church.

The boys would stop their own work to watch. The sound of it was like nothing a machine makes, a long clean whisper, over and over.

I asked him once why he did not just let the sander do the lid too. It would have saved an hour.

He said, “A machine does it faster. A hand does it kinder. The family will never know the difference with their eyes, but I will know, and the boy helping me will know, and that is who it is for.”

He kept that plane in a wooden box lined with felt. When the arthritis got into his hands in his last years, he could still run it, though it cost him.

The jig he built in 1994 was still bolted to the same bench thirty years later. He never replaced it. He said a thing that still does its job does not owe you a new one.

He taught the plane to only a few boys over the years, the ones whose hands were ready for it, and Cody was the first of them.

Dale told me once that the summer Cody was seventeen, he came in on his own time, not even on a casket, just to practice the long stroke on scrap pine until he could send up a curl the full length of the board without a chatter mark.

“That boy,” Dale said, “has the patience of a man twice his age. He will wear a thing down smooth instead of forcing it. You cannot teach that. You can only notice it.”

I did not know it then, but Dale was telling me who to go find, twenty years before I needed to know.