The Pine Boxes His Class Built
The Saturday They Came Back
Dale passed on a Tuesday in October, in the early morning, quiet.
I did what I had seen him do for other people’s dead so many times. I called the funeral home, but not about a box.
I called Cody.
By that evening the sign-up sheet was back on the corkboard by the shop door. I know because Cody told me later, and because one of the wives sent me a picture.
Only this time the names going down the sheet were not teenagers. They were a contractor, a farmer, a man who drove a propane truck, a fellow who had become a schoolteacher himself, a sheriff’s deputy.
They were Dale’s boys, scattered across twenty years of classes, and the word had gone out the way word always went out in our county, quiet and fast.
They came to the high school on Saturday. The current shop teacher unlocked the room and then stepped back and let them have it, which I thought was a grace on his part.
Nine of them built it. More than that came and went, carrying lumber, bringing coffee, standing against the wall.
They used Dale’s jig, the one still bolted to the bench from 1994.
And Cody finished the lid with the grandfather’s plane. He told me he had to stop twice because he could not see well enough to keep the blade straight, and I knew exactly what he meant by that.
They built my husband the finest pine casket that shop ever turned out. Tight joints, not a gap anywhere, the grain matched across the lid so it ran like water.
When I came on Saturday afternoon and stood in the doorway with no coffee in my hands, Cody crossed the room and took my hands and said they had him.
They would not let me pay for a single board. The lumberyard would not either. The man there said Dale had sent him forty years of business and a good deal more than that in character, and this one was on the house.
One of the younger men, a fellow who had Dale in his very last full class before the sickness, told me something I keep close.
He said he had not thought about that shop in years, had moved three counties over and come back only for this.
He said, “I spent the whole drive wondering why I’d dropped everything to come. Then I walked in and smelled the pine and I knew. He gave me the one afternoon of high school I’m not ashamed of. I owed him a Saturday.”
There was coffee going the whole day on the little bench inside the door, and somebody’s wife had brought a pan of bars, and it was the first time in thirty years that the coffee I thought about was not mine to carry.