The Casket Ottis Built for Arlis

She taught third grade for thirty one years, and half of Bedford County can still tell you what she said to them the first day. The four of us ate supper together every Friday night for thirty years, alternating houses.

They were not the kind of friends who talk about being friends. They were the kind who show up. They hauled each other’s furniture and borrowed each other’s trucks and argued about the Titans, and neither one ever, to my knowledge, said the word love to the other.

It was in how Arlis always saved the end piece of the pie for Ottis. It was in how Ottis built Eula’s kitchen cabinets for the price of the lumber and then touched up the paint every spring for fifteen years.

Then, in the winter of 2009, Eula got sick.

I am going to tell this part plainly, because it is the part my husband has never forgiven himself for, and he is not a man who will ever tell it right.

Eula was fifty five. It was in her ovaries, and by the time anyone found it, it had gone past anywhere a doctor could reach.

She went into the hospital in Shelbyville in February with a fever and did not come out again. I went every day. Arlis hardly left. Their daughter Janelle drove up from Murfreesboro each night after teaching school and slept in the recliner.

Ottis drove me there every afternoon. He would pull into the lot, in the same space by the cedar tree, shut off the engine, and say, “I’ll wait here.” And I would go in alone.

I did not understand it, not at first. I thought maybe a bad back, or pride, or not wanting to be seen in the hall with nothing useful in his hands.

By the third week I was angry, and I said so on the way home, and he turned the radio up. By the fifth week I had stopped asking, because I could see what it cost him to say no.

He sat out there for forty one afternoons. I counted them afterward, because I had to.

The reason was something that happened in 1979, before I knew him well enough to hear it. Ottis had a younger brother, Gene, nineteen years old, who laid his motorcycle down on a wet road one November night.

They took him to a hospital in Nashville. Ottis sat with him through the long part of the night, and around four in the morning he stepped out to the vending machine for a cup of coffee, because the nurse said Gene was resting easy.

When he came back down the hall with the cup in his hand, there were people in the room. That is the entire story. He has never forgiven a hospital for it, and he has never forgiven himself.

So he sat in the truck. He could not make his legs carry him through those sliding doors. Eula was dying on the third floor, and the best friend either of them had in the world sat with his hands on the steering wheel, watching a window.

Arlis saw him, of course. The room faced the lot. He told me later that Eula noticed first.