The Casket Ottis Built for Arlis

She was propped on the pillows one afternoon and she said, “That’s Ottis’s truck, down there by the tree.” Arlis said, “Why’s he not coming up?” And Eula, who was dying, and knew it, and had always known what people were made of, said, “Let him sit, Arlis. He’s doing the best he can.”

I wish I could say Arlis let him.

Eula passed on the eleventh of March. The funeral was at Cedar Grove on a bright cold Saturday, and half the county came.

Ottis stood at the very back by the door in the suit he’d been married in, and when they carried the casket out, he did not carry it. He had not been asked.

At the graveside, Arlis shook every hand in line. When he got to Ottis he held the hand a half second too long and said, “Thank you for coming,” in the voice you use for a man you will not see again.

Then the silence began.

It lasted six years. Not a fight, because they never raised their voices. Only a door that closed softly and stayed closed. Arlis stopped calling.

Ottis stopped calling. When we passed the Tidwell place on the way to Wartrace, Ottis kept his eyes on the road and I kept mine on my hands.

I tried to fix it. I wrote Arlis a note. I called Janelle.

I told Ottis flat out to go knock on that door, and he said, “He doesn’t want to see me, Vonnie,” and I said, “How do you know?” and he said, “I know,” in a voice that latched like a gate.

The only thing I ever got out of him was a letter.

It was the first week of April. I came into the kitchen one morning and found him at the table with a yellow legal pad and a flat carpenter’s pencil, sharpened with a pocketknife. The pad had one page torn off, and he was working on a second.

When he finished, he folded the page in thirds, put it in an envelope, and wrote the name on the front in the square block print he used to label every drawer in his shop. I asked if he wanted me to carry it to the mailbox.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

He walked to the end of the lane and put it in and raised the flag. It was the longest I have ever seen him look at a mailbox.

I never asked what it said. I assumed he’d tell me when he was ready, or that Arlis would answer. Neither thing happened. The letter went out and no word came back, and the not-hearing became its own kind of answer.

Six years.

Then, in the second week of June, 2015, a wind came through the county that took the roofs off three barns and half of Arlis’s house.

I know the date because I wrote it on the calendar. Ottis heard about it from the man at the hardware store, nodded, paid for his hinges, and came home. “Vonnie,” he said, “I’m going to be gone a while.” And he put his ladder on the truck.

He drove to Wartrace with a bundle of shingles and four hundred dollars of tarps. He told me afterward that he sat at the foot of Arlis’s drive for ten minutes with the engine running.

Then he carried the ladder up the side of the house without knocking on any door and began stripping what was left of the roof.